Читать книгу Tear Of The Gods - Alex Archer - Страница 8

Annja Creed studied the decapitated heads on the table in front of her.

Two of them had their eyes closed, as if they’d died peacefully in their sleep, but Annja knew better than to trust in simple appearances. There had been nothing peaceful about their passing; the fact that they were sitting on the table minus the rest of their bodies was proof of that, she thought wryly. The eyes of the third were open and surprisingly free of detritus from the bog. From her position in front of the table, the dead man’s eyes seemed to stare directly back into her own, as if he were as intently curious about her as she was about him. It would have given most people the creeps, but after all she’d been through over the past few years since inheriting Joan of Arc’s mystical sword, she barely even noticed.

The heads had been unearthed in an isolated peat bog several hours north of London in the West Midlands. She’d been invited to the site just over a week earlier by an old friend from the British Museum, Oxford University professor Craig Stevens.

From what he’d explained over the phone, a pair of farmers had reported seeing a head staring up at them out of the bog while they were out hunting. Further investigation revealed that the two men hadn’t been hunting at all, but rather running an industrious little business on the side selling cut peat for fuel. They hadn’t wanted the police to know that the section of the bog they were harvesting didn’t belong to either of them.

“Of course, when it comes to decapitated heads, the police tend to be a bit pushy,” Craig said with a laugh, something Annja didn’t have any trouble believing.

The detective in charge had seen enough bog mummies to know the difference between a recent murder and one that had happened a few centuries before. He dumped the head in Craig’s lap, given his specialty in Iron Age Celtic cultures, in an effort to avoid as much paperwork as possible. Craig was more than happy to take care of the problem.

It had only taken a few days at the site before a second head turned up and that had been enough to get Oxford University to fund a small dig to see what else might be present. Annja had worked with Craig on a previous dig in Wales and he’d called to let her know that he was looking for a few experienced hands to help him out. Did she think she could make it?

It had been a while since she’d had the chance to work an actual dig. The cable television show she cohosted, Chasing History’s Monsters, had kept her incredibly busy for the past few months, rushing around the world to highlight one legend after another. As had her unofficial role as protector of the innocent and the bearer of the mystical sword that once belonged to Joan of Arc. A week or two with her hands in the mud doing honest-to-goodness science was just what she needed.

But when she’d called her producer, Doug Morrell, in New York to get the time off, he’d gone ballistic.

“Are you insane?” he cried when she finished laying out her request. “We’re talking decapitations, human sacrifices and bog mummies here! How can you think of leaving us out of it?”

Quite easily, she’d thought at the time, but she knew if she stiffed Doug now he’d only get even with her later. He’d saddle her with hours of editing work or, even worse, handle it himself. And if he did that, who knew what would show up in the middle of one of her episodes? She still hadn’t forgotten the bloody mechanical shark incident….

In the end, they’d cut a deal. The show would pay for her airfare and her expenses while on-site and in return she’d deliver enough material to put together a special double feature on bog mummies, druids and ancient Celtic culture. It was as good as she was going to get and she quickly got Doug off the phone before he decided the episode wouldn’t be complete without a full-scale reenactment of a druidic ritual, preferably with plenty of special effects and a well-endowed blonde as the sacrificial centerpiece. If it drove ratings, Doug was all for it, science be damned.

She’d landed at Heathrow the day before, headed to a hotel and slept off the jet lag. This morning she rose early and set out for the dig site in a rented Land Rover. The dig was pretty remote; it took her until early afternoon to reach the landing stage where the rest of the vehicles were parked and then another hour of hiking up and down a series of hills thick with birch groves before finding the camp on the far side, down near the edge of the bog.

Annja bumped into one of Craig’s graduate students, a curly-headed guy named Zeke, just after arriving at the site and Zeke had been kind enough to offer to let “Dr. Stevens” know she was here. While waiting, she spotted the heads through the open flap of a large canvas tent, like those used by army encampments the world over. She wandered in to take a look.

Up close she could see that each head was held upright in a frame of clear polymer, designed no doubt to protect the artifact while at the same time allowing the scientists to study all three dimensions at once. It was a clever piece of equipment, one she hadn’t seen before, and she was moving in for a closer look when a cheerful voice boomed out from behind her.

“At last, she arrives!”

Annja jumped in surprise; she’d been so intent on her examination of the heads that she hadn’t heard him come up behind her. Working with bog mummies was an entirely new and exciting experience for her.

Craig looked much as he did the last time she’d seen him—a bear of a man with a thick beard and a mop of unruly hair the color of pine sap. He towered over her at six and a half feet and she could have easily hidden behind his nearly three-hundred-pound body if she’d ever had the need to, but his imposing size was a complete contrast to his open and general ebullient nature.

“Now we can do some real work!” he said, a twinkle in his eyes, before crossing the space between them in that smooth gliding gait that always looked so out of character on such a large man. He wrapped her in one of his trademark hugs.

