Spiral: Book One of the Spiral in Time (5 page)

She was feeling cross herself. He raised one eyebrow. She could tell from the mild look of surprise on his face that this might not be the best opening comment she could have made.

“Right on. And when you unearth a small bit of wood from a roundhouse site, you carry it back to your university and X-ray it, run the most modern carbon dating tests, and analyze it in every possible way. And still you know very little about the house, or how it was actually built. I can build it and find out more.”

His voice seemed accusing to Germaine’s time-lapsed mind. She frowned.

“Of course, testing is only the first step,” she said defensively. “
Then
we try to figure out how it was made.” She was snappish, but didn’t stop.

“If we don’t use the science we have, we’ll be back in the days when only rich lords and adventurers went searching for lost treasure and called it archaeology.” She winced at the sound of her own voice, lecturing this man whom she had just met.

Nicholas Greenwood didn’t seem offended. He shrugged his shoulders, shifting his weight on the cane.

“True,” he continued, in the same friendly tone, “but there are huge gaps in prehistory that science can never explain. I find those parts mystifying. If there is no written record, neither of us finds out how people thought or what they believed. Or who were friends or lovers. We rarely know even a name. It’s all pretty impossible without a written declaration from the past.” He raised that eyebrow again and smiled at her. It was a strangely beautiful smile that transformed his face.

“In the end, we know little about what really mattered in their lives.”

What really mattered in their lives? His last words repeated in Germaine’s mind.

What really matters is ...
A whisper of a voice trailed off.

Shocked, she stood quiet for a moment, listening. The voice sounded so real! She felt badly off balance, both physically and emotionally. Apparently Nicholas Greenwood hadn’t heard the voice; he was still smiling at her. It must be some strange aberration of her jet lag.

“I need to apologize ...” she started.

“Don’t. I just hope you don’t write off my kind of archaeology. In living the life, we find out things that are never apparent in your laboratory. And, by the way, it’s real life, not a play. But we do reenactments on special occasions, to educate and gain public interest. You should come and visit.”

His one free hand fumbled in the pocket of his jacket, and then he handed her a card.

Nicholas L.Greenwood, Director, Tavistock Farm. Dorset.
A phone number was listed at the bottom.

“I didn’t mean to sound so critical,” she said. “So I take it away and analyze it to death, and you find a way to reconstruct it.” This was not much of an apology, but it was the best she could come up with in her current sleepless state. Her brain was scrambled.

“What if we’re both wrong?” she asked. “The big mystery to me has always been what sort of story we give these unknown, so-called primitive people. We always recreate them from our side of the time spectrum. From how we moderns think. I know anthropologists say their brain size was the same as ours, but they certainly didn’t think like us. How could they? They were worlds apart. We make up stories about everything based on a few meager scraps dug up by archaeologists.”

This was close to heresy. Her own field in archaeology was based on material remains you could see, touch, analyze; it was scientific, written in large capital letters. If you could measure it, it was true. And modern science was very smug. Prehistoric people were usually judged savage and worse, mainly because they had no writing.

“The real question is how did
they
think? What did
they
feel? And we’ll never know.

People are really the great unknown, aren’t they?” she concluded, lamely.

Greenwood raised his eyebrow again and gave her another enigmatic smile.

“That’s why I live in an Iron Age roundhouse on a farm. Maybe living the life will help me figure out what the people were like.”

Grimly, Germaine thought it was hard enough understanding the people living today, like her ex-husband and her difficult, new boss. How could Nicholas Greenwood hope to reach into the distant past and discover what ancient people were like?

He was almost exactly her height. His eyes looked straight across to hers and seemed clear as a pool of water, reflecting light from its depths. Germaine felt a flash of something almost remembered run through her mind and then disappear. A shiver ran down her back.

She was always conscious of her height and acutely aware of other peoples’ heights relative to hers. Not so with this man. There was a straight line of contact. No unspoken psychological games here. They were equals in a vaguely exciting way.

She felt a hand on her arm and jumped. Aubrey! It broke the unusual connection she just felt with Nicholas Greenwood.

“Interesting stuff, eh? Tavistock Farm is a showplace. You should go down and see it. It’s a real place out of the past. You know, ‘The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see,’ as Winston would say.” Aubrey beamed at the opportunity to quote his idol.

She gazed fondly at him, glad to be rescued from her awkward conversation. Then someone called his name, and waved frantically from the other side of the room.

“Aubrey Clarke, Sir Aubrey! Message for Sir Aubrey!”

Germaine turned to him with a puzzled look. Aubrey’s grin turned his cheeks bright pink.

“Yes, my dear, I forgot to tell you last night. I am a real royal figure now, an OBE, Officer of the British Empire!” He gave quite a good imitation of bending a knee in her direction.

“Oh, Aubrey, you were knighted! What an honor.” She bobbed an awkward imitation of a curtsey in return as they both laughed.

“Sir Aubrey!” The messenger found him. He handed Aubrey a handwritten note marked Urgent.

“Oh, look at this. From His Lordship himself. Some problem, my dear. My presence is requested immediately!”

He winked and gave a courtly kiss to her hand. “Well, my dear, you’ll have to excuse me. It sounds urgent. I’ll call tomorrow, and we can talk about our clan mothers and such.”

