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Jack Corstorphine is a man with a rare intuition. He is convinced that the landscape of Europe hides a civilization a million years old. Jadis Markham has a gift for analysis -- she can reach solutions while everyone else is still grappling with the problem. Together, they change the face of prehistory. But prehistory bites back. Forces almost beyond imagination are stirring in Jack and Jadis' world, among the worlds of their friends -- their scientist-priest mentor Domingo, and their adopted son, Tom -- and among the stars. The Sigil is an epic of near-future SF about the nature of the past, religion, love and the nature of humanity. About the author: Henry Gee is a Senior Editor of the international science magazine Nature, where he devised and edited the award-winning Futures series of SF short stories. His previous books include The Science of Middle-earth, Jacob's Ladder and In Search of Deep Time. The Sigil is his first novel.

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The Sigil

Henry Gee

    Prologue

    Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
    A paradise for a sect; the savage too
    From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
    Guesses at Heaven: pity these have not
    Trac'd upon vellum or wild Indian leaf
    The shadows of melodious utterance.
    John Keats - The Fall of Hyperion

    It's hard to know where to start. I have so much to tell; I have so little confidence in my abilities to tell it (reticence being my usual state, as well as many years as a dry-as-dust academic); and I am of course uncertain of the reactions - even the identity - of you, my audience, except that each one of you will belong to one (or more) of twenty or so different species, and many of you will be out of sympathy with the particular species at the centre of the drama I am about to attempt. My problem, in short, is this: much as though I feel I need to set down this record, I am not at all sure that I want to.
    First to needs, then to wants. Of course, many of you will have good reason to despise human beings. They were the oppressors, the colonisers, the enslavers. Such, at any rate, is the modish view of certain among us whose opinions are constrained by neither memory nor experience. It is easy to knock a straw man, to caricature a thing that is no longer able to respond. While I do not intend to write a political treatise -- the contents should be sufficient proof that it is not -- a primary reason for my writing this memoir is to convince you that the story is more complicated, more compromised - and more painful - than many of you realise, those of you who never met a human being. I lived among them for most of my life, and for most of that I had no reason to doubt that I was one myself.
    A second reason is that, odd as it might seem, if it weren't for the sacrifice made by humanity - I would go so far as the ultimate sacrifice - none of us would be here. Our beloved planet Earth would be a dry, cindered husk floating in black space. It was a close run thing, of course, but in the end we live in a fresh new world, bought with billions of human lives. Those of you who have read some history could counter that a sacrifice is not such if not made knowingly and willingly, and that the human beings who laid down their lives did not know that they were doing it for any purpose whatsoever. At one level, you'd be right, but not at another - proximately, the sacrificial lambs were paralyzed with horror and dread for themselves; the good of the world was the last thing on their minds. Ultimately, however, as a species, their sacrifice prevailed. They died for us: we owe them our existence. Qui tollis peccata mundi, as an old friend of mine once put it (we shall meet him too, I hope).
    This is an unfashionable view, I know. People are entitled to their own opinions, and I own that most will differ from mine. However, I strongly believe that mine is the correct one, because I was there. I lived through it. I knew the people involved. I grew up with them, I worked with them. I have lived inside humanity under the deepest possible cover, for if none of them ever suspected that I was anything other than human (or did not, for a long time), then neither did I. The discovery of my true nature was a shock, followed by isolation from those I loved, as well as those whom logic told me were my own kind.
    So much for needs, and now to wants. My reticence is conditioned, very largely, by my recognition that to some what I am about to discuss will be a highly personal, indeed acutely painful agenda that could - will -- compromise my wider reasons for setting these thoughts in order and offering them to you. However, were these memoirs simply an annalistic treatment of dates and events, they would mean nothing at all to you, the reader. You would not engage with them, and you would, therefore, be out of sympathy with my view that the memory of the human race should be one held in gratitude if not reverence - and not become something dark and twisted, to be reviled. But as I lived through the events described herein, I am able to set down an account which I would say is involved, rather than compromised.
    For example: everyone recalls that the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, and that King Harold the Second was killed by an arrow to the eye, fired by the bowmen of William the Bastard. But that's just a bald account, related by nobody who was there at the time. History is written by the victor, so nobody will ever know the pain and panic suffered by the vanquished King in his dying moments. As the force of the arrow snapped his head back, as his vision clouded with red, and then white, and finally black, we could never know - nor be in a position to speculate - that his final thoughts were of resigned futility: that he had tried his best to stem a tide of invasion from both the Danes in the north and the Normans in the south, and that, in his almost certain failure, the halls of his ancestors might welcome him the less, for all that he did his best despite his foreknowledge that on the field of Senlac Hill he would meet his doom. Once again, my argument is all about causation. Proximately, Harold died of a traumatic insult to the brain. His kingdom was lost along with his eye and his life, but his death, in the end was emphatically not about conquest and the fall of dynasties. Ultimately, he died of at least a provisional shame, until his case was judged by his own Angels, his own Gods. This might seem such a small thing, especially when suffered by an insignificant loser. But once we recognize the fact, we can feel his loss all the more keenly: the extinction of the Ancient English civilization by the barbaric Normans becomes, for us, too, a personal loss - particularly as he was denied any chance to purge his guilt.
    And so it is with me. In these notes I wish to express a similarly personal loss, and confess a potential shame which I have come to identify with the spirit of the age - but unlike Harold - who never got his chance -- I should like to purge it, facing down whatever pain and resurgent grief this might cause. Now, I know how pompous this all sounds, but to me, my own story, and that of the world in which I lived, revolves around one, single event for which I feel responsible. A confession, if you like.
    There are three human beings whom I have loved, and so this account is in a great part about them. But one of these three I loved the most, with a fierce and consuming love. I have always been a little reserved and perhaps a little secretive (I am told that this is in my nature) so she may not have realized the true strength of my feelings at the time (although, if I am honest, perhaps she did.) No, that is not the source of my shame. Some rueful embarrassment in later life, perhaps, but hardly worthy of the confessional. My shame comes from the bald fact that I killed her.
    Of course, you might add, once you have read the account, you will see that I did not mean to kill her - quite the opposite. She was full of life - no-one fuller -- and we two wanted to make more life still. In fact, I had no knowledge that I was killing her - how could I have done? By my own logic of causation, you might argue, I should be able to understand all this. And so I do, but acceptance is harder. I do not doubt that these circumstances are both true and extenuating, the fact remains that I killed her as surely as an arrow killed Harold. I have lived with this for far too long, and although I have tried hard to forgive myself, I cannot forget - and I do not, in fact, want to. Therefore I am driven to write this account, whether I will or nill.
    At this point I had planned to say that after you had read this, you might understand, and even sympathize. But in the act of writing this I can now conclude instead that this is not my own ultimate reason for ordering my thoughts here. Naturally, I'd be gratified were you to derive pleasure, even understanding, from their contents - after all, everyone loves to read the intimate doings of others. But that's up to you. No, the final reason, and perhaps the only reason, is that I owe her a great debt. She was a part of my life. A part of me, in fact, in a way that few of you still living will appreciate except by bloodless intellection.
    And so, in the end, this is a love story. It now appears that the concept of love as an ideal, an emotion strong enough to transcend pain, loss, even death, was an uniquely human attribute: in which case it is ironic (for me, at any rate) that our major religion is of human origin and, what's more, founded on the redemptive power of love. Whereas it is quite true that in the modern, post-human world there remains a great deal of sex, this is almost always taken for granted as a mechanistic means of procreation, even when it is not coloured by its frequent and variegated use in ritual observance. But that sex can be an adjunct of love - its glue, its amplifier - is, I dare say, beyond the wit or purview of most people. I own that this is a circumstance that such people cannot help, by their very natures. Indeed, many of them will find much in the account that follows deplorable, perverted, even bestial - if they find it comprehensible at all. I can only hope that they do not consider it maudlin or trite, which I would find a million times worse.
    A mystery remains. Given my own nature, that I should have felt the influence of love so strongly is a puzzle. Was a capacity for love born within me, or did I only acquire it by virtue of my upbringing? If the latter, could my love, as honestly as it appears to have been to me, be in reality a sham, a pale simulacrum of the real thing? I am unable to offer any resolution, and so this account serves - for me, and for no-one else - as expiation only.
    But to begin, as they say, at the beginning. Or, in my case, some while before it.
   
    Chapter 1
   
    (January 2001 - July 2003)
   
    Yþde swa þisne eardgeard ælda scyppend oþþæt burgwara breahtma lease eald enta geweorc idlu stodon.
    Anonymous - The Wanderer
   
    Cambridge is, as it always was, an anomaly, rather distant from anything else at all remarkable. A visitor to Cambridge today will see it much as it was in the Middle Ages, a cluster of picturesque University colleges on a wide river, in the centre of a small market town. Although closely surrounded by several small villages -- Cherry Hinton, Trumpington, Arbury and so on, the homes of the farmers and craftsmen who populate Cambridge's twice-weekly market in the shadow of Great St Mary's - the wider picture is of desolation. Nothing besides cheerless sedge and brackish fen, not even the meanest hovel, now exists between the village of Barnwell and the muddy tidal flats at the remote seaside fishing village of Ely. As for Cambridge itself, the Monastic Orders are different from those that held sway in those far-off days (and the students are, very largely, of different species) but the entire town could be described adequately by this general picture of quiet remoteness.
    How a century can change things. At the very start of the last century, every one of these villages was no more than a suburb of the City, which was alive and crammed with bustle. The religious orders had long been in retreat, replaced by the more immediately potent forces of science and industry, and the swathes of housing required to accommodate all those scientists and industrialists. The fens had been drained, making the land far more extensive than it is now, and oceans of wheat had displaced the mud flats and oystercatchers, the reeds and bitterns.
    It's hard to describe, now, how crowded it was. No - description is easy. It was hard to understand. The streets were perpetually jammed with motor vehicles of all kinds, each accompanied with its slipstreaming flock of bicycles, like a cow has its ox-peckers. People of all kinds (human kinds) surged and jostled along the narrow sidewalks: students, townspeople and tourists alike. Cambridge was then at its zenith as the seat of one of the two great and ancient Universities of England, pulling in the brightest and best of its young people to learn, and once learnèd, to teach.
    The bulk of the students were undergraduates, who came from their own dispersed homes for intense bursts of study that occupied in total less than half the year, spread in eight-week bursts over a frenetic three-year period. This learning was accompanied by leisure activities of all kinds, for if Cambridge undergraduates did anything better than most other people of their age, it was to live. It must have been an exciting time for them, especially compared with the more relaxed schedule today, when students are invariably in the novitiate and combine their studies with routine offices that occupy the whole year, with no distinction between terms and vacations.
    Back then, there was so much to offer, to excite, and you were not obliged to rise at four a.m. and muck out the pigs. They must have lived like the kings of old: but when each new and starry cohort of undergraduates had finally gotten over the euphoria of having been admitted to this select cadre, not to mention the after-effects of all the parties; the full-on assault of invitations to subscribe to the student parachute club (`join us and fall out with your friends'); the geophysical society (`stop plate tectonics NOW!') or the microbiological association (`we do it with culture and sensitivity'); and the liberation of living away, often for the first time, from the tyrannical eye of a parent -- they invariably discovered with a jarring bump that the lectures they were required to attend were, with few exceptions, dreadful. The dons (that is, the resident academics, who were at this time not required to be monks) would rather have been refining exotic superconducting phases of rare-earth-based ceramic materials or dissecting the use of punctuation in Paradise Lost than actually teaching the rudiments of their subjects to students, and so generally did the latter in the most perfunctory way they could.
    After all, despite this fervid activity, there were only as many hours in the day as there are now, and those not spent in tedious meetings with other academics were spent in precious research, or in raising the money required to fund yet further research. (How cynical I seem! If you can detect an edge to these comments, please remember that I was once one of them). If there were corners to be cut, it was in teaching, and the most prominent and frangible corners were the notes lecturers used to teach. Such hours as could have been spent in the long summer vacation to update lecture notes soon disappeared in field trips, conferences and even (whisper it soft) time spent with families. The result was predictable enough. Year on year, a lecturer's notes became progressively more dated. Perhaps the same is true today. I suspect that it is.
    But there were means to ends, and there was, in those crowded times, a ready if not inexhaustible supply of cheap labour to remedy this deficiency: for postgraduate students (that is, those admitted to courses of still higher learning) could, if they were organized and had a mind to, take in small groups of undergraduates, teaching them all those things that their lecturers seemed to have missed, and, not only that, accumulating a reasonable and very necessary income. These small groups were called `supervisions'. Jack Corstorphine was just such a graduate student, and with his tact, reserve, laconic humour - and a reasonable capacity for administration - he soon made a name among hard-pressed college tutors as an accomplished supervisor.
    Then in his second year of a doctoral degree (`Models of land use derived from geomorphology and lithic distributions in the British Palaeolithic'), Jack Corstorphine found supervisions filled a social void. Although attached to a college - as all Cambridge students were obliged to be - he found few attractions in college life. His field work was by necessity solitary; his laboratory work often more so.
    Not that he minded overmuch. Tall, broad-shouldered but rangy, and good-looking in a somewhat angular way, the long, lonely hours of research suited his naturally reticent temperament. And coming from a northern provincial town, where he had attended the local university as an undergraduate, he found Cambridge by turns confusing, exciting and depressing. He felt he should be stimulated by at all, and he was, up to a point. But he felt that nothing he could ever feel about his life and work in Cambridge would ever match the shining-eyed expectations of his parents, on learning that their only child, having been the only one in their family ever to have attended a university at all, was going to crown his study in what, to them, was a city of romantic associations: of punting on the river and May Balls, of strawberries-and-cream, champagne breakfasts and black-tie dinners, like something out of Brideshead Revisited. He hadn't the heart to tell them that his life in Cambridge was - in truth - rather ordinary.
    He enjoyed studying as he came to enjoy teaching, but his real love was the outdoors, tramping alone all over England, refining an already intuitive yet sharp sense of landscape, and how human beings (and other people) had shaped it over millennia. He poked into crabbed caves in the bleak limestone of Derbyshire, the foam-flecked Gower peninsula of south Wales, and bluebell-lined Torbay, trying to picture each scene through a Neanderthal's eyes; he tramped the Vale of Pickering beneath the North York Moors, where some of Britain's earliest farmers had corralled their cattle. For weeks at a time he'd live rough, fishing by day, camping in potholes or under hedgerows at night, returning to his disapproving landlady in Victoria Road stinking, bearded and bright-eyed, like a prophet from one of the more obscure corners of the Old Testament. "I was trying to find out what it must have been like," he would protest, weakly and futilely, as she prodded him (with her broom) towards the bathroom.
    Such was Jack Corstorphine at his most content. But no man can remain solitary for ever, and Cambridge was a maddening and frustrating place for such a man as Jack to find himself cast up: in those relatively short periods of the year when the undergraduates were in season, as it were, life was one big whirl. When they left, all was grey and dull. But by taking supervisions, he got to know quite a few undergraduates, and what he knew, he almost always liked. Even the dimmest Cambridge clod had something special about them. His students here reached greater heights and lower depths than his colleagues from his home town. They seemed more focussed, more colourful, more alive. And none more so than Jade Markham.
    Jack first saw Jade in a fluster of confusion one chilly January morning when she breezed into Jack's office five minutes late. A trio of students from St John's - all big, burly rowers - were already getting their notebooks out. A flutter of apologies - bike puncture, you know, happens all the time - and then Jack started on his prepared notes. Now, this was something that always amazed him. As soon as he drew himself up to speak - putting on his `official' voice - they were all attention. This never happened at his old university, where a patina of well-meaning dullness coated all endeavour, he thought: and (he admitted) it felt good, as a departmental dogsbody, to be treated as an authority, someone who Really Knew. Even then, Jack saw that Jade was just that bit more studious, more attentive, than any of his other students. Her initial lateness was the sole anomaly. Her assignments were always returned on time, and were always substantially better argued than anyone else's. Of course, he reasoned, Jade was very attractive - hardly difficult, given the three well-meaning but cauliflower-eared meatheads that made up the rest of her class. Could he be favouring her because she was the pretty one, the only female, as well as being the one with that extra sparkle? This caused him some anguish - something he laughed about in later years - so he tried a scientific experiment, asking some of his departmental colleagues who knew none of his students personally to rate their work. Jade's always came out on top. "Here's someone with some initiative, some promise", his doctorate supervisor told him, confidentially. "This is first class material, no doubt about that. Such a clarity of thought, of purpose - something only too rare nowadays. She could go far. Keep your eye on her."
    Not that Jack had the slightest intention of averting his gaze, but at least, he reasoned, he could appreciate her better without a guilty conscience. It wasn't long before she began to stalk his idle thoughts: she was long, lean and very leggy, with an open, round face; clear, slightly olive skin, and large, round, dark hazel eyes, so that while lost in thought she looked like a slightly surprised owl. When she spoke, her voice was neither loud nor shrill, but a modulated contralto (the product of a comfortable if not conspicuously wealthy Surrey background) that commanded the room.
    But what always caught Jack's breath was her apparently artless habit, while talking to the class in general - of, say, some arcane process of the evolution of postglacial landforms -- of piling her sprawling mass of very long, straight, glossy dark brown hair on top of her head, thus lifting her long, lovely arms, and thrusting out her small but exquisite breasts, each one crowned with a shapely nipple which could often be seen, if only just, pressing against the fabric of her clothes. Jack, in common with many of the legions of the overworked and sexually frustrated, soon evolved a gradation of female attractiveness. For a woman to pile her hair on her head was the third most alluring thing she could do while still completely clothed. The second most alluring thing was, then, for her to let a single strand of dark hair fall loose down her back, making a contrast against pale and curving shoulders. But the most alluring thing was her studied ignorance of the effect that these two small gestures would have on any male company. Suffice it to say that Jack was entirely lost. And the very moment that her time with him as a supervisor ended, he asked her on a date. And not just any date - but the Clare College May Ball. Oh, thought Jack, if she'd only accept: and if my parents could see me then! And if I should succeed in getting tickets!
    He shouldn't have worried that she might refuse. Jack wasn't to know that Jade was just emerging from the wreckage of an intense long-term attachment with a boy from her home town: a boy who'd only become more jealous and petulant as it became ever clearer that Jade's talents and ambitions would eclipse his own. She didn't show it, but she was finding it hard to sever the connection without being made to feel guilty and wretched. In which case, an old-fashioned, romantic night out with the kindly supervisor -in no way threatening or overbearing, and anyway, kind of nice -- would be just the tonic she needed (or so her girlfriends told her). He was clearly not the type to be jealous or possessive, which would be a relief. His twinkling eye, the way his mouth always seemed to curl upwards on one side as if he was just about to laugh, and (let one not forget!) his trim, yet husky and well-muscled form, gave the lie to the urbane exterior. She secretly suspected - she even dared to hope - that he might even be fun. And the venue! Clare College, on the river itself, with its charming stone bridge, was as romantic a date as anyone could ask for. And if he became attentive to an irritatingly juvenile degree (which would be a bore), or just plain boring (which would be irritating), she could easily lose him in the proliferation of sideshows, rock bands, jazz quartets and food and drink stalls that wafted the lucky guests from dusk until dawn. It was not unknown (she was secretly shocked to learn) for a girl to arrive with one consort and leave with another. And given that Clare May Ball tickets cost an absolute fortune and demand always outstripped supply, what sensible girl could refuse? And if Jade Markham was attractive, she was even more sensible.
    The Ball was an enchantment from beginning to end. After many hours of joyful worry, clucking over this outfit and that, Jade dressed in a plain, black strapless gown that showed off her clear skin, against which her dark eyes made a teasing drama, counterbalanced by her loose, cascading hair. She was perfect company, naturally poised and dignified and never clingy (which Jack wouldn't have minded so much) or bubbly (which he'd have hated), and he - well, he - he was the perfect gentleman he always knew he could be. With such a Lady on his arm, Jack felt like a Lord, like a million dollars, like James Bond, far more than the shy junior scientist he would be when dawn crept up over Clare's lawns and parapets. The night progressed smoothly on a seamless carpet of stars, and, much as he wanted to, he dared not make any obvious pass at her for fear of bruising that fragile magic, of shattering a perfect state of grace which could, with some careful and restrained management, persist indefinitely. Please don't end, he thought, he implored - please don't let it end.
    Jack dropped her off at the door of her house by car, his ageing and beloved if rust-pocked Peugeot 205 Diesel, whose back seat and trunk were littered with maps and paperwork mixed crazily with mud-caked camping and hiking gear: hardly Cinderella's carriage, but a car all the same, a luxury not permitted undergraduates in Cambridge's crowded medieval streets. They said nothing, neither wanting to be the first to break the spell, and so acknowledge, by the simple vehicle of speech, that even two hours after daybreak, the enchanted night had come to an end at last. But she was all excitement, her eyes the brightest things in the car's interior. That he had not made any advance whatsoever she was well aware, and for that she was grateful. Such a contrast with the boys - boys - she'd so far known, all acquisitive, hot hands, groins filled to bursting with unused testosterone, and no idea of how to cultivate the slow-nurtured romance that grown-up women really liked best -- or even any knowledge that such a thing might exist. Grateful, but not satisfied. She'd long been used to compliments, to being told how lovely she was, and soon learned to disregard all but a few as insincere: Jack was the first real man who'd asked her on a date, and while he had treated her with every old-fashioned courtesy, he had not shown any sign of deeper passion or intention. She strongly suspected, however, that Jack was no cold fish, and that not too far beneath the studied shell was a man as passionate as she could wish, and this suspicion teased and tickled her. As it was, however, the situation as it was could go on forever. If he wouldn't make the first move, then she would.
    As they came to a stop he was pulled up sharp by the first thing she said:
    "I'm so sorry about my name."
    "Your name?" Jack, in truth, had been wondering. He didn't think he was a snob, but he'd often wondered how such a name and such a girl went together - they seemed such ill-assorted company.
    "Well, it's like this. It's short for `Jadis'. My parents - my parents! - they were at Oxford, you know, and had a thing about C. S. Lewis."
    "But Jadis, wasn't she...?"
    "Yes, the Witch. You know, between the Lion and the Wardrobe," she paused - "the baddie!" she laughed. "I suppose my parents were expecting me to be a handful."
    "And did they...?"
    "Well, I had to live up to it. Didn't I?" And with that she reached over and kissed him, calmly, warmly and firmly. Her hair brushed his face and shoulders: as their lips came together, hers parted slightly in a sweet admission, her tongue probed out to meet his, questioning, exploring, in a contrast at once forceful and shy. Her mouth was so soft that Jack could hardly imagine anything could be softer without melting. Women, he concluded, revisiting his early classification with the tiny part of his mind not completely absorbed, were attractive because of their contrasts. Jade was soft and yet decisive, firm and yet submissive. What kind of Wicked Witch would ever cradle up into his arms - anyone's arms - quite like this?
    After a long, long moment they pulled apart. She couldn't invite him in, she teased, as she needed to get herself together before travelling home later that same morning. "Run along now", she giggled - "Or you'll turn into a pumpkin!" But as she rose to get out of the car, Jack brushed against her arm: at this, she sprang suddenly back into the car and his arms for another endless kiss. Jack drifted off home like thistledown, and as he had a late breakfast in his digs - still in his rented tux - he might as well have been floating on air. His landlady (who'd seen this all before, many times) permitted herself a rare smirk.
    "Welcome back, Romeo."
    The summer vacation seemed to drag on, but Jack and Jade met, and met again, and somewhere in a wooded dell in South Devon (where Jack was rooting around for some ancient caves forgotten for a hundred years, for clues about Palaeolithic behaviour), they came together.
    In later life neither could remember it without a fond smile: hiking boots, anoraks and rucksacks are hardly the stuff of romance. But to him she looked even sexier in her practical outdoors wear than she had in her ball-gown. Again, he thought, about contrasts. The harsh practicalities of rain gear against the unfeasible softness of her skin. The solid fabric of her hiking shorts against the filigreed nothingness of her underwear. The crabby roughness of the woolly socks against the long, cool smoothness of the inner surfaces of her thighs as she parted them and wrapped them around his hips. And as he came into her, her pure unselfish yielding stood sharply against her otherwise firm decisiveness. This is a girl, he thought, who always got what she wanted. And what she wanted was him, again and again.
    Life for the next two years was a constant bacchic buzz. It was hard to concentrate on work, but Jade, for all her teasing skittishness, could only be a party girl when her own strict, self-imposed timetable let her - and she had work to do. As her final exams approached, Jack and Jade met increasingly rarely. They avoided the temptation of moving in together, so that each meeting was a jewel in their busy lives, a cache of memories to be treasured, and when recalled, yearned for all the more. Jack continued his field work, criss-crossing the ancient landscape of Britain, but where he had once seen bald crags and meandering valleys purely as they were, his mind now infused each vista with erotic overlays. In the curve of a far hilltop at dawn, drenched in the blue of distance, he traced the swelling form of Jade's left hip, sweeping down to shadowed thighs and belly, as they had once lain together in the half-light of a secret, stolen early morning in her room. The clothing of leafy woods that clung in narrow crevices at the bases of shorn and billowing downland ridges became the warm fuzz between her legs that he had once caressed, as gently as he could manage, before she made a small, uncharacterizable sound, licked his earlobe, and then - oh, then! -gathered him inside her. Every curl of smoke from a village chimney stack became the soft cloud of her hair as she unfastened it, letting it tumble over her face, her shoulders, almost as far as the incurving of her waist: in the glint of sun on water - and even the reflection of light on the lenses of his surveying equipment, he saw her wide eyes, in a perpetual expression of happy surprise. Oh, what a basket case he was. But he had his work, too, and a career to pursue. Who knew where he would have to find work after his doctorate, always assuming he got that far? And who knew where Jade would go? He suppressed the thought that in the nomadic world of academic life, let alone the hectic mayfly existence of undergraduates -- they might be parted, and soon.
    At last - and too quickly -- the summer came when Jade took her final exams. She graduated at the top of her class (of course) and when she came out of the Senate House with the result, she was as flushed and excited as a little girl who'd just been given the Christmas present she'd always wanted. On seeing Jack, she turned from the small gathering of her friends, and, running to him, flung her arms round his neck and - before he had even a moment to whisper a word of congratulation -- rained kisses down on him like a summer storm. But as the rain slowed, it became slower, more leisured and more languid - and when they parted - as Jade, in another charming habit of hers, brushed herself down, making her breasts bounce and recoil ever so slightly - she looked up at him with her owlish eyes as if reappraising him all anew.
    "What is it?" he asked.
    "Well, now that's over, I can help you."
   
    Chapter 2
   
    (July 2003)
   
    The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
    Henry David Thoreau -- Walden
   
    To be sure, Jack found himself in need of help - and badly. Just how badly he was reluctant to admit to himself. He knew only too well how a blow to one's self confidence in the final stages of a research degree could destroy everything. He'd seen, so many times, how research students started with so much ebullience, only to find, more than two years later and within sight of the dreadful midnight watch they called `writing up', that what they had accumulated actually amounted to very little. Drifts of accumulated data vanished like April snow in the first, glancing light of critical analysis. Worse, that they had spent those years asking the wrong questions to begin with; that however good the data they had gathered, that there was, in sum, no case to be answered -- or, worse still, that they had, in technical language and with much circumlocution, done something that had been worked out already, but in some other way. Or - worst of all -- that they had simply proved, with certainty and without fear of contradiction, that x equals x. So much time wasted. And more than wasted -- those self-abasing, self-denying years when careers are built, and they might, like their school friends, already be in steady jobs with mortgages and some status in life, rather than living like overgrown students in drabness and in debt.
    But Jack was as tough as the roads he'd tramped for years. He was a rock as hard as the millstone grits around his Yorkshire home town, as eternal as the White Cliffs of Dover. He would let nothing shake him. In any case, his problems were not yet terminal, for he could make out patterns in his data - this, the most exciting sensation a scientist can experience, at least in working hours. He was simply at a loss to understand how they could be systematized.
    As a result of his long pilgrimages, he could view a landscape and immediately sense that people had been there, long ago. Jack had gone far beyond looking for traces of buried roads, post-holes, cave hearths and flint débitage: more than anyone alive, he could look at the angle of a hill-slope, or the way a river curved in its course, and tell that these things had been shaped by the hand of man, even without any other sign - and even accounting for the titanic forces of climate change that had shaped Britain over the past million years, in which glaciers had come and gone, scrubbing entire ranges of hills from the map and altering the courses of rivers over their whole lengths. His talent was so passionately internalized that he could no longer look objectively at its products. That these things were so he had no doubt - but he had no way of demonstrating that the slight and subtle clues he saw were not made by natural forces, unaided. And he'd look a right fool if his thesis committee asked how he knew that - say - the layout of the caves in Cheddar Gorge could not possibly have been natural, and he had had no answer ready save that they just looked like that.
    What he needed was some formal way of comparing his intuitions of ancient human presence in one place with those inspired by somewhere else, and then contrasting both of these with what nature would have created, unaided - a system that would corral the patterns thrown up by his gut reaction, to domesticate them, to make them make sense. But quantifying his intuitions? One might as well try to lasso the clouds. Despite much research and earnest questions to statisticians, no ready method existed - it was all too vague -- and he had neither the means nor the ability to derive such a technique himself. But without such a key he could go no further. In his mind, he could see his thesis: he was so desperate that he could almost taste it, but a barrier at once so intangible and yet so impassable stood between him and completion.
    The frustration was doubly agonizing by his certain knowledge that Britain had been populated for far longer and more intensively than anyone had ever believed or guessed - and his total inability to prove it. Were he simply to step up and say, without supporting evidence, that, say, fifty thousand years ago, Neanderthal Man lived in Britain in organized populations numbering in the tens of thousands, he'd be laughed off the stage as surely as if he'd said he'd discovered Atlantis.
    He had this recurring dream in which he and Jade were at a tropical beach. Jade, in a flowing, colourful sundress and a big floppy hat, stayed on the shore, nose in a huge novel, too engrossed to do more than wave carelessly when he announced he was going for a swim. Cut to himself fifty yards out, and despite all his efforts, in the thrall of a slow riptide which, slowly and surely, took him yet further away from land. He shouted to Jade for help but she didn't seem to notice. Perhaps she was beyond earshot? And just before he woke, his last thought was of being almost sure that Jade had taken off her sundress, and was naked but for the hat, but he couldn't be certain, as she was too far away now to make out very clearly, and he got fewer and fewer glimpses of her, sandwiched between a sunhat that had grown as large as a parasol, and what seemed like a self-generating library of books.
    It could be, he admitted finally, that he'd simply have to chuck it all in as an insoluble problem. Roaming around the countryside had been fun, he thought, but perhaps he lacked the talent to put it all together and make it work as a piece of scholarship. But he was loath to admit this to anyone, not to his parents, and especially not Jade - not yet. He wondered if he'd ever have the courage. And so, helplessly, he clung on.
    Jade's news, on the Senate House lawn, came as something of a revelation, the proverbial bolt from the blue - although he could kick himself for not seeing it coming, even though he was lost in his own worries - worries that he'd not yet had the opportunity to share with her. Their most recent mutual absence had lasted five weeks, while Jade studied for her finals, and Jack kept well away, exploring (in desperation, he thought) a new tack, in southern France.
    Long ago, he recalled from some sodden mental archive (now awash with a flood of incipient panic), she had been marked down as doctorate material. Indeed, how could he forget, as he was the first of her supervisors to spot her talent? (And how dare he, come to that?) But everyone knew that getting a doctorate place as a dead certainty, along with the grants to fund it, meant that the student had to excel in her undergraduate studies beyond almost all measure - to go right off the chart of the ordinary, and launch into new critical territory. And this is what Jade was now trying to get through to him, here on the Senate House lawn, with her expressive lips, the warmth of her hands under his jacket, on his shoulder blades, the cloud of hair brushing his cheeks and chin, the insistent press of her breasts against his ribs. She had graduated with sufficient honours that a doctorate course was hers, whenever she wanted it - and, because it was the starriest starred-first-class degree that anyone had seen for years, she could, pretty much, pick and choose her course -- and her supervisor.
    "I choose you, Jack," she said in a small voice, almost cracked, her eyes softening almost to tears, and puzzled by his momentary stunned shock, his distraction. "Darling Jack, I choose you. But -" she said, regaining (yet another of her charming quirks) a somewhat starchy and old-fashioned composure, as if auditioning for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, "they said you'd have to get your degree first. And a fellowship."
    It would be wrong to say, for Jack, that the clouds parted and the Sun shone. More, that Jade had become the persistent, never-to-be-deterred trickle of water that eventually erodes a secret cavern of breathtaking beauty beneath ragged mountains otherwise impervious to physical assault. But he felt himself smiling, and said something which, for all the intensity of their togetherness, for all its rightness, he'd carefully avoided saying for two years, for if he'd said it out loud, he reasoned, he'd bring the joyous youth of their relationship to a close:
    "I do so love you, Snow Queen." Jade buried her face into the expanse of his chest, and, silently - for she had never done so before - started to cry.
    Hand in hand, they crossed King's Parade and found a perch in a coffee shop, amid the jostling crowds of excited students. Jack was agog with surprise at what Jade now told him. Only her animated smile, the light through the window glancing from her flushed cheeks, her still-glistening eyes, kept him from the remorseful certainty that even with her evident acuity, of which he'd had the first and most intimate knowledge, he had still underestimated her.
    "A little bird tells me -" she began. "Or, actually, two little birds, that you've got stuck."
    He hung his head. Like a schoolboy caught thieving apples. She peered forward, looking up at his face:
    "Don't be so down. One of those little birds is me, remember? Even when we've been, you know - in bed -- you've been miles away."
    "Have I?" He tried to smile, and succeeded, although inside he now felt entirely wretched. This was, after all, her day, not his, and he was spoiling it, and what made it worse, she didn't seem to mind at all.
    "And when I saw you off to France, you looked like leave had been cancelled and you were bound for the Western Front."
    "That bad, eh?" His smile spread. "Well, I did miss you, Snow Queen."
    "And I missed you, too." For all those weeks, the hours spent revising, she had to keep working as fast and as hard as possible to stave off the ghastly ache that scraped away at her insides every time she thought about him - his smile, as if laughing at some long-remembered joke, his lovingly soft grey eyes, his lightly freckled shoulders. He called her his Snow Queen, but to her he was Aslan, the Lion - had he only known it: but she had never told him, for she didn't think she would ever be able to cram the fiery fluster of feelings that assailed her, whenever she thought of Jack, into the confines of language. He had become the Rock on which she had built - what? Herself! She had once been so sure of everything, that she knew what she wanted in life and how to achieve it. But now she could see that she had been nothing but a small child playing among the feet of giants, her assurance a product of her ignorance that the towering limbs all around her even existed. Jack didn't say very much, but what he said was always the right thing to say, and at least he was always there. Without him she was nothing.
    With the books, papers and printouts piled on her desk at three o'clock in the morning, when she'd had to take a break, only herculean effort could keep her away from imagining herself safely encircled in his warm compass; and (oh, and!) how when he was inside her, he was like a great oak beam wrapped in velvet, but so gentle, filling her with such warmth - and how, when she looked up from her dream, all was bare and monochromatic; she was pale, lost and utterly hollow, a discarded husk; and the long weeks stretched far ahead of her. But that was all over now, in the past, and she would say nothing of it to Jack. She leaned further across the small table, her hair haloed by the light through the café window, took both his hands in hers and kissed them very softly, as if she'd dusted them with goose down.
    "Well, you're back now. And here's the deal."
    She explained as they walked down King's Parade and did a circuit around the Backs. While he was away, she said, she'd run into Professor McLennane, a potential doctorate supervisor - and Jack's present one -- in the departmental coffee room, who'd said - well not actually said, but suggested, you know, as it wasn't really any of her business - that Jack had a lot of data, perhaps more than he could cope with, especially as he now should be calling a halt and writing it all up. This going off to France was all very well, but why a new direction now? Jade had explained that Jack - very considerately, she thought -- wanted to keep well out of her way while she was working towards her own finals, and Professor McLennane knew about their domestic situation, you know, which everyone in the department had probably known about for the past couple of years...
    Jack could well imagine the electricity of this exchange, and his heart went out to Jade for playing with fire, all for his benefit. Roger Sutherland McLennane was a bluff, hard-working scientist whose lust for life regularly spilled over into the thickets of impropriety. A smart and still dashingly handsome man who'd just turned sixty, he was the editor of the leading scholarly journal in its field; had papers in Nature more often than most people changed their socks; a wonderful, tolerant (and very rich) wife who had borne him six children; and a fondness of fast, expensive cars, which he would regularly crash. If that weren't enough, he had at least two mistresses - at least, these were the ones whose existence was common knowledge - and his extended periods in the field allowed free expression for his insatiable penchant for deflowering female research students. But if he weren't in the field and had worked his way through all the available and willing victims (and these were surprisingly many, as McLennane was generally regarded as a bit of a dish) he'd always make out with a nurse.
    "Roger by name - and Roger by nature", ran the departmental gossip.
    ]"McLennane's ability as a scientist is very great" one senior don remarked to another at High Table, "exceeded only by his capacity as a nurse-shagger."
    Anyhow, Jade said, as they walked, her eyes focussed inquisitively in the middle distance, McLennane had kind of, you know, leaned over towards her. She remembered, suppressing a giggle, how he had peered down the front of her blouse (which she had left just slightly unbuttoned in case of this very eventuality) - and suggested - confidentially, if you don't mind -- that with her fine analytical brain, and - ahem - other attributes - she might have a look at Jack's data for him? Perhaps give the old man a hand, if he weren't too stubborn to accept it, that is, Jack being something of a lone wolf? Proud man, you know, Corstorphine. But he could be an excellent mentor - of course, you know that, what? -- if he just pulled himself together, get the damned thing out of the way and claim the college fellowship he deserved. He's doing something genuinely new - so rare in this game, don't you know - way beyond most of the rest of us. He Is The Future! And so, my dear girl, are you, by all accounts (shouldn't really be telling you all this, what? Most unethical). Perhaps you could see your way to giving him some - ah - inspiration? Be his muse?
    At this point Jade did that thing with her hair, flashed McLennane her loveliest smile, made her excuses and left, leaving Cambridge's most notorious philanderer a sweet glimpse of heartbreakingly smooth, creamy thigh and the rueful prospect that some conquests would forever remain in the realms of the imagination. Lucky old Corstophine, that's all he could say. But he really hoped the young Markham could help, because his charge was deeply, genuinely -- and possibly intractably -- up shit creek. McLennane honestly believed that Jack was on to something truly new, but he'd exhausted all his own considerable resources trying to help him. Yet McLennane, like Jack, trusted his hunches. Perhaps a younger and nimbler mind could shine a light. His instincts told him that Jade, as well as being a prick-teaser (he thought, with a sigh) had - if her form were anything to go by -- the finest mind ever to be found atop a pair of pins as gorgeous as those. In truth, if MacLennane were forced into a corner, he'd be prepared to admit that this winsome filly (as he'd put it) was their final hope. He had to back her, because she was their last throw.
    As they walked across Clare Bridge their minds filled with reminiscence; they drew closer to each other, stopped and looked at the view: the river as it carried the punting, laughing tourists and students beneath them, like so many pooh-sticks. Jade was entirely aware of the delicacy of the situation: she knew that Jack was exhausted, boxed in, but not as yet sure how or why, and last thing she wanted to do was bruise his pride.
    "Darling Jack, you don't have to say yes..." She began to hesitate, to break up, the unwonted tears were again so close: "... and I won't blame you if you don't - but ..."
    Jack turned and pulled her into his arms, comforting her, stroking her hair as she buried her face into his shirt. Any lesser man, or a man less in love, would have felt stung by what could be seen as a betrayal of trust. But Jack realized (not for the first time) that McLennane was not only a sound judge of character, but would not have suggested such a crazy scheme if he didn't think that he, Jack, could pull it off - and that Jade was the key. How funny it was that a man such McLennane, with all the careless notches on his bedpost, believed at root in the power of love to conquer all adversity. And McLennane had undoubtedly realized that whereas Jack could smell data and connections that eluded all others, then Jade had a quite startling knack for seeing right through the data and grasping the point. Even way back, when she'd sat in Jack's supervisions, she'd solved every problem long before any other student had even begun to organize their ideas, and had come to conclusions which sometimes seemed orthogonal to the evidence, but which, on reflection, usually turned out to be right. And hadn't it been McLennane, back then, who'd advised Jack never to take his eyes off this promising student, lest she leave him standing?
    On the bridge, Jack looked down at this girl in his arms, this extraordinary girl who had given away her moment of triumph to the still-untested and possibly lost cause of helping him complete his work. Now, were one to be objective, as scientists are supposed to be, the whole idea was ridiculous. Here was McLennane - a man whose academic judgment had otherwise never been known to err, despite his recklessness with the feelings of others - putting all his chips on the slim shoulders of a girl who, while her abilities were not in question, was just twenty years old; who had been a postgraduate for less than an hour; and whom he expected to derive some kind of magic formula that all the statisticians Jack consulted were convinced did not exist. Were he a cynic, he'd simply admit that he had nothing to lose.
    But Jack was no cynic: he was a man in love. He longed to say `yes', but could he expose Jade to the chasm of disappointment that was widening between his feet, and risk her career, too? She could - she should - find some safer pair of hands. But in Jade's eyes he saw, beneath the sheen of softness, an edge of fire-hardened flint that could both cut flesh and set a forest in flames. Jade wasn't just some fresh graduate, she was his girl, and he knew what she was capable of. For him to deny her offer of help would be to demean her - and, by extension, him.
    In the end, their fates were bound together, whatever they did - of that he was now absolutely certain.
    "Look up at me," he asked, with determined evenness. His grey eyes, thoughtful with unguessable thoughts, met her broad hazel-brown ones, yearning for resolution, acceptance, absolution. "We're in this together, Snow Queen. Now - what's the question?" His lips broadened into a smile; her eyes sparkled with relief. They kissed, and as they parted, Jack felt a great weight of worry slide quietly from his shoulders and slink into the river. "But I do have one condition, Your Majesty."
    "You have only to name it!" she laughed, mock-serious, her apprehension vanished like smoke, her mood once again of uncrushable joy.
    He knelt down, and heedless of the crowds on the bridge, took her hands and said quite loudly:
    "Jadis -- Snow Queen -- will you marry me?" Most of the passers-by did not notice. But many stopped and smiled, a few applauded; and there were a few wolf-whistles. Jade pulled him up from the ground, not knowing where to look, wondering whether she'd simply fall apart with joy, her tears now quite open and full. The first thing she thought as she composed herself was how, if she was the decisive one, had it been he who had first confessed his love; he who had proposed, hardly an hour later, like one thundering wave after another? Perhaps there was something to be said for intuition, for sensing the moment - especially here, the scene of their first date, just twenty-four months and several geological ages ago. As it was, she was far behind. She had never told him how much he was her anchor. Like him, she had been reluctant to declare her love for fear of spoiling the bloom on a flower that might yet fade.
    She decided right there and then to make it up to him, that afternoon. And evening. And all night. And very early the next morning, as they lay together in her college room, wedged into a single bed, drowsy in a billow of sheets, she said, in a tiny whisper - not entirely sure if he was awake -
    "I love you too, you silly old Lion - so very much, so much it scares me, it hurts. Darling Jack -- hold me, please." But what she did not say was how, in that moment of confession, her mind crested a ridge of hills, and rather than seeing the expected summit, encompassed an unknown vista of opportunity - and of terror. He stirred, and still more than half asleep, pulled her into his embrace and muttered, just on the edge of hearing:
    "I'll always be here for you, Snow Queen. Always".
   
