Jenni Mills - Crow Stone

Jenni Mills

For my mother, Sheila Mills

‘A Fathomless and boundless Deep

There we wander, there we weep.’

William Blake,

‘ My Spectre around me night and day ’

Epigraph ‘A Fathomless and boundless Deep There we wander, there we weep.’ William Blake, ‘ My Spectre around me night and day ’ Level One: Corax LEVEL ONE Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Level Two: Nymphus Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Level Three: The Soldier Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Level Four: The Lion Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Level Five: Luna Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Level Six: The Runner of the Sun Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Level Seven: The Father Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Literary Corner Acknowledgements Copyright About the Publisher

LEVEL ONE

Corax, the Raven–the messenger of the gods. Just when you think life is on track, along comes a socking great bird, squawking news of a divine quest. My advice is, shoot the bloody thing.

Martin Ekwall, interviewed on Time Team, Roman Temple Special , Channel 4

Chapter One

Look at this. A sea urchin, so close we could snog each other. My eyes are crossing with the excitement of it, let alone the proximity. I feel like calling to Martin to get his fat arse down here, so I’ll have someone to share it with. But Martin couldn’t care less, and neither could the sea urchin.

I’d guess it’s been dead for a hundred million years or so. When it was pottering about, doing whatever sea urchins do in the warm, shallow sea, dinosaurs tramped the shore. It looks like a bun, doughy white, slightly heart-shaped. The stuff of life turned to stone.

I’m lying on my back. Stone is digging painfully into bone; the floor is nodules of chalk and outcrops of flint, none of them dovetailing with the knobbles of my spine. My nose is a couple of inches away from the white ceiling with the sea urchin in it. Until I saw it, I was trying to turn over, so I can wriggle back the way I came in–feet first, because there isn’t room to turn round. This is a fairly delicate moment. I don’t think the entire lot is going to come crashing down on me, but it’s always possible. The tunnel’s hardly more than body-width. Even by Neolithic standards, this is poky.

‘You OK?’

Martin, in dusty red overalls, is waiting at the end of the passage where it opens into the main gallery: a luxurious four feet high, so he can crouch on hands and knees and turn round, lucky bugger. He’s too big to crawl any further so, being the woman, I get all the shit jobs as usual.

‘Happy as a sunbeam,’ I hiss. We rarely shout underground, unless it’s ‘Get the fuck out quick.’ I’ve perfected a penetrating whisper that seems to travel down tunnels. Martin’s heard me, because he grunts. It’s hard to know who are the sparkier conversationalists: archaeologists or mining engineers.

This wouldn’t be most people’s idea of Saturday-afternoon fun, but I’ve lost count of how long we’ve been doing this kind of thing. We even did it right through the years of my marriage. Martin’s favourite archaeology happens underground. It’s dirty and it’s dangerous, and you can’t have much more fun than that. We’ll probably go on doing it as long as our joints hold out, or the luck.

Luck shouldn’t come into it, of course. As the engineer, I’m the guardian of the luck, the one who understands stresses and loads and how water seeps through stone, and can therefore take an educated guess as to whether we’re going to die today, entombed in a flint mine.

These galleries were dug out between five and six thousand years ago, by people who had only recently discovered farming. They’re amazing: they have proper air shafts, and pillars to support the roof. The light of my head-torch picks out five-thousand-year-old carbon stains on the walls, from the oil lamps the miners worked by. The gallery I’m investigating is a dead end, never properly dug out, a speculative tunnel that either failed to produce any decent flint or perhaps was one of the last to be opened before stone tools were superseded by bronze. Sorry, mate, no call for flint axeheads any more. Ever thought of reskilling in metalwork? Poor old flint miners. The thought of a Neolithic Arthur Scargill pops disconcertingly into my head, reminding me of those little yellow ‘Coal Not Dole’ stickers Martin and I used to wear in our student days. Flint Not Skint .

Sea urchin apart, though, I don’t like this place. There’s something claustrophobic about it, even for someone who makes a living out of going underground. The side galleries nip and pinch spitefully as you crawl down them. I keep thinking I should have brought a ball of string to make sure we find the way out again.

We’ll look bloody silly if we can’t. Particularly as no one knows we’re in here.

The point is, if Martin’s right and he can raise the money for a proper dig with the university’s blessing, I might get paid for this afternoon’s spur-of-the-moment expedition. That would be useful, because if I turn down the Bath job there may be lean times before I get a better offer.

And I will turn down the Bath job. No doubt about that.

I say goodbye to the sea urchin, and finally succeed in wriggling on to my stomach so I can start shuffling backwards down the tunnel. It seems much further when you can’t see where you’re going, and it’s with enormous relief that I feel Martin grasp my ankles to let me know I’ve made it out to the main gallery.

‘Whew. Don’t ask me to do that again in a hurry.’ I flip over on to my bottom, and bang my hard-hat on the tunnel roof. ‘Next time it’s your turn to slither up the miners’ back passages.’

Martin giggles, easing back on to his haunches. He may be six foot four and built like a bear, but he’s as camp as a Boy Scout jamboree. He’s had my arse in his face more times than I care to count, crawling through underground tunnels, and never shown the slightest interest in it, which suits me fine.

‘So, what do you think?’ he asks, offering me a swig of water. It tastes of chalk dust.

‘Well, it’s going to be expensive to dig. You’ll need to prop it to make it safe.’ I look around, my head-torch casting wild, wobbling shadows over the walls. ‘And I think you should steer clear of the side galleries altogether.’

‘Which are, of course, the most interesting from an archaeological point of view. Most of the main shafts were worked over thoroughly in the nineteenth century. Damn …’ Martin is chewing it over. I can see his heavy jaw grinding away as he nibbles the inside of his cheek. ‘… and blast. And fuck. If I had the money to employ diggers who knew what they were doing, I might risk it, but I’m going to have to take on students and anoraks. “Ooh, durr, Dr Ekwall, I seem to have brought down the ceiling with one blow of my mighty trowel.”’