When he finally released her, and she double-checked her ribs to be certain they were all still intact, she couldn’t help but smile at him in return. One thing about working with Craig: his good humor was infectious.

“You’ve got an interesting interior decorator,” she said, nodding at the heads on the table behind her.

Her fellow archaeologist beamed. “Marvelous, aren’t they?” he said, and then stepped around her to squat in front of the center head.

“This was the first,” he said, “the one the police sent over. Isn’t it beautiful?”

His voice held a note of awe, the kind reserved for those who’ve just had some kind of religious epiphany or incredibly mind-blowing experience, and Annja almost laughed in response. She wasn’t sure that beautiful was a word she would ever use to describe a decapitated and mummified head, but it was certainly striking, she’d give him that. The victim, if that was indeed what he was, appeared to have been a male in his late twenties, maybe early thirties, with sharp cheekbones and a prominent nose. His skin had the look and appearance of well-tanned leather. His hair, still held in a ponytail with a short piece of braided rope, was a fiery orange, just short of red.

“It’s certainly something,” she replied. “I’m amazed at the level of preservation. I thought bogs were basically swamps.”

Craig nodded. “Yes and no. It depends on where they are in their development.”

He stood and faced her, doing his best to explain. “When moss dominates a low-lying section of land, the soil becomes waterlogged and acidic. Since bacteria have a difficult time surviving in such conditions, it isn’t present to break down the dead moss and other vegetation. Instead, the stuff just piles up and eventually becomes peat.”

Annja got the implication right away. “So the acidic nature of the water itself actually protects the body rather than destroying it. No bacteria means no decomposition.”

“Right,” Craig said, smiling. “And the tannins produced by the moss add an extra level of preservation, turning the skin to something like leather and keeping it from tearing in response to the pressure from above as the peat grows deeper.”

“Is that why their skin is so dark, because of the tannin?”

Craig nodded. “And why their hair is red, too.”

“You mean that lovely color isn’t natural?” she asked curiously.

“Not even close. In fact, I’m pretty sure all three of them were Romans, which means their hair was probably darker than either of ours.”

“Romans? Seriously?” She’d never heard of Romans being uncovered in a peat bog before.

“Yeah, I know, it’s unusual to say the least. But it’s hard to argue with the evidence. Here, look.” Moving to the head on the right, he reached out and turned the frame around, pointing at something on the back of the man’s skull.

At first Annja couldn’t figure out what it was, but after staring at it for a minute and mentally smoothing out the skin while doing so, she finally got it.

“It’s a tattoo, isn’t it?”

Craig’s eyes twinkled. “Yes, but a tattoo of what?”

Annja leaned in closer, trying to puzzle it out. “It’s an animal of some kind, I think. A dog, maybe? Or a wolf?”

“Close,” he replied. “Look at its mouth. See anything unusual?”

She peered at it harder, trying to sort out the details of the tattoo from the natural lines of the aged flesh. It looked like…

“Is that a tusk?” she asked without looking up.

“Right! Which makes that,” he said, pointing at the tattoo, “a wild boar.”

He beamed at her, as if the presence of the boar explained everything. But Annja wasn’t seeing the connection.

“Okay, so it’s a boar and not a wolf. So what? I still don’t see why that makes him a Roman rather than a Celt.”

Craig led her across the tent to where another table held two laptop computers and a combination printer/scanner. He sorted through a stack of papers next to one of the laptops until he found the page he was looking for and then handed it to Annja without a word.

She found herself looking at a scanned image of a battle standard photographed from a museum collection somewhere. She could even see the edge of the glass box in which it was housed. But what really caught her eye was the image of the charging boar that dominated the center of the standard. It was the exact same design that was tattooed on the back of the bog mummy’s head.

“XIV Gemina, or the Fourteenth Legion,” Craig said. “Under the command of Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, it was ordered back to Britannia by the emperor in A.D. 67 to quell the Boudican rebellion.”

Boudica was the warrior queen of the Iceni clan, Annja knew. She’d inspired and led one of the largest uprisings against Roman rule in the history of the empire. The Roman historian Cassius Dio wrote that she was “most tall, in appearance most terrifying, in the glance of her eye most fierce”—a description that made Annja smile the first time she’d read it. Annja’d been called fierce once or twice in her day, too.

She had to give Craig credit; it was a nice piece of detective work. But it raised more than a question or two in her mind. “I thought Boudica made her stand near Mancetter?” That was at least fifty miles south of where they now stood.

“She did. And that’s where the story ends for most historians. But there’s a small group, myself included, that believe a portion of her army escaped the battle that day and tried to make it to Anglesey by cutting overland across the moors. If they had, and if Paulinus pursued them as I believe that he did, then it’s not inconceivable that they met again in battle and that we’ve stumbled on evidence of that very encounter. If you examine—”

Craig’s explanation was cut short by the sound of running feet. He and Annja turned to face the entrance just as the flap was thrown open and Zeke stuck his head in through the opening.

“Dr. Stevens!” he cried, his voice full of excitement. “We’ve got another one!”