    Chapter 3
   
    (October 2004)
   
    No definition had spoken of the landscape-gardener as of the poet; yet it seemed to my friend that the creation of the landscape-garden offered to the proper Muse the most magnificent of opportunities. Edgar Allan Poe - The Domain of Arnheim
   
    "Item: we have a Lion. We have a Witch. And now -- we have a Wardrobe!" announced Jade, flushed and breathless, after they'd heaved the second-hand hulk into the bedroom of the flat they'd rented just after she graduated.
    "But will we still get to Narnia?" said Jack.
    "That, Darling Jack, has yet to be determined," she replied, the steel of her eyes flashing between loose strands of hair.
    It was a one-bedroom Victorian garden flat in Chesterton, which they were paying for from a year's extension of Jack's doctorate grant, extra supervisions, and a few odd research jobs that Jade was doing for McLennane (who'd taken a proprietorial interest in both of them) on the pretext of her studying for a Masters while Jack finished his thesis - a prospect that seemed almost in his grasp, but forever just beyond his reach. The flat was dark and grubby, but it was sound and tolerably dry; the central heating worked at least some of the time; and a pot of paint on a summer Sunday afternoon always works wonders, even were one not to be distracted by trying to paint each other instead of the kitchen ceiling. In any case, Jack - who was never more content than when sleeping rough under a hedge - was pleased to have a base where he could think and work in peace and quiet, and where he and Jade could at least be together without prying landladies or college domestics.
    It also had the loveliest garden: hardly twenty feet by twelve, but surrounded entirely by a high wall, and, being north-east facing, made an evening sun-trap of the high, back wall. Jade rediscovered a fondness for gardening that she thought she'd left behind on her Dad's allotment when, as a little girl, she'd love to grow radishes and sunflowers and pick gooseberries. By the following summer it was a fragrant haven for herbs and cottage-garden flowers. On sunny days, Jack took his supervisions in the garden. He always felt happiest outside. He was, he claimed to a visiting French colleague, the last of the red-hot Palaeolithic lovers, at which Jade flushed and hid behind her curtain of hair.
    At the bottom of the garden was a knee-high raised bed that ran its entire width, restrained by a wall of reclaimed bricks, and in which some unidentifiable species of ornamental acacia grew over an unkempt understory of broom, rosemary and lavender. You could crawl right inside, under the bushes, and make a kind of nest on a carpet of herbs and the crusts of dead leaves, where nobody could find you. It baked in the Sun during the day, unleashing a lush torrent of fragrance, and even after dark, the old brick wall behind would radiate the accumulated heat well into the early hours -- warmth that the bushes would then trap, creating an almost Mediterranean microclimate . It was in the Nest (it was now capitalized), much more than in their first, new double bed, that they made love.
    On late summer evenings Jade and Jack would burrow into the Nest wearing little more than a bottle of wine, two glasses and a smile, and would not emerge until morning - their own private Eden. Jack remembered one chilly dawn awaking in the Nest to find them both slick with dew. A spider had spun drag lines across Jade's pale body, trapping drops of moisture that made a spangled net for the twining, leaf-adorned strands of her hair. Each of her long, dark lashes was crowned with a tiny pearl, just as if she were a sleeping fairy queen. For all that he was stiff, wet and blue with cold, Jack remembered it as a moment when his heart sang.
    And as for supervisions, ever since his best student had become his fiancée, he'd seen very few sparks of talent, or even (it has to be said) of much intelligence. One exception was a dashing and almost unbearably cocky young first-year called Avi Malkeinu, who was Israeli and knew all about Mount Carmel, famous for its honeycomb of caves rich in Neanderthal and modern human remains. Malkeinu had poked around them, boy and man, civilian and soldier, and had some outrageous ideas about the extent and depth of human and Neanderthal occupation in his country - outrageous to all except Jack, who learned as least as much from Malkeinu as Malkeinu did from him.
    Malkeinu got in very well with Jade, and at first Jack was worried. He needn't have been - Jade loved to flirt, but it was never, ever serious. In any case, Malkeinu, for all his affected medallion-man flash and fondness for offensively smelly after-shave, had been raised on an old-fashioned kibbutz where men and women grew up all together in a brash, matter-of-fact way, with none of the mysteries that complicated adolescence elsewhere. Malkeinu would have loved to have seen Jade without her clothes on - sure! What real man wouldn't? She was a babe! But he'd seen lots of beautiful women without their clothes on, quite often several at once, and he earnestly hoped to see lots more. The world was wide, a big new game made for his pleasure. There were no sliding panels about Malkeinu - you just took him as you found him.
    Which is why Jack was perturbed by a visit to his office by two rather shifty-looking characters claiming to represent some student organization or another, who advised him that he shouldn't be teaching Malkeinu as he'd served in the Israeli Defence Forces and was, no doubt, an Evil Agent of Zionist Oppression. Jack did something that he almost never did - get angry. Alarmingly, consumingly angry, so that he shed the shy, quiet academic that he tended to be in Cambridge, and became the wiry, weather-beaten, mad-eyed and rather piratical ranger that he was in the field. He listened quietly to what his visitors had to say, and then, still without meeting their gaze, invited them to go fuck themselves. When they began to remonstrate, he rose from his chair, as if, all of a sudden, he really had become Aslan, the avenger. "Listen, I thought I told you to fuck off," he said, as calmly as his sternly suppressed violence would allow, finally turning his scorchingly unflinching gaze upon them: "and if I see either of you again - or if you harass my friends - I'll fucking rip your fucking bastard heads off and stick them on poles. Understand? Now piss off." He had to say nothing further: in the ferocity of his stare, the grimness of his attitude, the two took flight and never came back.
    For ten minutes Jack remained his chair, his heart racing, his body shaking uncontrollably. He didn't think he had it in him: he'd normally do anything to avoid conflict, and immediately began to worry that there might be repercussions. But what began to dominate his mind, half an hour later, as he walked home through the searing streets -- it was already mid-October and term was in full swing, but the Indian summer had been as hot as a furnace, gathering itself for a final burst -- and seething further with every step, was that he'd heard spiteful rubbish like that before, from people in his own department, especially the social anthropologists: and those archaeologists who read the past not as it was, but through the lenses of current political preoccupation - and yet had the gall to call themselves `scientists'. Neo-archaeologists, processual archaeologists, feminist archaeologists, Marxist archaeologists, post-fucking-processual archaeologists, for God's sake, not to mention those idiots, quite often obscenely obese women from Berkeley or Pasadena, who climbed to the top of tells, stripped off and jiggled their leviathantine tits about for the benefit of some right-on Mother Goddess - as if (and this was the part he found really offensive) as if this charade had anything whatsoever to do with what prehistoric people actually believed or did! And there were people in his department who actually took that stuff seriously - the same people who'd cheerfully scorn a kitsch Hawai'ian hotel luau as having as much connection with authentic Polynesian culture as Mickey Mouse had with Mus musculus, simply because it was a product of capitalist colonialism. Prehistory was forged on the ground, not by political posturing, and it was people like Malkeinu - open-minded people, people only interested in acute observation - who had the best chance of finding out what it was, without prejudice. And they were damning him - because of his origins and national obligations? What utter, dismal, hypocritical crap. No wonder, Jack thought, that he'd spent so much time in the field, away from such pseudery.
    But as he approached Chesterton, and began to calm down, he realized that he was that close to being a pseud himself. Processual-and-whatever archaeology had, at least, been forged in the field as much as his own landscape-based approach, as ways and means to get to grips with patterns seen in data - patterns caused by the interaction of man and nature. But as yet he still had no way of interpreting the patterns he saw. He had to find something soon. Had to. To vindicate himself - and people like Avi Malkeinu.
    Jade, too, had had a rotten day, running errands for McLennane that meant scurrying to and from the University Library for books that didn't exist, when she was quite sure that they did; or if they did exist, were on shelves on the other side of the building; for papers which she wasn't allowed to see, even though she'd phoned ahead and received cast-iron assurances that they would be made available. It didn't help that the library was as hot as an oven, and that she was getting a headache. As she was sure she wasn't due for a period, this suggested that the oppressive weather had built up to its stifling worst before an imminent break - and not before time. In fact, when she paused to count days, she'd had her period about a week and a half before. This probably explained why, right now, she was as randy as a goat, which only added to her feeling of general dissatisfaction. It was about time, she thought, that Jack made some headway with his doctorate, because only then could she get serious about her own.
    She arrived home moments after Jack, determined to make some progress after a hot summer in which very little seemed to have been achieved. As she kicked off her sandals she saw his hiking boots and socks cast off in the hall, still warm; his bag on the kitchen table, papers pouring from it like the innards of a partially eviscerated dogfish. She found him where she knew he would be, in the Nest.
    "Wine?" he offered, barefoot, holding out a full glass of off-licence Shiraz Cab as she sat down next to him on the wall of the raised bed, beneath the lavender and rosemary, fragrant after this unseasonably scorching day.
    "Nicest thing anyone's said to me all day," she replied, taking a generous swig. "Correction," she noted, looking up, her eyes sharp, her lips stained with red, a rivulet running down her chin. "I'm sure you said something even nicer to me this morning."
    "I did...?" His lovely, unforced, unfocussed smile. Whatever clouds had gathered over him were beginning to dissipate. Responding, she warmed to him and snuggled up closer, sitting on the ledge between his legs, leaning back against his chest, completely enfolded by his arms.
    "Yes, you silly old Lion: you said" - she began to laugh - you said that tonight we really must have a brainstorm --"
    "Frankly, Snow Queen, I'd rather pour you some more wine ...", which he did. Then he put down the bottle and stroked her unfastening hair.
    "...and, you said that after the brainstorm, that I really needed a thorough seeing-to."
    "I said that? Doesn't sound like me. Are you sure that was me?" - he ran his fingers down her throat, unbuttoned her blouse, and let his hands steal lightly over her breasts, his fingertips teasing her tightening nipples through the fabric of her bra.
    "Yes, of course it was you," - her laugh was as warm as the wine as she reached her arms above her and pulled his face down to hers.
    "Nope. Can't have been me," he said. "Now, if it were me, I'd have said you needed a good seeing-to before the brainstorm. Nothing like a good seeing-to, you know, for clearing the brain".
    "Well, as it is you, and that's your view, Professor," she said, "why don't we...?"
    But before they could say or do anything else, the clouds broke with a deafening roar, and within seconds they were as drenched as if God had emptied his bathwater on their garden.
    "Aha, Professor!" she exclaimed, "the rainstorm that comes before the brainstorm!"
    "For that dreadful joke, Snow Queen, you really do deserve a good seeing to."
    "I do so agree, Professor," she said: it was the last thing either of them said for a long time.
    As they sat in the warm rain on the edge of the raised flower bed, her head under his chin, he ruffled her damp hair while continuing to unbutton her, peeling off her wet blouse and unfastening her bra, while she luxuriated in his love, his minute attention. She shimmied out of her long skirt and underwear, her feet raising splashy gouts on the lawn, and sat back. The rain coursed over their bodies: his hands slowly explored her breasts, her stiffly puckered, surprisingly dark nipples, her belly (shipping water in her navel), her arms, her upraised throat. She took his right hand in hers (he had a mental picture of a female saint holding a lily) and after kissing his fingertips very gently, placed them between her parted thighs. The weight of the immense drops of rainwater splashing on his fingers contrasted with the steadily radiant, tropical heat from between her cool, rain-washed legs.
    She rose, turned, in naked loveliness as if she were a dancing sprite in the dawn of the world, rain splashing and glancing and making sparks in all directions as it ricocheted from her glistening body, her hair swinging in lazy streamers over her face and breasts -- put one finger on his lips while she unzipped his fly. His cock stood up immediately, and while he was still perched on the edge of the raised bed, she bent down, kissed it, took it in her mouth, licked him, the ends of her heavy hair brushing yet lightly against his loins. Then she arose in languorous slowness and straddled him, gripping his hips with her firm, broad thighs, feeling him deeply, smoothly and hot within her, rocking back and forth, as he cupped her behind with one hand, and with the other, traced the rivulets arcing down the valley of her spine. As they moved, they kissed again, their lips meeting and parting, meeting and parting through the rain curtain, in a butterfly dance. After a minute or two he rose, and, with her legs still wrapped around his waist, picked her up, turned, and - sliding out of her - placed her inside the Nest on a deep carpet of leaves still dry and warm, the foliage above protecting it from the worst of the downpour. She lay there, almost buried in leaves, limbs spread, eyes burning in a soft glow as he shucked off his trousers and underpants.
    But before he could scramble into the Nest and take her again, she laughed skittishly and flipped over on to her knees and elbows, thrusting her leaf-strewn backside at him like a cat on heat, waving it from side to side like a flag, as if she had a tail. Although momentarily taken aback - this was a somewhat new direction for their sexual repertoire - he moved in towards her, feeling the irresistible, cool softness of the backs of her thighs against his groin, her swollen, pitted warmth between. He stroked the inviting curves of her hips, brushing the leaves away; traced the dips of her lower back, moving his hands forward, holding her waist before sliding them over her shoulders, massaging these as she moved back and forth, moaning; then weighed the ripe, hanging fruits of her breasts with their velvety-hard tips, and then, moving his hands back once more, parting her buttocks just slightly, feeling her soft and fuzzy wetness with his fingertips before clasping her waist with both hands and sliding into her as deeply and as fully as he could - and with such sudden and unexpected ferocity that he lifted her knees, for an instant, clear of the ground.
    Waves of electric shock coursed through her as he pounded into her; that she could not see him, could not feel his arms wrapped around her, could not kiss him - in fact, that she was completely passive -- was an alien and slightly frightening sensation. Even though she'd started it, she was not sure she liked it - this anonymous sex, this seeing-to - without the comfort of his face. But she needed him, deeply and with a savage, inhuman craving. His love was lovely, but needs must: she was a creature of decision, and she had decided that what she wanted most of all, right now, was to be fucked: thoroughly, completely, mechanically and forcefully, to have done, and bring this never-ending business with Jack's thesis to a head. She could tell from the way that Jack was throwing himself into her with such explosive violence that something had irked him, too - perhaps even stung him into a kind of remorse that demanded action, some kind of closure. But even after all that, she was beginning to experience the first waves of a slow burn which, if he kept up this relentless, kinetic bombardment - this fucking -- would lead to her own longed-for release. She forgot about the thesis, about the inaction, about her own academic holding pattern, concentrating on her love, her Jack, battering inside her, and when at length he came, in a vast and thunderous spasm, searing her insides with a surging tide that felt like it filled every crevice of her body and being, it was like - well, it was like being wrapped up in a hot cashmere blanket from the inside out. In other words, it had been her loving Jack, all along. With his last, sharp gasps she found herself panting for breath, shaking from head to toe, her soul dissolved, her body spent, collapsing on the bed of leaves, and as she did so, she felt him soften and draw out of her, a sensation both unbearably joyous and excruciatingly painful, all mixed together.
    They lay in each others' arms, exhausted and covered by wet leaves, him in a sodden shirt, her completely naked, saying nothing - their sex had been beyond the experience of either of them. They were both filled with a buzz and a flood of rapture, but in truth slightly embarrassed and awed by the animality of it all. He wrapped her in his arms, and, as the storm passed overhead, she felt herself doze slightly. It was gloaming dusk when she woke, her own Jack - not that animal -- stroking her hair:
    "Come on, Snow Queen," he said, "Time for that brainstorm".
    She could hardly meet his eyes as they made the few steps to the kitchen door and went inside. He made a big bowl of pasta (they were now very hungry indeed) while she showered - she felt she needed it. As the well-behaved and domesticated shower jets coursed over her body, replacing the screaming wildness of the rain, warming and absolving her, and sending the last of the leaves and dirt down the drain, she wondered how it was that sex could ever be separated from love. Men could do that, for sure (a quick chat with Malkeinu - or McLennane - was proof of that) but what about women who did that kind of thing for a living, servicing - fucking -- one faceless man after another as casually as any business transaction? She guessed that one could get used to anything in time, but she found it puzzling, alienating. And besides that, what with the intemperate violence of their sex, the extreme depths to which Jack had penetrated her, she felt sore and bruised, and perhaps even a little ill-used. She did not love Jack any the less - on dark days she felt that if he'd died, she'd simply snuff out of existence, like a candle flame - but this was a stern side of Jack she'd never seen. Somehow, perversely, this made her love him more - and that, she could not yet explain.
    After a supper during which they had hardly spoken they sat on either side of the kitchen table with Jack's papers, in an atmosphere of brittle nervousness. Their clothes, trashed, were shoved into the corner, waiting for a trip to the launderette. Jack had put on a long, white bathrobe (`Property of the Fairbanks Marriott') over faded grey tracksuit bottoms. Jade, her hair scraped back severely and tied in a long plait, wore nothing but a shapeless purple jersey so vast that it came down below her knees, its sleeves so long that she'd had to roll them in great puffs wedged above her elbows. She felt far too sore and bow-legged to wear anything underneath. But for all this informality their conversation was as stilted and as starchy as a job interview going badly, when both parties find nothing to say to fill the yawning pauses. As they discussed how to organize Jack's data, Jack longed to come round to her side of the table, but felt that she'd rebuff him. Jade, for her part, wanted his arms, his touch, and most of all that he should wrap her up like a baby, like a Christmas parcel and - well - to make everything all right. But each was too scared to move. And in any case, they had a job to do first.
    And so they bounced ideas to one another like the sexless talking heads that scientists are supposed to be: Jack, with his clear grey eyes explaining his intuitions, Jade with her hard hazels dissecting them with a cold, insectoid logic, shuffling them, probing them, parrying, throwing them back. Their language was framed in the cool tones of null hypotheses, falsifiability and significance levels, of distribution-free nonparametric tests; of circularity, of particularity and applicability. It seemed to Jade that the tables had been turned. She had become the teacher, he the pupil. Jack felt the same, and with that, the same kind of relief he'd felt when he'd asked her to marry him, of responsibility shared, of no longer being alone.
    But what neither quite realized was that their dispassionate discourse was turning into a loving exchange. As they came to see a shared picture of what Jack's course of action should be, their spoken sentences grew shorter as each one started was completed by the other. Cold eyes once again grew more animated, hands waved. Jade, still talking, rose to put the kettle on; Jack, to finish the drying up. They stood next to each other, at the sink, in their baggy clothes, arguing with force - but no animosity - over the details of what was beginning, almost, to look like an emerging strategy. A part of Jack that had detached from the argument looked face on at Jade in pure wonderment. To be sure, Jade was - how did Avi put it? - a babe - but more than that, she was his love, inseparable, and more than that, his colleague. He'd had enough hints - from McLennane, most of all - but with Jade to sculpt real shapes from the foggy nuances that made up his work, they'd be unbeatable, forever. But Jade was distracted, in full flow - about metadata, integration and whatnot - that he daren't stop her and just tell her - tell her - that he loved her. He didn't want to spoil it: even to touch her, to brush past her by accident, might break the flow of her argument. Even under that wonderfully hideous sack she loved to wear around the house, he could tell she was as taut as a string. She had to work it out of her system, for both of them.
    But then, it happened. Tea over, drying-up done, piles of notes made, they both rose at once in the tiny kitchen and - zap! - Jack's right wrist made a glancing contact with one dangling, purple sleeve, and - zing! - she was in his arms again, face buried once more in his chest, tears flowing uncontrollably. "Do you think you can take it from here?" she asked, looking up at him, red-nosed and eyelids full of water, racked with shuddering sobs, as if she'd had some intellectual orgasm. It had all been building up inside her for weeks - months - the way through the woods, until the tension had become insupportable.
    Later, when she'd calmed down, and Jack had tucked her up in bed, folding himself in behind her with one arm sleepily fingering loose strands of her hair, the other folded across her belly, she thought that perhaps a thorough fucking was all that she'd needed to break the deadlock. `Nothing like a good seeing-to, you know, for clearing the brain', Jack had said - she smiled at the thought.
    But a good seeing-to was good for other things, too. For when Jack's thesis was complete, after two months of sixteen-hour days; after more argument, more computer simulations, more anxiety, more sleepless nights, more testing, more checking and double-checking, and papers in unruly drifts all over the house, Jade discovered something else.
    She was pregnant.
   
    Chapter 4
   
    (December 2004)
   
    With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to.
    Charles Dickens - Hard Times
   
    "It was that last trip to France that clinched it ... " Jack had started to explain, uncertainly, to the thesis committee gathered in a lecture room whose heating had been turned off for the winter. It was a dank, dismal day in December and the undergraduates had left town, leaving in their place an arctic chill that enveloped everything in a sullen lassitude. The committee was, clearly, yet to be convinced by his case. He looked to McLennane - as his supervisor, one half of the committee -- for an encouraging sign, a welcoming smile, but his patron averted his gaze: there was a lot at stake for him, too.
    He missed Jade - he missed her terribly, on this day, of all days - but this morning, before he'd left, she had seemed so wound up tight with some matter so internalized that she refused to tell him what it was. But he'd looked so miserable as he turned to leave that she relented, ran towards him and embraced him from behind:
    "I love you, so much, you silly old lion," she had said: "I know you can do it. Now, go and show them what you're made of." He turned to hug her, but said nothing, except, too quietly for anyone to hear but himself -
    "Snow Queen".
    And then he left, walking into town through the cheerless fog.
    In truth, he was worried. The remorseless tension in these final weeks before his thesis defence had taken its toll on both of them. Whereas before he'd been lean and sinewy, now he looked gaunt, and thin. She'd seemed distracted, perturbed, and whereas their lovemaking had always been frequent and rapturous, it had lately petered out to little more than a static, supine embrace. He felt, somehow, that he'd committed some offence, done some wrong, and that - cruelly -- she wouldn't tell him what it was, so he could at least apologise. Their infrequent discussions about marriage, always meant to be put off until after he'd gained that mythical, ever-receding fellowship, had now ceased completely. So what was wrong? No, she wasn't ill, she insisted, turning her eyes away from his questioning face. Yes, she still loved him. Yes, she'd still love him even if he didn't win his doctorate - silly question!
    But her hair seemed, to him, to give the lie to all this - this façade. Her hair was the key to her mood. When she was happy, she would wear it loose, so she could play with it, tease with it, flirt with it. Even if she tied it up, some of it invariably came loose in a mild disarray that always turned him on, her dark eyes flashing like a come-on beneath the wayward strands. And until now, she'd always been happy. But now her dark eyes were dull, from nameless preoccupation or suppressed anger, he couldn't tell: and her hair was tamed, more often than not, into a plait of Presbyterian severity, with no prospect of idle straying.
    As he plodded on, the feet in his mind walked backwards to see if he could work out where things had gone wrong - if indeed they had. He knew he'd taken far too long to get down and write his thesis, trying Jade's patience. And then - yes, that was it - that evening in October, when they'd sat down together and had had the famous brainstorm - perhaps she'd felt that she'd had to do all the work, when it was, after all, his thesis to defend, and his prevarication had meant that her own prospects were forever on hold.
    And - oh, yes -- what happened before the brainstorm. That was it, too. He loved her beyond any words, but as the autumn lengthened and she seemed to recede, almost imperceptibly slowly, it dawned on him that she might have been scared, repelled -disgusted even - by the unexpected and uncharacteristic violence of their sex on that weird, overheated night when the weather finally broke, the night when they'd both been wound up like coiled snakes, ready to strike. If that was the case, then, frankly, he should just die of shame right here. He traced his travels further backwards from that evening in the Nest, through the hot afternoon, to the argument he'd had with those students who'd tried to intimidate him about Avi. And - oh, sweet Christ - he'd taken it all out on her, his one support, the one person most likely to put up with him, lovingly and without complaint. After they'd had the brainstorm, and when, in the days and weeks following had sat down to work furiously at the thesis, they'd never discussed it, the reason why he'd been so very angry - because they were just too, frantically, busy. Not that this would offer any excuse for his behaviour - and she had still brainstormed the thesis into being, gave it birth, gave it life, nursed it to maturity - it was her. Her! And even this morning, she still swore she loved him. Him! So now he thought, in dejection utterly foreign to his usually calm and level nature, that the great gamble had failed. He really didn't deserve this thesis, and he certainly didn't deserve Jade, whose life he'd now so royally screwed up. By the time he got to the department, his mind was clothed in a fog as thick as the one that laced the streets in white, funereal shrouds. Go ahead, make my day. In the end he was just too tired: too tired to panic, too tired to care.
    "Mr Corstorphine - Mr Corstorphine?" This from the tiny but intimidating figure of Professor Ernestine Yanga, the external examiner and the other half of the committee, who, McLennane had said, was famous for saying almost nothing during thesis examinations until near the end, when she'd skewer hapless candidates with the one question they'd been praying nobody would ask. Ah, thought Jack, we must be near the end, then, and this must be the preamble to the famous Difficult Question that McLennane had warned him about. Best to get it over with, and get out. So far, the examination had flowed glutinously past him like a river of sludge making its viscid way down to a black and putrid sea: he'd supplied all the answers so mechanically, that once he'd uttered a word he'd immediately forgotten about it.
    "Mr Corstorphine - you were telling us about your trip to France?"
    "Yes - of course - I'm sorry. As you've read in my thesis, I had accumulated a great deal of data about hominid influence on geomorphology in Britain. But it was very hard to make anything of it. Thanks to some new methods developed in conjunction with a fellow student..."
    "Yes, I see that this is acknowledged. A Miss Markham, isn't it? She has a rare talent."
    Jack said nothing: his lips were pursed together in a thin line of remorse, and despite himself, he could feel tears starting to prick the corners of his eyes.
    "Please continue, Mr Corstorphine..."
    "Yes, sorry ... I had long suspected the existence of a gradient of human influence on the landscape in England, consistent over the past hundred thousand years at least, in an increasing trend from the northwest - where it is hardly significant according to the variants of the nonparametric tests I've used - to the southeast, where it stands out quite strongly from natural influence, but still in places not significantly different from expected natural or stochastic variation."
    "Very good. But enough of Albion's fair shores, I think? You were about to tell us all about France, I believe. Would you like to - er -- enlarge upon that?"
    Jack had had so much to say about France. About how his trip there had changed everything, given him hope - rooting his vague instincts in something more tangible, more real. About how, after looking at the British landscape, scored, ravaged and broken by glaciers at least eight times in the course of almost a million years of human history - glaciers so powerful that they had literally erased rivers as broad as the Severn from the map - his personal antennae had become so tuned to every nuance of landscape that, when he had come at last to a region that had seen a million years of relative and continuous calm, the signs of human influence shone out at him like blinding beacons, rang like fire-bells in the night. Britain had only ever been a sideshow, an outlier: he'd seen immediately what had occurred to no-one, that nothing south of the Loire was wilderness - nothing - and had not been so for a very long time. But right now, he didn't feel like explaining anything. His answers were bland, apathetic, hesitant, whatever. Looking down on the scene, as if he were hanging from the ceiling, he saw McLennane rise slightly from his chair, as if in concern - and then Jack snapped, jarringly, back. He blinked, disoriented. It occurred to him that he must have blacked out.
    With her well-controlled perm, her neat dove-grey two-piece and pearls, Ernestine Yanga could have been the president of the local Womens' Institute, except that she'd been raised in a grass hut on the western shores of Lake Turkana, until the age of five, when her village had been razed by Ethiopian bandits and the rest of her family had been raped, macheted, burned to death, or combinations of all three. She'd only escaped because she'd been a mile away at the time, gathering pathetic twigs for the cooking fire, and sluicing the filthy puddle that passed for the village waterhole into a chipped enamel bucket. On returning home to find it so casually expunged from the face of the Earth, she'd walked thirty miles to the nearest fly-flecked bush town in search of work. By the time she was thirteen she was handy with a Kalashnikov; she'd been a drug courier, a fruit seller, a moneychanger, a news vendor, a prostitute, a pimp, a bandit, a copper's nark, a murderess twice over (once a policeman, whom she'd stabbed after he'd tried to extort further bribes from her pitiful cache of change; the second time, a potential rapist, whom she'd emasculated with his own blunt and rusty panga and left bleeding to death) -- and riddled with at least six chronic, parasitic infections. Having understandably decided that she'd had quite enough of all this, she'd walked to Nairobi and camped out on the steps of the National Museums of Kenya, where she'd decided she'd await the Lord's Salvation. The Lord took the shape of a kindly assistant curator, whose prayers for the Almighty to send him a child to ease his wife's shameful barrenness had now, it seemed, been answered - and who took her in and cleaned her up. A week later she was the illiterate, unpaid assistant to the janitor - and after thirty-five years, the Director of Palaeontology. And now, at the age of fifty-five, what Ernestine Yanga didn't know about the influence of early humans on landforms in the Rift Valley wasn't worth knowing.
    She knew far more than that, however, about the symptoms of human suffering, to which she was as sensitive as Jack's spirit chimed to the shape and history of every hanging valley, every drumlin, every scarp and oxbow. Her reputation as a terrifying examiner was justified - after all, a woman in her situation could never succeed in life without what she called `true grit' (she was an avid fan of old westerns) - but in Jack she saw a good man who'd been worn almost entirely away by worry, and, like so many men, he was suffering as much from injured pride as from lack of food and sleep. He had tried his hardest, but despite all his efforts, all his denial, he'd felt he was not quite up to the task, and this insulted his being, his masculinity. But he need not have been so concerned, she thought. The evidence he had from that final trip to France was right there, in front of them. And from what Roger (such a charming man!) had told her, Jack was a dedicated field worker, the kind of person she preferred infinitely to pallid, deskbound museum types, who so often built their intellectual castles on the sweat of others.
    More importantly, it was clear that Jack fulfilled the first criterion of a doctorate candidate - to venture, without fear, outside the small, cosy nest of knowledge, and into the dark and infinitely greater continent of ignorance that surrounded it. That Jack had ventured so far out that no techniques yet existed to make sense of what he'd found indicated extraordinary fortitude, a brazen and almost breathtaking resolve: if Jack could make no headway with it, then that was hardly his fault, because nobody else (she thought) would have had the ability either. Not McLennane (he'd admitted as much) and certainly not herself. And yet, if Roger had thought the task impossible, he surely would not have assigned it to a doctorate student. This in itself, she felt, indicated that Jack really must be a man of extraordinary talent, and - she thought back to the fortune that had smiled on her on the Museum steps - talent was precious, and must always be nurtured.
    In any case, Jack was not entirely alone, without help. As Professor Yanga understood it, Jack continued to enjoy the best help possible in the form of the acuity of his young associate, Miss Markham, who seemed to believe in him and who, Roger had assured her, would go far - especially if she and Jack continued to work as a team. And Roger's instincts were never wrong. Especially not about attractive young women, and Roger had been very quick to note that Jack's associate excelled in those two virtues as she did in her wit and intelligence. Jack was, indeed, a fortunate man, as fortunate as he was deserving.
    "Mr Corstorphine, of course, I understand. But please don't worry yourself. Oh my, you look so tired", she said, and she smiled - a warm, radiant, motherly smile that made Jack want to dissolve. This woman, this supposedly ferocious, hard-bitten creature who took no prisoners, had smiled at him. She had looked straight at him, into him, and she understood. She knew. And in that moment he knew that there was hope. And so he started again, clearing his throat, which seemed unaccountably to be full of damp sandpaper.
    "I'm sorry - please excuse me. When we think of the French Palaeolithic, we tend to see the landscape as a wilderness, punctuated with some interesting and picturesque cave sites. But that's a view conditioned more by our prejudices about brutish cavemen than by the facts on the ground. When I got there, accustomed as I had been to the far more challenging and - in any case - more sparsely populated British terrain, France looked to me like nothing more than an almost completely artificial, settled - even industrial landscape, continuously shaped by human influence for perhaps a million years."
    "What form does that influence take, Mr Corstorphine?"
    This really must be it, the Difficult Question that went to the heart of the matter. But the Professor continued to smile - and in that, he thought of the loveliness of Jade's enormous hazel eyes as she looked adoringly up at him whenever she was in his arms, an expression that said that he, Jack, was invincible. Now he could not be stopped. The influence takes many forms, he said. Just to take a couple of things more or less at random: virtually no watercourse south of the Loire or west of the Rhône has been natural for any significant part of its length since the Late Middle Pleistocene. At the very least, watercourse curvature has been altered by 16 per cent during the Brunhes magnetostratigraphic interval, with the confidence limits that you'll see on page 176, I think you'll find (the committee members turned to their copies of his thesis as Jack felt, at last, to be in the driving seat). In support of this (he continued), the overall number of river channel infill deposits indicative of buried oxbow lakes is very much less than you'd expect by chance, had nature been left to take its course. This means that something - somebody - has been altering the lower courses of rivers in a systematic way for a very long time. And then there is the general topography. Volcanic activity aside, no hilltop exists in this part of France that has natural surface run-off characteristics, possibly an indication of the former presence of earthworks or other structures. In fact, I could find no grade that has been completely free of human influence over the same period. There's one hill, at a place just not far from Aurignac, called Saint-Rogatien-Les-Remillards ...
    His mind drifted to when he'd explained all this to Jade, with mounting excitement, promising her that after this wretched thesis defence was over, he'd take her there and show her. It was about a month ago, their last evening sitting out in the Nest before it became too cold: they'd had a bottle of wine he'd brought home from the off-licence. Retreating to the sitting room, she'd removed a stack of printouts from their sagging old sofa, sat down, pulling him warm and close. As usual, she'd worn her shapeless purple sack, but her hair was loose - funny, he'd forgotten that. She didn't always tie back her hair. Not even very often. Why had he forgotten that? How? As he told her about Saint-Rogatien, she looked at him with shining eyes.
    "This is it, Darling Jack", she had said - "This is the key. This proves it. This settles everything." She unbuttoned his shirt - her big brown eyes intent and sweetly cross-eyed with concentration - and rested her soft face on his chest, letting him tousle her hair into a blanket, covering and embracing him. And this was only a month ago? After the brainstorm? Why had he forgotten that?
    He explained to her - to Jade - to Professor Yanga - that his close survey of this unusual landform revealed to him that its geology was entirely at variance with the underlying bedrock and, furthermore, that its location could not be explained in terms of any local, structural faulting. It couldn't be a glacial erratic, either, because there had been no glaciers. Much of the landform had been worn away by wind and weather, but with an estimated original volume at least a thousand times that of Saint Paul's Cathedral -- he was proud to have worked out this comparison - it was just too enormous to have been set down by any kind of fluvial transport short of a catastrophic flood of the kind that had created the scablands of the Pacific Northwest, or which had carved out the English Channel - and there had been no sign of any such activity, either. In fact, its location was inexplicable unless ...
    At this point, on the sofa, Jade had trapped his gesticulating hands in hers, and forced them to encircle her. She'd seemed so warm and content, he'd felt that at any minute she'd start to purr. Why had he forgotten that? As he'd kissed the top of her head, he'd said that the only way to explain Saint-Rogatien - the only way - was that it had was an artificial structure. That someone had put it there. He'd once read about an ancient pyramid at a place called Cholula in Mexico. By the time the conquistadores got there, it had been abandoned for centuries, its masonry stripped away, and was covered in grass and trees. Assuming it was just a hill (after all, that's what it looked like), the Spaniards built a town around it and a church on the top. And that was only a few centuries. Imagine, then, if it had been left for a thousand years, a hundred thousand, a million? It would look just like a hill, revealed as artificial only by its strange geology and situation - and only then if somebody first suspected that something was amiss - which nobody had ever done. But when Jack had seen it, his antennae vibrated into overdrive. He knew it didn't belong there. He just knew.
    By this time Jade had been on the edge of sleep, but not quite.
    "You silly old lion," she had said. "You've just about wrapped it up. The ancestors of the first Neanderthals built gigantic pyramids all over France..."
    "... pyramids that made the Great Pyramid look like a pimple -- and they were doing it for hundreds of thousands of years, Snow Queen."
    "Well then, you don't need statistical methods to prove that, so why worry? That's just basic geology and your wonderful masculine intuition, you gorgeous man, you." She looked up at him, blearily. It occurred to him that her face looked drawn and thin, that what she needed most was sleep, and also that she'd read his mind. "You're right, Darling Jack. Time for you to wrap me up, too, and take me to bed."
    So he'd taken her in his arms and laid her gently on the bed, still in her purple sack, pulling the duvet on top of her. As he'd got in and nestled behind her in their customary two-spoons-in-a-drawer position, she'd pulled his arms up inside her jersey, pressing his hands against her breasts, smoothing them down the hot - too hot - skin of her belly and thighs.
    "I do so love you, Darling Jack. And I want you." And so, still in the two-spoons position, in the darkness, they'd made love as gently as before it had been rough, and then, together, slid slowly off to contented, companionable sleep on a smooth, even grade rather shallower than about one in a couple of hundred (he'd estimated), that of a languidly meandering river that makes its mazy, lazy way down to a delta in which it becomes blissfully lost in oozy, woozy thickets. Why had he forgotten that? Why?
    As if from an immense distance, he thought he heard Professor McLennane and Professor Yanga commending him for a splendid thesis.
    "Congratulations, Doctor Corstorphine!" Hands were shaken, but it was clear to both academics that Jack wasn't really there. They looked worried. The Professors exchanged nervous words that Jack didn't catch, and Yanga left, looking anxious.
    "Come on, Jack, I'm going to take you home," McLennane said as he put his arm around Jack's shoulders, walked him outside into the quad and steered him towards what Jack could have sworn was a Ferrari Testarossa. "Don't worry, old chap - not going to do more than thirty - that's a promise! But I want to get you home fast. Got to break the glad tidings to that lovely girl of yours, eh? I expect you'll be setting a date. And now she can really start work on her own project, after Christmas. And .... I've been meaning to tell you .... That Saint-Rogatien business .... We really do have to get a paper off to Nature. You, me and the lovely Jade can do it together. Her brains, your intuition, and my - er - putting you two together, as it were. I had lunch with the editor the other day, and..."
    Jack lacked the energy to interrupt. He was drained, utterly, to the dregs, alternately assailed by waves of light-headedness and nausea, not helped by the low-slung suspension of a car so obviously unsuited to driving through central Cambridge in a freezing fog that still hadn't lifted after ... how long ago had he left home? He couldn't remember. On the other hand, if he'd stepped out of the car, he didn't think he'd have sufficient energy to walk, or even stand up. He couldn't remember having eaten more than a couple of bites of anything for three days.
    They drew up outside the flat: McLennane had to haul Jack out of the car. When they knocked at the door, there was at first, no answer.
    "Just coming!" - he heard her lovely voice, after a few more seconds: "in the bathroom! Won't be a minute!"
    As soon as Jack had left, Jade collapsed on the sofa, eviscerated, as if her heart had burst from within her and now bounced along the street after the dwindling Jack, the world on his broad shoulders, an old gunslinger who, racked by his internal demons, seemed to be losing the will to fight. But she had things to do, an errand of her own, and so, grimly, she dressed, grabbed her bag, and left the house.
    Poor Jack - her poor, Darling Jack - had never looked so down. But as she was sympathetic (how could she not be?) she was, it has to be said, a little annoyed. Not for the simple fact of his low spirits, his anxiety - anyone could forgive him these! - but perversely, that his mood seemed so entirely out of character, and that was harder to accommodate.
    Not that she didn't mind being there for him, to cheer him up, even for weeks on end: because she didn't. She loved him, and she wanted to make him happy. But where once had stood an imperturbable rock, there had now limped, in the hallway, half-sunk, a fractious, fretful, friable thing she didn't recognize, and didn't want to. Realizing how selfish this was, she wanted her old Jack back, the granite-hard Jack, the Jack who had become her secure foundation, on which she could build castles of her own, and from whose unshakeable ramparts she could launch herself, on her own wings: so that should she ever falter, should she ever go wrong, she could always come home to him -- depending on him to forgive, to love and mend her, to dry her eyes and make everything all right, without question or prejudice. But if he crumbled, she would slip, lose her footing, and they would both fall.
    It was in this resolution that she'd finally - finally - settled, in her own mind, the events and consequences of the rainstorm before the famous brainstorm, when he'd fucked her so hard that she'd been almost too giddy to stand, and so physically sore, inside and out, that she couldn't wear knickers for days for the pain. This sudden and quite unexpected brutality - there really was no other way to put it -- had frightened her then, but after much worry and wonder in the still hours of many troubled nights thereafter, when Jack had lain fretfully asleep beside her, she'd solved the disturbing riddle of why she'd loved him all the more, nonetheless.
    For all her ambition, for all that she wanted to make her way in the world on her own, to succeed by her own lights, she realized that at heart she was an old-fashioned girl, who needed a man around to love, and to be loved by. The man with whom she'd fallen in love was a man's man, with a real man's frustrations, and a real man's pride, always so exposed to injury. But the reason why she loved him so much was that his masculinity had been so lightly worn, so assured that he'd felt no need to prove it, either to be a macho man like Avi Malkeinu, or an irredeemable rogue, like dear old Roger McLennane. This (she blushed to herself) was why she'd been embarrassed when Jack had referred to himself, in company, however self-deprecatingly, as the last of the red-hot Palaeolithic lovers, or whatever it was. This was why his force on that strange night had first seemed so shocking.
    But then, she continued, why should it? Because Jack was so complete a man in himself, he'd never feel the urges to which Avi and McLennane were forever prey, to throw himself into one conquest after another, as if he were not quite sure that he really deserved his manhood, or that it wasn't eternal, a given; nor that he ever felt the need to perpetually advertise the fact. She knew how much of a man he was, and that was enough - that knowledge was theirs alone, a private thing, like the Nest: it was not something she'd much like to share. And after all, it was she, she admitted ruefully, who had led him on, waving her backside at him, inviting him to take her - to take her, as if she were not a human being, but some transaction, and he'd responded - to satisfy her, and no other. She basked in that thought, held on to it, but added that for her then to blame him for her shock, her soreness, would be unfair, for they had both been participants in the act which, in the end, was - as she'd established - a private thing between the two of them, just Jack and herself, as much a part of their love as a shared bottle of wine and any other long, lazy night in the Nest. She realized that if, in the past few weeks, he'd been beating himself up with remorse about it - as she suspected -- then she knew for certain that he really was neither an animal (for all that she called him her lion), nor a man forever seeking to prove his virility, but her own, tender, loving Jack. Hers. And she should make sure he knew it.
    But there was that other thing, too: that when the burning soreness had faded, it was replaced by a nauseating wretchedness that racked her guts out. At first she thought it was a physical after-effect of the pain, or just some psychosomatic backwash of shock and fear, so she had told Jack nothing of it - even had he noticed from behind the tottering turrets of his preoccupation. But when it had continued for weeks, making her feel wan and drained, vitiating desire, it occurred to her that Jack might have proved his masculinity in the most obvious and traditional way possible (she began to perk up at the thought, and reddened a little). There was no need for Jack to make any song and dance about his maleness, she thought - no need at all -- if by virtue of his savagery and his hunger he'd made her pregnant - a tangible badge of his love, and their shared love, together - and also something which she felt, with a strength of possession that surprised her, was something all her own, for all that it bound her closer to him, and made her love him all the more.
    Jade was almost sure she knew, but craved certainty, even within statistical limits, explaining why she had now returned home from the supermarket with a pregnancy testing kit: and -- even as Jack, his ordeal over, was allowing his rangy form to be folded passively into the passenger seat of McLennane's latest penis extension - was undressed, in the bathroom, peering awkwardly down at herself and wondering how a mere woman could aim so accurately at a target as narrowly defined as a test strip. Oh, that a man should have to do this, she grinned to herself (flushing more than a little at the thought), he'd at least be in a position to take better aim. And just as she heard the knock on the door, presaging the proud return of her conqueror, bloodied for sure, but all dragons slain, the line in the small, crystalline window coalesced, like a chromosome in the very expectancy of division, of the prolongation of a life stretching back to when the world was young, and forward into illimitable futurity -- from a yellow nothingness into a single shaft of clear blue.
   
