She didn’t know if she said the name aloud or merely thought it. But she must have said something, done something. Because George froze, one hand reaching for the skeleton, his head turned to stare at her.
“Magda?”
It was a moon, a star, a scythe. Glittering in the darkness of the shaft as she swung it, a band of quicksilver slicing through the fetid air. She could feel its weight in her hand, a solid comforting thing like a smooth round stone, and feel how easily it sliced through his throat. Like a river swollen by the spring rain, erupting from its frozen prison to pierce and gouge its way through rocky soil; it was so easy, she brought her hand back and struck at him again, this time hearing a small pop as the lunula severed his windpipe.
“Maaaa…”
His voice was a child’s, soft, whimpering, the sound fading into a hiss as air leaked from his throat. He staggered and fell at her feet, and she stared down to see where the blood ran in a bright shining stream from the dark cleft left by the lunula. Her hand remained upraised, the silver crescent an eye peering into the shaft. Along its curved edge blood gathered in small black beads. Like water on an iron grill the beads danced and ran one into another, until they vanished and only fine white wisps of smoke remained. A metallic smell filled the air. Magda’s tongue grew swollen, dry and with the taste of something ferrous, flaking rust or dried blood clinging to the back of her throat until she retched and pitched forward onto the ground.
When she came to she was lying with her face pressed into the soft earth. Bits of dirt and gravel stuck to her lips. Her hair was matted with soil. She pushed herself onto her elbows, coughing. Her right hand still clutched the lunula, a leaden curl of metal now, all its glory gone; but her hands bore a fine red cross-hatching of fresh scars and she could feel a dull ache opposite her heart, as though she had been punched.
She got to her feet, brushed the dirt from her clothes and turned to look for her flashlight. That was when she saw George Wayford. He was lying on his side, his body twisted into a grotesquely fetal position: arms curled inward, legs bunched up against his solar plexus.
“George?”
She bent over his corpse, her fingers stretching until they stroked the curve of his jaw. Gingerly she cupped her hand beneath his chin, tilting it until his head moved and she could see the wound beneath, as clean and smooth as though it had been executed with a razor. The blood made a stiff crimson sheet of his T-shirt, crumpled into hard folds like lava or ice; but the flesh of his throat was smooth and white, almost translucent. She marveled at the concentric rings inside, flesh and cartilage and sinew. She reached to touch it, then recoiled. From the corner of her eyes she had glimpsed his, dull and speckled with dirt. He had fallen so that his glasses were mashed into his face, and she could see the fine network of broken capillaries radiating from the shattered glass like twin spider’s webs.
“Oh, god.”
She stumbled to her feet, frantically wiping her hands on her legs. She turned and ran the few steps to the ladder, stopped and tried to calm herself, tried to keep the nausea from overwhelming her. She mounted the ladder, then looked back.
In the dimness the two bodies lay just a few feet apart, their posture nearly identical. It was like two stages in a time-lapsed sequence showing decay: before and much, much after. There would be feasting and song, exultant wailing from sisters and wives and mothers; but then the scarab beetles would come, and the elegantly segmented worms and ivory-billed vultures, and smooth-skinned boys with their arms full of asphodel and handfuls of red dust to be rubbed into the bones…
No.
She whimpered. This was crazy; she’d gone insane; it was the hash or something worse, some hallucinogenic poison percolating in her brain all these years. Acid is Groovy, Kill the Pigs! But even as she clutched at the worn ladder she heard something, a low moaning that rapidly grew louder and louder, filling the chamber like a torrent of black water pouring down. It wasn’t until something struck her cheek that she looked up and saw that the circle of light at the mouth of the shaft had been eclipsed, tongues of shadow licking fiercely at its sides as gravel and rusted tools began falling everywhere. Eleven-A was collapsing.
“No!”
Her voice was swallowed as she scrambled upward, the ladder bouncing against the earthen wall as huge chunks of compacted soil slid and fell away to either side. All she could see was the shaft above her and far away its opening, a small dead moon. She screamed, choking on dirt and debris; but still she went on, forcing her way out, until finally she could feel the top of the ladder; there were no more rungs, no more darkness, only grass-strewn earth and light and air. She scrambled from the pit and rolled away, heedless of her torn clothes, a place on her right arm that ached as though it had been caught between hammer and anvil. Behind her the rumbling grew to a thunderous roar, so loud her entire body shook. Then, abruptly, silence.
She lay on the ground, weeping softly. The echo of that final explosive surge died away. She could hear other sounds—Nicky’s shouts, Janine yelling her name in a shrill, panicked tone. When she tried to wipe the crust of dirt and leaf mold from her face, her hand grew sticky with blood.
“Magda! Oh my god, Magda, what’s happening, where’s George, where’s George?”
Nicky helped her to her feet. “Magda? Can you hear me? Magda?”
She pushed him away and barreled past the hysterical Janine, looking wildly for the excavation site.
It was gone. Anything that had ever been recognizable as the result of human engineering had vanished. There was only a great concave declivity like a sinkhole, fresh earth and stones strewn across its surface. From the soft dirt protruded two small nubbins of wood like fingers or horns: the top of Chasar’s ladder. Magda stared at them in stunned disbelief. They were all that remained of Eleven-A.
“…you were down there? Goddammit, Magda, I can’t believe you were down there!” Now Nicky was hysterical, his voice rising shrilly as he ran around the perimeter of the site, searching futilely for some way down, a passage, an air chimney, anything. “George! Can you hear me? George—”
“Of course he can’t hear you,” Magda said dully. She turned to where the sun hung above the horizon, the violet edges of the mountains in bold relief against the thin gold light.
“We have to get help—the Jeep, drive into town, someone to dig him out—”
She nodded mutely as Janine screamed on and on and Nicky shouted at her: as though his rage might somehow make things different. But after a few more minutes she let the two of them hurry her to the Jeep and help her into the back, where she lay on a heap of burlap. She tried not to cry out as the vehicle leapt forward, jouncing over rocks and gulleys as Janine’s voice rang desperately through the chilly morning air.
“We’ll find Chasar, right, he’s always there this time of day, why the hell don’t we have a goddamn shortwave—”
Magda bit her lip, wincing from pain and the effort of keeping silent. She knew they’d never find George. Chasar wouldn’t take on the job, and neither would anyone else. There was no way she and Nicky and Janine could get down there alone. The Çaril Kytur dig was finished. A thousand years from now someone else would discover George lying beside that other skeleton and marvel at the eerie symmetry, two victims in identical posture buried millennia apart in this desolate European wasteland.
At the thought Magda began to weep again. The ache in her breast grew stronger with each shuddering breath she took. She turned onto her side, still crying, and drew her hands upward. She grabbed at the damp weight of her sweater, kneading the wool as she tried to find some way to make the pain stop.