Chapter 41
Chapter
I set Ajax on the ground, then lifted my skirts and ran.
Ajax made a frustrated caw.
“Well, keep up, then,” I called over my shoulder.
I swear he understood me. I glanced back as Ajax cocked his head, as if he were considering a new idea. He took a few, quick steps. Then he stopped, stretched out his forelimbs and wings with them, and pushed off from the ground in a powerful leap.
“Henry—Henry, look,” I gasped, and stopped abruptly.
But Henry didn’t manage to slow. He was too close behind.
With a cry of alarm, he wrapped an arm around my waist and spun, as if he were trying to fling me aside.
But instead he landed flat on his back in the grass, the wind knocked from his lungs, and I fell atop him, our legs tangled together, my hand still on his chest where I’d tried to stop him short.
We lay there in a daze as the pterodactyl soared overhead.
“My God. He’s flying. He’s doing it.”
I was already drafting my note. Pterodactyls are capable of flapping flight, like birds, and bats. They launch themselves from standing with a mighty leap and generate lift with their wings, to—
Oh. Henry’s arm was stuck in the crook of mine, and as he moved, it brushed against my breast. I looked down from the sky, from the flapping wings on the wind, and swallowed hard.
The weight of my body was on his. If I laid down my head, it would rest on his chest.
The rings of his irises were silver in the sunlight. There was something urgent in the look of them. He lifted a hand and brushed his knuckles across my cheekbone. A sharp pain and then a pleasant tingle slipped down the back of my neck, like the brush of a feather.
“You’re hurt,” he said softly.
“I’m fine.” I jerked away, clambering to my feet. I dabbed at the small cut on my cheek. Only a scratch. “Probably your damn buttons.”
But one second more and he would have kissed me, I was sure of it. And would that have been so terrible?
Exclamations and shouts drifted up the hill on the wind. They’d seen Ajax flying.
“Come on,” I said gruffly, as I extended an arm to Henry. He flashed a grin and reached out toward my face.
I caught my breath, but he only plucked a bit of grass from my hair.
“Wouldn’t want to give anyone any inappropriate ideas,” he teased, and I glowered.
It was tight quarters in the cavern, our bodies squeezed together as we craned our necks to peer into the pocket chamber at the back, waiting turns to see the body.
I chose a spot far from Henry, on the other side of Mantell and Conybeare.
I’d tried to leave Ajax with Catherine, but he’d thrown such an enormous fit, I eventually let him follow.
He was mostly behaving himself now, investigating the nooks and crannies of the cave.
Goldsmild had found the bones, so by tradition, he would claim the honor of first inspection.
“It’s a pelvis, as I thought,” he called through the gap. “And I suspect a femur, too.”
We all spoke over one another.
“Is there sign of a skull?”
“Male, or female?”
“Adult, or child?”
“Are there any other shells? Or beads?”
“Can’t be sure. Can’t be sure,” Goldsmild said. He was on hands and knees in the small, dark cave, running a brush gently over the bit of now-exposed bone protruding from the earth.
“Get him some more light,” Buckland instructed.
Conybeare passed in another reliq-lamp, and Goldsmild angled it above the skeleton so the pale light flooded the floor.
“It’ll take a long while to get her out,” he said. “We’ll need to go about it slowly, so as not to damage the bone.”
“Yes, or…” Henry crouched and reached through the doorway, handing over a small belemnite. “We could have her out rather quickly.”
Goldsmild frowned a moment, then nodded. He tucked the manifold reliq under his shirt and then knelt to press his hands to the earth around the bones.
The cave was tomb-silent as we held even our breath, waiting to see what magic Goldsmild would work with Henry’s manifold reliq.
The ground began to tremble. Conybeare yelped and grabbed my arm, then let go just as quickly, as if my delicate lady-flesh had scorched his palm. I smiled primly. Ajax squawked and ran to me, huddling between my legs.
I bent to touch his head comfortingly. The ground continued to quake, but delicately, like an old man’s quivering hand.
Inside the small hole, pebbles loosened, and rose, tremulously, into the air. They drifted, a gentle, upside-down snowfall, toward the ceiling over Goldsmild, and hovered there. His head was still bowed, back arched in concentration.