    Chapter 5
   
    (March 2005)
   
    At length burst the argent revelry,
    With plume, tiara and all rich array,
    Numerous as shadows haunting fairily
    The brain, new stuff'd, in youth, with triumphs gay
    Of old romance.
    John Keats - The Eve of St. Agnes
   
    Her nerves fell away as soon as she took her seat at the press conference -- McLennane to her left, Jack on her right - and had been introduced to the crowd of journalists, photographers and cameramen who'd crammed - almost on top of each other, it seemed to her -- in the small but unnaturally brightly lit library that the Royal Institution had arranged. Not that anyone paid very much attention to her two male outriders, because she'd looked (as they'd hoped) as marvellously un-academic as might be imagined.
    She'd fretted for several days about what to wear, as (she'd felt) she had little sense for such things, except that what suited her least of all was indecision. Her mother was no help, wanting to change the subject to things which she thought more important.
    "Oh, I don't know dear", she had twittered on the phone. "What do people wear at press conferences? Something nice. And do give my best to Jack - how is he? And when are you two going to get married? And how are you feeling? Not too tired, I hope. When I was at your stage, when I was carrying you..."
    The few women academics she knew were, in the main, as unconscious of fashion as she was - either that, or they went to the other extreme and dolled up to the nines, dressing to impress - something which she felt might be fine for some people, but only made her feel embarrassed and uncomfortable.
    That left the men in her life. Avi Malkeinu's idea of a suitable outfit hardly bore thinking about, probably more Knave than Nature. She was fond of Avi - how could one not be? He was lovable in his way, in the same way that a rumbustious golden-retriever puppy is loveable, but he was such a boy. The thought of the way he undressed her with his eyes every time they met - but tried to hide it -- made her giggle.
    On the other hand, she knew that Roger McLennane had perfect taste and would have loved to have taken her shopping. But the thought of a mildly flirtatious outing with Roger, being whisked off in his Ferrari and modelling a succession of sleek, expensive outfits, twirling before his not-quite-dispassionately appreciative gaze, made her giggle, too - not least because it brought to mind a favourite joke of her Dad's about `Salome dancing naked in front of Harrods'. However, she knew that she was in no danger of ending up as another notch on McLennane's bedpost, for Roger, despite his reputation, had always treated her with the utmost deference. What she had not quite realised was how much he was in awe of her, and grateful for helping save Jack's thesis - and with that, his own reputation as a doctorate supervisor.
    She was conscious, though, that McLennane might think that such a request - which he'd feel honour-bound to accept - might make him uncomfortable for a much earthier reason. She had, after all, if quite unwittingly, put him in what he might have called a `compromising position'. Her cheeks burned hot whenever remembered the details of Jack's arrival home after his thesis exam, when Roger had so kindly brought him to the door. She remembered, in particular, Roger's expression of red-faced, open-mouthed amazement as she'd answered it, test stick in one hand, door handle in the other, hair everywhere, dressed in Jack's Property-of-Fairbanks-Marriott bathrobe - which, because she'd had her hands full and had been called away from her scientific experiment rather suddenly, she had forgotten to gather up at the front. It was hardly her fault that it had no buttons and had long since lost its belt. But she'd only made it worse (the memory made her squirm inside) when she'd suddenly become aware - as her bare skin met the unforgiving chill of a Cambridge December - of her state of undress; and resorting to her nervous habit, when she thought she was being watched by men, of lifting her arms and gathering her hair up on her head.
    Which is why Professor Roger Sutherland McLennane, FRS, had had a gloriously full-frontal eyeful of a leggy twenty-one-year-old woman in the first rosy glow of pregnancy. It was no wonder that Roger had made a quick getaway, saying nothing more than "the hero returns!" - or some such - before roaring off up the street in his Ferrari whose paintwork matched his own high colour. No, she thought, she couldn't possibly ask Roger. Poor man, he wouldn't know where to look. Well, he would, but he wouldn't want her to know that he was, so he would try very hard not to, which she'd notice, thereby obliging her to try hard not to notice that he was trying not to... in the room the women come and go, she might have mused: towards absurdam, reductio. And all that while trying to control a 400-brake-horsepower penis-extension at over eighty miles an hour? There had to be another way.
    And Jack - dearest Jack - well, he was biased.
    "I think I'd have to declare an interest," he'd said, in his best mock-serious voice, as, shirt-sleeves rolled up, he'd rubbed her back as she sat up in the bath one evening several days earlier, "as not only do I love you, but I love you more each day, as there is progressively more of you to love" - at which she'd snorted and soaked him with bubble-laden water. He'd sat for a moment, quite still on the edge of the bath, wet through, smiling quizzically, but saying nothing. So he did what she knew he'd do - something so practical, so funny, so Jack. He'd stripped and climbed in behind her, a leg on either side. She was, by now, in hoots of giggles, the water surging and splashing around her, around him, and all over the floor.
    "Give me one of those Magdalenian mother-goddesses every time," he'd said, half laughing, half growling, kissing her neck, her left earlobe, and starting to rub her shoulders and neck, which she loved - but not without first giving each of her increasingly sore and swollen breasts a playful squeeze - which she liked rather less.
    She decided that she enjoyed being pregnant - she enjoyed the fullness of it, its warmth. The only bad thing about it, after the horrible first couple of months, was the back-ache, hence the time spent in the bath. But what had surprised her - and delighted her - was how much her desire for Jack had sharpened. She supposed that it might have something to do with her recent rediscovery of the sense of smell, and especially his smell, an ineffable sense of masculinity, nothing very strong -- not like unwashed socks or stale beer or anything like that - but an instantly recognizable presence that reassured her, and which lingered in the flat even when he wasn't physically there. But when he and his smell were there together, her desire for him was overpowering. Some mornings it had been extremely difficult to leave his embrace, as if she were attached to him by a bungee cord - even if she just wanted to nip to the loo (which happened increasingly often). That Jack desired her more in response only redoubled her happiness. Hence his candid lack of objectivity: whether she wore a stylish designer outfit; `Horrible' (his affectionate name for her baggy old purple jersey); or a dustbin liner -- he'd have adored her just the same.
    For his part, Jack found her pregnancy enchanting. Her body was changing in all kinds of ways that he loved to examine in the tiniest detail, as if he were a surveyor, mapping the topography of an unexplored continent in the throes of some incremental but ultimately profound change of climate, from the trimly temperate, to the lush and exotic. Consider: her eyes, now more brown than hazel, were set to a permanently radiant chestnut smoulder. Her lips were fuller. Her already chocolatey nipples had broadened and become darker still as her small breasts had filled out, changing their shape as they grew, with the right growing fractionally larger than the left (an observation that amused Jack hugely, and made him think of the limerick about the proverbial man from Devizes). Her hair had become even longer and more lustrous, and not just on her head: bracketed by hips that were becoming luxuriously fleshy, her pubic hair had shot out from being a well-behaved fluff into a robust springy jungle -- setting, as an offshoot, a very fine, single comb of short, stiff hairs that led straight up towards her navel. He'd also noticed small drifts of dark, downy fuzz in the small of her back, the backs of her knees, and on the nape of her neck. Hmm. Most interesting.
    But most fascinating of all was her skin, which had become, if that were possible, even softer than before, as well as half a shade darker. This was strange, as it had - at the same time - become milkier and rosier. Trying to sum up this contradictory state (his mind wandering back to her, at a hundred unguarded moments every day) he'd said she'd had all the `R's: Round, Roseate, Rubicund, Ripe, Rich, Rubenesque. He amused himself trying to add more words to this small thesaurus of adoration.
    Jack was not afraid that her body would ever fail to surprise him, even though he'd been its closest observer for almost four years. And yet, for all that, she was still the same woman: the same woman, he reasoned, only more so. Cradling her soft form in his arms as they sat wedged in the bath, her leaning back, eyes closed, her breasts rising and falling with each even, content breath, creating slow waves in the water, Jack had to admit that he too, was enjoying her pregnancy: her swelling curves, her masses of hair, were magnetic, and all of it had to be touched.
    For her, then, her weight taken by the water and Jack's taut body for a chair, her lover had crystallized into a pair of hands. Funny that she'd paid so little attention to them before, but pregnancy was sharpening all her senses, not only smell and taste. His were the hands of a man who belonged in the great wide open - the hands of a field geologist, the hands of contradiction - calloused, beaten, blocked and ridged as they endured frost, thaw and great heat, but capable of marvellously sensitive precision and agility, as those same rough fingertips felt their way towards a fossil or crystal so fragile that it might be shattered by a breath of wind, a drop of water, a single shard of ice - and cradled it unharmed to safety. And so she craved the touch of his hands on her body, the counterpoint of roughness and gentleness, as they traversed her curving body, as if constantly recording, measuring, trying to gauge her totality at any instant.
    The sensations of their passage were mixed. As he brushed his fingers on her lips, they plumped in expectation; but when they orbited her breasts, these had stung with pain, and sometimes her nipples burned so much she was amazed they didn't glow in the dark. But where she most wanted to be touched was between her legs - as her body swelled, so did her craving for him, until it was like a constant drone in the background of her life, an unfillable void, a thirst she could not slake. She tried to part her thighs, as wide as possible, tried to drag one of his hands to cup the swollen warmth welling from inside her, but the bath was too narrow to allow any comfortable movement. However, as her insistent desire resonated with Jack's own, she felt him rise and grow behind her, in the small of her back. And the water was getting cold, too.
    "Out you get, young man," she'd said, with fuzzily distracted warmth, unmoving, her eyes still closed.
    "'Fraid not, Snow Queen," he'd countered, "as I am at present pinned to the spot by a Dangerous Wild Animal." She roared play-fashion as she gripped the sides of the bath, put her feet together and crouched - wriggling the arced expanse of her behind at Jack, teasingly, mockingly -- and then stood fully upright. Just before she stepped out in search of a towel he'd looked up at her and for a moment she was a vast, cool statue, shining with water, the fullness of her body exaggerated by the foreshortened angle of view. Jack sank into the bath, filling the space she'd left, stretched out, looked up at her and said:
    "There was a reason for those Magdalenian mother-goddesses, you know--"
    "Hmmm?" She had started to dry her hair.
    "They illustrate the inherent superiority of women - if only in the geometrical sense." She turned suddenly to lean over the bath, a mad flurry of wild hair, eyes, towel and dangling breasts -
    "I said, out -- you -- get!"
    He stepped out and into her arms, and their lips met, hers as burningly soft and full as he could ever remember, even more than the very first time, when she'd sprung on him after Clare Ball. His hands fell around the incurving of her waist, his palms buried in her thickening softness, his knuckles teased by the waterfall of her hair plunging down her back.
    "I want you," was all she'd said, in a small voice full of woeful ache and longing, but with a note of irresistible determination. Much later, sweetly spent, she reasoned that her yawning desire was for her to be worn way to nothing; nothing more than a thin shell surrounding his maleness, forever -- to be annihilated by his love, so that they would merge, so completely that nobody would discern that they had once been separate beings.
    Later still, after a long pause in the darkness, he whispered into her sleepy ear from behind -
    "I know! Why don't you wear Fairbanks? Then you could stand up and give everyone a quick flash, you know..." Laughing, she turned towards him, took her face in his hands and said, as if to a small child -
    "Don't! It was terrible!"
    But Jack did, at least, have a constructive idea. If she couldn't ask Roger, why not ask Mrs Roger? She'd be at the celebration tomorrow.
    "You can ask her then. Quite a character, Marjorie McLennane," Said Jack. "I think you'd like her."
    "What do you think of her?" she asked, muzzling into his bare chest, pulling his arms round her, her hair sprawling over his arms and shoulders.
    "Me? Scary. I've never dared talk to her. But that shouldn't deter you, Snow Queen."
    If Professor Ernestine Yanga only looked like the President of a local Women's Institute, then Marjorie McLennane really was one. Although entirely aware of her husband's errant behaviour, she could hardly complain that he did not attend to her own wants and needs in those particular respects, whenever such attendance was required, which was (mercifully, she thought) seldom: and in any case, with a large family and many other things to attend to, she found him very often to get in the way. Such residual irritation as she felt she sublimated into ferocious domesticity on an industrial scale. An active member of the WI, she was also a church warden, a pillar of the Conservative Association, ran the village fête, organized the cricket-club teas, was a Church Commissioner, and judged a rubber of bridge with such frightening perspicacity that few ever dared challenge her. She would have it that as a daughter of a Brigadier-General, that her life was dedicated to service. But that was only an excuse, a cover for a full-blown case of Kipling's Syndrome - a compulsion to fill every minute with sixty second's worth of distance run.
    Most people found her too intimidating to talk to, or even approach, on those occasions (rare) when she accompanied Roger to departmental parties. For her part, she found most of the academics not to her taste, and even if they had been, they'd have very little to discuss. Many of them detested everything she stood for, and shunned her in what she considered a singularly ill-bred fashion, by talking over her in her presence, or simply turning their backs. But when Roger threw a small party to celebrate Jack's doctorate and the impending publication of the paper in Nature (`Large-scale anthropogenic landscape modification in the Upper Pleistocene of France', by J. L. Markham, John A. Corstorphine, Avram Y. Malkeinu and Roger Sutherland McLennane), she felt she could hardly refuse.
    "You really must meet Jack," Roger had implored - "and you must certainly meet Jade."
    Marjorie had snorted at this - Roger had introduced her to several young women before, a tactic she thought calculated to make her approve of any future infidelity by putting her in a position whereby she'd be obliged to fraternise with the enemy. And Jade? What kind of a name was that? She thought it common. But then, she sighed, this was likely to be her husband's finest hour, and perhaps a last hurrah before he was kicked out to pasture. So duty called.
    When she actually met Jade, she found her disarmingly unlike what she had expected (although, if pressed, the nature of that expectation would have been ill-defined). She saw in this darkly attractive woman a person remarkably self-possessed for all her youth, yet who still had not lost an engaging girlish innocence; determined, steely, thoroughly unlikely to let herself be intimidated by anyone, and yet very much at ease with herself and those around her. She'd also, like herself, grown up on the Surrey-Hampshire border (a region practically dedicated to the British Army), had been fond of horses, and loved gardening.
    Looking at Jade, Marjorie saw herself, reflected, as a young woman, a graduate of Girton with a Double First in Natural Sciences, which is how she had met her junior-research-fellow husband. But it had been much more difficult for women in her position to pursue careers of their own in those days. That they might do so while conspicuously pregnant was unthinkable - yet pregnancy seemed to suit Jade very well, as her filling figure chimed well with the ease of her general demeanour. That, and the fact that she seemed to be quietly incandescent with love. Marjorie had guessed that Jade Markham's fiancé, Jack Corstorphine, was the tall, unobtrusively handsome man talking with her husband: the man that Jade couldn't help stealing glances at with eyes as big and shiny as the buttons on a guardsman's overcoat.
    So she had taken Jade under her wing.
    At the party, when they'd discovered how much they'd had in common, Jade confided in Marjorie, confessing a problem that had not occurred to her before she'd had to put her name to an academic paper -- that of how she should style her own name. Although she loved Jack ("have you met him?" she'd asked, her eyes glowing) she wanted to keep her own surname, at least for academic purposes, even after they were married. She'd only be Mrs Corstorphine in civvies (Marjorie approved). But when she'd seen the name `Jade' in print, on the draft of the paper before Professor McLennane had sent it to Nature, she realized with jarring suddenness that although she'd been quite happy with it up to now, it was, in truth, only a hangover from her childhood, and that she'd outgrown it. So, in the end, she did what many female academics did, which was to disguise her name - and gender -- behind a defensive shield-wall of initials. But she didn't like that much, either. It seemed such a crabbed, anonymous, half-hearted way to make one's academic début.
    Marjorie's advice was refreshing and direct: "if your name is Jadis, my dear, that's what you should be called. Drop this `Jade' business. Doesn't suit you. Doesn't suit you at all, if I may say so."
    She began to argue that she felt far too content with her lot to be a Wicked Witch, but Marjorie cut her off:
    "Really, the derivation is of no consequence. A name is not necessarily a guide to one's character. Why, I know an arch-deacon called Brimstone. Charming man, very devout, fellow Commissioner - and would you believe his Christian name is Cain? He's certainly not hellish, and not a murderer, either, as far as I know."
    Jade laughed, and so encouraged, Marjorie confided that the Narnia stories had been a particular favourite of hers as a child, and - being somewhat contrary herself - she'd harboured a sneaking admiration for the White Witch.
    "Clearly a very strong woman. Not to be messed with. Stick to that!"
    Jade thought Marjorie had finished, but there was still one ball left in the over, one more left for the bodyline:
    "What, may I ask, does your fiancé call you?"
    Jade was not sure whether she wanted to become so intimate with Marjorie McLennane so quickly by divulging the pet names that she and Jack called each other, but now she was on the spot, she found herself unable to refuse, as if she'd been called up before a headmistress who, while kindly, has the knack of extracting confidences, of baring souls, as if methodically peeling the layers of an onion. Jack was quite correct in his assessment of Marjorie as scary. How does Roger manage to get away with it, she thought? Ah - perhaps he doesn't! And with that, she laughed to herself, and said, quite carelessly, as if the admission had been buoyed on her recollection of Roger and the Flight of the Ferrari:
    "Jack always calls me `Snow Queen'" - and then it suddenly dawned on her, as if she'd been granted a spectacular vision of the familiar world under the penetrating light of a brighter and alien sun, that she had no recollection that Jack had ever called her by her childhood nickname, except, perhaps, for when they'd first met, and he had been her supervisor, which didn't count. And on the one occasion when it had mattered most, he'd called her `Jadis'.
    "Sounds like a sound man, to me," said Marjorie. "I'd like to meet him. Would you introduce us?"
    Jade resolved that from now onwards she'd be `Jadis'. And as they wove across the room, through the excited scientists and students all enjoying a glass of warm plonk and cheesy dips, Jadis (she would now always be Jadis) had another stunning realization, doubly amazing in that she had never made the explicit connection: that it was no coincidence that she'd always thought of Jack as Aslan, her Lion, as he had been the only one who could, with a single glance, a smile, make her insides melt.
    It was too late to change the name on the Nature paper, but the sign on the desk in front of her, in front of the reporters and camera crews - the name that would appear in the press that evening, and the next day, and for weeks afterwards -- was `Jadis L. Markham'. She tried on her new name - the one she'd been born with. She liked it. It seemed to fit.
    As did the gown that Marjorie had chosen for her, when Jadis had called the day after the party at the MacLennane's imposing Victorian villa in Grange Road.
    "You can never go wrong with a Little Black Number", she had said, exposing a rail of Chanel gowns in her wardrobe to the kind of scrutiny which her late grandfather had reserved for drilling the troops before Mountbatten, as the Union flag had been lowered for the last time over Delhi. "We shall have to find something that suits your current state, however", she continued, sizing up Jadis's easy curves, her long legs, her wild, unconstrained hair, but mostly her swollen belly and breasts, " -- without looking too much the Dowager Duchess."
    The contrast between that tight, censorious, wizened image and the open, relaxed, blossoming young woman before her was so instantly incongruous that Marjorie couldn't help but smirk, which Jadis caught and laughed in response: the two women looked at each other and they laughed and laughed until they both cried.
    Marjorie could see why Roger was keen on this girl - besotted, really - but not because she would be - or could ever be - one of his conquests. She felt that beneath the ready warmth, there was a hardness about Jadis that wasn't to be trifled with. And for all his faults, she thought, for all his flummery and foppery and fast cars and living the high life (at her expense), she had stayed with Roger all these years at least in part because he was, and always had been, an impeccable judge of character. He owed his career not to any great scientific insight of his own, but to the fact that he had surrounded himself with clever people: Roger had undoubtedly seen through the artless appeal of this girl to the steel beneath. And, after all, long ago, so he'd chosen her. And why shouldn't he have done? She had once been a girl much like Jadis, long-haired and leggy, full of wit and life and spark, and widely considered a beauty. Perhaps - she mused - Roger had warmed to Jadis precisely because she reminded him of their youth together. She raised her eyebrows at this privately comforting thought as her fingers alighted on a dress that might be suitable for Jadis.
    "Try this - it was made for me when I had to go to some ball or another, when I was pregnant with Fiona. Ooh - that was... well, Fiona has children of her own now." But she could remember perfectly well, of course. It had been the Clare College May Ball, 1970. Deep Purple had opened the bill and Jimi Hendrix had closed it, one of his very last concerts. She remembered that for all its incipient chaos, the timing must have been inspired that had arranged for the final, shattering chords of Purple Haze to ring out over the lawns just as the sun rose, illuminating the early morning mist rising over the Cam with a rich, golden light. She had been the same age as Jadis, then, and like Jadis, had got a most promising degree the year before, married her supervisor and immediately got pregnant. Further academic work had been out of the question but, at six months gone, she'd been awarded a specially made evening gown as a consolation prize. Jadis could not see it - Marjorie was still facing into the wardrobe and had her back turned - but in this picosecond of intense reverie, Marjorie worked to choke back her emotion. Turning, once more composed, she held the dress out for Jadis to try on.
    Jadis quickly stripped down to her underwear and Marjorie helped the gown over her head. Marjorie and Jadis were about the same height, so it fitted perfectly. It was classically black and breathtakingly elegant. Jadis looked at the mirror, disbelieving, enchanted -- and then she looked at Marjorie, whose expression was unfathomable.
    "That's the one for you, my dear. Would you like to try some pearls?"
    It was only as Jadis was driving home in Jack's old Peugeot, the dress wrapped in paper beside her, the parcel folded into a Harvey Nichols carrier bag, that she recalled how much this dress looked like the one she'd worn on her first date with Jack, and - had she known it -- at the same venue where it had been worn for the first time, more than thirty years ago. What a wonderful woman, Jadis thought. Not really scary at all. But very strong - stronger than steel.
    In that moment she felt that she'd finally crested a long climb to look over a new vista of opportunity. She'd seen that view before, the night when she'd made love to Jack after he had proposed to her, only then it had been full of terror. But she felt she was woman enough to meet it now, for this was nothing more than adulthood. And if she knew she was strong enough to accept the trials ahead, whatever they might be, she knew also that Jack - in his suspicion that Marjorie would meet her match in her, something he never could achieve -- was still the stronger. And when she thought of that, she burned with love, and the new life inside her stirred.
    Marjorie McLennane saw Jadis Markham drive away, scrunching across the gravel drive, through the curtain of yew and box, and off towards central Cambridge: a grateful wave, a smile, a billow of hair, and she was gone. Marjorie felt a yearning tug inside: a part of her youth, long forgotten but not entirely extinguished, a part which she could have - she should have reclaimed for herself at the time, and let the consequences go hang.
    "Lovely girl," she thought, turning to go indoors. "Good luck to her." This time, she let a single tear escape. Just one - and nobody saw it -- but it escaped nonetheless.
    At the back of the press conference sat Marcel Montgolfier, a distant relation of the pioneer balloonists, but proximately the veteran London correspondent of Agence France Presse. A press briefing in London on the topography of La France Profonde seemed an incongruity that bordered on effrontery, but no matter; in any case, one could forgive these English scientists in their startling assertion that French civilization was so ancient that it had preceded humanity itself .
    This offered by the suave and distinguished figure at the right of the panel, the man Montgolfier's press pack described as Professor Roger Sutherland MacLennane, FRS, from the University of Cambridge. Not that Montgolfier didn't know this, of course - McLennane was a well-known scientist, always good for a quote and a source of gossip, not all of which had to be vetted by AFP's legal department. Our picture of Neanderthal Man as the primitive savage (McLennane continued) was a distortion caused by the fact that history is always written by the victor: when the first Homo sapiens came into Europe 40,000 years ago, it was not to meet a debased race like Charles Darwin's Fuegians, but a civilization that had -- in his words -"endured for eight thousand centuries, and had created megaliths the size of mountains."
    The theme was continued by Dr Jack Corstorphine, the tall young scientist on the left of the panel, in the casual jacket and polo shirt, who explained, with a quiet but compelling authority, that the breadth and extent of this ancient civilization would have been incomprehensible to our own ancestors, who would therefore have seen only wilderness, weaving the bones of this great and ancient culture into the legend and myth of centuries. As the ruins of Rome had appeared to the barbarian Saxons as the works of mythical giants, so the megalith at Saint-Rogatien-Les-Remillards had appeared to our ancestors - and also, said Dr Corstorphine, to ourselves, until our own researches had recognized it as being "something quite extraordinary". Dr Corstorphine was a new face to Montgolfier, but in his assured delivery he could tell that he was one of McLennane's latest protégés.
    But he and Corstorphine were the sideshows, the hors-d'oeuvres, compared with what was obviously the main attraction, a young woman who was looking up at Corstorphine, as he spoke, with an expression of adoration so intense that it could have melted titanium. When the girl (identified as `Miss Jadis L. Markham'), rose to speak, the room fell utterly silent, except for the sound of a few people swallowing and some quickly stifled coughs.
    This was not a scientist - this was a movie star. As Jadis Markham discussed, with a dignified poise, how the ancient inhabitants of Europe had done more than leave a few isolated monuments, but instead had modified the very face of the Earth, Montgolfier and the assembled press corps began to lose the thread of the story and take a greater interest in its speaker. She was dressed in classic Chanel - Montgolfier (who had covered fashion in his time, in between stints on the diplomatic desk) thought her gown had been a couture item from the sixties: could anyone name any scientist, let alone such a débutante, who could carry off such cool retro chic? And - unbelievable - she was at least five months pregnant, and yet the strapless gown fitted her as if pregnancy was her natural state, the state in which she was most at ease: she simply glowed with beauty. The whole effect, the way her outrageously untamed cloud of glossy dark hair (who said scientists were buttoned-up?) tumbled over her pale shoulders, her décolletage, was enchanting! And her face! Framed - and indeed, sometimes partly obscured - by this nebula of hair, were two star-bright but yet unfathomably dark wells of intelligent, calculating ferocity. She was like a cat, a wild thing, he thought, her wildness kept in tight coils by an adamantine composure which on the surface appeared easy and carefree, but which - he was sure - was, not so far beneath, passionate and determined. All this in a girl of how old? - twenty-one? If this was another of McLennane's protégées, Montgolfier would bet that she would be his last, his swansong, because she'd be impossible to follow.
    As Montgolfier sat enraptured, it occurred to him that although the story itself was important - it certainly was that, and would be the centre of all discussion for weeks and months - he was not watching a press conference so much as a wedding, or a coronation. All this from tiny things he'd noticed that were never spoken out loud for all that they were quite evident, even from his place at the back. How Jadis, for all the poise and control that belied her years, for all that she conducted the wolf-pack of journalists as if she were Karajan directing the Berlin Philharmonic, would frequently glance at Jack, only for a moment, but with an expression of such - how could he describe it - supplication? - and his face would bestow a warmth of reassurance in return. And all this presided over by McLennane, who watched both of them with proprietorial satisfaction. Now, Montgolfier had never much cared for C. S. Lewis, but he did know his Tolkien, and this was nothing so much as the wedding of Aragorn and Arwen, with McLennane playing his accustomed role as Gandalf, Kingmaker. This would be a great story, he thought, because the people were at least as interesting as the tale they told. This is the next dynasty of archaeology in the making (he would write). He hoped he'd be able to get a picture of Jadis.
    At the very end, Montgolfier essayed a question for the young Elf Princess, deftly handled by McLennane as chair ("One last question? That man at the back! Ah, it's you, Marcel! Good to see you, what?")
    "Miss Markham," he asked, "excuse my presumption, but how will you reconcile your - how shall I say - imminent family commitments - with what promises to be an extensive programme of field research?"
    Jadis looked at Jack, who simply continued to smile back, and then turned her lighthouse eyes on Montgolfier. She paused for a moment, and it seemed to him that her hair gathered around her face like a brooding storm cloud as she said, with an unexpectedly stern asperity that made him start:
    "I'll take them with me of course. What else would I do with them?"
    And then the storm clouds dissipated as quickly as they had arrived, her face opening into a smile as bright as the sun, and of such innocent loveliness that he thought he'd die right there, at the pinnacle of his long career -- and in England.
    After the conference, when they'd managed to elude the last of the cameras, supplementary interviews and questions, Roger treated them both to lunch at Fortnum's, but then announced he was staying overnight on in London:
    "Business at the Royal - I'll billet at the Athenaeum," he'd said, hailing a cab in Piccadilly to take Jadis and Jack to Kings Cross. "But don't forget, you two - my office, oh-nine-hundred precisely, the - er -- day after tomorrow. Might have a bit of news, what?"
    The train home pulled through the cramped crenellations of North London and eventually eased into flat country under the immensity of the East Anglian sky, the land beneath now becoming clothed with the brilliant green haze of early Spring. Jadis leaned into Jack, and neither said a word for a long time. Not that they had nothing to say to each other, but that their communication had now become almost entirely intuitive, telepathic.
    Although she could never clearly have put it into words, Marjorie had been the spark, the catalyst that had fired her out of the last shreds of her girlhood, and into herself. It had to have been an objective eye: Jack could never have done it, and it was to his credit (she pulled him closer) that he'd realized this long before she had. The result, now, was that she and Jack were the indissoluble union that she had so inchoately, so blindly craved; that Marjorie had fired her, had let her loose, and the press conference - somehow, she couldn't quite express why - had been the last crucible.
    She suspected that Roger, bless him, had been the shrewdest of all. He should surely deny it if confronted directly, but she wouldn't put it past him to have woven the whole grand design: to have arranged for Jack to pursue the riskiest doctorate imaginable and give him his head; then, to introduce Jack to her (had he? She couldn't remember); and then, in the most audacious step of all, launch her at Jack's problem like some guided missile - all the better to add them both to Roger's starry crown. She had a feeling that this is what this meeting in two days' time was all about.
    Jack was silent, lost in thoughts all his own, until a full hour into the journey, when he pulled her closer still.
    "Might I ask you a question, Miss Markham?" he began, in his best Monty-Python French Accent. This time her smile was just for him.
    "But of course!"
    "You said, them. That you'd take them with you, into the field, when we get to excavate."
    "Well if there are, it's all your fault, you gorgeous man," she said, pushing closer still: and then more quietly, looking directly up at him and smiling, blearily yet, but just for him: "`Nothing like a good seeing to', you said, `for clearing the brain'".
    She began to nod, and it was only then that Jack realized how tired she must have been - the trip had taken it out of her: that, and the spotlight. How marvellous she'd been - how they'd all been. And how he still had to listen to McLennane's advice -- just make sure you're not the one left behind! How he'd struggled through his thesis defence, when she - a graduate student just starting out -- had had all those journalists under her spell. And most of all, how much he loved her.
    When the train pulled in to Cambridge, she was asleep in his arms.
    The next morning, as she looked over the breakfast table for the Oxford marmalade, Marjorie McLennane saw Roger's unopened copy of The Times. Such a waste, she thought, given that he'd get his own copy at his club. Then she remembered why Roger had been away and took another look at the lead story. `Civilization dates back a million years, scientists say', read the headline, but the picture was of a young girl, hair awry, who for all her loveliness had steel in her eyes.
    "Good for you, Jadis Markham", said Marjorie, marmalade now quite forgotten.
   
    Chapter 6
   
    (May 2005)
   
    Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
    Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
    The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
    Making the green one red.
    William Shakespeare -- Macbeth
   
    It was a relief to be here, at last, and to breathe the air. Not that Saint-Rogatien-Les Remillards was anything like she'd expected. To be sure, she'd known from Jack's pictures that it wasn't a wind-blasted, isolated place in the middle of nowhere, the kind of place filmgoers always associate with prehistory: but she hadn't expected it to be quite so tame. Remember Cholula, Jack had said, and he'd been right. The village of Saint-Rogatien clustered around the now-famous hill and up its slopes, and there was, indeed, a church and churchyard at the top. And not only a churchyard, but across the cobbled square - the tiny Place Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire -- the Mairie, a small but elegant pink-washed building, set back between the boulangerie and the Sanglier D'Or (restaurant, bar, tabac, café, pression and most importantly Hotel). Jack loved to tell her how, when he had first inquired about a permit to dig, the Mairie official had asked precisely where in the commune of Saint-Rogatien Jack had wanted to dig, and the expression of perplexity when Jack had pointed straight down at the tiled floor and said `Ici!'
    As they lay abed in the Sanglier D'Or, the occasional yellow headlight beams from the square below tracing sweeping lighthouse arcs across the ceiling, Jack reminded her that all was not as it seemed. The village had been built on the eastern spur -- just one corner -- of what had been a much more extensive structure, most of which had been eroded away into the valley. The present-day church did not mark the ancient summit, not by any means. Because of this erosion, there were some places around the village where one might get a direct view of the innards of the monstrous monument. Tomorrow, he'd promised, if she'd felt up to it, he'd show her the foot of the cliff-face that plunged from the churchyard wall, a full two hundred feet to the valley floor. This cliff, Jack thought, was where part of the megalith had been undercut by water and slumped, creating what he thought was cross-sectional slice right through part of its base. He'd picked up a few peculiar lithics there on his scouting trip, and there, he thought, she'd have the best chance of getting results fast - no need to dig or remove overburden, just map the cliff face and dig a few test tunnels in places that looked interesting.
    On the other hand, as it was, after all, their honeymoon, and they were both tired, they could relax, potter about, look around -- or even just stay in bed -- and look at the cliff another day.
    "Silly old lion!" she'd said, as cheerfully as she could given her fatigue from their two-day journey in the Peugeot, from Cambridge almost to the foothills of the Pyrenees, but Jack had the feeling her mind was elsewhere. He didn't inquire, but pulled her closer still.
    She lay bounded by his arms and chest, comforted, but still tired after the long drive. The journey (she'd driven the first few hundred miles herself) had aggravated the soreness in her back, and the aches in her legs, her belly - indeed, more or less everywhere -- were making sleep elusive. Her pregnancy had turned, in the past two or three weeks, from a phase of blossoming and almost boundless vitality to one of continual effort, and her general sleeplessness threatened what reserves she had left. She felt pale, awkward, bloated and huge, like a stranded whale. Her buzzing brain raced ahead far faster than the rest of her bulbous form could match, and thoughts whizzed around her head like so many golden midges illuminated by the slanting rays of autumn.
    First, there had been Roger's meeting, as promised, two days after the press conference - a meeting that had opened up amazing vistas for Jack and herself: if she weren't too worn out to reach and take them. But she knew her pregnancy would end, one day, and soon: she just had to stick it out in the meantime, to get over the next couple of months. Think ahead, she urged herself. Think ahead. Think beyond the uncomfortable present, to a secure future in another country, with her wonderful, gorgeous husband, and a project all her own.
    Jack's wedding present to her had been a slice of the past. For her doctorate project, he told her, she was to direct the proposed dig at the Saint-Rogatien cliff face. She'd be in charge of recruitment, management and budget as well as interpreting any finds they might make. Further, she'd have to find a base of operations that would last them for at least the next three years, as an expedition quarters as well as a home, a place to raise their family: their days as full-time residents of Cambridge would soon be over.
    He'd help her when he could, of course, but he had mapping and exploration of his own to do. His original trip to France had been an addendum, an afterthought, to a project entirely based and predicated on Britain. He now had to survey the region around Saint-Rogatien to the same level of detail, so that they could set the megalith in context. This meant that the Saint-Rogatien operation itself was hers, to do as she would.
    "It'll be your Kingdom, Snow Queen," he'd said, smiling his sweet, quizzical smile; "when I'm at Saint-Rogatien, I'll work for you."
    Her heart soared when she thought of how much trust Jack had placed in her, how much love. Her eyes filled with quiet, bright tears as, cosseted in his embrace, her mind catalogued, wandered, recalled - and, finally, rested.
    They were, all three of them, pie-eyed, fractious and spent, having handled around a hundred media requests each since the press conference. The press had even tried to get at Avi (whose surprisingly expert skills at data-analysis grunt-work had earned him a credit on the paper), but he had, wisely, disappeared. Three days later he'd sent Jack a text to say he'd gone home, but everything was cool, back in a week - alongside a photo of himself, outside a nightclub in Tel Aviv's swinging Dizengoff Street, wedged between two excited-looking blondes and obviously having the time of his life.
    Jack found the whole media circus daunting, at times overwhelming, and in the end, depressing. The questions seemed inane, irrelevant, often stupid, and he was only too aware of how awkward and uncomfortable he must have looked. He felt cramped, stifled, longing to get into the open air and away from all this crap.
    Jadis, who had attracted most media interest, and a disproportionate amount of that had been of the inane and stupid sort -- had coped better, but tired more quickly. Jack had noticed a new and disturbing quirk; that rather than answer a question, she would pause, and her brown eyes would, quite literally, switch off. Their lustre would disappear in a second, as if her sight were questing inwards, as if searching for something she couldn't find. Her brow would then furrow, and she'd rub her swollen belly distractedly, before returning to reality.
    "No, no, don't worry about me, I'm fine," she'd insist, resisting Jack and Roger's protests, trying to smile her loveliest smile at Jack but not quite succeeding, as if it were an injured butterfly, labouring to get airborne.
    Finally, Jack was so worried that he'd called Marjorie, swallowing his earlier fear in the knowledge that the two women had become close friends, to ask whether she might say something, because Jadis wouldn't listen to him: and so Jadis was sternly advised to take things more easily for a day or two. Marjorie also insisted that Roger handle all media enquiries - an obligation he was happy to fulfill - and that Jack find a portrait of Jadis that could be released to the press, so as to assuage the torrent of media requests.
    Rifling through the dreadful clutter that their flat had become - both of them being too tired or too busy to do much about it - Jack had come across a portrait of Jadis, filed in his laptop, that he'd completely forgotten about. It was a picture of her in Torbay, on their first summer vacation together. She'd been standing in a wooded dell, just outside some pothole or other he'd been studying, the sun through the trees making an aurora for her hair. While the surface of his mind concentrated on the practicalities of whether this casual snapshot would be a good enough for a press portrait (was the contrast right? Would newspapers want something of higher resolution?) -- the rest of him surged with reminiscence.
    He could no longer quite be sure, but this photo might have been taken on the very day they'd first made love. Perhaps even at the very same spot. Her face in the picture was open and smiling, flushed and happy, and she appeared to have been caught saying something to him - he could not remember what. But he did remember, as clearly as if it had been yesterday, how they had sunk into the dell, in the leafy remains of the bluebells; his first ever sight of her smoothly incurving waist, her bare breasts, her wild brown hair tumbling across them; and how pale and, well, exposed they'd seemed in the dappled summer sun, framed by her pale arms, and how white they were against her dark, upward-pointing nipples. He even remembered how her nipples tasted; her laughter when he tasted them; the smile of longing and surrender in her eyes when she'd at last opened herself before him, and the sudden feeling of rapture and completeness when he was inside her for the very first time; and, coincident with this, the strange and unexpected feeling that he had come home.
    It struck him, then, how much she'd changed since; that her spirit seemed to have become more urgent, more inward-looking. Like the taste of a wine set to age, their love which had once been gay and simple with no thought of the future, was now darker and more complex, with overtones of sorrow and joy, worry and long experience - and foreboding. His heart ached for her, for the girl he'd first dated, as well as the woman she had become. As her pregnancy had advanced she had become reserved, fiercer, controlled, and a little less inclined to present to the world at large anything other than a hard and steely resolve. The girlish warmth that she had once spread so gaily and casually she tended to hoard for him alone, focusing it at his heart in concentrated, overpowering blasts. The world knew nothing of this. To anyone but himself, the photo showed a pretty eighteen-year-old on holiday. He emailed it to the University Press Office.
    The morning before Roger's meeting - the day after Jack and Jadis had returned from London -- she had been in the corner of the office that she shared with Jack when, looking up from the flood of unopened emails, she saw an enormous camera lens peeping in at her through the window. A tabloid journalist had climbed up the wall with a ladder carelessly left by a contractor, and had been hoping for some unauthorized, exclusive shots of the New Face of Science. Jadis fled to the departmental secretary, who called security. In the departmental office she'd met Jack, who'd left for work later than she had: he'd been trying to sort their domestic paperwork into some kind of order, but not getting very far. (He tended to get swamped, distracted by details, whereas Jadis only had too look sternly at a pile of papers and they'd sort themselves.) Jack now reported that the flat was under journalistic siege. Unable to exit through the front, he'd had to scale the high wall behind the Nest and make a getaway across a neighbour's garden. His clothes were muddied, his arms scratched. Jadis cooed concern for him, ignoring all else: it had not yet occurred to either where they might go next - for they couldn't go home for a day or two - when they turned at once to see Roger, standing in the office doorway.
    "Please stay with Marjorie and me," he'd said, "until the heat's off. And we can have our meeting there. Much nicer, what?"
    It felt very peculiar to be in bed with his fiancée in the house of his former doctorate supervisor. For all that the spare bedroom was welcoming in a chintzy sort of way, and much tidier than their flat, Jack felt like a refugee. More than ever, he wanted to get out into the field, to take Jadis with him - to escape. When he awoke with these fretful thoughts, his first sight was Jadis, sitting on the side of the bed with her back to him, legs slightly parted to accommodate the bulge of her belly, combing her hair with urgent, rapid strokes, as if it were a task best over and done with. He wondered why she hadn't asked him to do it, a much more relaxed experience they both enjoyed, especially as it often led to other things. It was what in their private language they called their Bipcog ("baboons-in-pre-copulatory-grooming") routine.
    Jadis heard Jack wake behind her, and read his mind.
    "I'm sorry, Darling Jack. I just don't feel like it much here," she said, not turning round. "Here. At Roger and Marjorie's. It would seem like.... Well, having sex in the vicarage."
    Still sitting there, back to him, he saw her skin ripple, her shoulders shake with silent laughter, but the tenor soon turned and she began to emit small, spiky, sobs which she stifled only with difficulty. Jack got out of bed and rushed round to comfort her, quieting her in his arms. She did not explain her change of mood - even if she could have done - and Jack did not ask her. Which is why I love him so very much, Jadis thought. Which is why I must not let him down, her thoughts added, with an anxious and poignant edge, for somewhere deep inside her, she felt that her soul had begun to crumble.
    Roger's news, after breakfast, went a considerable way to cheering them up. Some years ago (Roger began), a Chinese-American investor and philanthropist called Ginsberg Wang had approached the University, offering a donation of several billion dollars if they'd build a new college with his name on it. After the common-room titters had subsided ("Who'd want to be a Fellow of Wank College?") the University, being used to such requests, politely thanked Mr Wang, and deftly pointed out that whereas the University had an elegant sufficiency of colleges, it sorely lacked front-rank research facilities that could benefit the whole University, if not the whole world, and mightn't Mr Wang think along those lines instead? And so Mr Wang had receded and it was generally assumed that he'd decided to take his billions elsewhere.
    However, it turned out (Roger continued) that the Senate had badly underestimated Mr Wang, who had indeed taken the University at its word, and had been consulting widely on the kinds of research facilities that the University might need - and which, he felt, he'd like to support. Mr Wang was known as a shrewd investor in what at first seemed an eclectic selection of interests, from carbon sequestration technologies to genetic manipulation, from geothermal power to personalized space travel. When Forbes magazine asked him, in the only interview he was ever known to have given, if he could characterize his investments in a sentence, he'd said "sure, but I'll do it in just two words: `The Future'".
    Hence the Universities' puzzlement when he chose to endow two new research institutes in Cambridge, neither of which seemed to have anything to do with technology or a brave new world, but both very much with cataloguing the past. One such concern - the Wang Astrometry Institute - had been busy in Madingley for two years now, cataloguing the recent spectral history and proper motion of stars in the solar neighbourhood, for reasons that nobody could fathom.
    "And the second?" Roger asked: "well, that's where we come in."
    It turned out that Ginsberg Wang had been watching the progress of McLennane's research, and that of his students, for some years, but had only finally chosen to make a commitment when the Nature paper had become public.
    "That's why I couldn't come back from town with you both," he explained, "I had to meet Wang's people at the Royal. Naturally, I couldn't breathe a dicky bird. I'm sure you'll understand."
    The upshot was that Wang, through his philanthropic GW Foundation, had chosen to endow what he'd called the GW Institute for Historical Geomorphology. This would - at least initially - be a `virtual' institute, made of people within the current Department and associates elsewhere.
    "Wang knows that institutes are made not of walls, but of people," said Roger. "The GW Foundation has asked me to head up the Institute, and I've accepted. After all, I've only a year or so to run at the University proper before they'd boot me out anyway, and I can't hang around here - Marjorie would never stand for it."
    Jack and Jadis congratulated him, but he pressed ahead.
    "My first act as the Head is to appoint you, Jack, as its first Senior Research Fellow; my second is to recommend that Jack takes on you, Jadis as its first doctorate student. No need to worry about money or grants - we've got pots of it. You could start tomorrow, but I forbid it. There's some paperwork to get done, and anyway you two need a break. Start work in a couple of weeks, after the Easter Vac, perhaps, eh, what?"
    The first thing Jack and Jadis needed to do was keep the promise they'd made to themselves that they would marry as soon as Jack got an academic post. Now this had happened, neither felt that they had had any time to waste. Ignoring protests from both sets of parents to have what Jack's father called `A Bit Of A Do', and what Jadis's mother called `A Proper Wedding, dear, you know, in a church', they booked a slot in the Cambridge Registry Office for the following week, and invited everyone they knew to meet for a drink in the nearby Isaac Newton pub afterwards.
    "Why have a proper wedding, Mum, Why?" said Jadis: "I've been living with Jack for ages, just as if we already were married. I love him. What's more, I'm having his baby in less than two months, so there'll be no time to plan anything, and after the baby's born, well, you can imagine."
    What she didn't add (because her mother just wouldn't get it, and in any case, she didn't want to hurt her) was that her marriage to Jack had existed in her own mind since he'd first asked her out. To Jadis, that a marriage should be before God and a congregation was neither here nor there. Concerning the existence of God she had no firm opinion, and the congregation, while nice to have, was irrelevant, because their marriage was really a private matter, between her and Jack, into which nobody - nobody, however much they loved them - could ever intrude. All she said was,
    "Mum, it would be lovely to see you there, if you can make it." Jadis' mother was the image of her daughter. As she put the phone down, she distractedly gathered her long brown hair behind her head, and in the dark pools of her eyes wondered how - when? - her daughter had learned to be so matter-of-fact, so hard?
    Deep in the first night at Saint-Rogatien, Jadis was having a dream in which she'd been in the garden in Chesterton, trying to plant out some summer bedding, but the plants shriveled and died as soon as she put them into the ground. She worked faster and faster, as if trying to beat some innominate contagion, but still it spread. The rising mound of dead and dying plants all around her turned from green, to grey, to red, dripping blood on the grass. When she studied the plants more closely, she saw that they were fetuses, and as she watched in pure horror, the blood smeared and spread, up the wall of the raised bed and into the Nest, up the trees, until, at the end of the leaves, it gathered and rained down on her in a torrent. She looked down and noticed blood rising up her bare legs, but she was stuck fast, unable to move or do anything to stem this tide incarnadine. But just as she thought she would drown in blood, there came a regular pulse, a subsonic thrum, like the heartbeat of the Earth. Assaulted by this calm but unstoppable vibration, the blood coagulated, dried, shattered and blew away like harmless dust; and before her, a vast and green plant rose clear out of the ground, bursting above her head into an immense Van-Gogh sunflower that became the sun. And still the Earth pulsed.
    She woke, still in Jack's arms, the shreds of the dream dissipating like fairy gossamer: but the pulse still beat, softly and insistently, just below the level of hearing. She knew her own pulse, and that of her love. But this was a new pulse, the pulse of a new life, strong and steady, beating inside her. Or, rather, a pulse returned, a pulse she feared had been lost for some time. Wave after wave of relief coursed down to meet it, and she embraced the pulse with triumphant inner shouts of radiant joy. She slept again in a state of happiness that she had not experienced for several weeks.
    When she awoke in the dawn, she'd forgotten about the dream, and now stood in the window of the small bedroom, looking down over the sunlit square. She felt amazingly refreshed after a night in Jack's arms, all her aches and pains were gone, and she was eager to meet the day.
    "Come on, silly old lion!" she'd teased, pulling the duvet off Jack's still recumbent form, yanking the curtains apart to admit the strong spring sunshine.
    "Okay, Boss," came the uncertain reply, but when Jack tried to pull the duvet back, Jadis snatched it away again in a furious cloud of fabric and hair, jumped on the bed, whacked him quite hard on the backside, and sprang for the door. Half an hour later, as Jack ordered coffee on the pavement terrace of the café below, Jadis went next door to buy croissants. If this was to be her new home, she felt she could accommodate its easy pace very well. Jack watched her return with the paper bag, and at first he didn't recognize her as his wife. The woman he was watching was indeed heavily pregnant, like Jadis, but unlike Jadis had been in the past two or three weeks, this voluptuary had acquired a devastatingly sexy hip-sway that accommodated both her legginess and her bulk with elegance and poise, her long train of hair waving to the rhythm of her movements, just as if she were dancing in her own one-woman conga line to some deep dub pulse. It wasn't until she'd stopped at his table that he was sure it was her.
    "What...?" she asked, looking at his astonished expression, while pulling out her chair and sitting on it in a single soft, cloud of fluid movement that simply exuded sex. Jack turned to his coffee, slurping it far too fast, coughed at its bitterness, and looked up, a rim of froth on his upper lip. Jadis laughed, and to Jack it sounded just like the romantic-novel cliché of tinkling bells.
    "Snow Queen, will you marry me?"
    "But we're already married!"
    "... to each other?"
    "Simultaneously, even" - she wore her mock-serious expression, shading her glinting eyes beneath the shadows of hair. Deep within her -or, in truth, not so deep -- she surged with renewed joy at her life, her fortune, and that she was married - married - to this man. She wanted him. Right here, on the street, if necessary. What fun it is, she thought, to flirt with the man you're married to!
    "And at the same time? I'm astonished."
    "In which case, I can't. Sorry!" She ran her tongue sexily around her lips, chasing flecks of coffee and croissant.
    "But this is terrible! Who's the lucky man?"
    "You are. And I expect you to take me upstairs, right now, and treat me to mad, passionate lunch.... I'm hungry", she added, leaning across the table towards him, leering like a pantomime villain and giving him an eyeful of rich, shapely cleavage.
    "But we haven't even had breakfast. Now, eat up, I have something to show you."
    And after ten minutes of silent contentment, the couple (who were, after all, on their honeymoon), sauntered out of the café in the way that honeymooning couples always will, as if they had the world at their feet. Hand in hand they crossed the square and Jack led Jadis into the churchyard. The graves closer to the street stood in well-tended, ordered lines, each stone adorned with garish sprays of plastic flowers and photographs of loved ones behind clear glass or Perspex frames. As they rounded the church they entered the cool shadows of a dark bank of cypresses and yews, where the graves were sparser and more sombre, and at length they came to a crumbling stone parapet that gave onto a magnificent view of the landscape stretched out below them to the west, with ridge after ridge of limestone hills fading to invisibility. She turned to him and kissed him calmly, warmly and firmly, just she had done for the very first time almost four years earlier. Alike - and yet not alike. There were three lives here, not two, and a new home to find, and a new life to explore.
    Two weeks later they were back in their flat. They'd been worrying what they might find, and their sense of anticipation was sharpened by the increasingly aberrant performance of the old Peugeot which toiled and grumbled up the last stretch of the M11 towards Cambridge, so much so that they began to think that they'd never arrive.
    "I promised the old Field Vehicle," Jack said, pointedly "that if she got us back home safely, I'd treat her to a thorough servicing."
    Jadis - half asleep in the passenger seat -- had begun to giggle at this.
    "Mmm.... Like you did me, you mean? Your capacity for seeing to things, Darling Jack ...." she yawned, stretching, "...knows no bounds."
    Despite her increasing discomfort and now continual back-ache brought on by the long ride home, her mind was floating on the gentle bubble of memories of her honeymoon, with long afternoons of leisured lovemaking between concentrated bursts of more serious activity. They had paced out the precise location for the first excavation season, scheduled for this time next year. And with the help of a friendly, English-speaking estate agent, they had scouted a few likely properties that could be used as live-in field stations, and would recommend the one they liked most to Roger, who'd have to authorise the funds to buy and remodel it.
    It was a big, old and mildly dilapidated farmhouse on a quiet lane about a quarter-mile away from the village centre. A large barn and the house itself formed respectively the west and north sides of a sheltered tarmac quadrangle, braced against the prevailing Atlantic westerlies. The shingles on the barn's roof looked rickety, but the beams were sound; there was plenty of scope for dividing it into a machine shop; laboratory and store rooms, and there was an extensive stone cellar beneath.
    The house itself was large without being ostentatious, with an enormous kitchen, (accompanied by a large, tiled back-kitchen, laundry room and pantry) that could serve as the centre of family life. Jadis could already imagine herself in it, with piles, and piles of children, students and field workers, cats and dogs running to and fro, an oak table in the centre laden with hot meals, lab notes, toys, specimens, in an ongoing jumble...
    There were eight large bedrooms - so plenty of room to accommodate themselves and several colleagues, children and friends at once - but only one tiny bathroom. Have to do something about that, thought Jadis. And put one in downstairs, too. She thought of herself in the future, shepherding shoals of small children in and out ...
    But best of all, there was a large garden, already in cultivation, that could be used to help supply the home and field kitchen. In the middle was a dense spinney of mature trees. It didn't look very extensive from the outside, but as soon as you stepped in, you had the distinct impression of being in an endless forest. Jadis immediately thought of the Nest. She warmed to this, and the pulse within her quickened in response.
    When they got back to the flat, well after dark, and expecting the usual explosion of disorder, they found it a picture of neatness. Papers were stacked, clothes washed and ironed, dishes put away, floors swept, and there were even flowers in vases. A note from Marjorie (who'd had the key) explained that she'd asked her cleaning lady to give the flat a spring-clean. "A welcome-home gift'", she explained.
    The next day, Jack rose early and went into the department, to give a progress report to McLennane. Jadis thought she'd stay behind for a while - the car journey had been hard on her; she was rather stiff, and she wanted to potter quietly around the garden for a bit, pulling out a few Spring weeds. She said she'd come into the department later. Maybe they'd have lunch? Great idea, said Jack: they kissed, parted, and he was gone.
    After Jack had left, she rose, shucked Horrible over her head and went into the garden. Leaning over to pull a few small grassy interlopers from the edge of the raised bed, she idly thought of the coming summer, a baby dozing in a pram, and - who knows, that Normal Servicing might be Resumed in the Nest. Her presumption was met instantly with a jolt so painful, so sudden, that she was thrown clear off her feet and sent sprawling forward into the wall of the raised bed. She stood up, dazed, sweating, gasping for breath, thinking that she'd been hit in the back with a battering ram. But before she could recover, a second bone-crunching impact cut her to her knees. The world whirled around her. Her head swam. Her crotch felt damp, and, raising Horrible's hem, she looked down and saw a trickle of blood running down the inside of her right thigh.
    Her head cleared immediately, as often happens to soldiers in the extremis of battle. No time to call Jack; an ambulance would take ages to get here; the answer was clear. She'd take herself to Casualty -- now. Stopping only to clean the thin line of blood from her thigh, to find a clean pair of knickers, and (regretting that pregnant women don't have much use for tampons or sanitary towels) stuffing as much loo paper as she could down her knickers and up between her legs, she grabbed the car keys and left. The Field Vehicle spluttered glutinously into life.
    After their long journey of the day before, Jadis hoped she'd have enough fuel to get herself to Addenbrooke's. In the event, this hardly mattered. Coursing down Elizabeth Way and across the river, another huge, shuddering spasm wracked her lower body. She gripped the steering wheel in fierce concentration, ignoring the fact that her insides were hemorrhaging. As she worked the pedals, she could feel that her inner thighs were slick with great massy gouts. She made her way carefully along East Road and past Parker's Piece, pulling up at the lights, signaling to turn left into Hills Road and the southbound straight to Addenbrooke's Hospital. Almost there.
    Willing the lights to change, she gunned the accelerator - the only way, she'd learned, of getting the diesel engine to make a quick getaway, but the long un-serviced Field Vehicle was slow to respond. At last, the lights changed, and Jadis steered into Hills Road, making sure that nothing was coming from the right - extra carefully now, as although the spasms had lessened in intensity, she had lost a lot of blood and was feeling a little light-headed, just as she had been in the night before last at the Sanglier D'Or, when, with the curtains swirling in the Spring breeze through their open window, and when her Darling Jack ...
    But what she hadn't seen, as she turned, was a police car, lights flashing, screaming northwards at eighty-five miles per hour up the wrong side of Hills Road, to her left.
    The police Volvo Cross Country hit the Peugeot almost head on, with a combined velocity of more than a hundred miles per hour. The Peugeot flipped forward and turned a full somersault over the top of the larger car. As the Peugeot righted itself in mid-air, the G-force pulled the safety belt clear from its fastenings, and Jadis was catapulted as a bloody comet forwards through the windscreen, landing face-down on the bonnet of a northbound car twenty feet away; a car whose driver braked suddenly, so that Jadis slid down the bonnet and came to rest on the ground in front of it. The Peugeot itself, now driverless, ploughed through the air, and, cratering nose-first into the road behind the police car, burst into flames.
    "Darling Jack..."
    The world whined and wheeled, and was silent.
   
