The Lost Goddess

4

“Jesus, Ghislaine?”

The large dark shadow was illuminated: she could see Ghislaine’s white face. He had flicked on his flashlight when he heard her scream.

“Ghislaine!” Her heart was still thumping, protesting. “What the fuck are you doing, creeping around down here in the dark?”

He came closer. His dark leather clothes squeaked, slightly, in the moist air of the cavern.

“Miss Kerrigan, calm down. There was no light, I was concerned: I thought Annika was working down here. With you.” His face was gray, and indistinct behind his torch. “Where is Annika?”

Julia felt her trembling subside — very slowly. It was just Ghislaine. Just Ghislaine Quoinelles, just her boss. Yet her terror had been very real: the dark shape, looming down the cave passage, so big. Like an animal. Maybe she had spent too long reading the local legends, the werewolf on the Margeride, la Bête de Gévaudan. The beasts and the skulls and the overwhelming darkness.

The mutilated skulls.

She spoke, urgently: “Annika is at home. She’s got a cold. She’s fine.”

“But the light? What happened to your light?”

Julia knelt and picked up her helmet — which she had dropped in her panic. “I guess I just forgot — and the battery ran dead. See?” She tapped the headlamp glass. “The battery’s flat. Totally dead. But, Professor. I had a reason to be distracted.”

“Yes?”

“I believe I have found something. At last.”

A glint of sly brightness lurked in his expression, like an old philanderer gazing at another ingenue actress.

“Show me.”

They crouched together, down and along the stone corridor. Julia held the torch aloft as Ghislaine moved closer still and leaned to scrutinize her discoveries. He lifted the skull with his large white hands.

“Oui, oui. I see. Yesss…. Yes, I see. Of course….”

Ghislaine was kneeling so close to her, she could sense his body heat in the chilliness. The smell of his leather clothes was distinct, and pungent. What was it with the leather clothes? Ghislaine Quoinelles dressed thirty or maybe forty years too young. Today’s leather jacket and leather jeans combination was especially risible. His haircut was the normal drugstore-black pompadour. Ridiculous.

Hunching herself against the cold as they knelt in the dirt of the dimly lit cavern, Julia wondered if she was being hard on Ghislaine, letting her anger at his foolishly creepy approach infect her thoughts. But why had he been creeping around like that? Maybe he was just looking out for her? He was a pretty strange man.

She knew a little of his background. She knew that Ghislaine had been something important a long time ago, a student revolutionary, a soixante-huitard: an upper-class leader of the leftish student rebels in the socially turbulent Paris of 1968. Indeed, she’d been shown black-and-white pictures of him — shown them by Annika — grainy shots of a handsome Ghislaine in Paris leading the kids, photos of him in sit-ins, interviews with him in Le Monde, profiles of him alongside Danny the Red and other famous young radicals.

So he had once been a tall and cerebral young Communist — in a country that worshipped daring and sexy intellectuals. Once he had been in possession of an exquisite future. Now he was, somewhat mysteriously, an aging professor in a remote part of the country doing an obscure job on the periphery of French archaeology: and perhaps the absurdly young clothes were Ghislaine’s way of holding on to the better part of his life, when he had been haloed by fame, when his hair wasn’t stupid.

A hint of pity for Ghislaine stung at Julia, in the cold of the cave. She wanted not to dislike him. She didn’t like disliking people. Such a waste of time. And someone must have loved him, once.

Besides, she needed his approval of her find. That’s how it worked in France: she needed his say so to make this her project, to secure her rights to her own discovery, to quarantine the cave until she could return next season and investigate further; then she could write a paper and make her name. Or at least, begin to make her name. And this was maybe her best chance. Ever.

“What do you think, Ghislaine?”

“Wait. Please. La patience est amère, mais son fruit est doux.”

Another agonizing pause. He was scrutinizing one of the wounded neck bones, and the arrow flint cruelly embedded between the vertebrae. At last he turned. The thick hair was very black on his large, white, gesturing hands.

“The skull, it is obviously male. Yes, yes. But the skeletons…” Ghislaine hesitated, and took out his eyeglass to once more scrutinize the neck bone. Then he stood. Abruptly.

