Michael Haring looked around his living room. There were glass cabinets everywhere, some arranged against the wall, others floating like huge crystal pendants amidst the expanse of black leather furniture and white shag carpeting. The cabinets were filled with figures very like the one that rested on his table, and with silver torques, beaked masks, bronze armor in the shape of wings, plaques inlaid with bone and silver and crudely polished stones. He surveyed them all, not with pride but with a certain wistfulness that gave his dark eyes a mournful cast. An Iron Age prince’s ransom in artifacts and metalwork: nearly all of it obtained on the black market, spirited from original holdings in Britain and Czechoslovakia and Turkey and Greece. He was tied up in litigation right now with the embassy of a small country in Eastern Europe, fighting over the disposition of his most-prized treasure: the mummified head of a Bronze Age man found in a peat bog, and now displayed within a tall glass case like a casket stood upon its end.
“I think,” he said carefully, staring at the tea-colored head in its crystal chamber. “I think that this could be a very important adventure you’re planning, Miss Magda. For both of us.” And turning, he let his hand rest upon her thigh.
Six months later Magda and her crew were in Çaril Kytur. The site was in a desolate corner of northern Estavia, deep within the Psalgÿuk Mountains—tall, needle-thin spars of quartz and flint that shot up against leaden skies that rarely showed the sun. Like something out of a Dürer etching of Hell, Magda thought, or Murnau’s Nosferatu. Even the trees were stunted, crippled pines and alders whose roots poked through the thin acid soil where they sought footing.
It was late July. In the three days it took Magda and her companions to drive from the Estavian capital to Çaril Kytur, they passed only two other vehicles: an empty Intourist bus with Moscow plates, and an ancient grey jitney piled high with wooden cartons, live chickens and ducks tied to its extremities with red twine. The bone-jarring trip was enough to make Magda wish that she’d left Janine, at least, back in Washington.
“This is not, like, what my faculty advisor told me to expect,” Janine announced after their second night in the Jeep. “I thought I was going to get to practice my Russian, but there’s nobody here.”
“Well, we’re stuck with each other now,” Magda said grimly. “So if you want to bail out, start walking.”
No one did. A few hours later they’d reached their destination.
“Oh man,” breathed Nicky D’Amato, another of the triumvirate who’d signed on from the Divine. “Are you sure you read that map right?”
Magda sighed. “I’m sure.”
They stumbled from the Jeep and looked down into the valley of Çaril Kytur, a long narrow spit of land crosshatched with streams that fed into a huge marshy area to the south. It was a dispiriting landscape. The stones dun-colored, pleached with lichen and moss; the few trees hunched against the wind that whistled down through a gap in the mountains to the north. Lowell Ackroyd’s theory had been that a band of Paleolithic hunters was stranded here during one of the minor ice ages, surviving to found the ancient encampment known as Çaril Kytur, Belly of the Moon. Certainly it was hard to imagine why anyone would choose to live here. The surrounding mountains were sparsely populated, mostly by shepherds who eked out a living from the barren hillsides and more temperate valleys. Magda had thought the natives would be eager to supplement their meager incomes with what they could earn from assisting on the dig, but that wasn’t the case at all.
“He says they’re not interested.”
George Wayford, the last of the three grad students who had accompanied Magda from D.C., shook his head. They were sitting in front of Magda’s tent—Magda, George, Nicky, Janine—the entire Çaril Kytur crew. Overhead the sky was grey and skinned-looking. A cold wind blew down from the mountain pass to the north, sending skeins of mist racing across the encampment. Magda shivered in her heavy Icelandic wool sweater and wondered why she’d thought this was a better idea than the Yucatan. “He says the whole valley is stantikic’t—”
“What? Haunted?” Janine interrupted derisively.
George squatted in front of the hissing campfire and lit a cigarette. “No,” he said, and tossed his match into the flames. George had majored in Slavic languages at Georgetown, and was hoping to find linguistic links between the Estavians of the Psalgÿuk range and the neighboring Cuclterinyi culture in the Transylvanian Alps, and even modern Crete. “Isch’raval, that would be haunted. This is more like tainted.”
“But they’re not coming. That’s what you’re telling us, right? That we are it as far as personnel goes—” Nicky looked balefully at his three companions, then picked up a stone and shied it at the Jeep. “Fuckin’ A, I knew we should have called first.”
“Called?” Magda laughed in spite of herself. “Christ, Nicky, there’s not a phone for seventy miles!” She got to her feet, rubbing her hands and doing a mental inventory. “Look, we don’t need anyone else, not really. We’ll start right in with the shaft at Eleven-A. That’s the one June said they’d just opened when they had to leave. It’s where they found that boar helmet crest—”
(now part of Michael Haring’s collection)
“—and it won’t be as much work as digging out a totally new site. We should be able to handle it on our own.”
Janine and Nicky shot her dark looks, but George was already heading for the makeshift lean-to where their tools were stored. “All right then,” Magda said, and started after him.
It took them four days just to dig through the accumulated debris and soil that had silted over the old site. But once they’d cleared away the dirt and rotting shrubs, the excavation that June Harrington had named Eleven-A proved to be remarkably well preserved. Nearly fifty years had passed since the original team from the American Museum had set up scaffolding around the burial shaft. But when they reached the first level, Magda and her students found that the timbers placed by Lowell Ackroyd were still holding back the chamber’s earthen walls.
“I’d feel better if we had some new beams there,” George announced, staring dubiously at the sagging timbers.
“I’m not climbing down otherwise,” Janine said flatly, peering into the dim reaches of the pit.
Magda nodded and took the shovel from Janine’s hands. “Well, then, I guess you and Nicky can start cutting down trees.”
By the end of the first week they had erected a second scaffold around the first, the whole shaky edifice sunk twenty feet into the earth. Curiosity and greed had gotten the better of the natives in the nearest village. Now Magda had a half dozen laborers helping to pull up buckets of soil and gravel. Janine carried these to a system of seines and screens set up nearby, and sifted through the debris for anything that might hold a clue to the nature of the shaft. So far they’d found potsherds, and a few bones that were probably a dog’s, but nothing more dramatic—no figurines, no human remains, nothing to make this site worth much more time and effort.
“I know it’s a burial pit,” Magda said stubbornly. She was balanced precariously atop a ladder sunk into the soft marshy ground at the bottom of the site, sipping her morning brew from a battered tin mug. She grimaced and stared at the cup’s murky contents, a concoction made from powdered beetroot that was the locals’ answer to coffee. “God, this is awful—no wonder they’re all so surly.”
“You’re gonna need something besides dog bones and a little bronze boar to determine that,” George replied mildly from a few steps below her on the ladder. “Chasar—” Chasar was the spokesman for the locals. “—Chasar says this hole is fancr’ted—unholy, you know, profane. Not a sacred site—”