    Chapter 7
   
    (September 2011)
   
    O for a beaker full of the warm South!
    John Keats - Ode to a Nightingale
   
    "Domingo, would you do the honours..?"
    "Yes, Jadis, of course." The big man in the radioactively loud aloha shirt and oversized Bermuda shorts waved his ham-sized hands over the table, and the happy chatter all around it ceased at once. Nothing could be heard but birdsong, the late summer wind sighing in the high branches of the spinney, the lazy plop of a frog into the pond and the distant, excited rasp of the grasshoppers in the field that opened at the end of the garden.
    "Benedictus, benedicat."
    The chatter resumed. Jadis had been standing in the doorway of the back kitchen, and now added an enormous earthenware bowl of lemon chicken and rice to the already laden table. Sitting down at its head, she slid off her sandals and buried her feet in the furry, dependable bulk of Fairbanks, her gigantic, lion-maned golden retriever, who looked up momentarily, emitted a contented nut-brown growl, and went back to sleep on the cool tiles under the table -- almost.
    Although very much fulfilling his job description as Mobile Self-Warming Hot Water Bottle and Guard Dog (Fierce) for his mistress, he still kept half an eye open, monitoring his arch enemy. This was none other than Horrible, the rapacious, greedy and thoroughly unlovely squashed-faced tabby that had adopted the household three years earlier, and, impervious to its protests, brought with it a truly titanic infestation of worms -- and a cloud of fleas that had made everyone scratch for weeks. The puling pit of scruffy kittens discovered one afternoon under a pile of dirty laundry, some weeks later, was the only outward sign of the animal's gender. But Horrible was in no mood to tease the dog today, for her tiny and sadistic mind had already been distracted. She slunk off towards the long grass and reeds at the edge of the pond, in search of small witless invertebrates to persecute.
    Jadis looked up at the human company, and felt a warm mixture of emotions: the glow of achievement, salted with a twinge of regret, and excitement about the future. For all that this was the final Saint-Rogatien field crew, at the end of the final season, and this, the final dinner, she was in a mood of quiet celebration. The dig had closed down that very afternoon. The last earthmover had replaced the overburden, grass-seed had been sown, and the mayor of the village had had a little ceremony to mark the passing of a remarkable, surprising, trail-blazing but ultimately frustrating archaeological endeavour. In the days ahead, Jadis would pack up the lab specimens, crating them for Cambridge, where, no doubt, they would make a few doctorate projects for graduate students to come. And in the meantime, she and Jack were clearing the decks for something new.
    Jack sat, unchanged and unchanging, at the other end of the trestle table, laid out on the back terrace in the dappled shade of a vast and ancient sweet-chestnut tree, its fruits already swelling. He returned her warm gaze, seeing her as she now was, as if at the end of a long journey. What he saw was his wife, of course, and someone he'd never tire of looking at, ever different from moment to moment, but always just the same, an eternal landscape under ever-changing skies. If he'd had to summarize a long-term, secular trend, he'd say this: that her long hair was, if any thing, even longer and richer, her dark eyes yet more lustrous and expressive (or had he just got better at reading them?) And after five - no, six - seasons at what the residents of Saint-Rogatien had called Le Dig, she had been winnowed by experience, and was now as toned and slender as a hazel switch, her dark skin toasted to a yet warmer shade of taut softness.
    Jadis felt Jack's eyes upon her and momentarily lost interest in the rest of the world's affairs, as the two of them exchanged in a moment what might otherwise have taken many hours of speech. Oblivious to the swirl of conversation around them, Jack raised one mock-serious eyebrow, just for her - we have our news, Snow Queen, but not yet. Her hand flew to her mouth to stifle a giggle, and then, lovingly and reprovingly as a mother, she affected a sterner but still-smiling countenance, a mental finger-wag: silly old lion! She was the hostess, and had her guests to look after! And so with a small shake of her head, her hair a shimmering cadence, she broke the telepathic link and the noise of the party flooded back. The entire exchange had lasted hardly more than a second. As if to compensate for her reverie, she waved her hands yet more animatedly at her guests, imploring them to begin, to dig in, dish up, have more wine.
    Not that they needed any encouragement: nor that they had taken much notice of the intimate currents sparking above their heads. At Jack's left, Primrose Tsien and Faye Callaghan were laughing uproariously as Avi Malkeinu, sat between them, his tight, dark curls bobbing, was telling what was probably a very salacious and undoubtedly exaggerated story about his latest stint as an Israeli army reservist. At Jack's right, Domingo was deep in conversation with the studious and startlingly freckled and red-headed Mathilde Reynard - to her right, Eric Onoye was laughing with Marjorie McLennane.
    The McLennanes, now retired, had broken off a motoring tour to visit Saint-Rogatien and close another chapter in the story of their last and most favourite protégés. Which left Roger - dear, silly, shrewd old Roger, seated at her right, in his off-white linen suit and panama hat - who looked at her with solicitous eyes and put his hand on hers.
    "Are you feeling quite all right, my dear?" Her smile was as warm as only she could make it:
    "Dear Roger - thank you, of course I am. Why shouldn't I be?"
    She liked to think of the 2011 crew as her Dream Team, the brightest and best she'd ever assembled. I mean to say, she thought, just look at them! First, and greatest, there was Avi, who'd just published a terse and thoughtful paper in Nature on his analysis of the still-mysterious artefacts from what the locals had come to call Le Dig, artefacts that she -- his doctorate supervisor -- had named as `Remillardian' in her own thesis, two years before. These featureless, geometrically perfect, polygonal coins of flint and obsidian were the sigils of a lost and ancient civilization that had dominated this part of the world for hundreds of thousands of years, except that their meaning - and their makers -- remained frustratingly elusive.
    And yet in the heat of this never-ending battle with the unknown (and at her kitchen table, no less!) she and Avi had fused his talent as a data wrangler with her ability to slice through a problem like a hot knife, and in so doing, they had created a new approach: what a commentator in Antiquity had called `Analytic Archaeology' and hailed as something that might one day become a potent force in their field, for those adventurous and gifted enough to unlock its potential.
    Jadis and Avi had not long returned from Avi's doctorate exam, and a rare trip to Cambridge, at which she had met Ernestine Yanga for the first time. She'd heard wonderful things about Professor Yanga from Jack, about how sympathetic she was. Jack's clear eyes had misted over at the memory. It was another time, long ago, another life, he explained. Avi's exam had been brief, almost routine. Afterwards, in the departmental coffee room (so familiar, but so, well -- alien), Professor Yanga had confided in Jadis that Avi's work was quite brilliant -
    "So bold, and so brash, I suspect, that he might find himself in very hot water!" She smiled, casting herself back to Jack's own troubled but ultimately triumphant defence -- and then said something that Jadis found perplexing.
    "And I have longed to meet you, Dr Markham. I can see where that husband of yours gets it from."
    Jadis had said nothing, but looked up with a half-smile of inquisition.
    "You don't know? Why, my dear, it's you! Your fortitude."
    She wanted to tell her that no, it had been the other way round - that if only she knew - that without Jack to tie her to the Earth she would probably have long since dried up, burned like stubble, or carried away like chaff on the wind.
    Over the previous two years, Avi had been called up regularly to serve two-month stints in the Israeli Army as a reservist, especially as the perpetually broiling Middle-East Situation was entering a more than usually sticky patch. With the mild, peacemaking Kingdom of Jordan having been swept aside by the green and black flags of the ever-advancing pan-Islamic Khalifa that had already swallowed most of the rest of the region, the incoming tide of war threatened break through the ever-fragile, ever-shifting dunes of armed truce. If the Khalifa defeated the still-resisting Saudis, there would be nobody left to fight - except the old adversary. Israel had decided that Avi's scientific skills were too valuable to be wasted on the dead past when they could be applied to the uncertain future. So Avi would be gone in a week: as it looked, this time, permanently.
    But perhaps, one day, Avi had said, he'd get back to science, for he had something up his sleeve -- a proposal to apply the new analytic approach to the whole Mount Carmel cave complex, where Neanderthals and modern humans had lived, alternately, like some great Palaeolithic time-share, swapping the same caves, over and over, for a hundred thousand years. He'd discussed this deep into the night with Jadis as he finished his thesis, papers strewn on the kitchen table and onto the floor (where, in one of those hazards of fieldwork, he found them the morning after, decorated with the remains of a semi-digested dormouse that Horrible had regurgitated).
    Jadis had confided Avi's grand plans to Jack later that same evening. The house asleep, the grandfather clock ticking, they sat together before the fire, on the same saggy sofa they'd had in Chesterton, the great dog snoring on the floor. Reviewing the day: it was something they tried to do every evening - or, at least, when Jack was around.
    Not that anyone listening would have heard very much more than a few half-snatches of actual words, because their conversation had been so worn by familiarity that it had transformed into an intensely, indecipherably private exchange, words distilled into nuanced signals of posture, gesture, hands, eyes that any casual observer would have missed. Jadis curled into a ball, tucked her feet in below her knees, loosened her hair, leaned up against Jack, and stared into the ebbing flames in the grate. She wished she could have stayed like that forever.
    They remembered the first time they'd met Avi, when as a raw and cocksure first-year undergraduate, he'd come to Chesterton for supervisions, full of the most amazing ideas about Mount Carmel. And yet, perhaps more prescient than cocksure - for he might even have been right. But as things stood now, who knew if any either of them would ever hear from Avi again? Jack detected her concern in a slight tension in her shoulders, which he began to rub, firmly and slowly in a deep, strong rhythm -- for a first graduate student is like a first child, especially when he flies the nest, and into danger: he knew this, for she had once been his.
    So he drew her close, tousling her hair with gentle playfulness, as if to say that there were other things to remember about their garden in Chesterton, besides Avi's visits. She stirred in recollection and, in response, stretched up towards him, her softly sunburned lips parted: they kissed, a tiny and briefly ecstatic moment in the quiet night. She subsided once again in his arms, her face obscured by clouds, her last sight before falling asleep the dancing light from the softly cracking logs silhouetting the waving mane of the dog at her feet.
    Not that Avi had any particular worries, and why should he? Here he was, in La France Profonde, in his favourite situation, that is, between two pretty, vivacious women who were hanging on his every word. As she looked over this, the Last Supper, Jadis did not know - how could she have done? - what discoveries Primrose Tsien, her Chinese-American technician (squeezed, giggling, in the crook of Avi's muscular right arm), and all-Texan cowgirl Faye Callaghan, her current doctorate student (embraced by his equally beefy left) might make, what renown they might achieve - or none?
    And one might ask the same of Mathilde Reynard, a postdoctoral researcher from Montpellier, her slim, pale, freckled form like a thin white ash against the dark thundercloud that was Domingo to her left; and Eric Onoye, one of Ernestine Yanga's graduate students, laughing with Marjorie. What would the future hold for them?
    But wherever they might go, and wherever their lives might take them, she silently wished them all the good fortune she'd had. And maybe some of them might like to stay on, for she was convinced that Saint-Rogatien was just the beginning of their adventures. Caught once again in the sough and swag of sweetly remorseful daydream, she paused, stopped what she was eating and, fork held in mid-air, looked up at Jack, now deep in conversation with Domingo and Mathilde. Her expression would have been unintelligible to anyone who'd witnessed its brief passage across her face, but the fathomless glints in her eyes turned to sparkles of curiosity, and then laughter: for in one of those random lulls that punctuate dinner-party conversations she heard:
    "... Domingo García Vasquez Santéria Sanchopanza de Orellanzana von Hohenzollern und Taxis."
    Jack sat back, incredulous: "if I might say so, Domingo, that's quite a handle." Mathilde leaned forwards on her elbows, gazing in open-mouthed awe at the huge man.
    Roger: "You're having us on, old boy!"
    Avi: "Hey, Domingo, run that past me again!"
    Domingo just smiled one of his winningly tombstone-toothed smiles and said, in his characteristically resonant, almost impossibly deep voice:
    "Of course, my friends just call me `Pongo'".
    There was a brief but significant spell of utter silence, and then everyone started laughing at once. Fairbanks, startled from sleep, sat up, tail wagging, jumping from guest to guest, eager to learn the reason for all the commotion.
    Her first sight of Domingo had been when, two years earlier, she had been hurriedly making herself a sandwich before taking Fairbanks for a walk. All of a sudden a vast shadow loomed in the ever-open kitchen door, and for a fleeting moment she could have sworn there'd been a total eclipse. Looking up, she gasped, as the apparition before her resolved from an inchoate blur into quite indisputably the ugliest man she had ever seen - and one of the most instantly loveable.
    "Please, may I come in?" he'd asked. And so Jadis invited this monstrous troll over the threshold. it was one of those days when Jadis had been rushing around in a fury and a foam of business, trying to do too many things at once. He thought she looked tired.
    "Please, Dr Markham, sit down, and let me deal with that." So without knowing quite how or why (let alone how he knew her name), Jadis found herself sitting at the table eating a sandwich and drinking a mug of tea that he had made for her. This gave her plenty of time to study this strange, uninvited guest.
    He was, indeed, immense in all possible directions. Well over six feet tall and broad to match, he had an immense nose; an immense chin; an immense mane of thick, black, spiky hair that ran down the nape of his neck; immense steam-hammer hands, and teeth that looked like Stonehenge. But the perpetually cheeky twinkle of his eyes (each buried beneath a brow seemingly the size of a small hedgehog) revealed this same immensity on the inside, too. As she was later to discover, he was immensely kind, generous, gentle, cultured, sensitive and hard-working. (He was also immensely strong, and became known around the village as the L'incroyable Hulk.) He had originally come from Andalusia in southern Spain, but had travelled, and spoke fluent English (and several other languages) with an accent so slight that one would not have been able to identify its location.
    Jadis had invited him to join her on her daily round of the village, an act that gave an anchor for her day as well as necessary exercise for the dog. She also found it a great way to get to know new people, for the fame of Le Dig had, over the years, attracted many callers, some of them unusual or even frightening, which was one reason she was grateful for Fairbanks, especially during those heart-aching periods in which Jack was away on one of his own explorations, or - now that Roger had retired - as Director, on Institute business.
    As they bowled along the cow-parsley'd lane that led from the back garden in a slow grade up to the village square - Fairbanks bounding on ahead, twirling his feathered tail like a propeller - they made a contrasting pair. Him in what she came to realise was his invariable uniform of Bermuda shorts and Hawai'ian shirt (making his bulk seem even greater), she in the long mackintosh she reserved for walking and shopping. He explained that he was a Catholic priest, newly ordained, who had (he said) "been given some time off for good behaviour" before seeking a flock of his own. Even just the way he said things made her giggle like a little girl - she imagined him as some kind of friendly fairy-tale giant who invites small children to play in the gardens of his castle, simply from the goodness of his heart.
    He had recalled that there was a long tradition in Catholicism for clerics to go out into the world, and even be scientists for a while, all the better to appreciate the Mind of the Creator. His greatest hero had been the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, usually noted for his role in the Piltdown Man hoax of 1912 and for some challenging ideas about collective intelligence, but revered among palaeontologists as a skilled and tireless field worker. But he had also become something of an expert on the Abbé Gaston de Bonnard, a tireless archaeologist and man of God who had worked in this part of France in the late nineteenth century.
    Would it be possible, he asked, to "do the Teilhardian thing" and join Le Dig? Perhaps for a few weeks? Jadis had said yes even before she'd known she had, and Domingo had been there ever since.
    The dinner was sinking into cheerful disarray, just as the golden ball of the Sun touched the western horizon, beyond the village, making a dramatic silhouette of the church on top of the hill that had ruled their lives and dreams for so long. Jack and the students cleared the plates (Marjorie laid a hand on Jadis' arm before she could stand: "let someone else do the work, dear"); candles were fetched and lit (bringing out a flutter of moths); coffee was made, brandy brought from the cellar, and the company pushed their chairs back. Roger - ever the most refined judge of such things - felt that it was time for a toast.
    And so, rising to his feet, he asked the company to charge their glasses with whatever was handy and raise a toast to "Saint-Rogatien-Les-Remillards, and all who sailed in her!" The enthusiastic response sent a murder of evening crows flapping from the spinney.
    Clinks of glasses, more happy chatter, and then Eric Onoye said -
    "Yes, Professor McLennane, but who, precisely, did sail in her? That is the question!"
    It was the one question they could not answer, the brick wall that had stopped every avenue of their investigation. Many trenches and tunnels had been essayed into the cliff under Jadis' direction, and they had found tons of animal bones and plant remains as well as the strange, precious, mystifying Remillardian artefacts. But of human bones they found not one; not a single tooth in six years of careful, fingertip search, not one tooth despite the arduous sieving of enough sediment to have buried the hilltop church steeple-deep -- twice over.
    If the megalith had been a pyramid, any capping masonry had long since been eroded away or stripped, if it had been there at all, and there were no signs of voids that might have hinted at some unvisited tomb or sarcophagus. The bulk of the megalith - its filling - had been like a compost heap, a disorderly mass of earth and rocks, more or less glued together with the limestone precipitating out of the groundwater, making a breccia, a kind of geological blancmange whose antiquity is notoriously hard to judge.
    This was, indeed, another problem: Jadis had called in teams of scientists from all over the world, each an expert in one or other of the many arcane techniques of age determination, from electron spin resonance to amino-acid racemization, from optically stimulated luminescence to uranium-thorium dating -- and yet each had come up with their own estimates, to which they held with the stubbornness of the several Blind Men of Hindustan in their variously confused contemplation of the Elephant. In the end. the best that anyone could offer was that the megalith had been built sometime between 800,000 and 250,000 years ago, but of the makers there had been no sign. It could have been that there were several different races of maker, different species even - each one adding a little more to the megalith over endless, unrecorded millennia.
    And so they all talked of the depth of civilization, the antiquity of intent, that had been the legacy of Saint-Rogatien, confirming Jack's suspicions gathered in a single flying visit so long before - a visit undertaken as a desperate, last throw, and so as not to distract his pretty undergraduate girlfriend from studying for her finals.
    "You know," said Domingo, "what I find most intriguing about the whole panorama is not so much antiquity, but recency."
    "How do you mean?" Roger said. Domingo had a way of holding an audience, so that whenever he spoke, or even seemed like he might wish to, everyone instinctively turned their heads to him in expectation.
    "Well, do you remember the whole business about Homo floresiensis?" All nodded in assent - the discovery of a strange species of tiny human-like creature that had lived on an isolated island in Indonesia until almost historical times had been the archaeological sensation of the last decade. "Just think about it. If these creatures were wandering about until as recently as - whatever it was - ten thousand years - how do you know they're not still around?"
    "But they aren't!" said Avi - "people have looked! Even though they're tiny, they couldn't have crawled under rocks or something..."
    "Hey, guy - aren't you forgetting something?" This from Faye, disentangling herself from Avi, lighting a cigarette and looking at him sternly: "you know, `In A Hole In The Ground There Lived A Hobbit?' Maybe we haven't found all the holes!"
    Laughter, and, had anybody noticed, a sage twinkle in Domingo's eyes, like tiny newborn stars emerging from beneath the vast interstellar gas-clouds of his eyebrows.
    "To be sure, Flores is perhaps not such a good example - too isolated, too far away. But what about here? When did our megalith builders stop building their megaliths? And why?"
    "Perhaps modern Cro-Magnons came in and stopped them?" ventured Mathilde.
    "That's, of course, possible," Domingo replied, his huge dark form looking down on the tiny, pale-skinned, copper-haired girl to his right, a tableau that reminded Jadis of nothing more than King Kong and Ann Darrow. She tried not to chortle at the thought. From the way that Jack was struggling to suppress laughter, she guessed that the same image had also flashed through his mind. They tried not to look at each other in case they had hysterics.
    Domingo continued regardless, with an easy yet precise fluency belied by his apparently unwieldy frame:
    "Consider, if you will, the Neanderthals. We have always had them in our sights for Saint-Rogatien. But that might be an error, might it not? Think of the age of the thing - when the Neanderthals first appeared, Saint-Rogatien was already well over half a million years old!"
    "And your point is...?" teased Avi. He and Domingo had become firm friends, and had often been out on Le Dig together, one each side of a great box-frame sieve, shaking out and winnowing the sediment for tiny plant remains or flint flakes, their eager conversation as dense - or as airy - as the clouds of tan dust they produced, wafting across the site.
    "My point, my dear Avram Yitzchak, is that their antiquity is a side-issue. But what, I ask again, of their recency? As far as I know, the latest known Neanderthal comes from my - er - neck of the woods, and is around twenty-two thousand years old..."
    "Twenty-one!" corrected Primrose, giggling.
    "I do apologise, and I thank you for making my next point ... that the age keeps dropping. Will it keep dropping forever? How will we know when we've seen the last of the Neanderthals? It's a bit like" - he waved his great hands expansively "-- it's like trying to know if you've got rid of every last one of Horrible's Little Friends!" He paused. "You can't!" They all laughed at this: September was peak cat-flea season and Jadis and Primrose had been busy fumigating all the bedrooms.
    Domingo was now a dark shadow in the deepening night, visible only by the glint of candle flames in his eyes: indeed, people could now only be seen from reflections, glances of yellow light on spectacle frames here, a curve of the face there, making them all look like a collection of off-duty models for one of Goya's Witches' Sabbaths. This only enhanced the drama of Domingo's speech: he was a Caliban, an Ariel, a Tyger, stalking the forests of the night that runs along the edges of dreams.
    "You know, my friends, I shouldn't be surprised if the Neanderthals survived, perhaps just long enough to have come into the very earliest legends of the human race. And perhaps even more than that."
    There was a long pause, and then came a strange new voice.
    "Ha'nephilim ha'yu ha'aretz ba'yamim ..." intoned Avi, his eyes focussed as if on some immeasurable distance, as if speaking to a lost past. The table was hushed by his unwonted seriousness. He had never been known to speak any language in their company besides English or French. This was a private side to Avi the existence of which nobody had been aware - none, that is, except Domingo.
    In their long hours together at the dig, Domingo and Avi - the Catholic priest and the Jewish atheist - had turned, inevitably, to religion.
    Domingo had wondered at what he saw as the manifest contradictions of Avi's upbringing; that he'd been raised in a Marxist kibbutz community in a land reclaimed by the Jews.
    "This is a delicious irony, Avram Yitzchak, is it not? That as soon as the Jews found the Land of Israel, after much heroism and effort and struggle, they abandon their religion! And - this is all the more intriguing - those Jews in Israel who cling most firmly to their religion deny Israel's very right to exist!"
    Avi just laughed. It was not that he was uncomfortable, or that he thought Domingo was trying to convert him, because he knew his friend too well for that. It was just that he completely failed to see what Domingo was getting at.
    So, over the months, Domingo tried a different tack. The argument that had worked was that if Avi was really as serious about archaeology and antiquity as he appeared to be, he might find it all the more enriching were he to have a better appreciation of history, especially his own.
    "After all, Dear Avram", Domingo had said, "the Jews are the custodians of the deepest traditions of written history in the western world. Yet bereshit is a fickle mistress: who really knows how far back that history goes?" It was the mention of bereshit - the Hebrew for `In The Beginning', and the name for the book of Genesis - that had made Avram sit up with a start and look with yet further admiration at his strange, new friend, whose erudition seemed bottomless. He would remember it ever as a key moment in his life.
    The company now looked at Avi in equal awe, as if he'd just chanted a spell, whether for good or evil they could not tell. Only Domingo had sufficient presence of mind to answer.
    "Avram's words are entirely apposite: gigantes autem erant super terram in diebus illis - in those days there were giants that walked the Earth," he said. "And let us not forget what the giants were up to." At this point he muttered a string of Latin under his breath, as if trying to find the place in his mind before translating it: "Ah yes, postquam enim ingressi sunt filii ...um... Dei ad filias hominum illaeque genuerunt isti sunt. Hmmm -- potentes a saeculo viri .... er ... famosi." And then, more clearly: "That these giants were great men, who interbred with the daughters of men, who bore great and mighty sons."
    "But hey, Domingo, my friend," said Avi, sitting back in his chair in his usual relaxed way, the seriousness of his face lost in the shadow beyond the table. "The word nephilim in Ivrit does not translate as `giants'. It means `the fallen ones'..."
    Avi and Domingo now had the floor before a rapt audience.
    "But that's precisely it, Avi. They were giants because they were great men, not necessarily that they were aliens or trolls or Neanderthals or anything like that, because the Bible would not have the appropriate language for such things. But we know that they fell, before the Flood, but before they did, they intermarried with human beings. Perhaps the Bible is telling us about human beings and - er - other people, before the floods at the end of the Ice Age? Now, I do not believe that every word of the Bible is true - can be true - but when something is said so plainly..."
    Domingo's point tailed off into silence.
    "Perhaps we can put Domingo's ideas to the test," said Jack, alleviating the suddenly brooding mood.
    "A-ha!" exclaimed Roger, "I just knew you and Jadis had been up to something!"
    "Well, possibly. But we have been thinking of our next move now that we're winding things up here at Saint-Rogatien. I've been scouting around quite a lot, as you know..." General laughter and some groans. Jack's habits of wandering off for days and returning looking like an ill-used tramp were well-known. "And I think I've found something rather .... well, odd."
    No laughs at this - it was Jack's instinct for following the bones of the Earth that had brought them Saint-Rogatien in the first place. Everyone was eager to learn of this new adventure, as if the legacy of Saint-Rogatien - after six seasons of nail-snagging, knee-grazing, back-breaking labour - was already long forgotten.
    "So I took Jadis to see it, on her birthday..." Wolf-whistles from Avi, catcalls from the girls.
    "...and she likes it, which of course is the most important thing ..." laughs, hoots of "hear! hear!" and "well done, Jadis!"
    "... and she thinks we should have a more serious look around. Perhaps early next month, dig a few test pits, and see if there's potential for a field season there."
    "Of course, my dear chap," said Roger, "we're all intrigued. Where is this interesting place, what?"
    So Jack told them, and the discussion continued deeper into the night until, well past moonrise, the Last Supper finally came to an end.
    Jadis had known what Jack was going to talk about anyway, so she started to the clear remaining plates and glasses into the kitchen. Marjorie, in contrast, had no particular idea of what Jack was going to talk about, but decided to help Jadis, all the same. And so, with the conversation still audible through the back door - now counterpointed by an intermittent frog chorus from the pond -- Jadis and Marjorie stood together in the kitchen, one washing up, the other drying.
    Like the two old friends they were, like two bookends, they stood together companionably, chatting amiably about gardening, and the lives and loves of the friends and colleagues they had in common, and what Roger was going to do with himself now he'd retired ("get under my feet, worse luck!") but neither feeling any need to start a conversation simply for the sake of it. They had both been through too much for that. For her part, Jadis felt that she was more in Marjorie's debt than she could ever express, or thank, let alone repay.
    Marjorie's thoughts were more complex. From the very first time she had met Jadis, she had sensed an inner toughness quite at variance with her easygoing exterior: but that her mettle had had to be tested quite so brutally was shocking, beyond comprehension. The facts of the accident were quite trying enough, even without further discussion. That Jadis had survived at all was remarkable - that she had thrived, a miracle. Looking at this self-possessed, evidently happy and, frankly, beautiful woman, her friend, you'd never have guessed that she'd endured so much. This, and the fact that she never once discussed or referred to it, was a testament both to her fortitude: that, and (she had to admit) the support of her husband.
    As the two women finished their work and turned to say good-night, Marjorie's hand brushed the sleeve of Jadis' sweatshirt, and they embraced. Neither with ardour, nor with passion, but as friends will, as an expression of knowledge shared that need not be spoken; and in the hope that such shared confidences might help to ease an otherwise intolerable burden.
    One question remained, a question that Marjorie kept to herself, as she settled down in the guest bedroom of the farmhouse next to a snoring Roger, the full moon hanging low over the eastern fields: for she never could - never would -- have broached it with Jadis, let alone anyone else. And that question was this: had Jadis managed to reach the hospital unscathed, could she have saved her unborn child, or would she have miscarried anyway? But Marjorie's mind was wired for certainties and decision, not hypotheses and counterfactuals, so she soon abandoned the struggle and surrendered to the arms and armies of sleep.
   
    Chapter 8
   
    (June, 2011)
   
    My beloved spake, and said unto me, rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.
    Song of Solomon 2, 10-11
   