Germaine gave him a wry smile as he left the room. When she turned back around, Nicholas Greenwood had disappeared. “And I just made an ass of myself,” she murmured, and cringed inwardly.

Now, Aubrey was off on some important mission, and Moira was with the Conan Ryan, ready to run him down and cast an Irish love spear into his beautiful body. Maybe she needed to take some lessons from Moira and learn how to hunt.

Germaine was at the front of the line now and flinched as she opened her mouth to have her genetic history placed in a glass vial. A quick swab from the inside of your cheek, by a long-handled, small brush, and you were done. The longest part was filling out the form with as much family history as she knew, so her DNA could be correctly entered into computers that would sift through the numbers and, in the end, tell her which clan mother started her own line of history.

There is something scary about delving into the past, she thought. What if it told you things you didn’t want to know? Or, almost as frightening, things you did want to know? Either way, there was no turning back.

She silently laughed at herself and went into the hallway for another iced coke. She would go over her notes for her talk and hope for the best. Life moves on, she thought, and change is the sacred rule, whether you like it or not. A new schedule was on the door and lying on the drink table was the old one that had greeted her with its graffiti message. She picked it up and read it again.

She folded the paper and stuck it in her conference bag: a reminder to not be so arrogant. She couldn’t run away from herself. Or her past.

Later, the room grew quiet as the last few people left, and she stood at the window. The moonless night sky was solid black—it matched her mood. The glass reflected the brightly lit conference room and her solitary figure back at her, like a mirror.

She felt like a small child again, alone and inexplicably frightened.

CHAPTER 3

London

June 5, 2006

The ringing would not stop. Germaine slammed her hand down on the night stand searching for the offending telephone, and opened one eye. It was across the room on the desk. The sky outside was barely light, way too early for anyone to be calling.

She stumbled to the desk and grabbed the receiver. Her head spun from the effort of getting up and the awful taste in her mouth was last night’s wine. Aubrey Clarke’s resonant voice shattered the last remnants of sleep.

“Germaine, something terrible has happened.” His words crackled and sounded like they were coming over a short wave radio. “Come down to Maiden Castle right away. There’s been an explosion—I can hardly believe it! Someone blew a hole in the middle of the site, and there is something there.”

The top of her head pounded with a steady pulsing pain as she tried to remember everything she knew about Maiden Castle, beyond that it was the largest Iron Age hillfort in England.

“I thought Sir Mortimer Wheeler found everything when he excavated there in the 30s,” she said, stalling, as she tried to make her brain cells wake up. “There’s nothing left to find.”

“Well, he was wrong. I’m telling you there’s something there. I have a feeling it’s going to be big and I need you.” The tone of his voice emphasized the last three words.

I need you
—there was no way to refuse after that. Her loyalty to Aubrey was absolute; she could only say yes. She hung up and then collapsed back on the bed. All she wanted was to be horizontal and not move, but there was no sleeping now.

She sat up and held her head in her hands. Little pinpoints of light, like slow-moving shooting stars, passed before her eyes. Aubrey sounded more disturbed than she had ever heard him. She would have to go. She had presented her paper, the rest of the conference wasn’t important, and the book would certainly wait a few more days.

With all her heart, she wished her hangover could wait, although she had an awful feeling it would come along for the ride to Maiden Castle. Something terrible, indeed. She knew what that felt like.

The great clock hanging in the middle of Waterloo Station said 10:00, and the train left in ten minutes. Germaine looked around in vain for a porter as she pushed a luggage cart loaded with her life compressed into a pyramid of four suitcases and a computer balanced on top.

“Just like a bag lady,” she muttered, as she trundled down the platform. Plastic bags filled with books and conference souvenirs hung from each arm, swinging and banging people as she hurried by. She felt out-of-breath. It was a lot to carry, but staying in England for a year meant bringing all her clothes from California. After Aubrey’s alarming call, she decided to take everything with her—there was no telling when she would get back to London.

Her head pounded. She was sure her eyes were red. With barely enough time to pack and check out, she had only glanced in the mirror. Now, her hair was coming loose from a too hasty attempt to tie it back and kept falling over one eye.

Her conference presentation had been a great success and afterward, against all better judgment, and barely recovered from her plane trip—she drank some wine. Germaine knew why, too. Moira had run off with the Adonis, her new conquest, and then Aubrey had been called away. Irrationally, she felt abandoned.

Safely on the train, she signaled the drink waiter, and pointed to a bottle of vodka. “A Bloody Mary, with lots of ice.” Hair of the dog that bit you and all that. If she wasn’t careful she would end up alcoholic—it seemed to be her answer for everything lately.

The 10:10 to Dorchester rumbled south, slowly leaving behind the congestion of London. In a little under two hours she would find out what Aubrey called “terrible.” An explosion at a famous English Heritage site was pretty dramatic.

The gentle rocking motion and soft clacking of the rails was soothing as she watched the urban landscape of old, brick industrial buildings and endless lines of row houses pass by the window, until there was only green countryside. She was tired. Sleep was no longer restful. Her nights were fitful, heavy with disturbing dreams she couldn’t remember on waking. Even the wine hadn’t helped last night; she kept waking up, finally falling into a deep sleep about 4:00 am. It was an all too familiar pattern.