Jenni Mills - Crow Stone

Martin settles back in his leather chair with the scuffed arms. I get out my cigarettes, glancing over to check he isn’t in one of his antismoking moods, gearing up for California. He frowns, but doesn’t stop me lighting up.

‘So what’s this new job, then?’ he asks. ‘I thought you were looking for something abroad. What changed your mind?’

The trouble with sitting on the hearthrug in a four-hundred-year-old cottage is that you freeze on one side from the draughts and roast on the other. The left half of me’s sweating like a side of pork, but my right side keeps shivering.

‘It’s Bath,’ I say, sitting on my right hand to stop it shaking. ‘Green Down.’

‘The stone mines? I didn’t think they’d got the funding yet.’

‘They haven’t, but they’ve already started emergency work. The consultants reckon the whole lot could come down at any time.’

‘What you’d call a big headache.’

‘And technically they’re quarries, not mines, even though they’re underground. Stone is quarried, not mined.’

‘They’re going to fill them all?’

‘That’s the plan.’

Martin spits a fragment of cork from his wine into the fire. ‘Criminal. Burying three hundred years’ worth of industrial archaeology.’

‘What about all the people living on top?’

‘I don’t suppose they’d fancy moving? … No, I guess not.’ He sighs heavily. ‘Not really my period, but fascinating stuff. You know they were dug out in the eighteenth century by Ralph Allan? He and his pet architect, John Wood–mad bastard with a penchant for freemasonry–were effectively responsible for developing Georgian Bath.’

‘And Wood’s son. John Wood the Younger.’

Martin nearly kicks over the pile of plates in his surprise. ‘Blimey, Kit, you’ve been doing your homework.’

I don’t tell him that I did the homework a long time ago, that I was at school in Bath and we used to go on educational walks round the Circus and the Royal Crescent and all the other famous buildings that the John Woods, Elder and Younger, designed between them. Martin thinks I was brought up in Bournemouth. But there’s quite a lot I haven’t told him.

‘You know,’ he says, leaning forward to poke the fire into a roaring blaze, ‘I reckon there’s something deeply perverse in your nature, Kit. This afternoon you nearly get yourself killed in a roof fall, and now you’re about to take a job where it’s possible an entire suburb will land on your bonce.’

I stare into the fire. ‘Glutton for punishment, I suppose.’

‘Anyway,’ Martin continues cheerfully, ‘we’ll call the AA out first thing in the morning so they can come with their lock-picking gear and get you on the road.’

Lying always gets me into this kind of mess.

And knocking back too much wine always stops me sleeping.

Martin’s snores echo down the stairwell while I prowl the kitchen in search of tea. Proper tea, that is, the sort that comes in bags, not the poncy caddy full of Earl Grey leaves Martin insists on.

‘You get bored in the night, flower, read this,’ he said, thrusting into my arms a hot-water bottle and a pile of manuscript. ‘Tell me if you think it’s too racy for Oxford University Press.’

How did he know I’d be awake at two in the morning?

Maybe it’s the wine. Maybe it’s what happened this afternoon. Every time I turn on to my back I think of my chalk coffin, the suffocating air full of coccoliths and the light from my head-torch getting dimmer and dimmer.

The teabags are in the canister marked Flour . Last time I stayed they were in the biscuit tin.

Mug of tea at my elbow, I settle down at the kitchen table with the latest chapter in Martin’s book. ‘My very favourite mystery cult. You’ll like it,’ he said. ‘Big butch soldiers. Lots of gender-bending. And ravens.’ ‘I can do without ravens.’

‘No decent mystery cult that doesn’t have a raven or two.’

In Persia, where Mithraism originated, ravens were associated with death because it was customary to expose corpses for excarnation–known as ‘sky burial’ in other cultures–leaving the flesh to be stripped away by birds and other scavengers. Symbolically, the neophyte has to die and be reborn before he can be admitted to the mysteries of the cult.

‘I love this kind of stuff,’ he said to me earlier, when we stopped discussing my next job and turned to what he’s researching. ‘Weird as hell, nothing written down, so everything has to be pieced together from the archaeological evidence. Our best guesses come from wall paintings and mosaics in Italy, but there are temples up by Hadrian’s Wall, and one was excavated in London too. Seven stages of initiation. Ordeals at every stage. Men only but, of course, the big laugh is that most of it’s nicked from an even older eastern mystery religion, the cult of the Great Mother , of all things, popular in Rome at the same time. Don’t you just adore it?’

Firelight and enthusiasm sparkled in his eyes.

‘And then the real symbolic giveaway is that they build their temples underground, or at least tart them up to look like caves. You couldn’t get much more Freudian than that, could you? Wait till you hear what they got up to during the initiation ceremonies–typical bloody soldiers, the slightest excuse to dress up as women …’

In the Mithraic myth, the raven takes the place of the Roman god Mercury, and bears his magical staff, the caduceus. He brings a message from the sun god, ordering first the hunting then the slaying, in the cave, of the bull–a sacrifice we can be almost certain was borrowed from the cult of Magna Mater. From the animal’s blood and semen gushing on to the ground, plants grow, generating new life.

Blood and semen. The dark heart of all male-centred cults. I look up from the manuscript, and outside everything is blackness, no light visible for miles from Martin’s cottage tucked under the lip of the Sussex chalk escarpment. It feels a long, long way from Green Down, and everything that waits for me there. Another sentence from the manuscript catches my eye, a translation of some priestly invocation.

I am a star that goes with you, and shines out of the depths.

It makes me shiver. Suddenly I’m tired, after all, and my feet are cold, and I remember that hot-water bottle still holding a ghost of its warmth between the not-very-clean sheets upstairs.

The same words are still reverberating in my head a couple of weeks later. I’m sitting in my silver Audi outside the semi-detached house on the outskirts of Bath, thinking about the circular motion that has brought me back here. There’s a big crack in its honey-stone facing. Underneath, hundreds of years ago, men tunnelled into the stone and drew out the bones of which Bath is built–oolitic limestone, carrying the imprint of millions of sea creatures, ammonites with their perfectly coiled shells, like snakes with their tails in their mouths.

My fascination with the bones of things, stone and fossils and the darkness underground where they lie, has never gone away, in spite of what happened that summer. I grew up here, and lived in this ugly yellow house until I was fourteen. I had no plan then to become a mining engineer. I wanted to track the origins of the human race. I saw my future in some heat-blasted gully in Africa or the Middle East, pacing the scree and looking for patterns. Turning over stones and occasionally recognizing the shape of a knucklebone, a fragment of tibia maybe or, if I was very lucky, a whole transfiguring skull.

Instead here I am, completing the circle, back where I started before I was fourteen and the big black car took me away.

Streaks of rain are beginning to dry unevenly on the honey-stone walls. I start the engine, put the car into gear and drive away up the hill, heading for the site.