She was silent so long he said, “You failed?”
“I got a third. A third! I could forget trying to get a research post. I was a third-rate archaeologist with no job, no credibility and nowhere to live.” She tugged her braid out, and tied it up again quickly, her fingers working nervously. “It’s taken me years to work my way back up, and no one is going to ruin it. Especially him.” As if she was embarrassed, had said too much, she stood quickly. “However it happened, the news is out, I can’t stop it. And we need you, Rob. Now more than ever. We have to work at top speed; every bloody pressure group, coven, and chapter will be here in hours. We have to get the henge timbers out of the ground. Once that’s done they can hold all the press conferences they want. It will be too late.”
The idea of the henge being uprooted terrified him. But he just nodded and went to lock up the bike.
The hole the bats had streamed out of was gone; Jimmy had troweled it away. Rob didn’t ask about it. They worked ferociously all morning. The rattle and crash of the fence builders shattered the quiet of the site, but behind that were other new noises: voices in the lane, cars, the trill of Clare’s cell phone. Once, when she was sitting on the bank arguing into it fiercely, Rob walked out of the inner fence toward the portable toilet, but at the last minute slid into the office and got the key into the back of the drawer in seconds. It would take more than a key to get in here now. It would take a parachute.
Someone else had the same idea. At about eleven a helicopter came over, cruising low.
Clare swore in fury. “My God, these people have got a nerve.”
Someone was leaning out of it with a camera.
“TV?” Rob muttered.
“Probably. I refused them access. They’ll have a good view of the henge from up there though.”
Darkhenge was alive. That was how it seemed to him. Hour by hour the timbers were growing, soaring up out of the churned peat. By midmorning they were as tall as he was, and if you were outside you could no longer see in. Solid and glistening under its mist of water, the wooden henge stood erect, the ancient knotholes and gnarled scars where branches had been lopped still seamed with hatchet marks. Crouched, troweling, his arms and back aching, Rob sliced the fudgelike mud, his eyes attuned to the faintest differences in color, knowing already the sludgy smears of clay, the knobbliness of mud-coated flint nodules, the stench of leeched worms. His overalls were saturated, the knees so clotted with wet soil he could feel it on the inside. He knelt in it, and his fingers were ingrained with earth in every crack of his skin and under his nails, so that he no longer recognized them as his. There was nothing to do but dig. The world outside had faded away. Here, in the clogged wet warmth of the henge, there was only the uncovering, a feverish, obsessive desire.
They snatched a few muddy sandwiches at about noon, and Jimmy brought mugs of tea out. Drinking it, Rob felt himself come back from somewhere; when Clare and Marcus spoke he had to listen hard to understand the words, as if their sounds held meanings only slowly recognized.
Was this how it felt to come out of a coma? To awake, months, years, centuries later? He frowned, tipping the last drips of tea onto the mud like an offering. It wasn’t like him to think like that. Archaeology gave you too much time to think.
By three o’clock the henge timbers were higher than his head. All afternoon the muggy heat thickened, the sky grew overcast and heavy, zigzagged with midges and flying ants. His skin crawled and prickled with heat rash and itches. Surely the prehistoric ground level must be close now. Thinking of what Vetch had said, he glanced at Marcus, who was dreamily scraping in the center. “Found anything there?”
The man looked up, startled. “No. Clean as a whistle.”
“What might there be?”
Marcus shrugged, and Jimmy stabbed his trowel in the soil and stood, stretching, as if the words had broken a spell. “Possibly a foundation burial. It’s usually a child, or young woman. Or there may just be a deposit, some antler, those weird chalk balls.”
A rustle disturbed him. Birds fluttered down, small birds. Jackdaws. They were coming from the trees in the next field, a flock, swooping, and as Rob turned his head he saw that they were landing on the henge timbers, a pecking, flapping circle, rising and settling, never still. The men watched, amazed, in a ring of birds. Marcus jumped up, but the jackdaws didn’t take fright, not until Clare clanged the metal gate and came up to the henge, and at that moment the whole flock rose into the air like a cloud, circling, chattering, screeching.
Then they flew away.
“God,” Jimmy said. “This place is weird.”
Close, toward the downs, thunder rumbled.
“We’re going to have to stop.” Clare’s face was set, her blond hair streaked with mud. She shook her head irritably. “Everyone’s on the phone. The Trust, English Heritage, the papers, my head of department. They all want in. Our cover’s blown.”
She sat, disconsolate, on the wet soil. “If I ever find out who leaked this—”
“Will they sack you?” Rob asked quickly.
“I don’t think so. But it won’t be my baby now.” Thunder rumbled again; she looked up. “Weather’s closing in anyway. We’ll shut down for today. There’ll be full security here overnight.”
Jimmy whistled. “Expensive.”
Marcus picked up his trowel, crouched, looked carefully, scraped with it.
They all watched him. His body had suddenly become intent. Even Rob recognized it.
“What?” Clare hissed.
“Not sure. Looks like the central deposit.”
“Oh bloody hell! What a time to find it.”
They knelt beside him. He scraped twice. Mud unpeeled like the pith of an orange.
Under it, a snake of wood curved into the soil.
“A carving?” Rob asked, astonished. Whatever he had expected, it wasn’t this.
The trowel opened another. And another. A tangle of wooden writhing, black ridges.
“Branches,” Marcus muttered, cutting quickly.
“No.” Clare had her face close to it, her fair hair falling onto the buried mystery. “Not branches. A tree, yes, but not branches. Roots.”
“Roots? But you mean…”
She looked at them, her face white in a crack of lightning. Her answer was a whisper, almost drowned by the roar of thunder. “A tree. Upside down.”
Q. QUERT: APPLE
The trees were so angry; their anger was terrible. It was mine and it was all toward him. When he turned I was already half out—he yelled and grabbed me around the waist, hauled me back, and I screeched and kicked. Powdery lichened branches held me; my hands slid along them; nuts and leaves snapped and cut me. I dug my nails in. I saw willows, blackthorn, oak reaching out to rescue me.
“Help me!” I screamed. “Mac! Can you hear me?”
The trees had my hands. They pulled me through the window.
I was the designer
who built Nimrod’s tower.
I spent three lifetimes
In the dungeons of Arianrhod.
“I could come with you.”
“It’s fine. It’s fine. I told you.” Running into Dan outside the pub just at this moment was a nightmare. Squeezed into the porch out of the pelting rain, Rob moved aside to let a group of tourists by. “I’m… Someone’s giving me a lift.”
“But you usually only go on Fridays.” Dan folded his arms, looking past Rob at the suddenly crowded bar. “There’s nothing wrong, is there? There’s no change?”
“No change.” Rosa’s car would arrive any second. “Go back to your illegal pint.”