    Jadis burst from the kitchen door like a rifle shot, a spinning mass of hair and legs and bags and baggy shirt and denim cut-offs and eager excitement. Jack threw open the passenger door of the open-top jeep and laughed.
    "No hurry, Snow Queen, they can't start the Ball without you!" Jadis threw the bags in the back, scrambled aboard, strapped herself in and said -
    "Let's go!"
    Avi was left in charge of the dig; Primrose promised she'd remember to take Fairbanks for a walk ("if you're too busy, just ask Domingo"); but once down the much patched-and-potholed drive lined with shimmering poplars, and through the twin stone pillars that supported their sagging, never-closed front gate, they were away, a bolt for freedom, if only for a couple of days.
    She couldn't imagine she'd feel such sudden exhilaration: that this must be the way champagne corks feel, when, all strain released, they career carelessly into space. But when she paused to think about it, she hadn't left the village in weeks and had become as taut as over-wound clockwork. Starting a dig was easy: just shift a spadeful of dirt and you're there. But finishing a dig -- that was another matter entirely. Contracts to terminate, forms to fill in, volunteers to send home, equipment to inventory, specimens to catalogue and ship, and endless, endless, reports to write. Not to mention the tedious process of environmental restoration (more forms, more reports), transforming a site that had been dug and heaped and levelled and scraped and picked over for six years back into a place that looked just as it had done when they'd first found it. Turning an omelette back into a raw egg, she thought, might even be marginally simpler.
    Late one evening in the middle of May, she was sitting alone in a pool of light in the darkened kitchen, working through another draft of her monthly accounts report for the GW Foundation. As the rows and columns of the spreadsheet expanded balefully before her tired eyes, she started to wonder if it would ever end; if Jack's much-delayed promise of a new dig site would ever gallop over the horizon and rescue her.
    To make matters worse, Jack had been away for three and a half weeks - a fortnight of surveying, followed by a conference in America and a meeting with the GW Foundation in Cambridge. She accepted his absences as necessary, but even after all this time, she found it hard to lie in a bed that lacked his presence. The first two or three days were always fine, as long as his smell lingered. For a few days after that she tried to compensate by inviting Fairbanks into bed - something that was never allowed when Jack was `At Home'. But that was no help, either. Fairbanks snored (something Jack rarely did), and, what's more, he smelled of dog. She realized that this was hardly his fault, and she couldn't really blame her faithful, uncomplaining companion for the fact that she missed her husband.
    It was just dawning on her, then, that she should, by now, be getting more used to Jack's absences, not less, and wondering why this might be, when she looked up from the spreadsheet swimming before her eyes to see Jack himself, standing by her side. She flung herself upwards at him like a firework and threw her arms tightly around his neck.
    "You need a holiday", he said.
    And so it was that they were now hacking along the country roads towards Aurignac, a small, sleepy village but with a remarkable distinction. For Aurignac can make a fair claim to being the epicentre and fountainhead of human consciousness. If the human race can be said to have started anywhere, it is here.
    Chipped flints had been the apotheosis of craftsmanship for almost three million years, but these had no more been the products of creative imagination than are the filigreed webs of spiders, or the great reefs secreted by a trillion mindless polyps, for all that their mighty works can be seen from space.
    And then, something happened.
    Quite suddenly, around forty thousand years ago, a spark lit up, and human beings emerged from primeval night. It was as if they had previously imagined the cave they inhabited as their entire universe, and had -- quite by accident, perhaps by turning a different corner - discovered the cave mouth, a portal to a brighter, wider world of limitless possibility. The effects of this stunning event were so profound that they had left their mark in the record of human endeavour four hundred centuries later. Could the skyscrapers and cities of the twentieth century ever be such enduring memorials?
    The most dramatic change was the manifestation of consciousness that human beings later came to call `art'. Before, there had been nothing. And yet now there were cave paintings that had brought the animals of the late Ice Age vividly to life; statues made with love and devotion and the worship of the strength of men, and the love of women, and the earliest known images of the human face. There were imprints of hands that said, more eloquently than any written language -- `I am'.
    This breathtaking revolution burst all over Europe within a geological eyeblink, but among the first discoveries had come to light here, at Aurignac itself, which therefore had the honour of giving its name - the Aurignacian - to perhaps the single most important event in the whole of human history: the moment when human beings first awoke from their long sleep. Or so it had been thought. For there were yet older, more enigmatic signs, more mysterious still because they might not have been made by humans at all, and would, therefore, not have been recognizable as art, at least, not to our, human eyes. Jadis' mysterious Remillardian stone-tool culture might have been one of these signs, but with no context, no maker, it was hard to tell.
    If a pilgrimage to Aurignac were not wonder enough for two archaeologists on a spree, the modern village had in Le Cerf Blanc a jewel of a hotel attached to a luxurious and expensive restaurant. A treat for them both. After all, it was her twenty-eighth birthday and she deserved it.
    And, as Jack explained as they drove -- Jadis' hair streaming out behind her like a flag, the laddered avenues of poplars and planes casting rippling zigzag shadows across the car, the fume of poppies and dust and the ripening maize whizzing past them on either side -- they had some planning to do. He'd found a site on the way to Aurignac which his intuition had told him might be something special, something new - something to wake them all up after the ravelled enigma of Saint-Rogatien. He wanted to show this new site to her, before anyone else: to give her a sense of place, in the hope that she'd pick up at least some echo of the vibrations that had sent his internal antennae thrumming, on his first visit, blotting out all else -- that in the seemingly modest little cave of Souris Saint-Michel there might be a door to a new world, if only he had the wit to see it.
    Jadis looked at Jack through the hair blowing across her face, and then at the road ahead of them, and felt, deeply inside her, deeper than words, that this journey represented far more than a short drive on some dusty summer back-road, more than a pleasant interlude in the lives of two busy people. No - this was a tipping point, a phase transition in existence, as it had been for the first Aurignacians. They were riding, like them, into a new life, awakening.
    She felt like the very first cave artist, reed brush poised stiff, dripping and overloaded with wet ochre, in the split nanosecond before it made contact with the cave wall, and, with this tiny pregnant act, had he known it, catapulting the human race into an entirely new realm. She felt as if she were now, finally, ready. Ready to be born --
    A soft pulse, lost in space and time. Sleeping, ageless, without thought, without form, and void, without ... guilt. Until --
    I Am.
    A pulse, one only. The other is lost. Blood, blood, so much blood. Lost in the garden, the Nest. Am I drowning in blood? No, I am not drowning - I am floating.
    I Will Not Die.
    Pain. I have pain. "Darling Jack ..." Whizzing, wheeling, into space. I do so love you, Snow Queen.
    I Will Not Die.
    I love you too. So very much, so much it scares me, it hurts. Darling Jack, hold me, please.
    I WILL NOT DIE.
    I'll always be here for you, Snow Queen. Always.
    I am. I am ...alive. And so, I wake --
    Jack swung off the road and into a back lane between two maize fields. The unsurfaced track dipped towards woods of maple and birch, oak and sweet chestnut, coming to an end in a small, dusty car park on the shores of a lake. The lake was perfectly smooth and still, and the colour of the eggshell blue sky above. Jack pulled the jeep across the car park and on to a narrow sandy beach right by the water's edge. Apart from two picnic tables, their planking warped, bleached and faded, there were no other signs to betray the hand of man. Through a belt of pines on the other side of the lake Jack had discovered a fern-choked track leading up a hill to the small cave he'd become so excited about, the last site ever excavated by Gaston de Bonnard.
    "Souris Saint-Michel," he said. "It's a bit of a mystery. I think we can solve it." At that moment it occurred to Jack that he had been talking to himself, and had been doing so for several minutes. He turned to his right, towards Jadis, but she was quicker, leaning towards him and kissing him lovingly, deeply. Unfastening her seatbelt, she climbed over on top of him, placing her bare thighs on either side of him, her elbows on the seat back on either side of his neck, her hands - smooth, yet with the floury patina of fieldwork - cupping his face, kissing him as if she'd never stop, hungrily as if she felt her lips might never gain purchase, her tongue seeking his with the desperate anxiety of a nestling squab whose mother had been too long away.
    He held her close, his arms sliding up inside the her oversized, faded `Saint-Rogatien-2007' sweatshirt. He found that she was naked underneath: he ran his hands across her back - brushing the pendulous softness of her hanging breasts on his way, finally reaching a comfortable place on top of her shoulders, her neck. There can be no God, he thought, for those who have never felt the skin of a woman, in all its glorious, unutterably luxurious, dry smoothness, its yielding tautness. No wonder that once human beings had come into the light, that their first expressions of reverence for the divine had taken the form of female nudes which, in their exaggerated curves, spoke of contrasts - of yielding, pillowy softness, and inexhaustible generative power. Jadis sighed, pulled herself away, and looked down at him with a strange expression, not so much of love, or adoration, or tenderness, but of inspection: as if she were at a market stall choosing cheese or eggs or apples. And as if she'd seen him, properly, for the very first time.
    "Jadis -"
    She sat up, tossed her hair out of her eyes, and brushed the creases from her sweatshirt.
    "Let's go and look at this cave of yours. It's my birthday!"
    It was as if nothing had happened. But then, he thought, everything had happened: that it really was her birthday, the very day of her birth. To him she looked like something newly hatched, a young jewelled lizard in fresh rainbow colours unsullied by care or age, as if she'd sloughed an ugly, warty skin that she had worn for years, but which had become invisible to him through long and resigned usage. She unwound her long, lean legs and got out of the Jeep, beckoning for him to follow. And so, hand in hand, they walked up to the cave.
    They had both known something of its history, and that of its first discoverer, de Bonnard; that it represented his last, most enigmatic and potentially most exciting find - and yet, frustratingly, incomplete. Domingo had filled in details that they had not known, especially about de Bonnard's little-appreciated years as a desert explorer, and some of what he'd found out in his own researches had made their hair stand on end.
    In an age when so many sites had been wasted, despoiled by sloppy and slapdash trophy hunting, de Bonnard's digs were ahead of their time -- bywords for accuracy, meticulous documentation and uncompromising thoroughess. Souris Saint-Michel seemed like just another expression of this approach: when de Bonnard passed through a site he was like a plague of locusts, so that there was nothing - nothing - left for later excavators to pick over. But Souris Saint-Michel, his swansong, just might have been the exception.
    De Bonnard's long life had indeed been touched by greatness. Born in 1769, the twenty-year-old seminary student had weathered the French revolution by working at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris with the dashing but eccentric zoological genius Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. In later life de Bonnard had briefly served in the parish of Saint-Rogatien, and Domingo suspected that it had been he who had named the village square in Geoffroy's honour.
    Like his mentor, de Bonnard had been part of the scientific expedition that Napoleon abandoned in Egypt after the Battle of the Nile in 1800. As Geoffroy had spent the years of his exile describing Nile crocodiles and conceiving ever crazier castles of theoretical zoology, de Bonnard had become an explorer, venturing into the Sahara further than anyone had yet been, into south-eastern Libya, and possibly even as far as the foothills of the Tibesti massif in northern Chad.
    His exploration journals -- as everything essayed by their writer, models of pitiless accuracy, clarity and deftly wrought detail -- made reference to half-buried monuments of indescribable antiquity, and of a size that made modest tumuli of the Great Pyramids. And were any other author but de Bonnard to have described what he'd called les Prètres du Sable, the tall, pale, living guardians of these cyclopean, all-but-abandoned monuments, and who conversed with him in what his friend Champollion assured him was like nothing he'd ever heard so much as biblical Hebrew -- nobody would have believed him at all. As it was, few did, and after his return to France, these accounts were quietly sidelined, ignored, and then forgotten, except, perhaps, by one or two laudanum-addled English romantics in search of the antique and the picturesque.
    As an almost-retired cleric in 1830 he'd witnessed Geoffroy's great debates with his old adversary Georges Cuvier, father of palaeontology, as yet another revolution closed in. And yet he'd had more than three decades more on this Earth. Souris Saint-Michel had been de Bonnard's last dig. The indefatigable cleric finally died in 1866, not more than a couple of months after the field season ended, but before he'd had a chance to compose his thoughts on it into any final, publishable form. It was believed that this is what he was doing while he was climbing a neighbour's apple tree to retrieve its more inaccessible fruits, when he fell out and broke his neck. He was 97.
    The composer Camille Saint-Saëns (a particular fan of palaeontology) had played the organ at the funeral. The only published report on the site had been a bare summary, cobbled together post mortem by de Bonnard's collaborators. Jack was convinced that there would have been more to say, had not de Bonnard died before the task was complete.
    Jack and Jadis talked of de Bonnard and his last dig as they crossed the beach, walked into the woods on the other side, and wound their way up a muddy, winding track that took them up an increasingly steep slope. With each step, Jadis felt that another part of her old self had fallen away, and that she was climbing out of a dream. Or, more pertinently, that she had finally come out of some extended rehabilitation. And so as with one part of her mind she ran through de Bonnard's jousts with antiquity, a film of her own past was spooling in the background, until, fading in the bright light of a new sun, the harsh colours of pain and poignancy shrivelled away to leave a comforting sepia, as if it had all happened a long time ago, and to someone else entirely.
    She could not remember the accident itself, and thought she never would, except perhaps in dark dreams of nameless, vertiginous horror when she would cry in the night and roll over to lose herself in Jack's chest.
    She had no memory of the first week, mercifully, in which her body, bruised and broken, still had to fight the horrific, raging inflammation caused by the sudden rupture of her uterus and the consequent brutal injection of masses of fetal tissue into her bloodstream. And in which she had nearly died - twice. On the second occasion her heart had stopped for a minute and a half.
    Her memories of the first six months were patchy. She could never be sure, when she'd tried to recall them, whether they were genuine traces of that dark time itself, or only synthetic impressions her mind had created from things that Marjorie had said later, because she had demanded to know: and because Jack had been too beside himself with grief and horror and rage to tell her himself. All she knew she could remember was the pain; in her chest, where she'd broken several ribs, two of which had punctured a lung; and in her right shoulder, which had been wrenched apart and had had to be pinned. She felt it still, sometimes, as a dull ache, especially on damp winter mornings. And most of all in her lower abdomen, where she felt her soul had been torn out and burned in front of her waking eyes.
    What she did not know at the time was how, when she had been in intensive care, Marjorie had moved into the flat and camped out on the sofa, because she felt that Jack had become quite impossible and needed to be looked after. He had tried to be strong, tried to hide his grief and fear, but when he no longer could - when he came into the department with tears constantly running down his face, whether he wanted them or not, and no matter how hard he'd worked to check them -- Roger had asked Marjorie to take him home and get a doctor and a bag full of sedatives.
    Neither did she know what the trauma surgeon had told Marjorie: that given the scale of her injuries, it was a miracle that Jadis had not died. Indeed, had she not been a very young woman in good physical shape, she certainly would have. And Marjorie had kept the obstetrician's news to herself, for a very long time, that although Jadis' burst and shredded uterus would heal itself in time, she would, almost certainly, never be able to sustain another pregnancy.
    It was Marjorie who'd had to break this news to Jadis' mother.
    A year after the accident she was living with Roger and Marjorie while Jack moved their home to France and set up the site at Saint-Rogatien. Although she would always be more grateful than she could possibly express to the MacLennanes, she pined for Jack terribly, to the extent that Marjorie felt that she should just go, to start work on Saint-Rogatien.
    "What that young woman needs is something to do", Marjorie had said, and being a do-er herself, she reasoned that activity would be the best medicine. When Jack met her off the plane at Blagnac, he'd had a nine-month-old golden retriever puppy riding shotgun, its ears too huge for its face, its tongue hanging out in a great, guileless clownish grin.
    "Fairbanks, meet Jadis: Jadis, meet Fairbanks. He'll be your Guardian Angel". She didn't know which of them to hug first.
    And so it had been: therapy, and very effective, but therapy nonetheless, which implies that a state of full health has yet to be achieved. But now she had come through, completed the course. Saint-Rogatien had done its work, and it was now time to live.
    But there was one part of her rehabilitation in which neither Marjorie nor Saint-Rogatien could help, and in which she was initially completely on her own. This deficiency hit her every time she woke in the night, over the first two and a half years, doubled up in agonizing spasms, wracked with cramps; and when she was forced to endure intense, bloody periods at irregular intervals, each followed by bombazine-shrouded processions of loss, guilt and grief for the still-small pulse that she would never feel again.
    As a side-effect, she had completely gone off sex. Or, to be more specific, she liked the idea of sex, the desire she always had for Jack to be inside her all the time in some non-specific way, as a comforting and reassuring presence, but she found that she couldn't face it as a physical reality.
    Pain itself was sufficient deterrent for many months, but even when that had faded, she felt that it would be too uncomfortable, for her, and for Jack: perhaps from fear, from concern for Jack - or perhaps from some horrible sense of guilt, that had she not been so foolish as to have driven to the hospital herself, then none of this would have happened. At its basest, she was concerned that she'd never be able to relax, to lose herself in the act, that she'd just be too dry, so that Jack would never have been able to have entered her at all - and if that happened, she thought, it would only set things back even more. In the meantime, therefore, her body had decreed a complete moratorium, in the hope that, one day, things would just sort themselves out on their own.
    But the very worst thing of all - the thing that most sapped her confidence -- was that she felt she simply could not possibly share these concerns with Jack. If she'd tried, she knew he'd understand, but he had been through so much, had stood by her through all this - that she desperately didn't want him to be hurt - or, shamefully (she felt) that she was unable to expose her own feelings of guilt to wider scrutiny. That Jack seemed to have grasped all this without being told only made her love him more, and this in itself started to solve the problem.
    During the day, her therapy was Saint-Rogatien, its organization, its direction, and the ordering of its people - Avi, Domingo and all the rest. During the night, her therapy was Jack who was, ever so gradually, coaxing her terrified body back into the light. Now that the weight of Saint-Rogatien had been lifted, she felt that she had been healed in another way too, and she could at last start to give something back: back to Jack who, as he'd always said, would be there for her, always.
    The very last slope was the steepest of all. Jack scrambled up to find that it had been the rampart of a wide, flat lawn before the cave mouth. The short, springy sward had presumably grown over the mass of soil and cave sediment that de Bonnard had removed in 1866. Jack reached down to pull Jadis up, too, and they stood, arms around each other, facing into the cave.
    "This is it," said Jack.
    "How much do you know about it?" Jadis asked, as they walked towards it, crossed the threshold and she began to explore. Jack hung back, as if to watch her reaction. The cave was surprisingly small, hardly more than an abri, a rock shelter - no more than fifteen feet across, twelve feet high at its tallest, and twenty feet from its lip to the back wall, now seated in shadow.
    "Not as much as I'd like - I've never had the time to follow it up. One thing just led to another. But after we're done here, I thought we'd go into Aurignac, meet Balthazar, and ..."
    It was then that Jadis stopped dead, in the middle of the cave, looking at the back wall with the same expression of awe and revelation as if she'd been shopping in Leclerc or Lafayette and looked up to find that the checkout clerk was the Archangel Gabriel.
    "Darling Jack, it's .... it's the wall."
    He rushed towards her, scrambling over the slightly rough, bare floor, embracing her from behind and gazing, over her shoulder, at the pinkish-grey tympanum that formed the back wall of the cave. Although it sparkled with the tiny crystals of flowstone, it was otherwise utterly flat and featureless.
    "I know, Snow Queen. When I first saw it ... it..."
    Jack thought back to his own moment of revelation when he'd first climbed to the cave as evening fell, the last rays of the setting Sun striking the back wall directly before he and the cave were plunged into night, and his utter conviction that for all its coating of natural flowstone, of stalactite, the back wall of the cave was not natural -- someone had put it there.
    He explained this now to Jadis, who was now standing right up against the wall, tracing her hands across it, pressing and probing, for all that she might find some hidden mechanism, a catch that would open a door through the wall and into another world.
    "Caves just don't end so abruptly, she muttered, almost to herself, "they just ... don't". She returned to Jack's side so they could both stare at it together.
    In truth, Jack was relieved that Jadis had felt so strongly about the wall. That was one of the reasons he'd brought her here. For when he'd first seen this cave a few weeks earlier, his natural empathy with the landscape had been blown off course so strongly, right off the scale, that he'd almost been knocked to his knees with the shock. Perhaps, he thought, I've been doing this too long, and too alone, without calibration, without consultation, without ... collaboration. But now that Jadis had felt it too, he was convinced, more than ever, that his first impressions had been wholly correct. And if the wall had been put there on purpose, that meant ...
    "...there has to be something behind it, Jack. Has to be. I'll hire in some sounding gear. Magnetometers, ground-penetrating radar, perhaps even shot-blasters and seismographs and..."
    Jack smiled. Jadis had opened her birthday present and was already taking charge of the next field season. Jack pulled her towards him and kissed her, lightly, on the top of her head.
    "But can we have some lunch first?" he said. "I'm starving!" She turned to look up at him and laughed.
    Balthazar Desplaines met them in the bar of Le Cerf Blanc, holding out a kir for each of them and smiling from ear to ear.
    "Welcome Jack, enchanté, Jadis!" he exclaimed: "please, take a seat, and I'll get a menu!" he continued, gesticulating to the barman.
    Desplaines had been an aerospace engineer from Toulouse who had taken a stupendously generous early-retirement package from Aérospatiale, bought a small but exquisite town house in Aurignac, and devoted himself to his hobbies - gastronomy and antiquity. In pursuit of these twin goals he shuttled between the bar at Le Cerf Blanc and Aurignac's small museum of antiquities which, despite the fame of the locality, was usually open only by appointment. When it became apparent that Desplaines spent more time there than the official guardien (who was often woken up at odd hours when Desplaines felt he just had to look at this Gravettian point or that Solutréan flake), the town awarded him the honorary curatorship, gave him the key and said that he could come and go whenever he liked.
    When Jack had first moved to Saint-Rogatien, while Jadis was still convalescing, Balthazar had been one of his first visitors. Jack had met him for the first time, albeit briefly, on his pre-thesis scouting trip, and, like all professional archaeologists, appreciated the value of local knowledge, even if amateur or (as it sometimes was) somewhat eccentric. Indeed, before Jadis had arrived to take on the full-time direction of Le Dig, Jack had found Balthazar a pillar of strength as a local fixer, relying on him to secure the services of everything from builders and plumbers (the house had needed a lot of renovation) to earthmoving contractors and even on one occasion, a helicopter.
    Six years on they were firm friends. Desplaines - long divorced and with no children of his own - clucked over Jack and Jadis as if they were the offspring he'd never had. The first time she'd seen him, in neatly pressed slacks and a striped blazer, Jadis thought he looked like Roger MacLennane would have done had he tried to impersonate Maurice Chevalier, and this prospect always made her smile.
    Lunch was a long affair, and merry, and it occurred to Desplaines that Jadis was looking a lot more cheerful than she had done of late. In fact, he thought, looking proprietorially (as well he might, in his role as Favourite Uncle) at her animated hands, her flowing hair, her bright eyes, that he'd never seen her look lovelier. When he ventured a compliment to this effect, she put her hand on his and told him of Jack's wonderful birthday gift.
    And then, of course, they started talking about the abri of Souris Saint-Michel and the mystery of de Bonnard's last dig, and that they might re-open it, starting again from where the great man had left off. As they talked, Desplaines' expression clouded and became serious, conspiratorial.
    "Do you know what happened to de Bonnard's field notes from Souris? And his collections from the last season?"
    "I always assumed they'd have ended up in Paris, at the Muséum," said Jack. "I wish I'd had the chance to go and see ..."
    "Ah yes, the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle - in memory of his old mentor, Geoffroy. And so they did. Or," he tapped one finger on his long, beaked nose, "... they might."
    "Don't be such a tease, Balthazar!" This from Jadis, laughing. She always laughed around Balthazar, she thought: perhaps it because he always made her feel like something out of Gigi, a little girl to be pampered and spoiled.
    "But not at all, my dear! Of course de Bonnard sent every scrap of paper and every chip of stone back to Paris, as soon as he'd completed any project. He was always such a stickler for accuracy and protocol - never leaving any loose ends - that I always assumed that he'd done the same for anything he'd found at Souris Saint-Michel, as soon as he'd found it. But when Jack told me you were coming today, I thought some more... and it occurred to me that the good Abbé had still been working on Souris Saint-Michel when he died. He'd been based here at Aurignac at the time, and he hadn't finished with the collections yet. So I did a little digging of my own, in my little museum here, and, quelle surprise ..."
    Jack and Jadis looked at Balthazar in amazement.
    "Oui, mes enfants," said Balthazar, enjoying the moment of drama and waving to the waiter for the check: "I have a little birthday present of my own to give you, my dearest Jadis. Shall we go and open it?"
    What Desplaines had to show them made them giddy with amazement, and he was clearly playing it for all it was worth. After all, it is not every day that an amateur antiquarian, even one as knowledgeable and well-connected as he was, found himself in the possession of information that blindsides the world-famous professionals. So, much as he was fond of Jadis and Jack, he relished his moment in the spotlight to the full.
    So, first, he showed them the Abbé de Bonnard's very last field journal. They clustered round Desplaines' desk in his small and cluttered office - Jadis in the chair, Jack and Balthazar leaning over her left and right shoulders -- the huge cloth-bound ledger before them in a pool of yellow light. The language was, of course, no problem to either Jack or Jadis, who'd lived for so long in La France Profonde, but de Bonnard had made it as easy as possible by writing in the most elegantly cadenced French, penned in the clearest copperplate.
    "I wish every archaeologist was as organized as this," said Jadis, admiringly, clearly recognizing in the long-dead cleric a kindred spirit. But what they read in the measured tones of the blessed Abbé had made them gasp. The very last entry of the field-log for 1866 ran like this:
    The excavations of 1866 at the antediluvian rock shelter known as Souris Saint-Michel have been productive, thank the Lord. However, I feel sure that the present eastern wall of the cave
    "That must be the back wall..." said Jack.
    does not represent an autochthonous feature of the present shelter, but is, in all probability, the result of emplacement of travertine subsequent to the cave's formation.
    Jadis was open-mouthed.
    "Darling Jack, you were right - not that I ever doubted you, of course, but..." Flustered, she pushed her increasingly disordered hair away from her face, so she could read more.
    Such secondary emplacement might indeed be inferred from the stratigraphy of the cave floor which dips very strongly towards the east, as if directed beneath any secondarily emplaced stalactitic formation.
    "Amazing," said Jack. "I never noticed any such dipping."
    "That's the Abbé for you," replied Deplaines. "I expect most of the present cave floor is overburden from the 1866 season, which Desplaines replaced and levelled, to protect the strata from disturbance..."
    "... leaving them mothballed and ready for the next season," continued Jack...
    "... which never came." concluded Desplaines. "But how typically tidy of the good Abbé! I expect that when you remove the overlying sediment, you'll see it all just as it was almost a hundred and fifty years ago, not a speck of dust out of place. Knowing de Bonnard, it wouldn't dare!" They would have laughed then - all of them - but were too engrossed in the notes, following them, like hounds, to their end.
    Should the Lord in his infinite grace and mercy preserve me for another season, I shall inquire about the purchase of suitable equipment, in order that the integrity of the eastern wall might be tested. For if the wall is a secondary feature as I now suppose, it follows that further voids might lie behind it. To summarise -- I am convinced that the cave as originally formed was much more extensive than it now appears. Only the Lord knows what secrets lie behind the eastern wall, and, were I not to be chastised by my presumption, I should also care to ponder that selfsame subject.
    The text ended there.
    "He was, indeed, chastised for his presumption, and soon," said Balthazar.
    "How so?" asked Jack -
    "Looking at the date of this memoir, and what we know of his life, he was killed the same day that he wrote this. I imagine he got up from his desk - possibly in this very room where you are sitting, Jadis - went straight to his neighbour's orchard, and fell out of the avenging tree. What you are looking at is the very last thing de Bonnard ever wrote."
    Jack and Jadis looked as Desplaines in astonishment and awe.
    "But there's more. Come with me."
    Desplaines hurried them into a dim side-room filled, from floor to ceiling, with cabinets of wide, flat wooden hardwood drawers - the signature furniture of any museum collection, for all that these looked stained with antiquity and not a little neglect. He turned on a single, dusty bulb that had the effect of making the room appear even darker and dingier. His eyes squinted and scanned the labels until one met with his recognition.
    "Truly, I'm amazed I had never come across this one before. But there's always something more to find, even in a small museum like this. Look!"
    He pulled out a drawer marked `SSM 1866' ("I had no idea what it meant, Jack, until your phone call made me put two and two together"). The drawer squeaked and protested on rusted runners as he pulled it out. Jack and Jadis looked inside. Jadis felt she was being sucked into a vortex, her knees that they might buckle, and she had to gasp for breath. For what she saw, arranged in a muddle of old newspapers and pasteboard boxes, was a collection of twenty-four pristine Remillardian artefacts.
    "There are five more drawers, just like this one," said Desplaines. "About a hundred and fifty pieces in all. And all come from the 1866 season at Souris."
    "... no wonder de Bonnard never described them," said Jack - "like us, he wouldn't have known what to make of them."
    "Balthazar," said Jadis, "did you say a hundred and fifty, and all from that one, tiny cave?"
    "Indeed so, my dear Jadis."
    "But that's incredible", Jadis said, the excitement in her voice rising with each syllable. "You know how much sediment we shifted at Saint-Rogatien over six years. You saw it, Balthazar -- it was vast. And yet in all that time we found ninety-three Remillardian artefacts. Ninety three! And de Bonnard finds half as much again in a small cave in a single season - and nobody knew this?"
    "Apparently not, Jadis. I agree, c'est incroyable, but there it is. And now it's your turn - de Bonnard was taken from this Earth by the Almighty and his neighbour's apple tree. But you're still here, and here, I think, is your destiny. For if you and Jack and the shade of the good de Bonnard are correct, who knows what might lie beyond the eastern wall?"
    Jadis gasped, looked at Desplaines with open-mouthed wonder and joy, and - to Desplaines' lasting delight - flung her arms around him.
    "Oh thank you, Balthazar - what a wonderful, wonderful present!" Jack just laughed and laughed, all tension gone, and when they'd all recovered, managed to say -
    "Balthazar, after that performance, dinner is on us."
    Much later, after another hearty, artery-challenging dose of Gascon cuisine, Jack and Jadis lay in their suite, the only light from a pale yellow streetlamp, some way off, filtered through the blinds. They exchanged not a word - they didn't need to, for each knew that the other was thinking over the shattering revelations of the day. Jack lay on his back, looking up at the ceiling, imagining a Remillardian artefact in each imperfection, each shadowing of the plaster. What further wonders lay beyond that wall? Jadis lay with her left arm flung over Jack, idly stroking his chest, her hair spread over his upper body like a cloak of invisibility, her face shadowed in thought.
    All of a sudden it occurred to Jack that they could all be wrong - Jadis, de Bonnard and himself -- that the cave wall was a natural structure after all, perfectly solid, with nothing further to discover behind it. Jadis caught his thought and replied:
    "If that's the case, Darling Jack, then I'd like another birthday present."
    "Hmm? What did you have in mind?"
    "I'm not sure," she replied: "but I expect I'll think of something." And with that she traced her fingers from her chest, smoothing them over his belly and stroking him, her touch lighter than a breath. He stiffened in a second, and became so painfully hard that he had to draw breath: he felt that were a passing butterfly to flap near his glans, he'd detonate. Then, very softly, she said something he hadn't heard for a very long time - not since they'd been in Cambridge after their first trip to Saint-Rogatien. No - before that - since the last, lovely night at the Sanglier D'Or, with the warm wind through the open window making sails of the curtains, so many painful long aeons ago, and before so many things had happened.
    "I want you, Jack. Very much. Please, now."
    "Jadis - are you...?"
    Her voice suddenly switched from coy gentleness to a mixture of school-marmish asperity and heartbreakingly painful, imperative need:
    "Please, Darling Jack. I need you. I want you inside me. Now. I've missed you so. It's been far too long." He turned over onto his elbows and knees as she moved underneath him, gripping his shoulders and gasping, panting " -- now, Jack. Now!" - and he was inside her, fully inside her, in what seemed to him a hot, eager embrace of liquid velvet. "More, Jack, more - fill me --" she begged, raising her legs and crossing them over his back, almost under his shoulder blades, squeezing him into her.
    As she did this, her whole body started to vibrate, to hum like telephone wires in a gale, each throbbing to a different subharmonic, some just audible, but many well below the range of human hearing. The vibrations built and amplified and, as they did so, reinforced one another. She dug her nails into Jack's shoulders as if afraid that the uncontrollable, random shivering might sweep her away, and with one last, terrible spasm, arched her back towards Jack, driving him inside her to the hilt. Jack exploded inside her like a star shell, and they collapsed like spent fireworks. The entire episode had lasted seventeen seconds.
    They lay, panting, in much the same position as they had before, both soaked in sweat, Jack on his back, his head full of wheeling stars. After a pause, she raised herself on her elbows, looking down at him with that slightly crossed-eyed intensity he loved, and started to kiss him, all over his face, his eyes, his chest; and, in between kisses -
    "thank you, Darling Jack - you gorgeous man -- thank you so much" - and, in between these, her silent tears began to flow until she could no longer control them. Jack enfolded her in his arms and cradled her against him like a small child until the tears had ebbed, and she had fallen asleep.
    It had been sudden, cathartic, he thought, but it had been a strange day, and - for him - a little frightening. But, stroking her hair that had spread over both of them like a silk blanket, he could see that she was, at last -- after all these long, painful years -- fully whole, and at peace.
    Jadis, wrapped in his arms, felt like she'd turned into a fluffy pink cloud sailing off into a vast sky of perfectly clear blue, over a landscape of mountains and summits that had once, inexplicably, filled her with dread. She tried - not very hard - to remember when she'd first fallen in love with Jack, but she could not. She was vaguely aware that there might have been a time before that, but the point was moot, as she'd been a completely different person. In any case, she thought, the only moment worth thinking about was now, the continuous present, in which she was secure in the arms of this man, the moment that had, for her, persisted since the beginning of time, and would endure for all eternity.
   
    Chapter 9
   
    (March 2012)
    It was a twilit grotto of enormous height, stretching away farther than any eye could see; a subterraneous world of limitless mystery and horrible suggestion.
    H. P. Lovecraft -- The Rats in the Walls
   
    It had been six months of frenetic activity into which Jadis had poured her heart and soul. And finally, here they all were - Balthazar, Primrose, Faye, Eric, Mathilde, Domingo, Jack and herself -- standing on what remained of the sward outside the cave at Souris Saint-Michel (or `SSM' as it was now universally known among the field crew). The rock drillers were on station at the back wall, and about to make first contact. Jadis had painted a neat red cross on the precise place where, she thought, the sealing wall was at its thinnest.
    Much had changed. The immediate landscape around the cave mouth now gave the impression of cramped and coiling industry rather than bucolic calm. The car park by the lakeshore was, more often than not, busy with jeeps and trucks. The forest track had been widened and graded, allowing motor vehicles access to the site. Even so, what with the still-lingering snow and ever-present mud, a helicopter had to be used to bring in some of the bulkier items, such as the twenty-six-foot mobile home that Jack and Jadis would use as a site office and temporary quarters if needed.
    The compressor and generator for the rock drill stood close by on the back of a Toyota pickup, together with separate generator to drive a water pump, pulling water up from the lake to lay the dust created by the drilling; and a third generator to bring in power for tools, and for the racks of lights that would be needed to illuminate any voids beyond. A trailer bearing eight large cylindrical tanks of LPG supplied fuel for all of them. Cables and pipes snaked in and out of the cave through a tough polythene membrane that had been fixed over the entire entrance. Balthazar's reaction at the transformation spoke for everyone.
    "If this is a mouse," he said, "it will be a mouse that roars!"
    Not that there had been much doubt that there would be something to find. As soon as the dig at Saint-Rogatien had officially closed in September, Jadis had applied to the GW Foundation for a small exploration grant to sound out the back wall. With the paper she was about to publish in Nature on de Bonnard's lost artefacts ("Remillardian artefacts from the Souris Saint-Michel rock shelter, France", by John A. Corstorphine, Balthazar Y. Desplaines, Domingo G. V. S. Sanchopanza and Jadis L. Markham), a grant was soon forthcoming, and by mid-November she'd established that the inside surface of the other side of the wall was more or less parabolic in shape, the apex - marking the thinnest part of the wall -- about a metre above ground level on the hither side. The signals had been clear. Twenty centimetres beyond the red cross she'd marked, give or take a couple of centimetres, was thin air.
    And not a moment too soon. The day after the first sounding results came in, all work had to be suspended - literally lashed to the decks -- before an Atlantic gale of demonic ferocity. They had been used to the vagaries of the weather, of course, but this storm was the sternest they'd yet faced, and indeed worse than anyone could remember. While still in full force, the wind veered to the north-east, and with it came a blizzard that cut off remoter villages for many days, burying livestock and stranding motorists. After a week of quite infernal battering, in which the dig crew had barricaded themselves inside the shuttered farmhouse, enduring power outages that lasted days at a stretch, the weather suddenly dropped, leaving a panorama of icy blue and white. Jadis remembered the day when they'd finally been brave enough to open the kitchen door, and how Fairbanks had bounded out to frolic in the snow, bulldozing the drifts with his nose and coming up with tiny white pyramids on its end.
    Nobody had seen Horrible at all for the entire duration of the storm, until, a day after it ended, she was seen picking her way across the snowbound yard, shaking each paw in evident disapproval at the unwonted, uncomfortable wet whiteness that had landed without leave on her territory, stirring her from her accustomed winter state of inept repose - and dragging the mangled corpse of something or another along in her jaws, spotting the clear, smooth snow with drops of red-black blood.
    The storm left human casualties in its wake, too, including the priest at Saint-Rogatien, who had been returning to the church after pastoral visits when a loose slate from above, lifted by the gale-force wind, scythed downwards and sliced open his jugular vein. Even this was not the first casualty in the commune: new graves sprang up under the yews on the edge of the cliff as elderly people succumbed to falls, or simply to the severe cold.
    Two weeks before Christmas, things had eased sufficiently for Jack to get away on a much-delayed trip to the GW Foundation in Cambridge, to finalize plans for the upcoming field season. Jadis was overjoyed to hear him, while they were washing up after supper one evening, declare that this would be his last trip away for the foreseeable future.
    "SSM should produce enough to keep us both busy for a while," he'd said. "So I am yours to command, Snow Queen."
    "I can think of ... oooh .... all sorts of things you can do for me," she'd laughed, flicking him smartly on the backside with the wet tea towel, after which they'd chased each other screaming round and round the kitchen table, suds flying, Fairbanks leaping and barking to join in this entertaining new game.
    The wintry landscape inspired Jadis to do something special for Christmas, so with Jack away, she decided, the last Saturday afternoon before Christmas, to go to the bird market at Seissan in search of a goose. Domingo volunteered to come along for the ride. He had been looking pensive: he clearly had something to tell her.
    Jadis was fascinated by the Gascon devotion to poultry, and in particular to its organized dismemberment. The market hall, a large covered square about thirty metres on a side, was crammed with rows and rows of stalls, all devoted to poultry, the position of each row giving a clue to the state of butchery of the products to be found therein. The first row, as you walked in, had live poultry - baskets of chickens, ducks and geese, and cheeping day-old chicks. The second row had much the same poultry, only dead. The third and subsequent rows exhibited birds progressively plucked, beheaded, dressed, spatch-cocked, quartered, filleted and preserved, so that the stalls in the very last row showed only the last stages in the process, the final apotheosis and zenith of Gascon cuisine - jars of pâté, confits and foie gras. Jadis knew that some of it was cruel, but she was always lost in admiration at the industry of it, and relished the smells, noise and bustle of French market life. She realized how much she loved it, and hoped that none of it would ever change.
    Domingo helped her choose a couple of jars of confits de canard, but to their surprise, one could not simply buy a table goose in the bird market, most geese having been bred especially for their livers, rather than for their corpses in general. However, a quick tour of the butchers nearby produced a simply enormous goose - plucked, beheaded and ready to roast -- and Domingo carried the not inconsiderable load to the jeep. As they loaded it into the trunk, she looked at him, noting his expression of distracted, brooding concern. She went up to him, put a hand on his immense barrel chest (clothed, as ever, and incongruously given the weather, in a Hawai'ian shirt of lysergic vividness), and said:
    "Domingo, what is it?"
    "Might I treat you to a coffee?" he replied " - and I shall reveal all."
    They sat a very small table in a sports bar opposite the market (not that any table ever looked large when Domingo sat next to it), their hands warming round steaming grand-crèmes. The bar was full of people and pre-Christmas chatter, the windows fogged with the accumulated heat of the customers and the steam rising from their meals and drinks, but most of the attention seemed focussed on the TV monitor above the bar. This was switched to English Premiership football where the hitherto unassailable might of Brighton and Hove Albion was being pummelled into the dust by underdogs Chelsea. There were many close-ups of the hopeless anguish that creased the handsome face of Albion's player-manager, Sir David Beckham, each time another goal thundered into the Albion net. The author of most of these was Honoré N'Dour, Chelsea's recent star signing from Toulouse - explaining the local interest and the frequent cheers from the bar, interpolated with calls of "vive Honoré!", "à bas Becks!" and -- what made Domingo smile -- "Albion perfide!"
    "What is David wearing?" asked Jadis, incredulously. Domingo peered at the screen.
    "It looks like a designer frock," he said, "and so, very soon, shall I be." He gave Jadis his best expression of unfathomable knowingness, the bright glints in his eyes betraying it, as ever, with the promise of puckish mischief.
    Jadis looked even more incredulous.
    "No, dear Jadis - I'm not going to run away to the Stade de France, nor venture on to the catwalk" - the mental image of Domingo modelling designer dresses made Jadis laugh - "but I do have to go. I have, at last, received my calling. I very much regret that I shall have to leave our happy band, at least as a full-time participant."
    He took Jadis' slim, brown hands in his own vast paws. Her face was a mixture of joy at his news, and sorrow that this wonderful man, who had become almost indispensable, would have to leave for pastures new -- just as they were on the verge of new discoveries.
    "But don't be sad, I won't be too far away. What with the somewhat ... er ... abrupt gathering-in of my brother priest at Saint-Rogatien, and with the season of Advent well advanced, I took my chance. The authorities have agreed that I can take over at Saint-Rogatien straight away. And as for designer frocks, I now have vestments - I had to have a special fitting!" He grinned, but his face turned serious again: "I now have much to prepare for the community, much to organize. I shall, of course, be moving from the farmhouse, as there is a small house that goes with the position. This implies that I won't be able to come to SSM very often, but I shall certainly be there as often as my duties allow - if you'll have me."
    "Oh, Domingo - of course! You'll always be welcome. Always! You're - well, you're part of the family". Jadis would never be able to articulate how Domingo, with his steadfastness, reliability and ready wit, had been part of her own recovery, even had she wanted to tell him.
    As for Domingo, he was happier at this news than he thought he ever could be. Up until his arrival at Saint-Rogatien, his life had been dark and troubled, and yet all inquiries as to his history had been met with nothing more than an enigmatic toothy smile and a change of subject. Nobody was even sure how old he was (he was, in fact, the same age as Jack). But only he knew what he had endured, and only he and the Merciful Father would ever know. As it was, Le Dig had been a haven, a retreat, and Jack and Jadis had become almost as foster parents to him. Jadis would have been surprised to learn (and probably a little embarrassed) that she, especially, had always been in his prayers, and had assumed in his private pantheon a place close to that of the Holy Mother herself. He experienced a sense of unutterable happiness and gratitude that Jack, Jadis and all the crew came to help him celebrate his first Midnight Mass at Saint-Rogatien - and to invite him home for their reveillon.
    And here he was, with the rest of them, wearing his most migraine-inducing shirt, standing bare-armed and open-necked in the drizzle of a raw March morning. A shout came from inside the cave, and a few people made their way out through the slit in the heavy door membrane. The drilling was about to start. The noise was fearful, only slightly dulled by the polythene sheeting. What the men inside must be enduring, Jadis could hardly imagine. Even with face masks and ear defenders, the yammer and thud of a rock drill in a confined space as it made its way through ten centimetres of limestone was incredible. But within five minutes, it was all over. The crew emerged, covered in dust and filthy water, looking for all the world like South African diamond miners emerging from a twelve-hour shift.
    "We're through!" said the foreman - "Come and see!"
    It was mid-afternoon by the time the drill crew had packed up and gone, and the contractors had returned for the water pump. Peace reigned once more. Jadis's first sight of the cave after the breach was a damp, reddish puddle in the cave entrance, just beyond the membrane, the floor climbing up towards the back wall. This looked quite different from the surface that Jadis had first seen, nine months earlier. It was milky white, its normally dirty pinkish-grey colour bleached by the harsh glare from the racks of powerful halogen lamps mounted on stands. The hole in the wall made a sharp contrast with the general whiteness, a ragged circle of blackness about forty centimetres across - the size of a small trapdoor -- and a metre off the ground.
    "Nobody's looked through yet, Jadis," said Primrose: "Director's prerogative!"
    Jadis smiled, took a torch, and peered through the breach. If she was nervous, she hid it well. What lurked behind the wall? A monster from Tartarus that would bite her head off? At first she could not quite work out what her beam illuminated, but it soon became clear that it was a smooth, backward continuation of the cave, narrowing after three or four metres into a tunnel. The tunnel was not the irregular fissure one might have expected in a natural cave, nor even a rough passage, but a more or less symmetrical structure, tubular - with a diameter of two metres of so -- and with a flattened floor. It looked like the kind of tunnel that two people could walk down in comfort, as far from a tortuous, sinuous pothole as might be imagined. As far as she could tell it went directly into the side of the hill for as far as her beam could penetrate.
    In later life she was often called on -- by journalists, especially - to recapture this moment. But she could not. She had been stupefied. With surprise? With anticlimax? She could not tell. Of course, she'd expected something - after all, they knew that the false wall in the cave had been artificial, so the tunnel behind it was likely to have been modified, too, presumably by the same people. Her earnest hope was to find some sign of the makers of the Remillardian artefacts, and with them, the builders of the hill of Saint-Rogatien, and a dozen other, similar structures Jack had since found all over Gascony and Languedoc. But the tunnel, as it was, was bare and featureless.
    All she knew at this point was that the tunnel had to have been bored at least twenty-five thousand years ago, for that was the best date for the emplacement of the flowstone in the wall. No doubts, this time, about the age: tried-and-tested uranium-thorium dates on small samples of rock material drilled from the wall over the past few months had confirmed this beyond all doubt.
    She pulled her head out. Nobody who looked at her then - her face framed by her hair and a bright yellow safety helmet - could read the expression pooled in her dark, thoughtful eyes. Only Jack had seen it before. It was that look of intense, slightly cross-eyed concentration she'd only ever worn for him. He laughed, breaking her reverie, and so they laughed together.
    "Well, we're in," she said. "Let's make a bigger hole tomorrow, so we can explore. Let's meet here at ten a.m.?"
    The team drove away in the farmhouse jeeps: except for Domingo, shoehorned into his brand-new second-hand hippy-trippy pink-and-purple-Paisley Citroën 2CV which, he said, he did not so much as drive, as wear ("think of it as a motorized aloha shirt", he'd said.) Jack and Jadis were to stay on site, in the caravan, at least for the first few nights, just to keep watch. Primrose and Faye were to take on the next shift, next week. After they'd waved the crew down the track, Jack made tea in the tiny kitchenette while, not a metre away in the sitting area, Jadis made a play of reviewing a sheaf of official site documents: permits, contracts and so on. But when Jack found her, sitting quite still in a pool of light, she was clearly miles away. He chose not to disturb her.
    Jadis flung open the flimsy caravan door on a bright, fine morning, the close drizzle of the previous day quite gone, the weather having lifted to reveal bright Spring sunshine and birdsong. By the time the rest of the crew arrived, she and Jack had coffee on the go, and invited them all in to discuss strategy. Domingo had sent his apologies ("duties on a higher plane", he'd explained) but promised to visit the farmhouse later and walk Fairbanks, who, with the rest of the crew increasingly preoccupied with SSM, was coming to enjoy accompanying Father Domingo on his parochial rounds.
    That left Primrose, Faye, Eric and Mathilde, and it suddenly occurred to Jadis that they'd paired up into two couples. She knew about Eric and Mathilde from the way Mathilde flushed as red as a traffic signal every time Eric turned up on the dig. She'd been doing this for ages, except that Eric hadn't seemed to pay any attention. But now, as they walked up to the caravan, they were trying very hard not to hold hands, or even look at each other, and patently not succeeding.
    Primrose and Faye, on the other hand, did nothing to avoid each others' gaze, and couldn't help bursting into fits of giggles any time they made eye contact, as if they were a pair of nine-year-olds sharing secrets about boys at the back of the class. But they'd had more serious moments when, each seemingly lost in her own thoughts, held hands - subconsciously reaching out to the other -- oblivious to anyone who might notice.
    Jadis was almost sure Jack hadn't grasped any of these sexual undercurrents, but she thought it was all rather sweet - and mused on the things people got up to in the farmhouse, or in the spinney, as soon as she and Jack were away. She had no reason to complain, or even mention it, but it did make her feel rather old: responsible, like a schoolteacher, or a parent.
    The crew was as excited as a sports team about to run into the field for the crucial fixture that would win the trophy - or lose it. After coffee and croissants (brought by Faye from the boulangerie in Saint-Rogatien) they strapped on their backpacks, which they'd filled with anything they felt they might need, for all that none of them knew what they might encounter on this, their first scouting trip. Mathilde had raided the farmhouse medical kit, while Faye - a keen mountaineer and sometime spelunker -- had brought along several coils of nylon rope, some of which was already festooned with the assorted bric-a-brac of climbing gear that none of the rest could name. All had geological hammers, digital cameras, spare battery packs, waterproofs, sweaters, gloves, a small amount of food and water, and each bore a yellow miner's helmet adorned with a large headlamp.
    Once inside the cave - the atmosphere foggy with adrenaline and expectation -- it had taken only a few blows from Jack's rock hammer to make the hole left by the rock drill big enough for them to crawl through, one by one, without extravagant discomfort. Once on the other side - a drop of almost two metres, the level on the hither side of the cave having been raised by the backfill from de Bonnard's last dig -- they stood in a small huddle, switching on their headlamps so that they became a small, nervous cloud of nodding fireflies in the gloom.
    It was decided that Faye, who'd had most experience of underground exploration, would be the team leader for the day.
    "Everyone stick together," she'd said. "There are six of us. If you can't count another five lamps at any time, just stay put, and holler!"
    And so they started, carefully pacing along the tunnel, two by two, like Noah's animals had in their own epic journey into the unknown, long ago - Faye and Primrose, Jack and Jadis, with Eric and Mathilde bringing up the rear.
    The solemnity of the occasion had blanketed their excited chatter into silence. To Jadis it had seemed almost sacred, given the anticipation, and despite her own indifference to religion she had longed for Domingo to have been there, offering some kind of blessing: permission, almost, to go forth. As they tramped along the passage - smooth, and, the further they got from the entrance, increasingly dry and dust-free - Jadis became conscious of its airlessness. There was air, but it was static, stale, like the air trapped inside a rarely-used museum storeroom. It was also very cold, and she was glad of her synthetic fleece and gloves. There was nothing to see apart from the sweeping beams of their own headlights, illuminating near-featureless stretches of wall - white with cool, glistening limestone, but not quite smooth, like the whitewashed roughcast walls of a seaside cottage. The passage seemed to continue without limit in a dead straight line, although after a kilometre or so it began to dip downwards, at first very gently and gradually, but after another few hundred metres it became much steeper, the floor puckering into treacherous ruts and ridges, which, after they had clambered over a few of them, they began to think of as very worn steps - steps for giants.
    By the time they had reached the bottom of the staircase and the passage had resumed its smooth, gently downward grade, they were cold and exhausted, as if they'd just scrambled down a frozen waterfall. Faye called them all into a huddle, and they decided to stop for a snack, and to take stock.
    Faye looked at her wrist logger.
    "We've been down for forty minutes, and have covered three kilometres in a direct line from the cave mouth." Expressions of shock and disbelief. "I know, I know, seems like we've been down here forever!"
    "I wonder how much longer we'll go before ... before..." This from Eric. They sat, eating chocolate and dried apricots, the sound of self-conscious champing and chewing punctuating the atmosphere of silence and thought. They hadn't brought any sleeping gear - this was strictly a day trip, reconnaissance on-the-fly, not a full-scale hike. But when would they decide to turn back? Again, what were they expecting to find? The cave, this long passage, was entirely unlike anything that anyone had seen before, for all that it had (so far) turned up very few surprises.
    "Okay," continued Faye. It's now a quarter after eleven. I vote that we carry on until - say - one o'clock, and after that, we turn back - whatever happens. Jadis?"
    "Agreed," Jadis nodded. It was hard holding a council when you couldn't see anyone else's eyes, all lost in the impenetrable shadows cast by the brims beneath their headlights.
    "How much have we dropped?" asked Jack. Faye looked again at her logger.
    "About four hundred meters from the cave mouth. Of course, most of that was in the staircase behind us. Just a thought - we ought to leave a little extra time for climbing back. Me and Primrose might have to climb up first and lay some guide ropes. That should put our start-back time to, oh, let's say twelve-thirty, tops. Agreed?"
    A general chorus of nods, after which they packed up their litter, got stiffly to their feet, and plodded on.
    After another few hundred meters the passage began to narrow, imperceptibly at first, but it wasn't long before they found they were marching single file. This allowed Jadis to take a closer look at the walls, which now, more than ever, looked as if they had been artificially chiselled and shaped. The ceiling, rather than being a simple rough arch between two ill-defined walls, now looked as if it had been squared off, making the walls on either side distinct from the ceiling itself, and giving the passage more of a box-section profile.
    It was this, more than anything else, that forced Jadis to realize the implications of what they had found. What with all the years at Le Dig, and Jack's researches before that, she had become inured to antiquity, taking it for granted. The working currency of all who venture into the depths before history, where the skein of written record breaks and fades altogether, is time - measured in thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years, yet few stop to consider what these intervals of time really mean in terms of the scale of human lives. The world at large had been stunned by the implications of Le Dig: that there was a civilization in Europe that was at its height perhaps half a million years ago. Jadis, at the epicentre of discovery, was quite used to it, or so she thought, swapping talk of tens or hundreds of millennia with other professionals as casually - or even more so, in fact - as if she'd been discussing the price of fish with a market stallholder. In any case, the bulk of her life was less scientific than administrative, filled with the minutiae and frustrations of directing the dig on a day to day basis.
    When Jadis did stop to think about the meaning of it all, and to chat about it with Jack - and, lately, Domingo -- she felt nothing more than a sense of frustration. The megalith at Saint-Rogatien was really only a giant midden, a huge pile of backfill. It had been an artificial structure, for sure, but it had revealed, ultimately, as much about its makers as a well-rotted garden compost heap might of the dreams and desires of the gardener that made it. The sensational artefacts she'd described were teasing, only deepening the mystery.
    But when she looked up, at the neatly chiselled cornicing above, it struck her quite suddenly that here was a sign of a maker and his mark, creating a recognizable structure for a purpose. The purpose of the megalith at Saint-Rogatien was unknowable - of the artefacts she'd discovered and described, perhaps hardly less. And yet here in this structure, these tunnel walls, was a sign, speaking through ages too great to imagine, of intelligence, and what's more, intelligence that could be interpreted. The sign said `follow me!' - but to what end, she could not guess.
    Lost in reverie, and looking upward more than forward, she noticed that although the passage remained the same width, the ceiling was getting higher and higher until it was entirely lost, the beam of her headlight disappearing into shadow. This was more than a little disorienting, and she felt herself becoming a little light-headed. She began to wonder whether she might soon have to make way for a white rabbit hurrying past, or come across a glass table bearing a small bottle labelled `Drink Me'. At that moment she realized that she was at the back of the file, and that the rest of the team had moved on ahead. Snapping back to reality, she was just about to raise her pace when she heard, far ahead, a male voice - she thought it must have been Eric -- shout "Whoa!"
    She scrambled forwards, afraid of what she might encounter, and as she did so the passage widened suddenly, the walls suddenly falling away on either side, running into a platform whose width could not be guessed, its edges lost in darkness. Ahead of her were five figures, heads haloed by their lights, standing at what appeared to be the brink of a precipice, the edge of which stretched on either side further than she could see. She joined them - noticing that the air seemed cooler and less stale -- and looked into the void beyond.
    What she saw made her feel small, immeasurably and inconceivably small, a mote, a mustard seed, a cobweb, prey to the fortunes of the whims and the winds of the world. She had sufficient presence of mind to notice that the person standing next to her was Jack. She clasped his hand, like a small child suddenly confronted by a vision of vastness beyond experience or imagining. Hers was met by a grasp that was firm, and yet trembling. His voice was small, nervous, and seemed to come from an infinite distance as he said, without turning towards her,
    "Oh, Snow Queen..."
    The view was, initially, an immeasurable and utterly black void. If there were an end to it, or a bottom to the cliff on whose edge they now perched, their headlights were far to weak to illuminate them. But as the beams swayed to and fro, they caught flashes, here and there, of what looked like structures in the void - an edge, a corner, but no more than hints. It was then that Mathilde spoke.
    "Has anybody noticed how the air in here is fresher than in the tunnel?"
    Several agreed. Jadis noticed that despite the volume in which they found themselves, Mathilde's voice seemed close, intimate - the space was so enormous that even noise died before reaching any surface whence it might be reflected. There were no echoes.
    "Yes, there could even be a very slight ... breeze", added Eric. They all stretched upwards, noses in the air, and had anyone been able to see them, they would have looked like nothing so much as a row of meerkats which, having risen from their burrow, stand up to sniff the air. "But where... what...?"
    "I think that there must be ventilation shafts in the roof of the cave, far above, leading to the surface," said Mathilde. "And if there is air, there might also be light. Very faint, it's true, but who knows? Perhaps enough to see more than we can with these headlights - and with our cameras, we can always enhance any images we get, even if shot in complete darkness."
    "Hell, yeah," said Faye. "We can use ultra-long exposures. Not as if we're trying to shoot anything that's moving..."
    "Don't!" said Primrose, giggling nervously - "This place is spooky enough as it is!"
    Everyone agreed that it was a good idea, and they all took out their cameras. It was harder, however, to persuade everyone to turn out their headlights. They agreed to do it in sequence, along the line - and Jadis was last. She did not show it, but felt the first waves of that species of terror, the primal fear of the dark - that petrifies small children whose knowledge of the world extends hardly further than their mother's breast, and certainly no further than the front door.
    The lights went off along the line - flash, flash, Eric, Mathilde - she saw their afterimages as red glows, dying - flash, flash, there go Faye and Primrose, but as Jack extinguished his light - flash -- he held her right hand. She would not be alone in the dark. And so, with one last flash, she twisted the knurled rubber ring round the outside of her headlamp bulb and they were all plunged into sickening, stupefying, heart-stopping blackness.
    It was like nothing she had ever experienced. As if she'd been switched off like a bulb herself, she instantly lost all sense of space and time. For what most people call darkness barely deserves the name. The darkness of cities is no darker than a dim, orange glow of street lights far away. Even in isolated, lightless country lanes, there is still some glow from the sky, the stars and the moon. Human beings have grown up with light, and so, to them, darkness is by its very nature inhuman. Only cavers ever experience darkness in its totality, the darkness that existed before humanity, and which was one of the very first casualties of his evolution. And the darkness that now enveloped Jadis was complete, darker even than death that still has the memory of light: as dark as inexistence, a state that memory and light and time and human consciousness have yet to penetrate. Without Jack's fingers as a lifeline to reality, she wondered if she'd ever be able to come back, to climb out of that bottomless pit of fear.
    And yet, as she forced her eyes to stay open (assuming that they were open), and holding on to Jack's fingers, she began to experience a new sensation. Mathilde had been right: her eyes were slowly accommodating to the darkness, even here, and as she looked out into the void, she became aware of a panorama slowly, very slowly, inching into view. At first she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her, so deprived of light that they had started to create their own pictures to compensate. And yet the image firmed and grew.
    And it was this. Hardly brighter than pitch, and cast in shades of charcoal grey, what she saw before her feet was a city.
    The crew stood on a height, perhaps five hundred meters above the western rim of a bowl that stretched ahead, and to the right and left, as far as their straining eyes could see. The bowl was absolutely full of jumbled structures - polyhedra, cubes, cylinders, indeed buildings (they had to be buildings) of all shapes and many different sizes. Although it was very difficult to get any sense of scale, many of the buildings were very large indeed, and would have dwarfed anything ever created by Man. Straight ahead of them, and five kilometres away (as they later discovered) stood a pyramid, towering over all, whose apex must have stood as high as they were now.
    This was a city that had lived and died when the Aurignacians were painting their first pictures, carving their own Venuses, and imagining themselves the victors in a strange, wonderful and conveniently unpopulated new land, in which tales of giants and their works were fit only for old women to burble to infants. Well, how wrong they were, thought Jack - and how foolish we were ever to have believed them. Jadis wondered what Domingo would have made of it. She had a strange feeling that he would not have been at all surprised.
   