“My God,” Mantell whispered, speaking for us all.
More sediment and stone followed, shaking itself loose to pebbles and rising, like a rusted fog from the ochre-iron in the stone. And more followed, the earth carving itself from the ancient stone and peeling away from the bones.
Goldsmild crawled toward us, and we helped him through the gap as the rest of the cave floor inverted itself to settle on the ceiling instead. We waited with awe and impatience.
And then it was done. Now, through the small black archway, was a pit, a hollow, and the bones.
A naked skull. Arms. Scattered finger bones. The curve of a pelvis. Rounded, cracked ribs. It was whole, nearly perfect. If there were any bones missing, I couldn’t tell. The body was laid out straight; whoever they were, they’d been put here after death, not caught in a rockslide or flood.
Tucked among and round the body were two more mammoth tusks, and a scrap of iron that might have been a blade. More beads, shells, and clay, scattered across the floor.
It was, in a word, extraordinary. Here before us was a complete human fossil and…well, I couldn’t even think of another skeleton like it, in England or abroad. Even Ajax’s discovery was only a footnote, next to this.
Treasures beyond treasures, laid out as if on a table, and the covering sheet pulled back. Goldsmild had unveiled every secret in the cave in less than a hundred heartbeats. Hours—days—weeks of work, finished in moments.
There was no light on Henry’s face, but I knew his eyes would be bright with triumph if there were. His manifold reliqs had proved their worth once again.
We were all still, held by the spell of awe. Buckland broke free first. He knelt and peered into the pocket cave.
“Let Mary,” Henry said quietly, but firmly. I frowned. Goldsmild should still have led, by rights. Buckland hesitated before he turned around, but then said, simply, “All right,” and moved aside as I came forward.
The roof of the smaller chamber was now only a few inches higher than the doorway we’d made. I had to sit and slide a bit, bumping down the sloping wall, then landed ungracefully in the lower chamber.
“You stay put,” I said to Ajax, as he made to try and follow. He gave me a disgruntled look, but folded his wings and obeyed.
The air smelled metallic, of churned, iron-rich earth. I was careful to avoid the artifacts as I crawled over to the skeleton and knelt beside the skull.
The tableau told a story clear as words.
They’d been a leader. A woman, I thought, from the many beads—probably once strands of a necklace, or a crown.
A queen, maybe. Young, judging by the state of the many teeth still in her skull.
Someone respected, and beloved. I imagined the mourners, weeping as they laid her to rest.
I imagined her face, serene in death, closed lids and limp body as a lover laid her down and wept into her long, plaited hair.
I imagined the reliq across her breast, her arms folded to hold it close.
I could see them, in flickering firelight, tearstained faces as they laid down their huntress-queen.
I touched the skull, my palm round on the crest of her brow, and it was warm.
I gasped and pulled back, catching my wrist with my other hand.
Not a woman. He had been a man. A hunter. I saw a flash of him, dark-eyed and tall, when I touched it. That was impossible. Wasn’t it? But the tingle rolled down my arm, the thread of life. If I tugged, if only I pulled—
Except I knew what would happen.
It was one thing to keep a sea snail in a tank, to watch it live and die behind glass.
It was one thing, even, to keep an ammonite—despite those dark and knowing eyes, the ammonite was still a simple creature of instinct.
And Ajax was not so simple a beast, but I perfectly understood why he was caged, even if I didn’t like it.
Still, as I grasped the man’s skull, I couldn’t help but think of the ammonites and salamanders, dead on the sand of their tanks.
I wouldn’t wish that life, or death, on any creature. Not an ammonite or salamander, and certainly not a human.
His soul was with God. If I woke him now, would I tear him from that blissful rest only to see him caged?
“Mary?” Henry asked eagerly, and I knew what he was really asking—a question only I could hear. Could I reanimate it?
“Well, I think he was actually a male,” I said quickly, to cover my odd hesitation. “From the shape of the pelvis.”
I caught Henry’s eye and shook my head quickly as I pulled my hand away, the tingle retreating down my arm.