Athalaric said sternly, “Sir, you were younger when you were here — much younger. You must take care as we descend.”
“What do I care of the difficulty? Athalaric, if the path is overgrown it has not been used since I was last here — and the bones I found are undisturbed. What matters compared to that? Look, the Scythian has already started his descent, and I want to see his reaction. Come, come.”
The party formed up into a line and, one by one, they stepped with care down the crumbling path. Honorius insisted on walking alone — the path was scarcely wide enough to allow two to walk side by side — but Athalaric went first, so at least he would have a chance of saving the old man if he fell.
They reached a cave, eroded into the soft chalk face. They fanned out, the militiamen probing at the walls and ground with their spears.
Athalaric stepped forward carefully. The floor near the entrance was stained almost white by guano and littered with eggshells. The walls and floor were worn butter smooth, as if many creatures, or people, had been here before. Athalaric detected a strong animal scent, perhaps of foxes, but it was stale. Save for the seabirds, it was evident nothing had lived here for a long time.
But it was here that a younger Honorius had found his precious bones.
Honorius hobbled around the cave, peering at anonymous bits of the floor, kicking aside dried leaves and bits of dead seaweed. Soon he found what he was looking for. He got to his knees and cleared away the debris, carefully, using only his fingertips. “It is just as I found it — and left it — for I did not want the bones to be disturbed.”
The others crowded around. Athalaric absently noticed that one of the young Romans, a man of Galla’s entourage, was pressing peculiarly close behind Honorius. But there seemed no harm, nothing but eagerness in the boy.
And everyone was impressed when Honorius gently lifted his osteoid treasure from the dirt. Athalaric could immediately see that it was the skeleton of a human — but this must have been a particularly stocky human, he thought, with heavy limb bones and long fingers — and that the skull was distorted. In fact, it appeared to have been broken from behind, perhaps by a blow. Beneath the bones was a litter of shells and flint flakes.
Honorius pointed to features of his find. “Look here. You can see where he has eaten mussels. The shells are scorched; perhaps he threw them on a fire to make them open. And I believe these flint chips are waste from a tool he made. He was clearly human, but not as we are. Consider that skull, sir Scythian! Those massive brows, the cheekbones like ledges — have you ever seen its like?” He glanced at Athalaric, his rheumy eyes shining. “It is as if we have been transported back to another day, lost unknown centuries in the past.”
The Scythian bent down to scrutinize the skull.
That was when it happened.
The young Roman behind Honorius took one step forward. Athalaric saw his flashing arm, heard a soft crunch. Blood splashed. Honorius fell forward over the bones.
The people, startled, scrambled out of the way. Papak squealed like a frightened pig. But the Scythian caught Honorius as he fell and lowered him to the ground.
Athalaric could see that the back of Honorius’s head had been smashed. He lunged at the young man who had stood behind Honorius, and grabbed his tunic. “It was you. I saw it. It was you. Why? He was a Roman like you, one of your own—”
“It was an accident,” the young man said levelly.
“Liar!” Athalaric slapped his face, drawing blood. “Who put you up to this? Galla?” Athalaric made to strike the man again, but strong arms wrapped around his waist and pulled him away. Struggling, Athalaric gazed around at the others. “Help me. You saw what happened. The man is a murderer!”
But only blank stares met his entreaties.
It was then that Athalaric understood.
It had all been planned. Only the terrified Papak, and, Athalaric presumed, the Scythian, had known nothing of the crude plot — aside from Athalaric himself, the barbarian too unschooled in the ways of a mighty civilization to be able to imagine such poisonous plotting. With his refusal to accept the bishopric, Honorius had become an inconvenience to Goth and Roman alike. The planners of this foolish, vicious conspiracy had cared nothing for Honorius’s miraculous old bones; this jaunt to the remote seashore had been seen merely as an opportunity. Perhaps poor Honorius’s body would be dumped in the sea, not even returned for inconvenient inspection to Burdigala.
Athalaric struggled free and hurried to Honorius. The old man, his ruined head still cradled in the Scythian’s bloodstained arms, was still breathing, but his eyes were closed.
“Teacher? Can you hear me?”
Remarkably Honorius’s eyes fluttered open. “Athalaric?” The eyes wandered vaguely in their sockets. “I could hear it, an immense crunch, as if my head were an apple bit into by a willful child…”
“Don’t talk—”
“Did you see the bones?”
“Yes, I saw.”
“It was another man of the dawn, wasn’t it?”
To Athalaric’s shock, the Scythian spoke in comprehensible but heavily accented Latin. “Man of the dawn.”
“Ah,” Honorius sighed. Then he gripped Athalaric’s hand so hard it was painful.
Athalaric was aware of the silent circle around him, the men from the east, the Goths, the Romans, all save the Scythian and the Persian complicit in this murder. The grip slackened. With a last shudder, Honorius was gone.
The Scythian carefully laid Honorius’s body over the bones he had discovered — Neandertal bones, the bones of a creature who had thought of himself as the Old Man — and the pooling blood soaked slowly into the chalky ground.
The wind changed. A breeze off the sea wafted into the cave, laden with salt.
CHAPTER 16
An Entangled Bank
Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia. CE 2031.
I
At Rabaul, the sequence of events followed an inevitable logic, as if the great volcanic mountain and its pocket of magma beneath were some vast geological machine.
The first crack opened up in the ground. A vast cloud of ash towered into the smog-laden sky, and red-hot molten rock soared like a fountain. With the bulk of the rising plume of magma still some five kilometers underground, the stress on Rabaul’s thin upper carapace had proved too great.
In Darwin, the quakes worsened.
It was the end of the first day of the conference. The attendees, returning from their disparate dining arrangements, filed into the hotel bar. Sitting on a sofa with her feet up on a low stool, Joan watched as people got their drinks and reefers and pills and gathered in little clusters, chattering excitedly.
The delegates were typical academics, Joan thought with exasperated fondness. They were dressed every which way, from the bright orange jackets and green trousers that seemed to be favored by Europeans from Benelux and Germany, to the open sandals, T-shirts, and shorts of the small Californian contingent, to even a few ostentatiously worn ethnic costumes. Academics tended to joke about how they never planned what they wore, but in their “unconscious” choices they actually displayed a lot more of their personalities than blandly dressed fashion victims — the Alison Scotts of the world, for example.
The bar itself was a typical slice of modern consumerist-corporate culture, Joan thought, with every wall smart and pumping out logos, ads, news, and sports images, and everybody talking as loud as they could. Even the coasters on the table in front of her cycled through one animated beer commercial after another. It was as if she had been plunged into a clamorous bath of noise. It was the environment she’d grown up in all her life, save for the remote stillness of her mother’s field digs. But after that eerie interval on the airport apron — the whining of the jets, the distant popping of guns, grim mechanical reality — she felt oddly dislocated. This continuous dull roar was comforting in its way, but it had the lethal ability to drown out thought.