    Chapter 10
   
    (December 2012)
   
    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.
    Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ozymandias
   
   
    In the lee of the erg the winds slowed to an eddying lull just enough for their words to be heard, were anyone there to hear them. A small group of tall figures gathered round another who, though prostrate on the ground and virtually inaudible, appeared to be leading what passed for the chant:
    Jjeshmaii Zraal!
    Jjeshmaii Zraal! came the response, a dismal blizzard of guttering croaks as of the last autumn leaves cracking in the grate.
    Ajjhnaai ajjhnaai'hnuu! Ajjhnaii Hjajhaad!
    The prostrate figure, once kneeling, now fell full flat on its face, a flutter of dirty robes not quite disguising the extreme etiolation of its form. Two other figures stepped in, and, stooping low like a pair of ungainly cranes, helped the central figure to its feet. Surprisingly, it towered a head above all the others - so high, that even in the shadow cast by the colossal ruined sphinx behind them, the final rays of the setting sun crowned its head with fire, illuminating its leonine mane. As if refreshed, the figure took the ram's horn proffered by another and blew three mighty blasts. Blasts that would once have caused walls to totter and empires crumble. But the last such walls had been ground to dust thousands of years before, and these wanderers were the last of their kind - the raucous notes on the zjhjfaar seemed as futile as the croaks of vultures over long-abandoned skeletons.
    Life had not always been so desperate.
    Long ago, when the ancestors of these people came to this region, it was a promised land, a land flowing with milk and honey. Or, at least, waving with endless prairies of windblown grass for grazing, and rippling with immense lakes full of fish. Ostriches, elephants, giraffe and other animals, nameless by virtue of their later complete extinction, were chased by cheetahs and lions in abundance seemingly without limit. The people looked at this immensity of plenty, and settled down from wanderings soon much magnified in myth. A myth conflated by the legendary arrival of a great prophet bearing on two tablets of stone what they came to call the Jhaad Hjesa, the One-to-Ten. And because of this, in time, they came to call themselves Jajda h'Adami - `The Men of Judah', a proud heritage, worn away by time and desiccating wind to the terser and less pronounceable Jajkhadi.
    Many hundreds of years passed. The Men of Judah replaced their grass and wattle huts with more imposing structures of mud-brick. Their villages became towns and then cities, each guarded by demon-headed sphinxes, avatars of a God whose depiction in human form was forbidden. The greatest city, famed in legend, was the blessed City on the Heights, with its grand courts, its splendid temples and palaces faced with ivory, silver and pure gold, its impenetrable walls, its fountains, and towers that stretched to heaven. The people changed, too. After further uncountable years, they became tall, Kings among Men, taller than the other Men who appeared at the margins of a vast empire - themselves written in the margins of a dozen cultures. The Great Old Ones. The Ancestors. The Atlanteans. The Men like Gods. The Nephilim.
    But with cities came war, and slaves, and tribute, and flames, and destruction. And with cities came the dwindling of the ostriches, elephants, giraffe and the other large, nameless animals. They became less common, and then rare, and eventually the day came when even the eldest sage could not recall having seen such beasts at all, not even as a small child - images for such elders being as bright as gems, even when the fever and fret of later years had dulled the immediacy of more pressing concerns.
    And with cities came the taming of the great grasslands, the trammelling of the vast lakes to feed fields of wheat and barley, sorghum and millet, that stretched from sky, to land, to sky. Nobody could quite recall the precise year when the smallest of the great lakes dried out completely (smallness being a relative thing - this lake was as large as the glacial wilderness which would, one day, be called Scotland). And nobody could recall the precise year when that lake failed to be completely replenished by the rains of winter. And as more time passed, nobody could recall the year when the rains of winter failed to arrive, and turned instead to storms of choking dust.
    The toll of years built like the grains of sand left to accumulate to windward of the cities as they died, one by one, toppling the towers and burying the majestic walls as if they had never been, but leaving a few monuments exposed, a few isolated pillars, as enigmatic remembrances of glories past. The Men of Judah remained tall, but gaunt and weathered as they dwindled to a ragged tribe of herdsmen, managing to hang on in remote canyons of the Tibesti Massif - mountains echoing their once-great cities standing amid the fertile plains, now sere and barren rock. And yet in caves bored within the rock they maintained their ancient religion, itself wearing away at the corners but keeping its core essentially unchanged, the Way of the Jhaad Hjesa.
    After dozens of centuries, the Way had become nostalgic. The shaman would talk of a blessed future when the Jajkhadi would regain what they had lost, when they would return to their blessed City on the Heights. Every year, to mark the fall of what passed for the first droplets of spring, they prayed for the imminence of this last journey -- next year, maybe.
    And one day, just in time, when almost all they had ever had was lost -- that day dawned.
    The Elders of the very last settlement of the Jajkhadi convened in the lee of a Sphinx believed by the more credulous to represent the artistic peak of their ancestors, to discuss the latest in a long litany of bad news. Even though adapted to aridity to a degree not seen elsewhere, the tribe had to move on. The other tribes in the lands round about could not weather the Tibesti like the Jajkhadi could through long usage, but these others did have a new and deadlier advantage: automatic weapons. The Jajkhadi would have to move on before they were flushed out and slaughtered. That they had to move on no-one could doubt - but where, then, could they move? Their enemies surrounded them on all sides. Straitened in their last redoubt, they had recourse only to prayer, and to fast-vanishing hope. Hope that the great prophet of the One-to-Ten would appear from the skies on a flaming chariot as was foretold, and smite their enemies. Hope sustained by the comfort of ritual. But the tallest Elder had blown his last: the shrill notes of the zjhjfaar resounded among the rocks and died away.
    At last, the silence of the desert, eternal and without reproach. The Elders remained still, poised, waiting for deliverance, or for the end. After some minutes came the sound not of fiery chariots but of bullets, the answers to the horn-blasts. Hope died. Careering up a slope and over the jagged horizon came a technical - a jeep with a machine gun mounted on the back - driven crazily by bandits in green and tan fatigues. The bandits, hanging over the sides of the technical, whooped in devilment, firing their guns into the arcing sky. These Tibestian tribesmen would be easy prey. And what's more, they were Jews, so the Government far away - mired in its own concerns -- would turn a blind eye, even if it ever got to hear at all of the coming mayhem, the murders, the rapes, the impaling of children, the decapitations - the everyday story of pillage far from civilization.
    Even from a distance of a thousand yards the keen eyes of the Jajkhadi could see the bandits' bandoliers rise, sway and flop around their ragged bodies, the menacing gleams of white teeth in black faces, the glimmer of machetes and the pitted barrels of machine guns. The Elders were all that separated the coming onslaught from their last village, their skeletal flap-breasted women, their starving, bloated children. The Elders stood fast and began again to chant as one -- Jjeshmaii Zraal! They closed their eyes, waiting for the end: but were surprised by a second noise, a deeper, constant roar imposed on the staccato stutter and crazily slipping clutch of the technical.
    The Elders opened their eyes once again and faced their foes, only to see, rising behind the jeep, the promised deliverance. Not chariots of fire, but something else equally wonderful for all that it lay beyond their experience - a flotilla of ten, vast Chinook helicopters. The first helicopter let rip its judgement - a pair of rockets scythed away from the fuselage and smacked into the technical, which vanished in a dull rumble and a ball of grey smoke. Shards of metal and scraps of human flesh spattered the Elders standing at the feet of the sphinx. A head, removed by the blast, rolled and stopped by the sandaled feet of the eldest Elder, looking up at him as if in surprise. This is not how things were meant to turn out, it seemed to say. This is not how the story ends. It had not escaped the notice of the eldest Elder that the number of the sky chariots was ten - the same number as the Laws of the Prophet. And this, he reasoned, had to be a Good Thing.
    One of the Chinooks picked its way over the wreck and landed delicately a few yards away, close enough to the astonished watchers - but too far for them to be discommoded by the down-draught. The breeze was, however, sufficient to lift and make flags of their ragged robes, marking their otherwise silent stillness all the more starkly. The other nine sky-chariots roared overhead, looking for the village.
    Two people in fatigues (much like the bandits', but more recently cleaned and pressed) alighted and ambled towards the Elders, chatting with each other as if this was an afternoon stroll, as if the Elders were not there at all, or if they had been, they were an arrangement of statues by Giacometti. Ho hum, thought the eldest Elder. Not quite how he had imagined it, but the Prophet had come, nonetheless, with chariots in the sky, with fire to smite their enemies, who now lay thoroughly smitten. How could one possibly complain?
    As the two newcomers came closer, it became clear to the ragged watchers that they were as stocky and dark as the Elders were tall and pale. One, a woman, with very long, black hair, cleared her throat, and looked to her brawny male companion and said:
    "Hey, Avi, help me out here, big boy. Much as I hate to admit it, I never know what to say on such occasions".
    "You want I should do this?" Avi smiled his best ladies'-man smirk - always a danger with this particular ball-breaker, but, hey, nothing ventured.
    Commander Rivka Mizrahi of the Israel Defence Forces (Covert Aliyot Operations) narrowed her coal-black eyes.
    "Of course - you're the Digger," she spat. "You'll know what to say to ... to ... Lost Tribes. That's an order, soldier!"
    Avi Malkeinu wondered (not for the first time) whether his commanding officer would be as fierce in the sack as she was out of it, but decided (wisely) to put that delicious thought aside for later. So he simply smiled at her, gave a casual mock-salute and moseyed towards to the Elders, who had remained completely silent and still, except for their shreds of robes swaying in the light breeze. Avi stopped, wondering which one of these nearly-dead skeletons he should address first. Nobody had said anything at all about this before the mission - comparative anthropology, cultural sensitivities, even future shock. The terms of reference for Operation Elisha had indeed occupied a lengthy pamphlet written in Old High Military Jargonic, but the semantic content could have been boiled down to read: "go there, pick `em up, get the hell out."
    This directness, this simplicity -- this matter-of-factness of things -- would not normally have worried Avi in the slightest. He was just a regular guy, after all. But when he'd returned to his homeland, just after Le Dig had wound up, his luggage contained more than clothes and after-shave. There were memories, too, especially of that dinner, when he'd had those two fantastic girls, Faye and Primrose, practically eating out of his hand. And when Jack had told them the tale of Gaston de Bonnard, and when Domingo had bowled them all over with his amazing tales of de Bonnard's desert journeys in which he'd met the les Prètres du Sable, but nobody had believed him, especially when he'd said they spoke ancient Ivrit (Avi had perked up at that).
    But some legends turn out to be as plainly reported as de Bonnard intended. The Abbé's engravings of these creatures looked exactly like these ragged sticks standing motionless before him, and lived in the same places. In fact, it was Avi who'd casually mentioned the legend to a fellow soldier-archaeologist who - to Avi's consternation - had taken it all extremely seriously, and so Operation Elisha had got started in the first place.
    Avi now stood equidistant between Rivka and the Elders. He looked back at Rivka, who waved him on, crossly. It was all very well for Rivka to say that she never had suitable words for such things, after all, she was the kind of girl who let her uzi do the talking (and what a girl was that!) - but she'd never thought to ask Avi if he could do any better. And all Avi knew were chat-up lines. My God! At times like this you really needed to have rehearsed your Neil Armstrong moment, not some pick-up line that might work in Dizengoff Street, or, then again, might not. And if women were challenging and unpredictable creatures, what about these poker-faced statues - these aliens? But there was no more time to lose. He could feel Rivka's eyes drilling holes in the back of his skull, so he stepped forwards and his best Voice-Of-Israel Hebrew, looked up (up!) at the eldest Elder and said:
    "Boker tov, chevrai. Ever hear about `Next Year in Jerusalem?'"
    He could hear Rivka trying not to laugh - an effort that failed catastrophically a moment later, for what happened next took their breath away. As soon as he had uttered, all the Elders had, as one, prostrated themselves before Avi's feet, mumbling what he swore was a prayer in Ivrit, for all that it sounded so odd and distorted. Jjeshmaii Zraal, these weird, stretched Bedouin seemed to say -
    Shema Israel, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad -- Hear, O Israel, the Lord is your God, the Lord is One.
    No doubt about it. They had come to the right place. Surrounded by quivering white masses and unable to move his feet without inadvertently kicking one of the supplicants in the face, Avi turned on his hips to throw Rivka a shape of perplexity, miming - like, what the fuck do I do now? But Rivka's expression, a mixture of ferocity, wonder, tenderness and mirth, sliced through Avi's heart.
    He'd seen that face only once before, when Jadis and Jack had returned from Aurignac, after their first scouting trip to Souris Saint-Michel. It was the unfathomable expression in Jadis' eyes whenever she'd looked at Jack. Lucky old Jack - but whew! The intensity of it! He wondered what Jadis would look like in battle-dress and toting a machine gun. No, don't even go there, at least, not in working hours. Jadis was a honey, no doubt about it, but you never crossed her on Le Dig. No way! For sure, she and Rivka might be sisters, and at that thought, he started to laugh, and found himself saying the standard response:
    Baruch Shem K'vod Malchuto L'Olam Va'ed -- His glorious majesty be praised for ever.
    At which utterance the Elders rose as one and marched, calmly, and without once looking at either Avi or Rivka, to the waiting helicopter.
    Avi had much to think about on the long flight home. Strapped onto a bench seat on one side of the helicopter, looking across at the Tibestian tribesmen webbed into the other side - unspeaking, unsmiling and, remarkably, uncomplaining - his mind was cast back to the long, long conversations he'd had at Le Dig with Domingo, ever needling at him about religion. Religion! he thought, well, I need this like a hole in the head. Religion, he'd said to Domingo, has caused far too much trouble already. True enough, said Domingo, but that's because people really care about it. More than sex, more than life or death. And why? Avi had been unable to answer. Because, said Domingo, it's what marks us out as human beings. It stems from the same impulse as love - and is therefore as unreasoning, as passionate. It sustains us, it defines us. Without religion, said Domingo - and without the love of God -- we are no more than beasts.
    But humanity? He looked across at the Tibestian Prètres du Sable -- Sand-Priests. They were Jews, of a sort, and their religion had sustained them through many ages of adversity, but were they even human? Okay, he admitted to himself, ruefully, most human beings thought of Jews, most of the time, as a race apart, perhaps not even proper humans, either. But more seriously, he continued, thinking mostly about the conversations he'd had with Domingo, perhaps religion transcended and even antedated humanity. Perhaps - now, there's a thought -- humanity evolved because of religion. And as Domingo had said - don't forget love. It was part of his own Catholicism, it was true, and (he said) he wouldn't want to push it too much, but as far as he was concerned, he'd said - and the big man's eyes seemed to mist over, looking inward -- love and faith are inseparable.
    Avi was not sure whether his long conversations with Domingo had had any single, marked effect. For sure, he hadn't dropped everything and become a yeshiva bocher like his grandfather, but it had made him reassess his own place in the great scheme of things.
    His grandfather had started as a market trader in Tashkent, in central Asia, and after many long years had made it to the status of middleman in the Chinese textile import-export trade. As such he was simply a facet of a tradition that had endured for millennia, part of the great Silk Road, the mercantile artery that had traversed Eurasia since before the dawn of history. And where there was trade, there had always been Jews. But the resurgence of Islam in central Asia had made things hard for the Jews, who had, first in ones and twos, then whole families, made their way to Israel. Perhaps none too soon, thought Avi - Tashkent was now just one part of the seemingly unstoppable Khalifa that would, he thought, soon stretch from Indonesia to the Atlantic Ocean. The reason why the Chinooks had been able to fly without hindrance across the Sahara was because the secular governments of Egypt, Libya and Chad were deeply distracted, fighting their own, hopeless wars against the resurgent Legions of the Prophet.
    Avi's grandparents settled in Israel, traded Uzbek for Hebrew and started again, and lived in a tiny flat in a scruffy part of Tel Aviv, a part of town where sand poked through the cracks in the baking, neglected roads and sidewalks, creating tiny dunes. By dint of working hard - and, as his grandfather had emphasized, praying hard - they managed to make a modest living and raise a family, which, in time, dispersed. Avi's own parents, raised in the new country and unencumbered by the traditions of the old, were uncomfortable about religion, and he dimly remembered the arguments between his father and grandparents when they visited the flat for Shabbat or Pesach.
    The grandparents had never approved of Avi's mother, an outspoken, blonde American feminist Avi's father had met while studying at the Technion in Haifa. She may say she's Jewish, they said, but does she keep a kosher home? Shabbat? festivals? No! This presumptious shiksa wants to work, be an engineer, and not be a good Jewish wife and mother, staying home and keeping kashrut. We managed it, said the grandfather, so why can't you? By this stage Avi's grandfather was spending less and less time working, and more and more at a small synagogue with other Uzbek Jewish emigrés, thinking about old times while studying Talmud -- and returning home, head full of religious zeal and pockets empty. Avi was far too small to remember the arguments, the recriminations and the final break, when his parents abandoned religion altogether, although he did remember moving to the Marxist kibbutz within sight of Mount Carmel - a mountain continually riding high on the horizon of his thoughts. It was at this kibbutz where he'd grown up, where he'd had lots of fun with the other kids, and where God was only ever mentioned as a profanity.
    But now ... well, Army life is mostly a lot of boring hanging around, during which his mind became less and less occupied with girls, and more towards turning over everything Domingo had said to him, about religion, and his heritage as a Jew, and, very slowly, the long-buried thoughts of Friday nights at his grandparents' flat came back. The rich, spicy smells of chicken and lamb, rice and couscous as his smiling-eyed grandfather had opened the door, lifting his tiny, squealing grandson in his wiry, brown arms ("shabbat shalom, little Avi!) The solemnity of the moment when his grandmother lit the Friday-night candles, how she filled the wine goblets and broke the freshly-baked chollah; how - as a four-year-old, he was always asked to say the age-old blessings (he winced inwardly at the thought, but it was a sensation mixed with the pleasure of nostalgia); and how lavishly his grandparents praised his lisping, uncertain efforts. And how this - this holiness - blended with the cosy family atmosphere.
    His later experience backfilled these memories, enriching them with the thought that Domingo had been absolutely right: this is how religion must have started, with a human family gathered round a fire in some cave-mouth to thank God (or whatever) for bringing them safely together. Families, thought Avi, were more than a way for a species to propagate - they were a uniquely human invention, bound by family and gratitude for divine providence. Fuck me, he thought, I'm getting old! I'll be joining Likud next! But he reflected on his own expression of religion, his search for God, as it were, which had become directed into the search for the very beginnings of human culture. Which, he supposed, was how he'd come into Jack's orbit, and then Jadis's.
    The chatter of the soldiers and airmen, the thrum and throb and chop of the big helicopter's twin engines continued, but Avi was oblivious, thinking once again of Jadis, his doctorate supervisor, and a woman who'd gone so much further in his estimation than a barrack-room pin-up which - for all her commanding zeal, Rivka Mizrahi would only ever be, really. Okay, okay, he thought, backtracking -- what a sap he was! - in mitigation, he'd met Jadis for the first time when he was at a very impressionable age, having only just arrived in the maddening and mysterious maelstrom of Cambridge. And so, of course, she'd made an impression.
    But even afterwards, when he'd go to know her well -- when he'd been her pupil, and when they'd worked so hard together at Saint-Rogatien, and had stayed late into the night poring over the findings, systematizing them - she seemed to exemplify for him the very essence of what fascinated him about women. It was the contrasts: between softness and steel, between acquiescence and determination, between a girly skittishness that only ever lived for the moment, and depths of humanity and experience winnowed by a drama that seemed to go back to the beginning of time, and in which poor hapless men had arrived relatively late, to be dazed and startled by what they found.
    Jadis had been playing on his mind more than usual (and no, you schmuck, not because Rivka looked like her) but because of the reports from SMM she'd been sending by emails so well encrypted that they'd briefly baffled the IDF censor (something he was very proud of, having installed her encryption programs himself).
    They'd started in March, with a brief and breathless report on what they'd first found inside the cave, and continued in length and frequency ever since. Although Jadis never wrote anything other than clear, plain facts, unencumbered by anything superfluous, he could read, between the lines, a steady increase in intensity, excitement - and desperation. There's so much here, the messages seemed to say. So much to tell - too much -- I wish you were back here to look at it - can you come? - what are we going to make of it all? - Help!
    The news that Jadis had to tell, buried in stray bits, would blow the lid off the world, and suddenly Avi was conscious that of all the human beings (and other people) in this Chinook, only he had any idea of what Jadis was about to unleash. He wondered why his head wasn't glowing like a distress flare, and why nobody seemed to be taking any notice of him whatsoever.
    The latest email had contained two lengthy attachments. The first was the paper that she intended to send to Nature ("Subterranean Palaeolithic settlement at Souris Saint-Michel Rock Shelter, France", by Jadis L. Markham, with Jack, Faye, Primrose, Mathilde, Eric, Balthazar, Domingo and about sixty-five other names he didn't recognize). The second, much longer attachment was the more monographic treatment she'd send to Antiquity, pending the deliberations of Nature's editors. The email's covering letter, written in her own words, not in the careful, measured understatement of a scientific report, had made his blood run cold. He'd read and read and read it again, until he'd known it by heart, even more thoroughly than the standing orders of Operation Elisha. The Nature paper is a stop-gap (she'd written):
    The Antiquity paper has a lot more analysis. After all your help with data analysis you deserve a co-authorship on both papers, if you'd like.
    (He'd agonized over this but decided to decline, as he'd never been to the site himself, and there were too many authors on the paper already).
    For now, just to sum it up (she continued), what we've found goes like this. The city covers about thirty square kilometres. All of it consists of buildings in a pristine state. There are no ruins. We have found no art work, nor any sign of writing, but there are Remillardian artefacts everywhere. At first we did not know what they were for.
    Then we discovered the cemetery - that's what we're calling it for now - just below the western side of the Great Pyramid (that's what Balthazar called the largest structure. You can see it in Fig. 2 of the Nature paper as Structure SSM-255-9-1). We have not so far been able to do more than a pilot excavation in one corner of this area (this is locality 255-9-2), but so far we have found 86 Neanderthal skeletons. All are complete. Some seem to have been dressed in Remillardian artefacts. Mathilde thinks that each artefact is a small plate in a suit of armour that would have been held together by leather, but we are not sure yet. At any rate, we now know who made the Remillardian artefacts, which is great news.
    How typical of Jadis, thought Avi, not to have mentioned that this one fact alone - the discovery of so many pristine Neanderthal skeletons in one place -would be enough to turn anthropology on its head, quite apart from the other findings. These now came thick and fast, wave after wave of startling revelation, until Avi had to take a breath, to pause, to allow him to come to terms with it all.
    When Jack and Faye went to the top of the Great Pyramid they found it did not taper to a point, as we had first thought, but was flat. On the flat surface, a square platform about 25 meters on a side, they found several other structures. One contained skeletons of what seem to be anatomically modern humans. Some of these are pristine, but others have been decapitated. A preliminary analysis of cut marks suggests that this mutilation was deliberate. In a nearby structure they found what look like the skulls from the mutilated bodies. The tops of the skulls had been removed. Some of these calvaria have a kind of resinous deposit inside and there are signs of burning.
    Even in the cramped, hot fuselage of the Chinook, Avi's blood chilled every time he replayed this particular detail.
    What's really puzzling is that apart from these instances of fire on the top of the Pyramid, and a few hearths inside some of the buildings, there seem to be no signs of any additional artificial illumination. The inhabitants of the city - we are already calling them the Remillardians - must have lived most of the time in complete darkness.
    The email went on for a while in this vein before concluding:
    Thanks again for your help, Avi, we couldn't have done it without you. So until we see you - I hope it won't be too long - everyone on the team sends their love, Faye and Primrose especially, and Jack of course, and Domingo reminds me to tell you that you are in his prayers. Fairbanks sends a bark and a lick, and Horrible would probably send you a dead dormouse if she could (!) With fondest love -
    However, at this point, Avi had always drifted off, because he couldn't help remembering something his father had shown him when he was a teenager on the kibbutz. In his quest for a perfect socialist Zionist utopia, and a world in which there would be no borders and in which Jews would never again be persecuted, Avi's father had read up on some of the older ideas of world government. Perhaps inevitably, his reading had drawn him to H. G. Wells. Although Avi's father had found Wells' idealism rather hard going, he was instantly sucked into the power and drama of his fiction, and it was this that he shared with his son. His father had read him The Magic Shop and from there it was only a short hop to The Country of the Blind and - what had the most lasting impact - The Time Machine.
    Avi wasn't sure if Jadis knew any Wells or had caught the parallels - in any case, literary allusion wasn't really her style. But he couldn't help thinking of the subterranean city as a landscape that Wells would have recognized. Not in The Country of the Blind so much, but in the future landscape of England that greeted the Time Traveller, who found the Eloi living witlessly in a sylvan idyll, unaware of the technically advanced Morlocks dragging them down to a horrific, subterranean fate. His father read in this story a parable about revolution and class warfare. But for Avi, now, it had taken on an additional, grisly reality.
    A gear-change in the helicopter, betrayed by a slight shift in the ceaseless rumble of its engines, indicated that they were about to land at the desert air-base, and the Tibestians would take their first steps on the hallowed soil they had desired for so many millennia. But even in the hot Negev sunshine, Avi's blood would run thick and chill for several hours afterwards.
   
    Chapter 11
    (September, 2020)
   