“I am finished, Miss Kerrigan.” With a beckoning signal, he retreated into the higher, wider part of the cave. “Yes, it is quite an interesting discovery. Quite interesting, but…”

“But what?” Julia quelled her rising sense of panic. Surely Ghislaine could see the extraordinariness of her find?

With his expensive German pen, he pointed down and along, at the wholly disinterred skull. “You see? These trephinations are moderately common in this region, and this era. The Gorge of the Tarn, and the grottos in the Causse Méjean, they have yielded similar fruit. We see this quite a lot.”

“But the wounded children, the flints? Professor?”

“Eh. They are typique.”

“Typical? Typical?? I’ve never seen anything like this and—”

“Please. Calm down. We can talk on the Cham. The cave is… unpleasant.”

His reply was polite, yet somehow sharp. Ghislaine turned and walked toward the ladder. She watched his bulk as he ascended the steel rungs, to the winds and skies of the plateau. Supplicant and pleading, she followed. What exactly was Ghislaine doing? What was he saying? Was she going to get the chance to exploit her find? As they reached the surface, Ghislaine put a hand in his leather pocket. For his cell phone.

The twilight air was cold and dank, almost colder than the cave. Julia gazed about. The dark forests of the Cévennes stretched away beneath them, rolling down to the very distant coast. A crackle of lightning flashed in the east; black Luftwaffes of clouds were rolling in, scudding over the gravely sober stones of the Cham des Bondons.

Ghislaine was on his phone, chattering away in quick, cultivated, impenetrably Parisian French. Julia walked a few yards away, tuning out. Waiting nervously for the final verdict. What was happening? Ghislaine must see the relevance, the importance, of her discovery. For all his superciliousness, his oleaginous bullying, he was a smart man, he spoke so many languages; he spoke very good English — which Julia appreciated, as she was embarrassed by her own poor, probably Québécois-inflected French.

Tense, she waited, as patiently as she could, as Ghislaine strode this way and that in the drizzle.

The professor had finished his phone call. She waited for him to speak: to pronounce. To turn and smile his sickly smile, and say Bien sur. You are right, this is the most interesting find of the season.

But instead, he shrugged, and tutted, and turned — and started marching straight to his car, parked on the road by an abandoned farmhouse. Just visible in the gloom.

The rain was falling harder, persistent and annoying. Half frantic, Julia pursued her boss. She had to know. Her heartbeat matched her excitement. She stammered:

“Ghislaine, sir, I mean, Professor—please. I need to know. Can I do the next season? Can I? Please? I am sure there is something here. The bones, the skulls. That is OK, isn’t it? I have ideas. I know you think this is typical but really, really I do have an idea and—”

He swiveled. There was a look on his face she had never seen before. Contempt. Not the laughable pomposity or the risible vanity of before. Contempt. He snapped.

“The crania will be taken tomorrow, and the skeletons. There are museums that can accommodate them, perfectly. They will find their home in Prunier, of course.”

“But—”

“You have heard of Prunier? Ah, no. Obviously not.” Another contemptuous snort. “Miss Kerrigan, I will not need you anymore, not next season. Not ever. Your job is complete.”

This was stunning. This was a stunning disappointment.

“What?”

“You are relieved, is that how you phrase it? Retired. Finished. I need you no longer.”

“But, Ghislaine, please, this is the best find I have ever made, I know I make mistakes and—”

“Ça suffit!” He pouted, angrily. “Go home, go home now. Back to the States. They have history there, do they not? Some of your post offices are thirty years old.”

The rain was heavy, the thunder rumbling. Julia felt the blackness closing in on all her dreams. Her wild dreams of this afternoon. The Find of the Season. The Justification for Everything.

“But this was my find! This is unfair! Ghislaine, you know it is unfair.”

“Pfft. Your discovery is mediocre, and indeed it is shit.” Ghislaine’s black hair was damped by the rain, his leather trousers were smeared with mud; he made an absurd yet slightly menacing figure.

And now Julia found herself backing away. She was alone here, in the emptiness, not a farmer for miles, all the villages abandoned: alone with Quoinelles. And she had the horrible sense of physical threat. His angry finger was jabbing the air.

