He swiveled. There was a look on his face she had never seen before. Contempt. Not the laughable pomposity or the risible vanity of before. Contempt. He snapped.
“The crania will be taken tomorrow, and the skeletons. There are museums that can accommodate them, perfectly. They will find their home in Prunier, of course.”
“But—”
“You have heard of Prunier? Ah, no. Obviously not.” Another contemptuous snort. “Miss Kerrigan, I will not need you anymore, not next season. Not ever. Your job is complete.”
This was stunning. This was a stunning disappointment.
“What?”
“You are relieved, is that how you phrase it? Retired. Finished. I need you no longer.”
“But, Ghislaine, please, this is the best find I have ever made, I know I make mistakes and—”
“Ça suffit!” He pouted, angrily. “Go home, go home now. Back to the States. They have history there, do they not? Some of your post offices are thirty years old.”
The rain was heavy, the thunder rumbling. Julia felt the blackness closing in on all her dreams. Her wild dreams of this afternoon. The Find of the Season. The Justification for Everything.
“But this was my find! This is unfair! Ghislaine, you know it is unfair.”
“Pfft. Your discovery is mediocre, and indeed it is shit.” Ghislaine’s black hair was damped by the rain, his leather trousers were smeared with mud; he made an absurd yet slightly menacing figure.
And now Julia found herself backing away. She was alone here, in the emptiness, not a farmer for miles, all the villages abandoned: alone with Quoinelles. And she had the horrible sense of physical threat. His angry finger was jabbing the air.
“What do you know? You learn in your American colleges and yet you have not heard of these things? You know nothing. The skulls and skeletons are just typical. Typical shit. Shit. Just shit. I expect you to return your carte d’identité tomorrow.”
His aggression was palpable, yet also strange. She got the queer impression he was threatening her for some kind of nihilistic fun, for his own bleak amusement. Trying to frighten her, trying to make her flee the scene first.
Standing her ground, with a tilt of her chin — thinking fuck you, if you’re going to sack me, fuck you—Julia stared straight back.
The silent hiss of the rain surrounded them.
With a weary shrug of repugnance, he turned and walked to the car once again. She watched as he disappeared along the path; he didn’t seem at all absurd anymore.
And now?
Her own car was the other way. She had to trudge through the drizzle, carrying the weight of her disappointment, her crushing letdown. She wouldn’t be able to call her father, or her mother, and vindicate her decision to go to Europe; she wouldn’t be able to tell her friends, her colleagues, the world about her discovery. She felt like a teenager spurned in love; she felt like an idiot.
She had been dumped.
Julia walked. Her bleak route took her past a steel cowshed, a run of barbed wire, and the very loneliest of the moonlit megaliths. And there, despite the pelting wet, she paused and looked around, feeling her anger and anxiety evolve, very slightly: as she surveyed the stones of the Lozère, the Cham des Bondons.
Truly, she still loved this locale — for all its saturnine moods. It was somehow bewitching. This ruined landscape, of legends and megaliths. This place where the werewolves of the Margeride met the elegiac Cham des Bondons.
The rain fell, and still she lingered. Remembering what had brought her here.
The only reason she was in Lozère at all was an offhand remark by a friend, in her college department in London, a year ago, who had mentioned a dig in the south of France. Not far from the great Ice Age caves! And there was room for an archaeologist from England! For a season! The offer had immediately gripped Julia with that old and giddy excitement. Proper archaeology. Dirt archaeology.
Enthused and animated, Julia had scraped together her savings and begged for a sabbatical from her mildly sneering London boss, and then she had left for the Continent with high hopes and had spent a summer digging in France — in France—and yet she had found nothing, because there was nothing to find anymore. Nothing. And right up until today it had seemed her sabbatical was going to dwindle away into disappointment, like everything else, like her career, like too many relationships.
Until today. The skulls. Her Find.
Julia gazed at the standing stones.
The megalithic complex of the Cham des Bondons was one of the biggest in Europe — only Carnac was bigger, only Stonehenge and Callanish were more imposing — yet it was virtually unknown.
Why was that? She could think of one obvious answer: the remoteness was crucial. The departement of Lozère had been depopulating for centuries. The highest limestone steppe of all, the Causse Méjean, just west of the Cham, was said to be the single most deserted part of France: a great plateau of rock with just a few shepherds remaining. Everyone else had gone. Everything else had gone.
It was, therefore, no wonder almost no one knew about the cold and windy Cham des Bondons: there was no one here to see the stones, and no easy way to pierce the guarding wilderness.
And yet maybe there was some other explanation, too — maybe the atmosphere of the Chem des Bondons had something to do with the stones’ lack of fame. The dark, mournful, off-putting ambience. They were like sad soldiers standing around the grave of a beloved king. Like the moai, the great and tragic monoliths of Easter Island, erected by a dying and maybe violent society.
A flash of insight illumined her thoughts.
Could it be?
Fat raindrops were falling, yet Julia did not feel the cold. This sudden idea was much too intriguing: it was a long shot, fantastical even, yet sometimes in archaeology you had to make the intuitive connection, the leap of faith, to arrive at the new paradigm.
Walking briskly to her car, she fumbled for her keys even as she fumbled for the truth. The dating of the Cham des Bondons was late Neolithic. The dating of the skeletons was Neolithic. They came from the same long era of human history. Could there be some link between the Bondons and the strangeness of those bones?
Yes. No. Why not? Who could say?
Hell with Ghislaine. This was her Find. It was her puzzle to solve: and now she had an intuitive lead. There must be a link between the stones and the bones. And the link was that echoing sense, that chime of insight. The fact that she got from the skeletons underneath her feet, down there in the cave, the very same emotional sense she derived from the stones:
Guilt.
5
The Lao policemen had guns in shoulder holsters. The smell of male sweat in the hot and stuffy room was distinct and intense. The questioning became more aggressive.
Why were Jake and Chemda here? Who was the dead man? Why had Tou disappeared? Why had Tou telephoned them last night? Why would anyone kill a harmless old historian? Why were they looking at the Plain of Jars? Who had given permission? What did they expect to find? What could be interesting about a bunch of old jars? What? When? Where? How? Why were they here?