    And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking.
    Mark 8, 24
   
    Tom and Fairbanks were playing in the sun-baked yard outside the kitchen door, chasing the crisped, fallen leaves as they eddied and swirled in the first gusts of autumn. The boy grabbed and grasped at the leaves - missing them every time - while the dog barked encouragement. He was too old to do much active chasing himself (his back legs were arthritic and far too weak to propel his bulk into the air, as they once had) but he enjoyed watching the small boy run round in circles, laughing and hooting.
    Which is why the big old dog was perplexed, and then worried, when the boy sat down abruptly on the ground, covered his eyes and screamed at the top of his voice. He was not, judged the dog, calling for his mistress in particular, but was instead letting out an inchoate cry of utmost pain and terror. It reminded Fairbanks of the sound made by a vixen at bay in the field adjoining the garden, or that made by one of The Horribles' multitudinous small victims just before they'd had their necks broken. Naturally enough, Fairbanks was concerned. He advanced on his friend, whimpering, nosing apart the hands covering the boy's face, sniffing out his fear (he detected that the boy had peed himself) and trying a few consoling licks. The boy calmed down somewhat and threw his arms round the dog's neck, grasping handfuls of his mane. Then, with his face buried in the dog's fur, the boy tried to open his eyes again.
    This time the searing, burning sensation wasn't quite as intense as it had been a moment earlier, when he'd opened his eyes and let all the world pour in at once. No, this time, he could smell the dog, feel the fibrous strands of his outer coat, the softer nap of his inner fur, the ripple of his muscles, and hear his steady breath and the beat of his heart. But there was something else too, a new dimension to the smells and sounds that took the form of a large, blocky patch with furry edges. The patch moved slightly, taking the smells and sounds with it. And then the patch made a noise - a kind of conversational growl of encouragement - and he realized in an instant that the patch, sounds and smells went all together, and that they all belonged to Fairbanks, his most bestest friend in the whole world, who always understood, always knew.
    The boy screwed his eyes up so tightly that tears began to squeeze out and ran into the house with Fairbanks in lolloping pursuit. Tom's hands and ears and nose guided him up the stairs, where he heard the quick footsteps of his mother hurrying down to greet him, her arms picking him up and hugging him, her smell tinted with anxiety -
    "Darling, what's the matter? Why are you crying?"
    It was only a little while later, when she had settled Tom on the sitting-room sofa, that Tom had calmed down enough to say:
    "Maman - my eyes hurt when I open them", but he'd refused to open them when they'd asked. Afraid that Tom's eyes had trapped some irritant, they called the village doctor, who administered some drops as well as he could, and left. Later still, and long after nightfall, when Tom had returned to more or less his usual, happy state - except that he kept his eyes tightly shut - he asked his mother:
    "Maman, can you hear and smell with your eyes?" she had at first said nothing, but turned out the light, hugged her son and said:
    "Yes, Darling, you can. Perhaps you'd like to try it now?"
    Although he was reluctant, the burning heat on his eyelids seemed to have disappeared, and he opened them - on a dim vision of blank, angular spaces, except for one, a more curving, irregular form that was moving and changing its shape as it did so. He smelled it and knew it was his mother. Around her edges - edges - were lots and lots and lots of long thin lines, which he touched and discovered were his mother's hair. His hands flew to her face, which he knew to be in the middle of the hair, and felt - saw - that it was moving in an odd way and was wet. The wetness was coming from the two large holes in her face that were her eyes.
    His mother's shape changed further, as if she were some tentacled hydra, extending two long outgrowths which, rather alarmingly, got larger and larger at the ends. He began to flinch, but just in time he smelled that they were only her hands, her fingers, reaching out to caress him.
    "Oh, you sweet boy. Everything's going to be all right. You'll see." Tom didn't know what she meant, but she was his Maman and apart from Fairbanks the centre of his tiny world, so whatever it was, it was probably okay. He turned over and dreamed the dreams that only blind people know: dreams that he would soon leave behind.
    She walked very slowly downstairs, making sure she placed each foot carefully on the creaking wooden treads, in case the rich and uneasy mixture of emotions currently assaulting her mind lifted her physically off her feet. Fear, terror, dread, horror, joy - and relief, and hope. Relief that a long and nagging worry had been lifted; hope that her little son would soon be walking out into the light, unafraid.
    Jack was waiting for her in the sitting room with a glass of wine, which she accepted gratefully. They both sank into the ever-more-sagging sofa in front of the fire, she curling up in his arms, as they'd always tried to do as part of their routine.
    "He's fine - just fine," she'd said in response to his unvoiced expression of concern, and added: "you know, I'm probably being the classic hysterical mother..."
    Jack snorted. A mother less hysterical than Jadis would be hard to imagine. The past six years had been difficult, both at work and at home, but somehow Jadis always managed to hold everything together. As her girlishness had begun to fade, the steel had come to the fore more often, and although she had never, to Jack's knowledge, raised her temper at SSM, he knew that some of the younger members of the eighty-strong team referred to her as the Wicked Witch. It was no coincidence that these were the team members who never stayed very long. But Jack knew there was a young girl in there somewhere, just for him, and so began to stroke her hair, as he always had.
    "What's up with Tom, then? You may not be hysterical, but he was. I know he's only six, but Tom's always been unflappable. Even Fairbanks was worried."
    Jadis smiled, thinking of how Fairbanks had adopted Tom as soon as he'd seen him, a tiny infant just a year old, and had never let him out of his sight. She lost count of the postmen, academic colleagues, friends, relations and stray visitors who'd given Fairbanks a wide berth when the vast, snarling bear of a dog thought that anyone was coming too close to his infant charge. She thought that Fairbanks had got on with Tom so well because of a shared view of the world - and wondered how much Fairbanks had actually taught Tom, perhaps without even knowing that he had. Tom was blind, and Fairbanks would never have done very well on an eyesight test, either. The world of boy and dog had been one of hearing, touch and smell. But things, it seemed, were changing.
    "Oh, Darling Jack, where to begin..." sighed Jadis, grasping his right arm like a mast to steady her in a storm: "you know, all those ophthalmic surgeons, those psychologists, those specialists we took him to, one after blessed one after another - and they all said that yes, he was blind, but there was nothing actually wrong with him?"
    "Mmmm..." - he continued to stroke her hair, teasing out each strand, spreading them all out as a great scapular around them both.
    "And do you remember the one in Toulouse who said that he might even suddenly learn to see, one day?"
    Jack remembered. Ah yes, that was the one occasion he could remember - the only one - in which Jadis had become really, incandescently furious. He remembered how her skin had turned white, her eyes coal-black and her hair had seemed to take on a life of its own, streaming out in all directions like turbulent seaweed, when she'd turned on the hapless specialist and said words to the effect that she'd hoped that the doctor would have spoken to her like a fellow scientist, and not give her the standard patronizing brush-off treatment, but, sadly, she wished she'd trusted her expectations instead, which were, she'd said, disarmingly, poignantly low. Not that she'd raised her voice - quite the opposite - but her tone was so commanding, her articulation so pitilessly precise, that all the doctor could do was hang his head and shuffle backwards out of his own office.
    Jadis' constant uneasy shifts in Jack's embrace, as if she weren't entirely comfortable, said it all. She was remorseful, embarrassed, because the doctor had been right after all. But this was no time to press the point, thought Jack. Time to move things forward.
    "So what do we do now?"
    After a thoughtful pause, Jadis sighed, and said, quite decisively, " I think we should just let things be." Having made up her mind, she relaxed suddenly as if released from some kind of possession, and sank contentedly back onto Jack's chest. "Let Tom work it out on his own. He's always done so before..."
    "If it ain't broke...", added Jack, but Jadis was already on the margins of sleep, as if she'd shed a heavy load that had long weighed her down, and, having been relieved of it, could now afford to collapse from exhaustion. Jack continued to caress her head, staring into the sinking embers.
    He thought back to the long, agonized conversations they'd had a few years back, when SSM was well under way, about children. Jack had been reluctant - the memories of her pregnancy were still too painful - but Jadis, who after all (she said) had been the one who'd suffered the pain, was adamant. She kept saying something he didn't quite understand about a lost pulse, and a horrible, bloody recurrent nightmare she'd had about the Nest, and how it was about time she'd done something about it.
    And then there was the dismal year or so when they'd been `trying for a baby' - a phrase that Jack thought quite the dreariest in the English language. Despite the fact that they'd had sex more frequently than they'd ever had, none of it had been very much fun. Jack remembered one night when they were holed up in the caravan at SSM, the rain flooding down outside, and he'd had one of his extremely rare colds. Now, he thought, most men, even when running a temperature of a hundred and one, would find the prospect of opening one's eyes to find oneself being ridden by a nude and sensationally sexy woman at least cheering, if not arousing. But being told in stentorian tones that he was to perform because she was ovulating and that if we missed this chance we'd have to wait another whole month - well, it was a turn-off.
    After a while they'd both decided that this mechanically procreative effort was more likely to damage their marriage than produce offspring. Natural reproduction was a complete failure - as they'd known it probably would be. And, as it turned out (after many consultations), although Jadis' uterus had healed, there had been a lot of scarring, making the chances of implantation and placentation very low indeed, even had they managed to conceive, either naturally or in vitro. The only chance was some kind of surrogacy - which Jack found too weird, and Jadis flatly refused even to consider. That, or adoption.
    This would have been easy but for one thing: a worldwide shortage of spare babies. The European birth-rate had been in long-term decline for decades and was now so low that children under five years old were almost never available for adoption. Babies from other parts of the world were also increasingly rare, as even in what was once called the Third World, birth rates had been slowing, and the demographics were made more complicated by endemic war, famine and disease: over the past decade, much of sub-Saharan Africa had been depopulated by chronic famine, exacerbated by malaria, AIDS and a seemingly constant barrage of pestilences nobody had heard of before, each one more horrible than the last. Few had realized it yet, but the populations of every country between South Africa and the Equator had sunk below the level of viability. Many of these states had effectively ceased to exist except as flags of convenience, and were in fact administered by a variety of multinational concerns, some of which used them as game reserves. Elephants, lions, gorillas, cheetahs and zebras were on the increase as the human tide receded. Eastern Asia had long been a source of babies for adoption, but even here the market was drying up as the regional economies soared. In fact, the trade had switched in the opposite direction as Korean and Thai would-be-parents competed for the few remaining babies in Russia and Romania.
    Jack and Jadis were becoming reconciled to childlessness until they decided to discuss the issue with Domingo on one of his increasingly rare (and cherished) visits - his talents had been recognized in Rome and he was now, more often than not, at the Vatican. For their part, Jack and Jadis had come to regard him as their confessor, and appreciated his own concession to their agnosticism in that he always visited them in what he termed an unofficial capacity - in baggy shorts and customarily eye-watering 5XL aloha shirt ("I wouldn't want anyone to know it was me", he'd said). And he was, they thought, a good listener, and most of all a good friend. Domingo knew of Catholic agencies that rescued babies from the burgeoning slums of Catholic countries such as Brazil or the Philippines, and he'd gladly make some discreet enquiries. He'd never seen Jack and Jadis look so anxious, he thought privately. His heart surged out towards them. As he wrote on his private recommendation to the agency concerned, it would not be God's will to deny children to these people. He omitted to mention, however, that these were the same people who had given him his own first taste of a loving family, even though he'd had to attain his own maturity to get it.
    And so it was that one snowbound December day in 2015, Tom Markham Corstorphine made his way up the potholed drive, swaddled in a blanket and carried in the arms of Father Domingo Sanchopanza on the last stage of a journey that had started a year earlier in the middle of Borneo, when Islamist rebels fuelled by the thoughts of the Khalifa had razed a remote jungle village, massacring all the inhabitants - all except one, who had come into the world just a few hours earlier.
    Domingo handed baby Tom over to Jadis in their kitchen, with Jack and Fairbanks in attendance, all looking in wonder at the new arrival. As Jadis cradled him in her arms, cooing softly and searching every wrinkle of her new baby with her softly intent, slightly cross-eyed gaze, Domingo started to laugh - softly at first, but building into a great, hearty guffaw.
    "You know what day it is, of course!" he said, wiping tears from his eyes with his vast, hairy arms. It had occurred to none of them that it was Christmas Day. Fairbanks jumped up at his old friend, eager to share the joke. Domingo patted him - "can you play the ox and the ass both at once, my friend?" he'd asked.
    It wasn't until Tom was four and attending a day-nursery in Panassac that they discovered that he was blind. No, the teacher said in response to Jadis's evident disbelief, he'd had the first of a standard set of eye tests and had failed them comprehensively. No possibility of doubt, Tom could not see anything at all. Yes, Madame Corstorphine, we were as surprised as you are. Of course, Madame Corstorphine, you're right, he's otherwise well-adjusted and settled, but no, Madame Corstorphine, we can't have him here. We haven't got the resources, you know, and then there's safety..."
    What utter nonsense, Jadis wanted to say, before bringing him home. The happy four-year-old sat in the passenger seat of the jeep, burbling merrily about all the scrapes that he and his friends had gotten into that day, while Jadis tried to think of any cause they might have had for thinking that anything had been wrong with Tom's eyesight. Tom had been exploring the house since he was a toddler, coping with stairs and doors and every other hazard; since the age of two he had known the huge garden as well as she had, and played near the uncovered pond without incident.
    They had even taken him to SSM and - hang on, this was it - she now recalled when she and Tom, then aged three, were visiting the long avenue they called the Champs Elysées which, like all the thoroughfares of the ancient city, had now been illuminated with giant-sized halogen street lamps, so that it looked no darker nor more threatening than any other cityscape at night, for all the strangeness of the brooding polygonal monoliths and pyramids. She was chatting with a group of surveyors who'd just opened a structure called the Hexagon when all the lights suddenly went out, and they had been sucked into that same gut-wrenching blackness that had greeted her when, for the first time, she and Jack and the others on the first exploration crew had switched off their headlights. She heard others scream and whimper as the primal darkness swept into every crevice. The blackout lasted less than ten seconds, when an emergency generating station came online. She had immediately looked down at Tom, holding her hand, who looked no more than slightly confused, and said
    "Maman, why is everyone scared?"
    She had been so swept up in her own fear that she had not at first realized that her small son had not noticed the blackout - because he lived his life in such darkness.
    As she drove, half-listening to her son's innocent prattle, she realized that blindness must be, for Tom, a natural state - his other senses reported his world so well that vision would only ever be, at best, a corroboration of more reliable modalities; at worst, a source of confusion and anxiety. Even without sight, he lived so well in the world that they had always assumed he was as sighted as anyone else. But that, she thought, could have been an assumption dictated by our own narrowness of perception, living as we do in a world in which vision the most dominant sense, the sense we live by, and which has forced our other senses into an undergrowth so deep that we lack the language to describe flavours and textures except by metaphor. We have no words, Jadis realized, for the colours of smells. Because of this, Tom would never be able to describe his world to her, and this sudden knowledge hit her with a pang.
    Apart from behaviour, though, did Tom's eyes themselves ever give the game away? Did they flail anxiously hither and thither, like the eyes of blind people? No, they didn't. Were his eyes closed and sunken, like sightless eyes, long unused? No, they weren't. Indeed, they had given every appearance of being keen and alive. They were very large, fringed with long black lashes, and with yellow-green irises so broad that they left little room for whites. The pupils were not circular, but very slightly elliptical, almost pointed at the top and bottom.
    When they were thinking of names for him, Jack had remarked that his eyes were so cat-like that they'd just have to name him `Tom'. "That," he said, "and the fact that he's got an enormous, well... just look at him" Jadis looked down at the nether regions of her new baby (Jack was changing his diaper at the time), saw what Jack was pointing at, and giggled.
    Well, Jadis thought, on the very edge of sleep in Jack's arms, Tom had been blind for no apparent reason, and now he could see, equally miraculously. No sense in wondering the whys and wherefores of it: instead, her mind started to reorganize her schedule for the next several weeks so she could spend as much time with Tom as possible, guiding him very gently into what would be a strange and terrifying new world.
    Jadis' schedule had indeed become horribly crowded. Within the first few days of establishing an illuminated base camp on the western edge of the underground city, they realized that the resources they'd had available would be sorely unequal to the task of mapping, exploring, collecting, cataloguing, preserving - and interpreting - the potential of what was almost certainly the greatest single archaeological find ever made. Even with a hundred times the manpower Jack and Jadis had at their call, it would take years. As things now stood, it would take centuries.
    Jack, as GW Institute Director, flew to the GW Foundation's headquarters in New York for an urgent meeting with the Board, proposing that the Institute relocate from Cambridge to Saint-Rogatien, where it would devote ninety per cent of its resources to SSM. After showing them the data and pictures acquired so far, he hit them with detailed plans for the immediate acquisition of expertise, requiring a massive injection of capital and a thirty-fold increase in operating budget.
    The cool, bland, Fifth-Avenue suite could have been the offices of a cheap sting operation rather than the largest venture capital firm in the world, for Ginsberg Wang preferred to spend his money on his projects, rather than his own surroundings. Jack had never met any of the Board before except by videoconference (which, he thought, is never as good as the real thing). The six men, all of whom he'd have passed without a second glance in the street, betrayed no reaction whatsoever to Jack's performance. He was introduced to none of them, and he had no idea which one - if any - was the legendary Mr Wang. The end was greeted in absolute silence, until the anonymous man at the head of the table raised his hand to an earpiece, cupping it and exchanging a word, and said to Jack -
    "Dr Corstorphine, a limousine is waiting for you in the lobby. Goodbye."
    Well, that's it, Jack thought - we'll just have to do what we can with what we have, even though it would be like trying to cut down every tree in the forest with a scalpel, leaf by leaf, twig by twig. But the limo wasn't taking him to JFK, as he'd assumed, but to the Freedom Tower at the southern tip of Manhattan. Two suits met him kerbside and escorted him to the elevator, pressed the button for the 217th-floor penthouse, and left. Jack's stomach hit his shoes as the elevator rocketed upwards, and in no time at all the doors opened and he was met by a tiny man with green, startlingly cat-like eyes and an unruly shock of snow-white hair.
    His host was wearing the bottom half of an Armani suit, held up over a red-and-white striped Jermyn Street shirt by a pair of novelty suspenders decorated with rubber tyrannosauri. His feet were bare and - Jack couldn't help but notice -- remarkably hairy. And he talked non-stop.
    "I don't believe we've ever actually met, Jack - may I call you Jack? I'm Ginsberg Wang -- please call me Ginsberg -- I've been very impressed with your work - very impressed -- so naturally we'll give you everything you and Dr Markham need -- pity you didn't both come, I'd like to have met her. I like a girl with spunk." Jack smiled. Wang continued as if he were really talking to himself.
    "Did I say everything? Yes, everything -- don't stint -- just do it and send us the check. Sorry -- scotch? Wine? Tea? Ah - I know --" Wang hurried to a drinks cabinet without waiting for Jack to respond and came back with two tumblers filled to the brim with an Islay single malt so dark and peaty that Jack almost choked, pausing only a moment to wonder how Wang had known that this was his most favourite drink, even though he rarely got the opportunity to sample it, as Jadis hated the smell and wouldn't allow it in the house, and Jack never liked to drink on his own. How?
    "Why will we be so accommodating, I hear you ask? So of course I'll tell you -- you can't take it with you, and I'm older than I look, but apart from that, the Board and I are convinced that the work you and Dr Markham are doing is of the utmost importance - the utmost importance --we think it might even save the planet. How will describing a city that's been dead for 25,000 years save the planet, I hear you ask? You do? Great -- so of course I'll tell you -- I haven't the faintest idea. But I have a hunch, that's all it is, a hunch, and I always follow my hunches, because they've never let me down -- that's something that you and I have in common, I believe? Like my hunch that you're an Islay man, am I right? Of course I'm right!" The little man laughed and slapped his thigh as if he'd cracked the most amazing joke.
    "So drink up, Jack, you've got just enough time to get the last plane -- I've arranged a very nice upgrade, I hope you'll agree. Goodbye - and good luck!"
    Hunches, Jack thought, as the sleek stealth-winged private jet wafted him, his good news and several tumblers of Talisker smoothly homewards at Mach 4.7 across the inky black Atlantic, the ocean hurrying backwards beneath him as if actively trying to get out of the way. His world had been a castle built on gamble after gamble; that McLennane had backed his own then-unframed, untested hunches about landscape, which had later borne fruit at Saint-Rogatien and now at Souris Saint-Michel. And McLennane's last and greatest gamble - that Jack's own hunches could be brought to maturity not by some accomplished Professor, or even a rising academic star, but by a green girl just twenty years old, whom, on a hunch on Clare Bridge nine years earlier, he'd asked to marry him. Science is not built from certainties, he thought (inexplicably, in the voice of Ernestine Yanga), for we cannot extend knowledge by forever elaborating on what we already know. No, we have to take chances. Hunches -- that's what it's all about. And when he thought of his wife, his hunch was that the best chances are always those that one knows instinctively are dead certainties. He felt sure that Ginsberg Wang would have agreed.
    And so their work had been transformed. The farmhouse was no longer accommodation for an entire field crew, but for them only, most of the bedrooms being converted into offices for a team of full-time administrative assistants who commuted in daily. Universities and Institutes all over the world were invited to send research teams, who were accommodated at the GW's expense initially at Le Sanglier D'Or and (if Full Professors) at Le Cerf Blanc, until the entire Institute took up residence in a disused teacher-training college just outside Aurignac which, once refitted, had plenty of space for accommodation as well as offices, laboratories, storage space for the flood of material coming up from SSM, even a museum which, one day, would be open to the public. Jack and Jadis' own administrative staff moved into the new GW campus and, once again, they had their home back. Jack felt that his wandering days were over and that he now had to pay his dues, so he became what he called a `house-husband', running the administrative side of the Institute. This left Jadis to direct the actual research.
    Eight years later, by the time that Tom first opened his eyes to see, Jadis' research had given them a city. There were no written records, no pictures, no carvings, nothing that a human eye would recognize as art: but the ground was littered with stone artefacts of such sophistication that the Remillardian type proved to be just one of the simpler varieties. There were millions of animal bones of all kinds, many representing species never before recorded from Ice Age Europe. And there were thousands of Neanderthal skeletons, yielding billions of bases of DNA, enough for several whole genomes. Analysis confirmed that the Neanderthals from SSM were no more closely related to any single modern human group to the exclusion of any other, but stood outside the modern human range - at least, as far as could be told using the then currently available human genome samples.
    Even in the absence of written records, Jadis' severely analytic approach to the data - the layout of the city and the radiometrically established ages for the buildings, skeletons and artefacts -- had teased out sufficient patterns for her to be able to sketch the city's history.
    For more than half a million years, the Neanderthals and their immediate antecedents had sculpted Europe to their liking. Without agriculture or written language, they had created a landscape that supported their population by practices that encouraged the animals and useful plants on which they lived. They dammed rivers, changing their courses, shaped mountains to farm the winds, and built immense pyramids whose purpose was initially obscure, but generally assumed to have been religious.
    But when modern humans arrived just before 40,000 years ago, the original Europeans faced a new threat. The invaders bred far faster than the Neanderthals, and swept all before them, despite their clearly inferior culture. It was then that the Neanderthals decided to go into hiding. They abandoned the surface, building Souris Saint-Michel and perhaps other cities that remained undiscovered, though Avi Malkeinu's group had found what seemed to be a smaller, older version of SSM beneath Mount Carmel. SSM itself ceased to be viable some time after 26,000 years ago, for no reason that Jadis could yet discern. The last inhabitants left, sealing up the wall behind them.
    Balthazar had been right when he suspected that Souris Saint-Michel would be a mouse that roared. The world was stunned by all these revelations, and Jack and Jadis had become much-sought academic superstars - rôles they did not much like, although they did their best to accommodate reasonable requests. But they'd had to post round-the-clock security at SSM, and were glad that they did not live close to the site itself or to the new Institute campus at Aurignac. Press interviews always made Jack irritable, and although Jadis usually managed better, she was often withdrawn and silent for hours afterwards.
    One concession they made to celebrity was the acquisition of a television - something they'd never had any time for, and now found hard to get used to. But when asked to give interviews, they had never heard of the stations that journalists represented, and could rarely understand the references they made to the TV and current affairs shows in which Jack and Jadis' work now featured. Reluctantly, they felt that they should be better informed: and so, cautiously, they called their long-standing and long-suffering electrician, Laurent Gaspard, who had occasionally been called in at strange hours when it was found (for example) that a dormouse had gnawed through a cable in the attic, and he'd had to venture into this dark sanctuary for rodents, owls and other wildlife (and their refuse) and perforce do battle with one or more of The Horribles on the way. Gaspard was a brave man, but, Jack thought, his bravery was amply reflected in his call-out fee.
    In addition to his electrical services, Gaspard ran a TV sales and rental franchise in Masseube. Jadis called on him one day while on the way back from Seissan market, to see if they might rent something, you know, just to see if they could live with it.
    Their first TV was not a success. Jadis felt that she couldn't relax with Jack in the evenings because she felt that the set was looking at her, intruding. It went back to the shop after a week.
    "We can't have that thing in here, Laurent", complained Jadis: "Looks like a giant bat. Can we try something less... well, obvious?"
    Gaspard then supplied them with a flexi-screen ("latest organic semiconductor technology!") mounted in a gilt picture frame which, he said, could go on the wall above the sitting-room fireplace. It could double as a remote computer monitor if they liked (they didn't) and could even be used for videoconferencing (which they admitted had possibilities.) But after five minutes of sales talk, Jack and Jadis felt their eyes glazing over. Jadis said that this was all very well, but how, mon cher Laurent, did you switch it on, or more to the point, off?
    The agent, sensing this imminent technophobic ennui, moved to the main selling point for any reluctant TV owner -- that this model would, in standby mode, look indistinguishable from a framed painting or print, indeed, any picture they wanted. And if they got bored, they could change the picture on command. He showed them a wide selection of possibilities, most of which were either clichéd, pornographic or both. Jack said he rather liked the surprising diversity of exuberantly flesh-toned Titians, and started to recite a rude limerick on this theme in English, which left Gaspard looking nonplussed and Jadis practically doubled on the floor with mirth. After she'd recovered her composure, Jadis emerged from behind her hair and asked the agent if they could have a custom picture?
    And so it was that the monitor now looked exactly like the picture it replaced, a now-faded framed reproduction of Riña de Gatos (`The Cat Fight') by Goya, something they'd had since their Chesterton days, and which they'd kept as the two furred and be-fanged protagonists looked so much like two of the The Horribles.
    Having now finally installed the TV - which Jadis would only ever refer to as the Thing - they found themselves extremely averse to switching it on, at least to begin with. Their end-of-day winding-down had become a sacred, special time that nobody had been allowed to disturb, with the exception of Fairbanks, and Tom, when he had been very small and reluctant to go to sleep on his own (and who, being blind, never watched TV anyway). Now, however, they felt obliged to watch the Thing, to force themselves: which they did, in increasingly horrified fascination.
    The TV news was ever varied, but ever much the same, in that every single item seemed coloured by the implications of the discoveries at SSM. Politicians were more guarded, more cautious, as if a greater, older power was always looking over their shoulder. Comedians became wild-eyed and edgy: if human existence had been a late coda to a vast, lost civilization, little remained that was sufficiently important to make fun of, so they launched into one of two opposite directions - unspeakably bestial crudity or mannered, knowing surrealism.
    Reporters in the increasing number of war zones, or covering the steadily rising tally of death from famine, disease and the more overt manifestations of climate change, seemed to struggle to make their voices heard, as if the immediate tragedy and horror of their subjects paled before the immensity of time that civilization had been known to exist - and that this immensity was, by and large, inhuman. It wasn't long before Sir Raphael Dimbleby, the doyen of the more thoughtful TV pundits, wondered openly whether SSM were the final proof of the ephemeral futility of human existence, quoting Macbeth's lines about life as a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.
    Jadis, watching, pulled Jack's arms around her and said, in a dry, cracked voice:
    "What have we done, Darling Jack - what have we done?"
    Jack kissed the top of her head and, looking more intently at the latest report on the ongoing rebellion in somewhere or other, said
    "I still think we should have gone for the Renoir. Or the Titian. You know, while Titian was mixing rose madder, his model reclined on a ladder..."
    Jadis sat up, suddenly bright-eyed again, and walloped Jack with a cushion. Jack fought back -
    "her position, to Titian", he managed to utter, between whacks "... suggested coition..."
    Fairbanks joined in, and the whole melée ended up on the hearthrug, the Thing, playing to itself, now quite forgotten.
    Later, softly on the edge of sleep, Jadis, now half-clothed but warmly wrapped in Jack's embrace on the hearthrug, muttered, laughing to herself
    "... so he leaped up the ladder..."
    "And `ad `er...", Jack concluded, eyes closed.
    In times of existential crisis, people by and large turn to the certainties offered by religion. Whether or not these certainties really exist is a secondary question that few choose to confront. And what most gripped the world about Souris Saint-Michel was the definite, indisputable signs of Neanderthal religion, and in particular the sacrifice of modern humans to the nameless Gods of their captors. This news, summarized in one of a seemingly never-ending series of reports in Nature ("Evidence for Neanderthal funerary and sacrifical custom" by Jadis L. Markham and twenty-seven others), was both denounced and welcomed in editorials and pulpits.
    Denunciation was very much in the rule among the more austere Protestants, especially in the United States, who felt that religion in non-humans debased the very idea of religion itself, as well as being a challenge to biblical literalism. Jews were, by turns, fascinated, repelled and awed by the antiquity of it all, even though the more Orthodox rabbis claimed it was a scientific fraud designed to undermine the sanctity of Torah. Avi Malkeinu had written to Jadis of the small ultra-orthodox contingent who'd set up demonstrations outside his own dig at Mount Carmel. ("I get most work done on Shabbat, when they've gone home," he'd said). The Imams of the Khalifa, finding no ready guidance (and indeed more concerned with their own internal schisms), wisely said nothing. And yet the news from SSM might have had the effect of increasing religious fervour in the Islamic world generally, spurring the Khalifa ever onwards.
    The only positive reaction came from the Catholic church.
    "It goes without saying that His Holiness deplores human sacrifice as barbaric", a black-garbed Papal legate said in a news package on FoxTurnerNews in their main bulletin one Friday evening in 2020, a few weeks after Tom received the dubious gift of sight.
    "However, with the new encyclical Undique Humanitas, His Holiness proposes that the problem of the non-human origin of the religion from Souris Saint-Michel can be solved very easily --by the simple expedient of widening the definition of humanity."
    At this the legate flashed a twinkling, toothy smile that made Jadis and Jack sit up at once, in wonder: the name at the bottom of the screen, not that they had any need to read it, said `Mgr. Domingo Sanchopanza, Vatican Science Advisor'.
    The Papacy had, it seemed, been well ahead of the game. For not only had the world to worry about the implications of non-human cultures in the dead past, but those that were still very much alive. The surprise 2012 airlift of the Tibestian Jews had been a news item for a day, but a longer-lasting and much-debated preoccupation was the revelation the following year that Tibestian DNA had evolved along a trajectory utterly foreign to that of the rest of humanity. The implications of this were hard to unravel: either that the Tibestians had undergone a series of unusually harsh population crashes over many thousands of years, sculpting their DNA into strange, inhuman forms - or that their lineage had been distinct from that of modern humans for almost a quarter of a million years. In other words, well before modern humans evolved.
    Whatever the answer, a number of other strange, lost peoples now started to emerge from long obscurity in remote regions of the world, taking their cue from the Tibestians to claim their share of the limelight. It was a common human conceit to imagine that by the start of the twenty-first century, people would have rustled every bush and looked behind every tree in search of undiscovered species. But the world is far greater than even the arrogance of scientists can imagine, and undiscovered species, if they are sentient, often have a knack of being discovered only on their own terms.
    In 2013, a tribe of very peculiar pygmy `hominids' (that had become the convenient, media-friendly catch-all term) emerged from the jungle in northern Sulawesi to give a press conference. With their all-over pelage of thick black fur and enormous, circular, completely red eyes, these people looked even less human than the Tibestians. From their point of view, however, it might have been better had the Sulawesians chosen to remain in hiding, because their press conference - aired on live global webcast -- was disrupted by a band of equally unknown but much larger hominids who decapitated the pygmies (and a few reporters who came too close) and ran into the bush, taking the A/V equipment with them.
    No trace of either species had been seen since, and people were beginning to wonder if it had all been an elaborate stunt, until the emergence in 2015 of the menehune people who had been living for millennia, completely unsuspected, in the remote Alaka'i Swamp in the highlands of Kaua'i, Hawai'i: and the incident the following year in which a brigandish tribe of sasquatches burst into a bar in Dawson's Creek, British Columbia, baying for whiskey and human sacrifice.
    After that they started popping up all over the place.
    Looking at Domingo, on sparkling form, as ever, Jack and Jadis felt that whatever their own views on religion, the Papal stance was the best - indeed, the only civilized course. Good for Domingo, they both thought, and now that the Thing had had their attention, it showed them news that turned their expressions from vicarious glory to outright horror. It was news - of a sort -- of what had happened to Faye and Primrose.
    The Saint-Rogatien Dream Team of 2011 had always occupied a special place in Jadis' heart - especially as it was very largely this same team that had broken ground at Souris Saint-Michel. She tried to keep up with them all, as far as she could. Eric and Mathilde had got married and had taken over Ernestine Yanga's office in an increasingly beleaguered Nairobi. Primrose and Faye had also become partners at home and at work, having established CATS Adventures, a very successful expeditions business, taking all-female teams of explorers up the many still-unconquered peaks of Tibet. Although the Chinese government had loosened access to the region, much of it remained wild and hardly visited by human beings, let alone westerners. In the globally harsh winter of 2018, Faye and Primrose and their party had been trekking up a peak so obscure that it was known only by its GPS coordinates, when they lost contact with their base camp in unseasonably heavy weather, and were not heard from again. Jack and Jadis were perhaps some of the more anxious among the worldwide TV audience following the long but ultimately futile attempts to trace them.
    So news of Faye and Primrose guttered and petered out - two years on, news watchers were now fascinated by the furore that inevitably greeted Undique Humanitas, and the strangely compelling personality of the Science Advisor at the Court of Saint Peter. And then, after the news, came Zenge.
    Michael Zenge (`Remember - it rhymes with Henge!') hosted the most widely syndicated chat show in the world. His success was widely attributed to a complete lack of gimmicks. Polite but warm; mild and self-deprecating to a degree just short of self-indulgent; conservatively-suited, silver-haired Zenge would just sit next to his guest, posing what seemed the most innocuous questions -- and then just let them talk. In so doing, guests often let slip the kind of revelations that more up-front interviewers could never manage to prise from their victims.
    Another Zenge hallmark was that he never went for the obvious roster of wall-to-wall celebrities, but sought genuinely interesting and varied voices, many of whom would be unfamiliar to most people, and sometimes even downright eccentric - but all of whom had interesting stories to tell, and whom he presented as sympathetically as possible. Jack and Jadis had been guests themselves about five years back, in the only live TV interview they'd ever consented to give since their Cambridge days. Zenge was almost the only thing on the Thing that they enjoyed watching.
    "Who's he dug up this time?" asked Jadis, remembering the captain of the trans-Antarctic nude pre-op transvestite cycling team of the previous week..
    Jack, who'd risen to refill their wine glasses, looked puzzled. "Not sure ... I don't recognize him. Too much hair."
    "More hair than last time, anyway..." Jadis took the wine, her own cloud of hair swaying. She snuggled close to Jack as he sat down again, trying not to spill the wine as, laughing, they re-lived the nude polar cyclists. "No danger of frostbite with this one, then," she said.
    And so in static fascination they watched the emergence of yet another new species of hominid on the world stage.
    "Freddy, can you tell us why you like Tolkien?" asked Michael Zenge.
    "Freddy who?" asked Jadis. "I don't know, I missed the credits", replied Jack.
    "Yes, of course, Michael, of course I can," replied the guest known only as Freddy.
    "And....?" Zenge prompted.
    "Oh, I see, you actually want me to tell you, what?" The studio audience laughed.
    "Yes, please, if you would..."
    The guest scratched his left nostril with the second index finger on his right hand and adjusted himself awkwardly in his seat. Something about him made Jadis squirm. He just looked all wrong.
    "But of course, Michael. It's like this. When I first looked into The Lord of the Rings, I was struck at how all the different peoples of Tolkien's Middle-earth are happily living together, with harmony and cooperation in place of strife and discord."
    "All the Elves, Dwarves and so on, all living in racial harmony? What we used to call a `multicultural' society'?"
    "Yes. But don't forget, Michael, the stone giants in the mountains. Not to mention those glorious tree giants, the Ents, so sadly declining to extinction - with, I have to say it, such British fortitude. I found it most admirable. And affecting. A model for our times, what?"
    Jadis tensed, her lips pressed together in a hard line. "Jack, I don't like this one at all. He's ... he's .... a creep." She had now sat up, perched on the edge of the sofa, her front now illuminated by the wash from the screen. Jack saw her eyes burning like coals, the tautness in her neck muscles. Jack tensed up too: she was right - there was something very, very odd indeed about this guest. He braced himself for what his instinct told him was a nasty surprise around the corner. Part of his mind replayed another occasion when Raphael Dimbleby quoted Macbeth: by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.
    Zenge again: "How did you come across The Lord of the Rings, Freddy? If I might say so, it is a very popular work in many countries, but it's a surprise to hear its praises sung from the Tibetan Plateau."
    Tibet, thought Jadis... oh no, it can't be ... and Faye was always going on about hobbits. Jack pulled her back down, close to him, hugging her to his chest. Her eyes got wider with each new revelation, and she started to bite her nails.
    "Great literature transcends cultures and geography, Michael, as I am sure you're aware. But I admit it, foreign literature is somewhat hard to come by in my neck of the woods, what? Ha ha ha!"
    Freddy's laughter was like the sound of concrete blocks being dragged over corrugated iron at four o'clock in the morning: Jadis winced as if physically slapped. The guest, a thousand miles away in a studio in England, was seen quite obviously to scratch his groin. The camera panned (perhaps over-rapidly) to his face, or what could be seen of it. The guest's eyes were completely covered with wrap-around designer shades, the rest furred with long off-white hair.
    "Is this guy for real?" asked Jack. "Isn't this another hoax?"
    Once more, the guest tried to adjust himself in his seat. The problem was that he seemed far too big for it. The audience, once sympathetic and warm, had now become edgy and nervous. Zenge, affecting not to notice, sat forward in expectation. As if on cue, the guest leaned slightly forward as if to share a confidence.
    "It's a very interesting tale, how we acquired Tolkien's masterpiece, Michael. Most interesting indeed, what?"
    "That's the tale everyone knows? About the all-woman expedition to Tibet and what happened to it? Can you dispel the myths?"
    Jadis' face burned hot, she was confused, flustered - were they talking about Primrose? Faye? Were they? All she could say was:
    "Oh, Jack..."
    "Ha ha ha!" The sound of a dinosaur being dismembered by a chorus of unsharpened chainsaws. "Yes, oh yes, Michael, we made them feel most welcome at our humble mountain fastnesses, or, to be poetic, our Caves of Ice, whence flows the Sacred River Alph, what? Ha ha ha!" This last a roaring screech like a battery chicken farm sustaining the glancing blow of a rocket-propelled grenade. This time the studio guest needed no further prompting:
    "So nice to have a visit from others in Middle-earth, if you will. I am pleased to say we gave them a very warm welcome. Anyway, one of those nice ladies had The Lord of the Rings in her baggage. A long read, one supposes, for those long days when blizzards confine one to base and one cannot find a good film on the television. Ha ha ha!" Plate steel attacked by ill-tuned combine harvester at full throttle.
    "Fuck me," said Jack under his breath, holding Jadis tightly. She had begun to shake.
    "Could you read it, though? Straight off the bat?"
    "Naturally, Michael. To be sure we see very few others at our home - which is why any visit from outside is to be treasured. But we are not completely ignorant, you know. Some of us have even scaled the heights of Henry James, what? No, no, we could hack our way around Tolkien very passably, thank you".
    The guest now idly picked at his left nostril, teasing out a long, lime-green skein of snot, which he ate, chewing appreciatively for some seconds, wiping his fingers on large handkerchief from the breast pocket of expensive-looking Navy-cut blazer.
    "You say that visits from the outside are to be treasured.... So treasured that they never come home again?" said Michael Zenge, the implications of the guest's story just beginning to sink in. Not often one had a confession of mass-murder on his show, but for now, he must play this fish for all it was worth. And Freddy took the bait:
    "As the old koan from the lamasery has it, `you can check out any time like, but you can never leave', what? Ha ha ha!" Police sirens being dragged as fingernails down chalk board the size of a skyscraper.
    The guest now sat back expansively. This had the effect of thrusting his pelvis forward, spreading out the lower limbs, and making the guest's gender shockingly, vastly apparent even beneath heavy cavalry twill trousers. The guest smiled, baring huge yellowing canines.
    Jadis now sprang up, struggling free of Jack's constraining embrace, and threw the wine bottle at the screen.
    "You bastard!" she yelled at the top of her lungs. The bottle bounced, splashing bloody gouts of Bergerac on the carpet and into the fire, creating fizzing bolts of hot liquid that shot out over the hearth. One hit Fairbanks on the nose. He'd been distressed by the obvious, rising anxiety of his mistress, but this was just too much. He yelped and ran for it, padding up the stairs and hiding underneath Tom's bed.
    Jadis's screams from downstairs continued: "you evil bastard!" She punched a hole through the screen: sparks arced across the gap and died, but the picture, being formed in a distributed network of organic semiconductors, continued regardless: "You ... you ... filth!"
    The studio audience was tittering like a lunatic on the verge of running amok as Zenge and Freddy skirted around the delicate topic of how Faye and Primrose and their colleagues had met their grisly end at the hand of this - Thing. Jadis now turned on Jack, fists pummelling his chest - "turn the fucking Thing off, Jack! Turn. It. Off!"
    And so he did, but when he'd tried to take her in his arms and still the incandescent eyes, the flailing arms and ragged masses of hair, she fought him back.
    "Look what we've done, Jack - look what we've done!" she screamed at much the same volume as before.
    Tom had now got up, roused by the racket, and was standing at the sitting room door, in pyjamas and dark shades, Fairbanks at his side.
    "Maman? Papa?"
    Jack's first instinct was a strong urge to flee, but a second later knew that this would be unhelpful at best. So he simply held her, and held her again, until she could flail no more, and crumpled into his arms, wracked with sobs - Oh Darling Jack... He laid her carefully on the sofa, saying to Tom and Fairbanks - Maman is fine, just tired, you two go up to bed, I'll come and tuck you up in a minute - and sat by his wife, calmer now, stroking her hair. She pulled herself into his lap as if she was a cat, her arms thrown around his waist.
    He wanted to say so many things, but he was not a man given to long speeches, and everything he could think of seemed either pat or trite. Shared horror for Faye and Primrose? Yes, he'd loved them both, too, but they were grown women in the high-risk adventure business who'd knowingly put themselves in danger: that was their choice, not ours.
    That had Avi not heard about De Bonnard's work, here at Saint-Rogatien, he'd never have rescued the Tibestians? Possibly, but think of what would have happened had he not done this. The Tibestians and perhaps all the other hominid species might have perished without our even knowing it, which would have been a greater evil.
    That he and Jadis should not have followed their hunches? That would have been a disservice to science, and a worse evil still. Jack thought of Ginsberg Wang and regretted that Jadis hadn't met him.
    That they should not have followed their hearts? Inconceivable.
    However, it remained the case that their discoveries had changed the world more profoundly than anything since relativity, or evolution, or gravity, in which case Jadis was partly right -- that we cannot simply discover things and unleash them on the world without taking some measure of responsibility. That was something that would just have to be borne. There came to his mind a favourite line from Middlemarch, a book he'd read in the past few years and found - to his surprise -- greatly to his liking, partly because he saw in Jadis an echo of Dorothea. It was something about the greater good of the world being forged by unhistoric acts. And with that, Jack resolved to do what he could in the only way he knew how - by the mild, quiet and deliberate exercise of love.
    In the end Jack said nothing, but as so often happened, Jadis sensed the currents of his thought, sat up, parted her hair, and kissed him: her lips were swollen and warm, and tasted of tears.
    "Oh Darling Jack, I'm so sorry..."
    "Don't be, Snow Queen. And I have an idea." She smiled then through the tracks of her tears, so radiantly that Jack felt his heart might break. "I think," he continued, "that the Thing should go back to the Black Lagoon whence it came."
    She laughed. "But before you do that, you silly old lion..."
    The next day, Tom barged into his parents room to find them curled up like two spoons and fast asleep, even though the sun was climbing fast into a blue sky. Oh well, he thought, I can feed Fairbanks myself. On going downstairs he was puzzled to see the flexi-screen, rolled up and shoved into a black plastic bag outside the kitchen door.
   
    Chapter 12
   
    (April, 2034)
   
    What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
    John Keats - Ode on a Grecian Urn
   
    Shoshana Levinson shouldered her backpack and clambered wearily up the jetway. The six-hour journey crammed into a budget seat on the Stansted airship had been gruelling. She should have saved up and got the train, as everyone had advised. In the arrivals hall at Blagnac, she looked round at the small cluster of people, each one with face drawn, eyes expectant, waiting to see a friend or loved one emerge. A few - bored taxi drivers, mostly -- held up signs. Although some were in uniform, it was easy to make out the skeletally tall Pamir Kaptars, their cream-and-dirt-orange manes either shorn or pinned back in laughably vain attempts to make themselves look human. Not that one should ever laugh at a Kaptar, she thought, not after what they'd been through at the hands of the Khalifa. And especially if you didn't want your head bitten off. Or worse.
    She stopped, scanning the reception committee, and now that her mental search image had become attuned to fur and hair, her own committee became apparent. It was a tall, bronzed woman in a baggy sweatshirt, denim shorts and extremely aged sneakers, but distinguished mainly by an shaggy and unkempt mass of hair which reached down past her waist. It was dark brown - almost black - but here and there streaked with grey.
    At first Shoshana couldn't make out her face, until the woman tossed the hair from her eyes and stared at her with a gaze so dark and piercing that - just for a moment - Shoshana imagined herself in one of those anxiety nightmares in which you are looking for something, but in which everyone else is unable to help you, or to notice that you are naked. It was Jadis Markham, of course. Shoshana recognized her from innumerable news pictures, none of which had captured the instant and overwhelming intensity that hung about her like a cloud. But then Dr Markham smiled, and everything changed. The eyes lit up like firebrands, and but for the crows-feet, her face seemed to be that of a girl in her mid-twenties. Not at all like the serious, distinguished academic of fifty that Shoshana knew Dr Markham to be.
    "Shoshana Levinson? Lovely to meet you. Quick - let's get out of here. The car's parked illegally..."
    Shoshana hurried to keep up with Dr Markham's tall, easy strides. Nice legs, too, she thought, for a wrinkly.
    "Hop in," said Dr Markham, gunning the motor as Shoshana flung her pack in the back seat of the open-topped Toyota jeep and climbed aboard. It was great to have shed the load, and to feel the warm springtime breeze of France on her face and arms, the loose sleeves of her t-shirt flapping, blowing away the shrouds of miserable London with each passing mile.
    For a long time, Shoshana was too awed by her company to say anything. Jadis Markham was her heroine. She'd read about the fantastic discoveries at Souris Saint-Michel since she had been a little girl, and Jadis had been an inspiration for her even during her darkest hours - hours that had increased in both frequency and darkness until she'd made the final break from home. The fluke that had scraped her through the Cambridge entrance exam to read Analytic Archaeology, with a good but not spectacular diploma result, had a lot to do with that. She whispered a grateful prayer for the old-girl network, in which her college tutor had been a student of Professor Reynard at Cambridge: ("And by the way, Mathilde, I have a student who's bright but has had a hard time, could benefit from interview after the exam and also field experience in her gap year. Could you...?") Shoshana knew that Professor Reynard had been one of the very first people to see the underground city at Souris.
    She could not, of course, know that Mathilde's own life had been clouded by tragedy. Just six years into her stint in Nairobi, her beloved Eric had died in the most awful spasmodic agony, having succumbed to the new and lethal Naivasha-6 virus, probably contracted from contaminated blood during an operation for a ruptured appendix that had itself gone badly wrong. She counted herself lucky that had not caught this highly contagious disease herself - either that or any number of even more horrible diseases which, rumour had it, were stalking the bushlands. She'd heard some of the junior staff gossip about a curse that had struck distant relatives in remote villages - a curse that transformed the victims into some kind of black, inhuman monster. Such talk was easily dismissed as folk superstition, especially in these days of crisis, but after what had happened to poor Eric, she did wonder.
    Nairobi itself, wracked by shortages, disease and a flood of migrants from the increasingly lawless countryside, was no comfort. Mathilde had fled, at first to Jack and Jadis' farmhouse where by happy chance Domingo was visiting, and being a good Catholic herself, she was able to discuss her concerns with him in depth and detail. The sensation of spiritual healing, of absolution, of uplift, had been palpable. She thanked God for confessors as sensitive and as articulate as Domingo (because, honestly, you hardly know it, to look at him). In time, the Chair at Cambridge came up, and her application was successful. But for the rest of her life she would regard the farmhouse at Saint-Rogatien as a haven untouched by care or worry, and would recommend it most warmly to any promising student, even one as inexperienced as this Levinson girl. Nothing like a good start in life, Mathilde thought, and if Shoshana was as good as Jadis had been at the same age - eighteen, was it? - then she'd be fine.
    Mathilde had seen Shoshana at interview, much as Jadis saw her now. Sizing Shoshana up with a glance in the afternoon sunshine at Blagnac, Jadis' first thought was that she'd have to be careful in case she drove some of the male crew demented. Shoshana was hardly more than five feet tall even in trek-booted feet, but packed every inch of her frame with what Jack would have called `personality', before he started referring (as corroborative evidence) to Magdalenian mother goddesses and the more fleshly works of Titian. Jadis strongly suspected that Shoshana was well aware of her own appearance and its effects. She thought of Tom. No - no need for her to worry on Tom's account: he could handle himself quite well. He was in the middle of his second year at Cambridge with Mathilde, and had (according to her) broken a few hearts already. With his stocky, rugged good looks, matinée-idol French accent and permanent designer shades, he looked more like a rock star than a trainee archaeologist. No, Tom was more than capable of looking after himself.
    In fact, Jadis thought, as Tom was at Saint-Rogatien for the Easter recess, she might ask him to show Shoshana around. There had also been talk of Shoshana going to Israel in the summer as a volunteer on Avi's project, as Tom was also due to do. The fact that Shoshana had a smattering of Hebrew and had been to Israel already this year (according to her letter of recommendation) was a big factor in her favour - she could show Tom the ropes there as he would do for her at SSM. It could all work out rather well, but for one thing: Jadis wondered if Tom would be able to keep himself from showing Shoshana the latest and hitherto very secret discovery at SSM. She rather wanted Domingo to see it before anyone else outside the immediate team, because it was - well, puzzling. But Domingo had promised a visit soon, so perhaps it wouldn't hurt for Shoshana to get a sneak preview.
    Jadis' first instincts about Shoshana, her appearance and how she might exploit it, had been entirely correct. Shoshana had been raised an only child in a conventional Jewish household in North London. Although her parents belonged to an Orthodox synagogue, she went to a secular secondary school where she was very happy. And then came the day when, aged twelve, she'd returned home one Friday evening to find the mirrors turned to the wall, a blanket over the TV... and her mother in the kitchen in such distress that she was initially quite unable to talk.
    "Where's Dad?", she kept asking her mother, receiving no reply but shakes of the head and more tears. Only when Aunt Jess, her mother's sister, called a little later did she learn the full horror - Barry Levinson, aged fifty-three, moderately successful chartered accountant, loving husband of Myra and father of Shoshana, had been robbed and pushed under a tube train by assailants unknown. He had died two hours earlier from his injuries at the Royal Free Hospital.
    It was then that the nightmare started. Over the days and weeks, the full history of Barry Levinson's past came back to haunt Shoshana and her mother. They knew that he'd come from a rigidly Ultra-Orthodox background but had somehow escaped. He had gone to University as Baruch but re-emerged as Barry, joined a middle-of-the-road Orthodox congregation and did his best to avoid his more intolerant and intolerable relations. His Achilles heel was his brother Howie, with whom he'd started his business but who was now a sleeping partner. Shoshana loathed Uncle Howie, who had backslid into religious fundamentalism as his active interest in his brother's business waned - while still raking off a share of the profits.
    But Barry was dead, and the mishpoche scuttled like gaberdine-clad cockroaches out from under their stones with indecent haste. It was made clear to Myra that unless she married Howie, and Shoshana went to a decently Torah Jewish school and stopped hanging around with goyim - both demands made in accordance with what he felt was his religious obligation - he'd have to pull the plug from the business. Which, he didn't need to add, would require them to sell their home. What with death duties, and what Howie thought was reasonable recompense for the accountancy firm (which he'd have to wind up), this would leave Shoshana and Myra destitute. So Shoshana acquired a stepfather she hated, and who Myra feared. Shoshana suspected that Howie beat her mother - and worse - for all manner of infractions to do with modesty, decorum, kashrut, the list was endless. If her new school weren't bad enough - run by a load of creepy rabbis who didn't so much as teach the students as yell at them -- attendance at synagogue was compulsory every weekend. She remembered when her mother was forced to shave her hair and wear a wig, and how she'd looked so beaten, so defeated.
    Like most of her friends, Shoshana had had no reason to complain about the more tolerable strictures of her religion - it was part of her life. She had always been fascinated by the historical and cultural roots of Judaism, especially its antiquity. She'd enjoyed cheder each Sunday morning and was reasonably proficient at Hebrew, and it always amazed her that words like shemesh, meaning the sun, had been used continually and without change for more than three thousand years, the word having been used for the name of the Assyrian sun god: and yet the English she spoke in her everyday life had been recognizable as such for much less than a third that time. But the new régime at home and at her new school convinced her that whatever the glories of its history, the purpose of Judaism now was to say `no' to everything and generally to make life as miserable as possible. It was hardly her fault that this growing and understandable antipathy met the full force of her surging teenage hormones and her own fascination with her newly voluptuous figure - and the possibilities it offered.
    And so she became a rebel. Hardly a week would go by without a stern conference in the sitting room in which Howie - in Homburg and tzitzis - would berate Shoshana about the damage that her behaviour was doing to his reputation, and Shoshana shouting even more loudly that she couldn't give a flying fuck for his reputation, as he wasn't her Dad, and what the hell was he going to do about it anyway? Lay his tefillin even more tightly? Perhaps one day he'd do them a favour and strangle himself with them. At which she'd claw her way out of the house and not be seen until dawn. Shoshana's only worry - and who worried about such things when they're a teenager? - was what this was doing to her mother. But her mother had let herself be a doormat for this creep to trample on, so maybe she deserved what she got.
    The last straw came when Shoshana was expelled. They'd been on a school trip somewhere or another, and Shoshana (whose position in the school bus had moved ever backwards to match her plummeting academic, attendance and behaviour records) had apparently (and this was not in quite the roundabout form that her parents had been notified of the event) climbed into the back window and flashed her abundantly fabulous tits at the motorists following.
    The sitting-room conference was much as expected - Howie raging, Myra standing behind him, pale and anxious, and Shoshana swearing and storming out. But the result of her motorway escapade had caught up with her. Wherever she went that evening she was followed by boys from school - and other, less savoury characters - demanding that she `got her kit off for the lads'. Outside a pub at about ten thirty she was surrounded by a gang of men she didn't recognize, one of whom she'd only just manage to fight off, but others had started to remove belts, get out knives... when she was saved by a couple of cab drivers. One was her cousin, Frank, a burly ex-boxer who kept himself fit at the gym when he wasn't out cadging fares. The other was an eight-foot Kaptar who went by the name of Big George.
    "Hey, Suzy," said Frank, piling her into the back with Big George -- "you're getting into bad company." Big George made as much room for Shoshana as he could, but said nothing.
    "Piss off, Frank", she said, playfully - but her eyes sparkled with gratitude.
    "No, seriously, girl. You should wise up."
    "So what do you think I should do, Frank? You seem to know everything."
    "Do me a favour -- ditch that Dad of yours. I shouldn't be saying this, but that shlemiel, he's a loser. I'll never convince Myra, but you, you're a clever girl. Think about it."
    "Yeah, right". Shoshana felt that the domestic situation, while bad, wasn't something she could do much about. And whatever she thought about her Mum and her reaction to Howie -- akin to that of a rabbit about to be mown down by a truck -- she could hardly leave her. And in any case, where would she go? She was only just fifteen, had no qualifications, and with the way things were going, the chances of her acquiring any were slim and receding daily. Frank and George dropped her, still shaking, clothes torn, lip bloodied, at her front door.
    "Now listen," said Frank, hanging out of the window, motor humming: "I'll let you off the fare if you sharpen up. When you've got your exams, then you can wave those nice boobs whoever you want, but only if you think they deserve it. Okay?"
    Her chance of freedom came that very evening. It was Friday night and the house was totally dark, for Shabbat. The only sound came from the sitting room - smacks and small, choked yelps -- where through the open door she saw her mother's form, cowering on the floor, Howie standing over her, whipping her with his belt. Shoshana's blood went cold: her head cleared and she sprang into action. She got out her cellphone, burst into the room, snapped on the light and took several pictures. All Howie, hatted and bearded, could say was
    "Turn off that light - it's Shabbat!"
    After that things turned out better. Shoshana mailed the pictures to her own private webspace, and threatened Howie, then and there, that she'd release them if he didn't let her mother alone; if he didn't allow her to continue her education at a sixth-form diploma college; if he didn't stop her studying what he considered blasphemously Torah-threatening goy science - and if he didn't allow her to leave home as soon as convenient. Howie had no choice but to agree. The very next day, Shabbat be damned, she was living with her aunt Jess ("so relieved that you got out of that house, love, even though poor Myra...") and had taken cousin Frank's advice.
    Two years later she had got her diploma and scraped her entrance exam to Cambridge, the interview with Mathilde Reynard being the clincher. The day after the result came through, she told her mother to flee to a women's refuge or else, and released the pictures anyway: to the police, the News of the World and -- to Howie's chagrin -- the weekly newspaper that Howie and all his friends read, a self-appointed organ of smugly censorious Orthodoxy. Howie got fifteen years, and the tabloids had had a mild field day with the fiery, feisty (and notably busty) young woman whose testimony had done most to put him behind bars. Then, to kick off her gap year, she'd gone to visit Israel with some old friends from her cheder - and had been transformed. Her life was now set.
    Jadis didn't know very much of this, but what she picked up was that Shoshana was a strange mixture of knowing and naive, gauche and street. Perhaps she herself was like that at eighteen, but she had a feeling that Shoshana had escaped from something, whereas she, Jadis, had had a comfortable and happy childhood, with no baggage to shed. She resolved to do whatever she could for this young woman.
    Tom, for his part, had never been happier. He'd come home for Easter and was looking forward to his seasonal task - digging a bean trench for his mother, on her potager. Beans needed a lot of water and nutrients, and before they were planted, he had to dig a trench twenty feet long, three feet wide and two deep, fill it with compost and shredded paper ("Tom - I have boxes and boxes of old field reports!"), and backfill with the removed topsoil. The work was backbreaking, but after a term of study it was just what he needed to loosen himself up.
    But what he enjoyed most about this ritual task was the refreshing sensory symphony that accompanied it. The soil was heavy clay, but his mother had worked it diligently for almost thirty years, so it was now rich and loamy. He loved the pungent smell of wet earth each time he pushed his spade into it, turning it - a smell, he thought, of the promise of growth coiled up tight and just waiting to burst forth. He loved the feel of the well-rotted compost as he crumbled it through his fingers. He loved the angular plosh and plash of the water as it hit the shredded paper, the gurgle as it soaked in. And all this against a background of breeze and birdsong. The only thing he missed - still missed -- was the shuffling swish and pad of a golden retriever following him up the garden, the contented `harumph' as the dog subsided onto the grass next to him - but his childhood companion had died when he was ten. Fairbanks' grave was somewhere over there, beyond the spinney, the retriever himself having long since made his contribution to the regional soil structure.
    So that's what Tom was doing as evening fell, when his mother brought home a gap-year student who wanted a little field experience. He knew that his parents were deluged with such requests, so he reasoned that this one must have been a bit special to get through the screening. Perhaps the fact that she was going up to his own department had something to do with it. His mother and Professor Reynard had always been close.
    Not that Cambridge was anything like it had been when his parents had been there, as far as he could judge. They seemed reluctant to tell him much. Jack had just looked distant, as if lost in a dream. His mother either changed the subject or, if he'd pressed the point, said something to the effect that he'd soon find out for himself.
    Tom's suspicions had been entirely correct: by the 2030s, Cambridge was not half the place it had been at the turn of the millennium. The smaller and less well-endowed colleges were closing, and because the town depended on its colleges, Cambridge itself was shrinking. There were two reasons for this, the first being a precipitous decline in revenue from the admission of foreign students. Prosperous countries in East Asia and the Americas now tended to educate their children within their own borders. The African market had all but dried up, the death-knell being the collapse of Nigeria in 2019, before the two-pronged advance of the Khalifa and the Sahara desert.
    Climate change was indeed starting to have marked effects on the global economy. A combination of international carbon treaties (too little, too late) and shortages of oil meant that long-haul jet travel had ceased to become routine, except for the super-rich and business people with generous expense allowances. Fewer travellers meant fewer foreign students and tourists, tipping Cambridge further into decline. The droves of Japanese tourists who once crowded King's Parade and Trinity Street, weighed down by their Pentaxes, became small flocks and then stopped altogether.
    Even had students and visitors continued to arrive in Cambridge as they had a few decades earlier, climate change would still have left its mark. Although Cambridge had always been a chilly place, the winters of the past decade had been harsh even by East Anglian standards. A dramatic season of storms each November presaged Arctic blizzards, a frozen Cam and snow on the ground continuously until April. After a brief Spring, late May onwards would be lived in a furnace blast of alien heat, making the exam season all but intolerable.
    And if his lecturers and fellow natural-sciences students were to be believed, the Autumn storm-surge season built on rising surface temperatures in the North Sea. With the consequent expansion of seawater, the grain prairies around the Wash were inundated each November, ruining all winter wheat and making the land too wet and salty to cultivate. After the rains came the big freeze. Even cold-tolerant Manitoba and salt-hardened `Sahelized' wheat cultivars failed to thrive as dikes and drains were regularly overtopped. Some ambitious farmers switched to salt-hardened rice varieties, but after a couple of years the land became too salty even for these.
    In the end, enormous acreages of East Anglia had been abandoned to fen and salt marsh, undoing more than a thousand years of careful reclamation in less than twenty. The coastline from Skegness to Blakeney in North Norfolk had become a vague and fickle thing, an uncertain merger of land, sea, and big, big sky. King's Lynn had been evacuated and abandoned, Boston was once again a sea port, and the interior almost as far as Peterborough was dotted with half-submerged villages and the long-forgotten calls of bitterns.
    The students had changed, too. The regular crowd was punctuated with traditional garb of all sorts, not just from the young sultans and princelings of the Khalifa. You could occasionally spot a Kaptar, one of the Almai or the various Sulawesians, even a Sasquatch, and there were rumoured to be a couple of Menehune at Christ's: the hominids had come to town. Tom was fascinated by all this diversity: he intended to study them in greater depth, someday. For tens of thousands of years, Homo sapiens had thought himself the only species on Earth capable of holding a conversation. But now there were so many different sorts of human, some of whom had been distinct species for far longer than dear old Hom. sap. What opportunities might this variety not present for a comparative anthropologist? That, thought Tom, was where his career path should be headed, though he'd not said as much as yet to his parents. He'd never yet seen a Tibestian - these were pretty much all in Israel. But he was going to Israel this summer to work with Professor Malkeinu. He thought he'd heard his parents say that this new gap-year student had planned to do that to, ("and maybe Tom could look out for her?") So maybe he'd see one then. Thus happily occupied, Tom went on with his work.
    Tom heard the thrum and scrunch of the jeep as it hit the gravel drive. He stretched, feeling his back muscles snap back into place, and, walking in through the arrière-cuisine and out through the kitchen door, he went to greet his mother and the newcomer. He sensed the quick, decided steps of his mother as she alighted, the swish of her hair and her sharp smell. But there was a new and intriguing odour, too - yeasty, buttery, almost like - what was it? - cinnamon? -- and in any case quite definitely female. Tom had been around women all his life - the majority of his parents' colleagues were women; mostly young, all of them intelligent, many highly sexed and some very interested in Tom. But he'd remained aloof: without consciously being aware of it, he was wary of forming any attachments on his parents' home turf. Cambridge was a another matter. Once free from the apron-strings of home, he found himself endlessly fascinated by women: their compelling odours, intriguing shapes, and most of all, by their quite unbelievable textures. That women seemed equally fascinated by him offered plenty of scope for experience and experimentation.
    But this one seemed somehow different, even in a world where every woman was, to Tom, so gloriously different from every other. To be presented with such an example on his parents' own doorstep seemed to break a taboo. Then, she spoke - "Hi, Tom! Great to meet you" - a voice that was full of contradictory contrasts. It was full of laughter and yet seemed rough and strained at the edges -- almost distorted by an ugly accent he couldn't place -- these corners bracketing a warm and appealing smoothness that seemed incongruous.
    He felt a strong urge to remove his shades, but vision was something he generally only used for corroboration. He found that he was never able to trust his eyes as primary sources of evidence, so he tended to keep his almost impenetrably opaque mirror shades on, even at night. Women found this more alluring, somehow. Some women, anyway. So he always made a big fuss and feature of his shades, always choosing the trendiest designer labels he could afford. And in any case, he found that even a small exposure to sunlight hurt his eyes. But this time - this time - he thought he had to make an exception. The odours and sounds seemed so varied and - well, interesting - that he just had to see for himself how they would all merge together. And so he took of his shades, squinted for a few moments in the still-bright evening light, and accommodated his eyes to a view that would change his life.
    About half way through the journey, Shoshana and Jadis had begun to converse, at first in a rather stilted manner, but then with increasing animation. Shoshana was awed and shy, but it was plain that Jadis wasn't going to go out of her way to make it any easier. Shoshana had resigned herself to this. After all, Dr Markham did have a reputation as sharp and frosty as her first name. But as they progressed, Jadis would turn to her passenger, bestowing on her a series of increasingly lovely smiles, which Shoshana interpreted as encouragement, as if they were just two girls together, in the mood to share confidences. Perhaps, she thought, here was someone who didn't say much unless it was worth saying. If so, this was a refreshing contrast to her own Jewish upbringing, counterpointed as it had been by incessant talk, whether conspiratorial, loving, angry, sad, lamenting, catty, barbed, reproachful, sarcastic, gossipy, joyful or just everyday. She'd never met anyone who'd had the restraint to say nothing, as a default option. But her upbringing got the better of her, and she gave way to an overwhelming urge to fill the void with a confessional stream in which Jadis was given perhaps a fuller account of Shoshana's life than she'd intended to vouchsafe, and was left in no doubt about what Shoshana thought about it and where it was going.
    Jadis learned about how Shoshana's recent horrific experience of Judaism had been transformed by her trip to Jerusalem that winter, in which she'd shaken off her old cheder companions and went exploring on her own. How she had seen so many different kinds of Judaism, and other religions and peoples, all muddling along in a city so ancient that history just dripped from every crevice. She'd seen the western wall, but had also visited the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, preserving the last footprint of Mohammed before he ascended to heaven on the great beast Al-Buraq. She'd marvelled at the crazy warren that was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in which each Christian denomination had its own jealously guarded corner ("and the poor Copts are banished to the roof, with the washing!") She had followed a troupe of Niger-Coast pilgrims as they walked the Stations of the Cross. It was all, she said, quite wonderful.
    In the course of this, her own pilgrimage, the anger she'd felt at her upbringing was distilled into a kind of sadness at how narrow it had been, and how the people imposing the narrowness seemed to have lost all perception of the joys of their heritage. Their relentlessly precise codification of Judaism had squeezed out all possibility of challenge or inquiry, so that Judaism was preserved simply for the sake of preservation, as if it had no other contribution to make. Rather than rage, she now felt regret for her stepfather and his ilk, about how they had walled themselves into a ghetto without hope of rescue.
    On hearing all this, Jadis made no comment but could not help but think nostalgically of Avi and his long discussions with Domingo, and more generally of the Dream Team of 2011, and how Shoshana seemed to have some of the flair and grit that had made that crew so special. She was now convinced that here was somebody who would be well able to take care of herself in Israel, and help Tom along if he needed it. And also that here was a girl full of pluck and life who deserved every encouragement. As they turned off the lane and bounced up the drive to the farmhouse, Jadis turned to Shoshana, smiled warmly, touched her hand and said,
    "Welcome to the team, Shoshana. I hope you'll like it here. Ah! Here's Tom!"
    As the jeep pulled to a halt in the courtyard, Shoshana saw a young man clad in scruffy khaki Bermuda shorts and a faded but still lurid Hawai'ian shirt that seemed several dozen sizes too big for him. His large hands were stained with dirt; his skin was as brown as teak, his black hair was very thick and stuck up in peaks like a meringue silhouette, and on his face he wore mirror shades and a smile as big as his mother's. Everyone's at it, thought Shoshana - looks like one happy, hippy place to be. Thus buoyed by the sudden warmth of their welcome, she couldn't help but laugh a little as she said:
    "Hi, Tom! Great to meet you".
    She leaped from the passenger seat and found, now that she was facing him, that although he seemed stocky and well-muscled, he wasn't very much taller than she was.
    Then Tom took off his shades - an act that Jadis seemed to find hugely amusing.
    "Tom", she said, her voice full of smiling, suppressed mirth: "meet Shoshana. Can you show her around? Make sure she finds her room?"
    "Sure, Maman, d'accord," Tom replied distractedly as Jadis hurried inside, his eyes fixed on Shoshana. "So, you're Shoshana!"
    Shoshana had the weirdest feeling that an insect might have had if pinned to a cork board by an entomologist, and finding, much to its surprise, that it enjoyed the experience. She gazed back at Tom's curious, unblinking cat-like gaze, and his sunny, easy-going smile. As she did so, she couldn't help but smile back: her own eyes widened, and Tom saw that they were big, round and the deepest blue, a colour so dark that they were almost purple, fathomless and full of intelligence. These were eyes that could swallow you whole. It took all of a quarter of a second for Tom to examine the rest of her. She had a long nose, a rather wide mouth, full lips and quite a lot of teeth, some at curious angles. Her skin - her skin? - this was the source of the lovely smell he'd sensed as the jeep arrived. How would you describe it? It looked just as flawlessly buttery as it smelled, was all he could think of. Her hair was long and straight and the very darkest shade of blonde, the colour of wild honey, smelled like freshly made bread with a hint of salt, and there seemed to be a lot of it, rather like his mother, in negative. Tom put his shades back on, held both hands out to Shoshana and said - "Viens!" Her hands were dry and slim and gripped his firmly, full of resolution.
    Tom led Shoshana round the farmhouse, delighting in showing her every last nook and cranny, and making sure she knew where her room was in relation to the bathroom, the stairs and so on. "Just come and go whenever you want," he'd said. "It's your home." Her room was a small but comfortable nook with a view over the front yard, containing a double bed, a stripped pine chest with a mirror on top of it, a bookcase with a lamp and a pile of books and magazines, and a bentwood chair. The wallpaper had a cheerful floral pattern but was spotted and peeling in places: lived-in and relaxed without being luxurious. Most of the rest of the rooms seemed to have been variously used as store rooms, offices and bedrooms, or a debatable mixture of all three. There were books everywhere - unceremoniously stuffed into bookcases, littering tables, piled in tottering stacks on the floor, wedged into doors, even in the bathroom. This was a house in which books were meant to be read and used.
    At one end of a long, broad corridor hung with torn hessian ("Aïe! Ils sont Les Horribles! - I hope you don't mind cats! In this house they are everywhere!") was a large, open space with two windows overlooking the back garden. In the centre stood a two huge and well-worn oak desks, facing each other, with computer monitors on smaller tables to either side. More bookshelves lined the walls, crammed not just with books, but papers, boxes, stone tools, chunks of ancient masonry and all kinds of equipment, spilling on to the floor in untidy drifts. More papers were piled high on the desks themselves. Battered steel filing cabinets, drawers half open, disgorged further paperwork.
    "This is the office," said Tom, "where my parents do some of their thinking. Let me show you where they do the rest of it. Come!"
    So Tom showed her the kitchen - a crazy mixture of a room that seemed to be part study, part greenhouse, part garden shed, with only the range, a sink and a corner of a worktop to betray any culinary activity. This was where Jadis seemed to do most of her actual work, (rather than in the study, which is where she just dumped it); and the sitting room, where an enormous and utterly hideous sofa, its upholstery ripped and stained, stood before a broad fireplace, its grate heaped with logs, more logs stacked haphazardly in the alcoves. A strange picture of two fighting cats hung above a mantelpiece crowded with framed prints of Tom and several other people Shoshana didn't recognize, including a golden retriever and a very large and breathtakingly ugly man who seemed to share Tom's fondness for loud shirts. Shoshana pointed at the picture above the fireplace -
    "More horrible cats?"
    Tom smiled. Shoshana was awed - this crazy, untidy house was where it had all happened, where Jack Corstorphine and Jadis Markham had changed the face of human history. It was as if she was being given a tour of Einstein's office, or Faraday's laboratory - or, perhaps most of all, Down House, the big, rambling country home where Charles Darwin had thought about evolution and raised a family in one big, joyful mess. She was confused, elated, but most of all, tired, and looked at Tom with a smile that conveyed all this to him in a split instant,
    "Shoshana, I'm so sorry," he said. "You're worn out. I haven't even asked if you're thirsty. Would you like some tea? Tiens - why don't you go upstairs, wash up, have a lie down, I'll bring you some tea." Shoshana didn't know whether to laugh, cry, to say yes or no - but Tom looked at her and smiled again - "vas t'en, go! I'll bring your things up with me."
    Shoshana made her way up the broad, creaking wooden stairs, tottered to her room, kicked off her boots and collapsed on to her bed. The candlewick bedspread and duvet beneath swelled up around her in a cool embrace. She felt as if all her batteries had expired at once, and now closed her eyes. She hadn't slept at all on the flight - her memories of this morning were a dawn rush as Aunt Jess had pushed her on the Stansted Shuttle from Liverpool Street, the constant taking-off and putting-on-again of her rucksack during the innumerable security checks ... the endless flight in which, unable to sleep, she'd seen three films but couldn't remember anything about any of them ... and now, here, at this strange but special farmhouse that exuded a casual happiness.
    And her guide, Tom? Funny, but even though she'd seen him less than two minutes ago she couldn't quite picture him. Not because she didn't want to - in contrast, she startled herself by her desire to recall every aspect of him - but because he seemed so utterly different from anyone she'd ever met, including Jadis Markham herself. To be sure, her experience was largely limited to the young and mostly Jewish men she'd known since she was a girl, most of whom seemed pallid, predictable, serious and most of all utterly weighted and freighted with the tribal baggage of millennia, a load which they'd only seek to pass on to her, if she got too close. Tom seemed like a free spirit, like Peter Pan, who could soar into the sky on a whim and go wherever he wanted, do whatever he liked, and if she wanted to come with, well, great - and if she didn't, that was great, too.
    She'd always known what to do with men, how to use them, how to manipulate them. It was easy, she'd thought, because all that men had ever done on first meeting her was look down at her tits, their gaze rarely straying thenceforth. Tom had instantly confounded this well-used and almost instinctive strategy. He'd looked at her face, constantly. Well, by `looked' - she wondered if he'd really seen anything. His eyes were strange, huge, green like the sea, slightly cat-like, unfathomable. In contrast, he'd seemed more focussed when he'd had his shades on, and his eyes were obscured. And yet she'd felt that he'd looked right through her. No, not like he'd undressed her with his eyes like all those schmucks from home, but something more genuinely appreciative, respectful, making her want to undress herself for him, at her own pleasure, rather than his. Was that right? No, she couldn't put it into words. She was too confused. Too tired.
    Tom fumbled up the stairs with a tea-tray. What a jerk he was being, dragging this girl round the house like he was a six-year-old wanting to show it all off. How could he have lost it so badly? There he was, parading her round the place, with her following him like some golden glow, muted by her own tiredness. He'd known lots of girls - lots of them - he had, in truth, got well into double figures within his first year at Cambridge - but Shoshana was as different as he'd thought she might be. To be sure, all the Cambridge girls were tough and self-assured, but Shoshana seemed just as tough as they were and she hadn't even got to Cambridge yet.
    But here was the contrast, and why he was so flustered, so confused. To appreciate Shoshana he'd had to use his eyes. This put him, as far as he was concerned, on thin ice, in new and dangerous territory. When Tom and his friends went chasing girls, he noticed that some of his friends invariably chose blondes, whereas others usually went for Asian girls, or redheads, or women with big boobs, or long legs, or whatever. To Tom it seemed unusually restrictive to base one's choice on categories defined by vision which, to him, couldn't be trusted as a modality on its own. To Tom's friends, his own choice of women seemed eclectic, even eccentric, but this was because he never chose them by sight, but by a private combination of well-honed senses too refined and subtle to be understood by those born as slaves to vision. But with Shoshana he felt that he had been forced to open his eyes, and because of this, he would be at a disadvantage. As he reached the top of the stairs, he felt that Shoshana Levinson had done what no other woman had achieved. She had penetrated his eyes and was setting up residence in his soul.
    It was enough trying to carry her rucksack (slung in the crook of an elbow) and manhandle two mugs of tea on a tray up the stairs without being assailed by these confusing cross-currents. Damn, he hadn't asked if she wanted milk - he'd made it black with lemon and sugar. Oh well, perhaps too late now. He knocked at the door with his booted foot. A tiny voice from within bid him enter. As the door opened she rose from the bed in a single fluid, curved movement that raised all kinds of smells - the dust from an unused room; newly washed sheets; a cat that had been hiding (unbeknownst to Shoshana) under the bed; fly paper; but most of all her own odour, accented by exhaustion but salted with relief, relaxation and something else - exultation? Wordlessly, she took the tea-tray from him, putting it on the chest of drawers, allowing him to drop the rucksack.
    As he rose she was standing before him, an expression of intensity and determination, eyes wide open, lips slightly parted in concentration - and before he knew it, she'd reached up and, very precisely and slowly, removed his shades. All he saw were her purple eyes, focussed on his, and her lips as they approached, her eyes closing as they made contact, her arms reaching round his back and up inside his shirt. Her lips parted more fully, her tongue pressing gently between his own, flickering, probing, asking, demanding, and finally acquiescing as he came to his senses, embracing her in response. Lost as he was in the breathless cosmos of her kiss, he felt the live pressure of her body against his, the pound and flutter of her heart, the contours of her breasts against his chest.
    They parted, briefly, and she exhaled a breath - a sigh -- of Muscat and warm October honey. Although still embracing like a pair of Brancusi statues, they looked at each other's faces, not quite believing what they had found in the other. For Tom, no longer afraid to see, she was beginning to make sense. Her expression was something like revelation. Looking back at her, his own eyes widened, his face broadening into a smile of understanding: quand le coup de foudre frappe...
    She pressed herself closer to him, grasping on to him more firmly, but rather than kiss him again, she buried her head beneath his chin, as if to say that now she'd arrived, she'd never leave again. He moved his right hand, tracing it up the line of her spine to the nape of her neck, feeling every ridge of her backbone, every hair, until his fingers met the rich, glossy hair on her head, stroking it, feeling the strands separate and part and drop through his fingers. She looked up at him again, eyes now slightly moist. "Hey, now..." he said, before she kissed him once more, just a short demonstrative peck, fluster all over now, normal service resumed.
    "Thanks for the tea, Tom - I'm bushed. I think I really will have that lie down, now." Her eyes lost their focus, as holding his hands, she lowered herself onto the bed.
    "Of course, Shoshana - of course! Sleep well!"
    Tom was in a daze and could hardly remember what he did or where he was for the next hour or so until Jadis called him into the kitchen to say that dinner was almost ready, and could he call Shoshana?
    Shoshana - the tingle of her lips on his, that strange expression of her eyes, the press of her warm curves, the peculiar, gut-fluttering sensation of coming home - even though home was where he was! Wasn't he?
    "Tom - you're miles away!" said his mother, a knowingly playful glint in one eye peeking from beneath loose strands of hair. She remembered Jack looking rather like that.... When was it? It seemed so long ago now: it was the day she'd learned of her final exam results. Oh, poor Tom. Perhaps he couldn't be relied on to look after himself after all.
    The following day started early, and soon they were bowling along towards Aurignac, Jack driving, Jadis shotgun, hair flying; Tom and Shoshana in the back. Jadis kept looking round at her son and the new gap-year student, playing a game with herself to see if she could catch them holding hands. That they clearly wanted to was painfully, instantly obvious. Dinner the previous night had been a strange business: Shoshana clearly didn't know where to put herself, contorted expressions replacing one another on her full lips faster than the speed of thought, her eyes trying very hard not to gaze at Tom with a curious mixture of supplication and proprietorial watchfulness (and failing). Tom could always retreat behind his shades - but hang on, where were they? She recalled that he hadn't worn them all evening. Unused to the etiquette of naked-eye expression, Tom was staring longingly at Shoshana as much as he could. No wonder Shoshana looked like she was just emerging from the shower to be doorstepped by a phalanx of press photographers.
    Later that evening, on their sofa, Jadis found that the drama had conjured in Jack the same reminiscences that it had in her.
    "Oh, Snow Queen, were we really like that?"
    "What do you mean, were, you silly old lion?" came the reply, Jadis - resting as ever with her back against the nearly supine Jack -- pulling his hands closely around her, pressing them onto her breasts. He leaned forward and nipped her ear.
    "Be careful what you wish for, Snow Queen - the Old Boy still has some lead in his pencil."
    "Grrrr!" she teased, eyes closing - "promises, promises".
    Within a minute she had begun to snore softly, under the blanket of her own grey-streaked hair. Jack, who was now completely grey, marvelled - not for the first time - about how his wife seemed like a different woman every day, yet somehow always the same. She had thickened around the hips, although her legs were still lovely and long. Her breasts had changed shape in all kinds of ways that he couldn't quite summarize. Her skin was not quite as perfectly soft as it once had been. But, he reflected, the more they both aged, the more he saw in his wife not this recent escapee from the menopause, but the eighteen-year-old who'd made love to him in a dell one summer in the morning of the world. Where was it? He could hardly remember the location. Recalling the date would be an effort. But he could remember her touch and her taste as if it were today. And even now, her eyes were as dark and as full of unquenchable, inexhaustible life as ever they were.
    Rattling down the lanes in the jeep, Jadis turned away from Tom and Shoshana, now that her game was over (Tom had finally grasped Shoshana's hand, and she had returned it with a smile of total worship, now quite oblivious to anyone or anything else) and was catapulted into her own thoughts. Eighteen months ago, on the day that she and Jack had seen Tom off at Blagnac for his first term in Cambridge, they'd returned to the house looking forward to having the place to themselves at last. But on the way home from the airport she had felt progressively more nauseous, so that by the time they got home she'd felt clammy, hot and headachey, and she was unable to do anything other than lie motionless in Jack's arms and - unusually for her - actively complain of being ill.
    Her health fluttered up and down for several months until she'd finally admitted defeat and went to the doctor, who looked her up and down critically before asking her age. This puzzled Jadis - Doctor Makembe had been her physician for almost twenty years, and knew perfectly well how old she was.
    "Jadis," said the doctor, "we're none of us as young as we like to think we are."
    Jadis was puzzled. What was the doctor getting at? In her mind she was always eighteen and had just met Jack.
    "Jadis - Jadis? Are you listening? You have to face facts. You're fifty years old. There is nothing wrong with you but the menopause. It hits us all, God help us." Dr Makembe raised her eyes to heaven. She'd just gone through it herself. "But with an implant I shall now prescribe you'll escape the worst of it and be right as rain again, eh?"
    The truth dawned on Jadis only very slowly. Menopause? Fifty? Where had it all gone? But the implant had taken the edge off the horrible cocktail of misery, the sweats, the feelings of anxiety, the dreadful nightmares edged with blood and a pulse forever receding into the background but maddeningly never quite fading away. Her love for Jack remained as strong as ever, but their lovemaking had changed - as intense as it always was, but stretched out. It had undergone a phase change, a definite break, as if the menopause had been a September storm that separated the ferocity of summer from the slow-burning days of autumn. Funny though, she still felt like a young girl. Although she had heard from Mathilde that Tom was quite the heartbreaker (the pair of them giggled on the phone like two teenagers) it had taken the physical reality of her son, plainly helplessly in love, to make her feel old. No, she didn't mind - it was all rather sweet, really - and in some ways, positive. She had always lived life one day at a time, not worrying much about the future and not caring greatly about the immediate past. But Shoshana's arrival and its effects on Tom had made her see her whole life all at once, as if spread before her like a map. Jack had always been there, of course, a constant like the sky or the sea, but the landscape itself was marked with the milestones of discovery. And it struck her with some force that Jack had first taken her to Souris Saint-Michel twenty-three years ago: she had spent almost half her life exploring it. And now they were going to look at perhaps the greatest discovery of all - and the most worrying. So worrying, in fact, that Jadis was beginning to think she should keep it a secret forever.
    Shoshana's first view of Souris Saint-Michel was of a parking lot full of tourist coaches. Between the parking lot and the lake stood a graceful, low-rise building that contained the visitor centre, restaurant and shop: for the wonder of the age had become a tourist attraction. From the parking lot, visitors would board a robotic vehicle that would take them, thirty at a time, into the city, round a preset course and back again. They would see the Great Pyramid and hear about its human sacrifices; parade down the Champs Elysées, past the Hexagon where a series of nameless and still-inexplicable rites had been practiced (Avi Malkeinu had seen signs of similar ones under Mount Carmel, but was equally mystified) - and into the Place de la Concorde, with its immense granite obelisk marking a thousand graves, each body clad from head to foot in exquisitely wrought flint-plate armour.
    The two-hour circuit would, it had to be said, leave the visitor more mystified coming out than going in. There had been many lost cities that would match Souris Saint-Michel in grandeur, even in scale - Teotihuacan, Imperial Xi'an, Minoan Knossos -- but even if one could not grasp the purposes of their monuments, one was always reassured to know that such things might one day be fathomable by virtue of the fact that their builders were human. With Souris Saint-Michel this reassurance dropped away beneath one's feet like the trapdoor beneath the hanged man, leaving one with a sense of vertiginous unease, almost of terror.
    Compounding the mystery was the fact that despite all the mapping, despite the years logging every centimetre of the city over its thirty-seven square kilometres, the team had found not a single recognizable work of art, and no sign of writing or record-keeping of any kind. No inscriptions, no engravings - nothing.
    Now that the city had been charted to its full areal extent, Jadis had started on a new tack - digging downwards, excavating test pits beneath selected buildings and in certain streets. It wasn't long before she realized that SSM was much older than anyone had guessed.
    Jadis had always assumed that the city had been built around 40,000 years ago, when modern humans invaded Europe, forcing the almost unimaginably ancient Neanderthal and pre-Neanderthal civilization underground. Within a few months of the new project, Jadis had to confront the scale of her error. The city she had mapped was the latest of no fewer than fifteen cities, built one on top of the other, and even then, there were signs of earlier, pre-urban occupation. The deepest level beneath the pit known gnomically as TP255-9-2A, dug in the graveyard next to the Great Pyramid, was capped by a stalagmite layer laid down three and a half million years ago - meaning that the level itself was even older.
    The Nature paper reporting this finding ("The extreme antiquity of the earliest occupation layers at Souris Saint-Michel" by Jadis L. Markham, Mathilde Reynard, A. Y. Malkeinu, John A. Corstorphine and thirty-eight others) was initially greeted with scepticism. Jadis found it hard to accommodate the fact that some people simply refused to believe her findings. She raged and fumed until the age was confirmed by three separate, independent teams of experts. But the conclusion was clear. Someone, or something, had lived in this cavern more or less continually from just before 25,000 years ago back to a time when no humans or indeed any known species of hominid had ventured out of Africa. And for those hominids in Africa itself, cities would be a dream beyond imagining, because for these creatures the first chipped pebble still lay a million years in the future.
    This is why the latest discovery at pit TP255-9-2A was still a secret, and why Jadis really wanted Domingo to see it before she made any announcement. For the first time in her life, she felt she needed some kind of religious counsellor.
    Jack drove the jeep across the car park and through the gate towards the cave itself, greeting the security guard with a wave. The road into Souris Saint-Michel was broad, smooth and brightly lit. Shoshana could hardly imagine what it must have been like when Jack, Jadis, Mathilde and the others had first walked through the pitch-black tunnels into the unknown. Tom could imagine this more clearly, as his first trips to SSM had been in darkness anyway. The road narrowed - Jack had to stop at a signal to led a robo-train pass - until, widening again, it swept them up to a broad viewpoint, where the full extent of the illuminated city could be seen. To Shoshana, the lights seemed to stretch forever to the left and right, as if she were in a small plane coming in to land over a big city at night. She had seen this view many times, of course - it was the poster that had adorned every student bedroom for the past twenty years - but the real thing was eerie, ominous.
    "Don't worry, Shoshana," said Jack, sensing her unease. "It's something to do with the lack of echo. When we first got here, it gave us the willies, didn't it?"
    He turned to Jadis as he said this: she was quite still in her seat, reaching out to hold Jack's hand.
    Jack swung the jeep down to the left, so that the descended a long, broad ramp that took them into the city itself, past two more robo-trains and several groups of scientists, some of whom waved cheerfully as they drove along the Avenue Gaston de Bonnard to the foot of the Great Pyramid itself. Looking up from its base at its entire illuminated immensity, Shoshana was initially unable to grasp its scale until she glimpsed, on the very edge of sight, a few motes at its apex - and realized that they were archaeologists working at the summit platform.
    "Everyone out!" said Jack, and they followed him towards the large plastic tent that covered much of the graveyard area. The tent, illuminated from within, looked like a giant Chinese lantern. Inside it was a hive of activity, both human and mechanical: a guard handed them all hard hats with emergency headlamps, and Jack and Jadis stopped several times to chat to the various surveying and digging teams. They all knew Tom of course, and some of them - particularly the younger women - gave Shoshana what she thought were rather resentful looks.
    In the centre of the tent was a pit about three meters square.
    "I hope you're not scared of heights," warned Jadis to Shoshana, as they boarded an old-fashioned miners' cage mounted in one corner of the pit. Jadis pressed the start button and they descended for what seemed like several minutes down a shaft whose sides were clearly demarcated into distinct layers. Many were marked with coloured tags, indicating artefacts, bones or buried structures for later investigation. The tags were densely placed in the upper layers, becoming progressively sparser as they descended further into the Earth. Shoshana felt that she was losing all sense of time and space. Even though she was wearing a fleece borrowed from Jadis, she started to shiver - Tom put a reassuring arm around her, and she pulled closer into him. She thought she'd known enough about this site to be prepared for the vastness of it, but the reality was an almost nightmarish shock.
    The bottom - two hundred and five meters beneath the cemetery floor -- was a blank three-meter square of hard-rock floor. Jack explained that they were standing on the controversial but continuous layer of three-point-five-million-year-old stalagmite that covered the deepest layer of SSM yet found. In the corner of the square opposite to the cage was what looked like an upturned crate. Jadis now walked towards this with a curious expression that mixed determination and excitement, as if worried that what she might find beneath the crate might be different from what she had found beneath it last time - or even of hope, that it might somehow be different.
    For she remembered the day two months ago when a survey team had called her down to look at something interesting beneath a slight mound in the flowstone layer - a large block of granite that had been shaped with curious accuracy for something so old. Indeed, to have found granite here at all was itself unusual. When the flowstone had been removed, Jadis and the three surveyors stood back aghast. First, because of the high polish of the perfectly smooth, flat, grey surface of the rock: a polish that implied purpose, and a high degree of technical skill.
    And second, because the rock bore the first and only inscription found at Souris Saint-Michel.
   