“What do you know? You learn in your American colleges and yet you have not heard of these things? You know nothing. The skulls and skeletons are just typical. Typical shit. Shit. Just shit. I expect you to return your carte d’identité tomorrow.”

His aggression was palpable, yet also strange. She got the queer impression he was threatening her for some kind of nihilistic fun, for his own bleak amusement. Trying to frighten her, trying to make her flee the scene first.

Standing her ground, with a tilt of her chin — thinking fuck you, if you’re going to sack me, fuck you—Julia stared straight back.

The silent hiss of the rain surrounded them.

With a weary shrug of repugnance, he turned and walked to the car once again. She watched as he disappeared along the path; he didn’t seem at all absurd anymore.

And now?

Her own car was the other way. She had to trudge through the drizzle, carrying the weight of her disappointment, her crushing letdown. She wouldn’t be able to call her father, or her mother, and vindicate her decision to go to Europe; she wouldn’t be able to tell her friends, her colleagues, the world about her discovery. She felt like a teenager spurned in love; she felt like an idiot.

She had been dumped.

Julia walked. Her bleak route took her past a steel cowshed, a run of barbed wire, and the very loneliest of the moonlit megaliths. And there, despite the pelting wet, she paused and looked around, feeling her anger and anxiety evolve, very slightly: as she surveyed the stones of the Lozère, the Cham des Bondons.

Truly, she still loved this locale — for all its saturnine moods. It was somehow bewitching. This ruined landscape, of legends and megaliths. This place where the werewolves of the Margeride met the elegiac Cham des Bondons.

The rain fell, and still she lingered. Remembering what had brought her here.

The only reason she was in Lozère at all was an offhand remark by a friend, in her college department in London, a year ago, who had mentioned a dig in the south of France. Not far from the great Ice Age caves! And there was room for an archaeologist from England! For a season! The offer had immediately gripped Julia with that old and giddy excitement. Proper archaeology. Dirt archaeology.

Enthused and animated, Julia had scraped together her savings and begged for a sabbatical from her mildly sneering London boss, and then she had left for the Continent with high hopes and had spent a summer digging in France — in France—and yet she had found nothing, because there was nothing to find anymore. Nothing. And right up until today it had seemed her sabbatical was going to dwindle away into disappointment, like everything else, like her career, like too many relationships.

Until today. The skulls. Her Find.

Julia gazed at the standing stones.

The megalithic complex of the Cham des Bondons was one of the biggest in Europe — only Carnac was bigger, only Stonehenge and Callanish were more imposing — yet it was virtually unknown.

Why was that? She could think of one obvious answer: the remoteness was crucial. The departement of Lozère had been depopulating for centuries. The highest limestone steppe of all, the Causse Méjean, just west of the Cham, was said to be the single most deserted part of France: a great plateau of rock with just a few shepherds remaining. Everyone else had gone. Everything else had gone.

It was, therefore, no wonder almost no one knew about the cold and windy Cham des Bondons: there was no one here to see the stones, and no easy way to pierce the guarding wilderness.

And yet maybe there was some other explanation, too — maybe the atmosphere of the Chem des Bondons had something to do with the stones’ lack of fame. The dark, mournful, off-putting ambience. They were like sad soldiers standing around the grave of a beloved king. Like the moai, the great and tragic monoliths of Easter Island, erected by a dying and maybe violent society.

A flash of insight illumined her thoughts.

Could it be?

Fat raindrops were falling, yet Julia did not feel the cold. This sudden idea was much too intriguing: it was a long shot, fantastical even, yet sometimes in archaeology you had to make the intuitive connection, the leap of faith, to arrive at the new paradigm.

Walking briskly to her car, she fumbled for her keys even as she fumbled for the truth. The dating of the Cham des Bondons was late Neolithic. The dating of the skeletons was Neolithic. They came from the same long era of human history. Could there be some link between the Bondons and the strangeness of those bones?

Yes. No. Why not? Who could say?

Hell with Ghislaine. This was her Find. It was her puzzle to solve: and now she had an intuitive lead. There must be a link between the stones and the bones. And the link was that echoing sense, that chime of insight. The fact that she got from the skeletons underneath her feet, down there in the cave, the very same emotional sense she derived from the stones:

Guilt.