    Chapter 13
   
    (July 2034)
   
    Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
    There is no speech or language, where their voice is not heard.
    Psalms 19, 2-3
   
    The journey to Israel had been even longer than Shoshana had imagined possible. After all, she and he small gang of old cheder friends had managed it perfectly well on a scheduled El-Al turboprop just the previous winter, and were at Ben Gurion just seven hours after leaving Gatwick. This time - only a few months later - it was as if they'd been thrown back to the earliest days of air travel. And, contrary to popular belief, she'd thought, it had been anything but romantic. Or would have been, had Tom not been there with her.
    First had been the budget turboprop that had meant to go from Toulouse to Athens, but had been diverted to Brindisi. Weather conditions had been blamed: the desert winds that scoured the Sahara had been taking unusual northward turns of late, dumping vast tonnages of sand in the Mediterranean and posing a real threat to aircraft, some of which had been literally sandblasted out of the sky. This particular wind had sent a tongue right up the Adriatic, preventing the crossing to Greece. The plane took off again after twenty hours on the ground. This meant an enforced rest wherever they could find a spot in the crowded, overcooked airport, and a tiny allowance for food grudgingly doled out by the airline.
    Things wouldn't get very much better next day, after they'd hopped from Brindisi to Athens. Their connections now all in disarray, they'd finally managed to squeeze on to a 19-seat prop to Ben Gurion, but this had to make an emergency stop in Nicosia where they were once again grounded overnight. As he told Shoshana later, Tom thought that one of the passengers had looked ill and had been behaving strangely, furtively, disappearing rather often into the toilet cubicle. When the stewardess finally broke down the door, her screams of terror would have been sufficient to have grounded the aircraft all on their own. None of the passengers knew what was going on, and were told no more. Suffice it to say that screens were raised, the plane landed and the passenger was removed from the plane in a hail and scream of sirens. After another hour of uncertainty, Tom and Shoshana and all the other seventy or so passengers were escorted off the plane and put up in hotels.
    "No, we don't know what was wrong with the passenger, either", said the airline agent at Nicosia, trying not to make eye contact, especially not with Tom - "but we were told not to use that plane again." She sighed, having explained this a dozen times already. "This means we'll have to charter another one from somewhere. We'll take you to a hotel and call you in the morning. I'm sorry, that's really all I can say. Okay?"
    The final hop to Ben Gurion on a rickety old DC3 that ought to have been in a museum passed, thankfully, without incident. Tom was cradled in Shoshana's lap (just like the big tomcat he is, she thought, fingers running through his thick, untameable hair), and didn't see that the plane had acquired a pair of IDF Elijah jets to escort it down. Shoshana was grateful for this attention - she remembered something similar on her last flight here. Air traffic into Israel had come under increasing threat from the Khalifa. So far it had just been routine saber-rattling, but one never knew when this posturing might acquire real teeth. And so, two and a half days late, they touched down in the land of Shoshana's remote ancestors in the afternoon sunshine, and as they stepped out of the air-conditioned prop and into the smoggy fug of Israel's coastal plain, Shoshana felt as if somebody had dropped a hot, wet blanket on her head.
    When Tom saw Avi at the gate, he dropped his rucksack right there, rushed towards him, embracing him as enthusiastically as a small child might have, and as strongly as a cursed mariner whose albatross has finally been excised, beyond expectation or hope. Parting, they looked at each other, the broad smiles and shining eyes betraying a love and trust from which Shoshana had, temporarily, been excluded. Not that this was in any way intentional. Avi had been a frequent visitor to the farmhouse throughout Tom's childhood, and what with his open and playful demeanour, Avi had become, for Tom, a kind of elder brother, or long-lost favourite Uncle, and someone he loved to be around.
    Joshing and punching each other for joy, they started jabbering excitedly to each other in French too fast for Shoshana to pick up any more than one word in ten, until, as one man, they turned to look at her: Avi, a broad grin in a handsome, brown face under tight, grey curls, and Tom -
    "Shoshana, I'm so sorry, it was very rude of me. It's just, well, it's Avi, it's been so long, and..."
    Shoshana threw a mock-punch at him - Tom play-acted the stunned victim, staggering about - and she turned to Avi, shook his hand, and addressed him in passable Hebrew. Avi's expression became serious, appreciative, and he answered in the same language,
    "You are most welcome, Shoshana. But what's a nice girl like you doing with a schmuck like him?"
    She'd heard from Jadis that Avi had once been a ladies' man, but that he was now sternly, fiercely and firmly married: Jadis could never help snorting with mirth whenever she thought of it, recovering her composure long enough to peep skittishly from beneath her hair and say that Avi only ever referred to his wife as "The Ballbreaker." Shoshana was always slightly shocked by all this - Avi was almost as great a hero to her as Jadis had been her heroine. But when he met the man in person, she realized that Jadis had been right all along (of course). Even our heroes are human beings, just like us. Avi looked like a big kid. She could see why he and Tom got on so well together: they made a good pair of Lost Boys who'd sail off on an adventure together without a second thought, and Wendy would just have to trail along as best she could.
    Not that she had any intention of giving up. Now that Shoshana and Avi were chatting in Hebrew - for all that it was far less fluent and easy than Tom and Avi's rapid-fire French -- it was Tom's turn to affect confusion, looking to Shoshana and then to Avi and back again as if they were Martians. Eventually the three of them ended up in a three-cornered embrace. Avi became suddenly and acutely conscious of the perfect smoothness of Shoshana's arms, her slender hands, the curve of a full breast brushing and yielding against his shirt, and even tiny details, such as the way her skin dimpled in the crook of her elbow. Phew! He knew that Tom had a reputation to maintain, from what Jadis and Mathilde had said, but this one -- she was quite something. And Jewish, too.
    He made an effort, with supreme concentration, to think of his wife. Her thunderous expressions of disapproval? That wouldn't do it: not enough to take his gaze from the spray of broad freckles across this girl's butter-cream shoulders and neck; her long, glossy hair; her broad mouth with its odd assortment of teeth whose haphazard pattern seemed somehow instantly engaging; her big blue eyes, and (wow!) that fabulous figure, which he'd defy any man to say that its very sight didn't make his fingers (and other places) itch. Okay, so, fair enough, his wife's cooking? Not bad, but still not half as good as his grandmother's, may she rest in peace. He knew there was a reason he'd eventually consented, twenty years ago (was it really twenty years? -- he could have sworn it was thirty) to get tied down. Ah yes, his wife was good in bed. Perhaps too good. Terrific, in fact: three times a night for more than two decades, with a matinée on Shabbat. Whew! No wonder he always walked around like John Wayne. That, and because she preferred to let her uzi do the talking. Could only ever be my Rivka, he thought, and the romance of military weddings. He smiled more broadly still:
    "Come," he said, "we have a long way to go before nightfall. And I regret it won't be comfortable."
    Just outside the terminal building they had to wait for only a few minutes before a green army pickup squealed to the kerb, driven by a woman in fatigues as green as the jeep, who leaned out of the cab and blasted Avi with jagged and guttural shards of what sounded like abuse, in fluent Arabic. Avi turned to Tom and Shoshana.
    "Sorry, what with all the flight delays, this was all I could sign out from the Army at short notice - you'll have to pile in back, I'm afraid. I have business to sort out ... er ... upfront." He looked slightly embarrassed. "I'll explain later, yes? But you have to hurry! We don't want a taxi marshal to book us for stopping too long kerbside".
    Too tired and puzzled to remonstrate, Tom hauled their bags to the back of the truck, up on to the footplate and beneath the canvas. He helped Shoshana inside: the windowless interior was baking hot. The bench seats on either side were entirely occupied with wooden boxes containing a strange assortment of goods. One had burlap sacks; another was full to overflowing with lettuces; a third contained a jumble of greased and grimy car-mechanics' tools. Two uzis were scattered just behind the drivers cab. But what took up most of the space were about a dozen truly vast, green-striped watermelons, wedged under the bench seats.
    The only concession to comfort was a filthy, stained mattress spread out on the floor. Being the only available space for them and their luggage, they stretched out on it together, wedged in between their rucksacks and the watermelons, perforce in each others' arms. And so they lay there, looking into each other's faces, sharing each other's hot breath, and laughing at the invisible but animated, frequently heated and occasionally violent conversation emanating from the driver's cab as the truck lurched crazily out of the airport and hooked into the highway towards Tel Aviv and thence Haifa.
    There were also some long silences - one in particular when the truck pulled to the side of the highway for reasons that neither Tom nor Shoshana could immediately identify. Shoshana put her ear to the metal of the cab, beckoning to Tom to keep silent. Her eyes were sparkling with mischief when she resumed her spot beside him.
    "I think I know what they're doing..." she said, conspiratorially.
    "What?" asked Tom, puzzled.
    "This", she replied - embracing him tightly and kissing him - initially with some force until she felt he'd really got the message, before subsiding into a hot, lengthy, loving and yearning finish. He drew her head beneath his chin so she could rest against him, cradling her head in his hands, hers clasped round his waist. Exhausted from the trip, Tom dropped off to sleep. Shoshana envied him his ability to catnap more or less anywhere, at no notice, leaving her to brood.
    The long journey had given her plenty of time to analyze and review her feelings for Tom, and to marvel at how far they had come in so short a time. When she met Tom - when was it? Just three months ago? -- she had been no stranger to men, or to sex. In fact, she thought, she'd probably had far too much of both, which was something she now regretted. But what had first perplexed her most was that with Tom, uniquely, she was no longer in control - even though he made no demands on her whatsoever - and, more perplexing, was that this was something she welcomed, craved, even.
    She'd always had men exactly where she wanted them, and had begun to use them rather cynically, picking them up and dropping them when it suited her. To be sure, there had been downsides. The first few boyfriends she ditched usually followed her around anyway like lost dogs. Some of the later ones became petulant to the point of violence, and occasionally beyond it. She had come to regard sex in much the same utilitarian way, and with few exceptions, she hadn't enjoyed it very much more than any other pleasurable experience, such as - say - going shopping with a girlfriend. On reflection, she thought this rather sad, and this thought alone pulled her up short: that before she'd come to the farmhouse, she thought that her life, while miserable in many ways, was the kind of life that most people learned to expect and took for granted.
    It was only when she'd met Jadis and seen how happy she was, married to the solid, dependable Jack, who plainly adored her, even though they'd been together practically since dinosaurs walked the earth, that Shoshana had any way to calibrate her own experience. Her teenage years had been lived in an atmosphere of brutal repression, and although she had known this to be true at the time, these same years had been the backdrop to her adolescence and puberty, and had done much to shape her character. She told herself that by using men as things she would not end up an abused house-mouse like her mother, but in seeking the other extreme, she now feared she ran the risk of ending up in substantially the same place as her poor, meek mother had done - beaten, and alone. The kind of romance she saw in Jack and Jadis, lived in an easy and carefree style, bound by respect, trust and love freely given and accepted -- and certainly without the constant worry about rules, demarcation and the strictures of religious duty -- was, she thought, only to be found in slushy TV dramas. But now she knew that it could really happen, and that she could be a part of it, if she wanted.
    And with Jack and Jadis there came an added bonus prize - Tom - who had forced her to rethink everything she'd ever thought she knew about men and sex. Here was a man utterly different from any she'd ever met. He was a free spirit, not easily tied down: she had the impression that he'd slept with at least as many women as she had with men, but with one crucial difference. Whereas she used men as a means to an end, Tom loved women simply for what they were. Because of this, his lovemaking, while earthy, was always courtly, respectful - perhaps a little old-fashioned, in that he always seemed to care very deeply about her own satisfaction, before his. And this was vitally important for Shoshana, who until she met Tom had not quite realized that her desire for conquest was fuelled by a need for sexual satisfaction for which, the more she strove to achieve it, the more it remained out of reach - and because of this, sex became more an act of politics than of love.
    But there was another thing, too. Tom, having been raised in an atmosphere overflowing with love, gave his love without expectation of return. It was this, as well as his obvious consideration for her (which he would have thought of, if he'd thought of it at all, as simple good manners) that had evoked a response in her that was far more than reflexive or mechanical. She felt that she wanted to demonstrate her feelings for him likewise without thought of any recompense, but simply because he was there, and she felt like it. Because she loved him.
    She'd known this instinctively within a few minutes of first meeting him, when with a casual smile he'd removed all her defences and rendered all her usual stratagems at naught. But it had taken her much longer to admit it to herself, to fight her way through to this conclusion, past a host of snares and demons.
    The first two weeks at Saint-Rogatien, before Tom had to return to Cambridge for what was still called the Trinity Term, had been exciting as well as deeply frustrating. They rose early each day and had too little time for confidences: Tom rode off with Jack to the GW Campus the other side of Aurignac, where he was learning about laboratory techniques for handling ancient DNA.
    The Neanderthal skeletons at SSM represented the single biggest source of high-quality ancient DNA from any species anywhere in the world, and now that Jadis had opened up significant time depth, the team was beginning to shed light on Neanderthal genomic evolution over the course of hundreds of thousands of years in detail unprecedented for any species.
    Shoshana accompanied Jadis to SSM itself. Jadis felt that Shoshana, as a school-leaver, should get more of a general flavour of an archaeological site rather than learn anything particular in any depth. After three or four days, Jadis felt that she could bounce ideas off Shoshana, who had the interesting combination of obvious intelligence and curiosity with no more knowledge than an interested outsider. As such, Jadis felt that she could be an honest sounding-board.
    And so she put Shoshana on the spot - what should she do with the inscription at the bottom of the pit? Should she publish it? Shoshana was initially flustered and a little embarrassed to be asked such a thing - that she, less than a week on the job, should be quizzed by the greatest living archaeologist on a discovery that could change the world. But Jadis didn't seem to be playing games. It was as if Jadis really did want to know, much as her Aunt Jess and (more pointedly) her mother seemed to be relying more and more on Shoshana to make important decisions about their finances, their living arrangements - their very lives.
    So Shoshana reviewed the evidence as she saw it, Jadis at the wheel, listening quietly while concentrating on the road ahead.
    "Well, first, it's an artefact," started Shoshana: "the inscription can't be natural." Her mouth had gone dry. She licked her lips and for a fleeting instance imagined Tom before her, his eyes staring intently back at her. She smiled at the vision.
    "Go on," said Jadis -"You're doing fine."
    "The age - that's interesting. It is clearly more than three-point-five million years old. Bottom line - it's a mystery." Tom's imaginary eyes stared back at her from the inside of the windshield. They smiled. Before Jadis could prompt her she asked, almost rhetorically: "so what would I do about it? If you're asking me, I'd do nothing: keep it a secret."
    "Why should I do that?" asked Jadis, who felt the same way, but was genuinely intrigued to learn Shoshana's answer: as a scientific ingénue, her views were likely to be more honest than those of Jadis' immediate academic peers. It was what Jack always called the `Emperor's-New-Clothes Effect'.
    "Because ... well, because the whole thing just sounds completely crazy." Shoshana thought she'd gone too far, but Jadis only smiled at her, willing her on.
    "The inscription isn't natural," Shoshana continued, "so somebody must have made it." She swallowed, forcing her nerves back down her gullet. "But who?" The first hominids in Europe that made tools lived a lot later, maybe two million years ago? Max?" Shoshana was beginning to think she'd been trapped into some kind of oral exam.
    "Keep going," encouraged Jadis, "so what does it all mean?"
    "It means that you have ... " she hesitated ... "you can have no idea who made this artefact, not even a single suggestion. Apart from aliens! That's why, if it were down to me, I'd keep schtum until we knew more about hominid history. Maybe you could get some clues from the bones and other stuff in the lower layers you've been digging out? But I don't know anything, and you're, well, you're..."
    "Shoshana, don't worry," said Jadis: "I won't bite. This isn't a trick question, and I really am interested in your opinion. And for what it's worth, I agree with you. I'll keep quiet. At least for now." Jadis thought about the misery she'd suffered when she'd had to bear much criticism, some of it unpleasant, from people who refused to believe that the lowest layer of SSM was as old as it evidently appeared to be. Perhaps she'd been spoiled by success, she thought - everything for her and Jack had been so easy, they'd had it all on a plate. But to announce an artefact of this age now, without further context, would be to court ridicule.
    What's more, Shoshana hadn't even touched on the significant point that this was the first inscription of any kind found at SSM. Or even what the inscription itself might mean. Oh, she wished she could ask Domingo, but as a Cardinal now more or less permanently at the Vatican his diary was, inevitably, always full.
    But what Shoshana really wanted to talk about was Tom, although she knew that this was the very last subject she'd broach. Jadis knew perfectly well, at least from what she'd seen of Tom, that he and Shoshana had formed an attachment, and although she tried to conjure up some feeling of parental anguish, she found that she could not. Even though her head told her that Tom was now a grown-up and would have to follow his own star, and that any effort that she'd be likely to make to influence it in one way or another would almost certainly backfire, she felt that her heart should be more censorious, more rebellious - but it wasn't. Was this because Tom wasn't her biological offspring? Ridiculous! No, she thought, decidedly and instantly, it's because Jack and I found each other in much the same circumstances, at about the same age. Somehow we just knew. And neither of us even let our parents have a look-in, not even about the wedding. She had a feeling that her mother (who was still alive, and in a nursing home in Godalming, and whom she visited far too rarely) had never really forgiven her for that. So she could hardly expect to come the stern and disapproving parent with her own son. In any case, whatever she might have felt about Tom's love life was probably irrelevant.
    Shoshana's thoughts were more clouded. She'd known Tom hardly a week, but her heart was racing ahead, careering out of her knowledge and control, and this was disturbing. She wanted to ask why, apart from that first kiss (which she'd initiated), he'd remained nothing more than polite. Warm and smiling, to be sure, but also just a shade uneasy in her company - even though his eyes, when uncovered, were on her constantly. It was agonizing, and she was dying to ask Tom what his feelings were, but if there really were a spell, she didn't want to break it; and in any case she felt she didn't know Tom at all well enough to put such things into words in case they might be misinterpreted. (She was too young to know that most people, even in marriages of half a century, have similar doubts from time to time.)
    Now, were Tom any other man, she'd simply have shrugged off all these worries and got on with her life. But the simple fact was that he had already won her, conquered her, had he but known it: the question was whether she should just declare unconditional surrender (in other words, just show him), or let himself work it out on his own. No - the way he looked at her was clue enough that he had worked it out, but why was he so hesitant? Could it be because he didn't want to come on to her in his parents' house? Maybe, but he hadn't had the chance to take her anywhere else. Or perhaps he already had a girlfriend, and was trying to spare her feelings by toughing it out until he got back to Cambridge? This was entirely possible, and the realization made her recoil in anguish. How could she not have thought of this before? And so the first week continued, her eyes exposed to the wonders of the ancient world at first hand; her heart in misery and doubt.
    She couldn't go on like this, she felt, as the second week drew on, and Tom was due to return to Cambridge at the end of the third, and then she'd be stuck here for eight more weeks, marooned, still in search of resolution. It would be intolerable. Some answers came when Tom came to her room with a cup of tea early one Sunday morning, and, putting the tea down on the chest of drawers, sat on the edge of the bed, pulled her up to him and, without a word, returning her kiss of their first evening together. Parting, he said:
    "I've an idea. I'm really sorry I haven't showed you around at all - we've just been so busy. So let's go for a picnic. Just you and me? A date?"
    Although this was just what she'd been hoping for, her own feelings surprised her. Men asked her on dates all the time. Sometimes she agreed, sometimes she didn't, and quite often she agreed but later on found something more interesting to do instead. This time she felt she was a little girl again and her Dad (her real Dad) had given her a present she'd always wanted, or had taken her to some fabulous place, like the park, or the zoo, just the two of them. So the tears that now started in her eyes as she sat up and embraced Tom were partly of joy, and partly of regret, for she knew in that moment how much physical affection she'd been missing, for years on end: and that she'd finally traversed a parched desert into which she'd effectively been banished the moment she'd heard that her Dad had died.
    So they raided the kitchen for bread, cheese, fruit and wine, and Tom drove them to a byway just outside Marciac that led to a small lake of clear blue with an idyllic, secluded, sandy beach. They made camp on the beach, eating and drinking as much as was possible between holding hands and kissing. Where Tom had been hesitant, he was now demonstrative: Shoshana decided not to inquire about Tom's seeming change of heart, and to enjoy what would turn out to be a memorable day for them both. After they'd eaten, Tom stripped down to his shorts and, inscrutable behind his shades, stretched out in the strong spring sunshine. Shoshana, lying next to him, hesitantly ran her fingertips over his taut, brown and almost hairless chest.
    He turned to her and kissed her again, and then did something completely unexpected, for, quite suddenly, he got up, said "Alors - time for a swim!" and ran full tilt into the lake. She felt that she had no option but to follow him: she dropped her shorts and chased after him, laughing, catching up with him in the water, and finding not a man, but a maelstrom of splashing and noise. He drenched her, ducked her, pulled her under, laughing all the while - and she did the same to him - until, just as suddenly, they stopped and were close together, quiet in each other's close embrace, up to their necks in water.
    Shoshana's long t-shirt had ridden up and was floating around her neck like a sodden scarf. Tom amazed himself that he had not previously noticed the curves of her figure, so entranced had he been by her smell. Now this was doused by the water, he became aware of her fullness, her bare breasts pressed against him, and how beautiful they were. As her mouth sought his, he felt her nipples against his chest, each as hard, big and round as a coat button. He ran his fingers up and down the curve of her spine, tracing the fleshy roundness of her broad hips, letting his hand slide beneath the waistband of her bikini bottoms, and feeling himself harden. Shoshana felt his pressure against her thigh and, emboldened, reached down to unzip his fly as best she could, tracing her fingers along his shaft, languidly exploring every vein, every ridge, every corrugation. It could have been the water, it could have been the strange position they were in, but she was convinced he was huge, at least as big as any man she'd encountered.
    "Where are we going to put all this?" she teased, but privately wondering whether it was, in fact, possible.
    She hoped she hadn't been too brazen, hadn't put him off: but to Tom, the flutter of her fingertips on his cock, all unseen under the water, had been the most exquisite sensation, and he knew that he wanted her. But if their first encounter was to be here, in the lake, it had to be hors-d'oeuvres only. Sensing she might be disappointed if he stopped kissing her, stopped loving her, just at this moment, he drew her close and whispered in her ear -
    "Shoshana, I want you. Really. I'm sorry, we're always so busy, but I want us to spend time together, properly." So he turned to kiss her once more, and as he did so, he slid his fingers into her bikini bottoms, caressed the curled, springy fur inside and touched her very gently between her legs, just for the briefest moment, but as he did so she closed her eyes and sighed, parted from him and rested her head on his shoulder. He took her by the hand and led her from the lake. As they emerged he noticed that her smile was wide and beatific, her eyes were round and innocent and huge, and were for him only. They pierced his heart.
    They walked back to the jeep for towels to dry themselves, or at least to sit on as they drove home. Shoshana felt ecstatic with anticipation: she could hardly keep her hands off him, and as they drove, she had to restrain herself from unzipping his fly again so she could at least have a good look - and a touch, and a taste - of the wonders within. It took half an hour for them to arrive back at the farmhouse, and as they approached, Shoshana worried that their escapade would be instantly apparent from their damp clothes (which had, in any case, dried in the sun and wind) if it weren't written all over their faces. But Tom didn't seem to be worried at all, and as they arrived, Jadis came into the yard to greet them. Shoshana was grateful that she didn't ask them about their picnic, as she was clearly bursting with news of her own.
    "Domingo just called," she told Tom. "He's in the area, and he's coming for supper. Isn't that wonderful?"
    Domingo arrived on cue along with Jack, just as Jadis was dishing up a farmhouse supper of new loaves, cheese, pâté and pickles. Jadis hugged the huge man even before he'd had a chance to cross