The Tenth Chamber (30 page)

Their head man came forwards, clutching a silent infant. The man wore a splendid necklace of bear teeth.

Kek translated.
I am Osa. This is my son. Make him well
.

Tal took a few steps forwards and asked to see the boy. He peeled back the hide blanket and saw a limp, listless baby, several months old, its eyes shut, its smooth chest contracting with each breath. With the permission of his father, he touched the skin – it was hot and dry as an old bone. He saw its bowels were leaking.

He let the blanket fall back. Then the head man took off his necklace and handed it to Tal.

Tal accepted it and put it around his neck.

He would try to heal the infant.

Through Kek, Tal instructed the Neanderthals to congregate at the river bank and wait. He had Mem organise the best spear men to keep watch while he and Tala ran off to find the correct plants. When they returned, they had filled a pouch with two kinds of bark, a handful of succulent round leaves and the stringy roots of a tuber. When Tala filled a skin with river water, Tal said they were ready to begin.

Because the boy was very ill, Tal decided to take him into the deepest, most-sacred chamber for the healing. He would need all the powers at his disposal. Osa bore the infant in his thick arms and followed Tal into the cave accompanied by three of his clansmen, brutish fellows who seemed genuinely scared to venture into the darkness with only lamp light. Mem, Tala and one of Tal’s nephews represented the Bison Clan. Kek rounded out the party. It was his lot to straddle both worlds and bridge their languages.

The Neanderthals cried out when they saw the painted walls. They pointed and jabbered. Kek spoke in their guttural tongue and tried to soothe them by showing he could safely touch the images without fear of being trampled or maimed.

It took a great deal of coaxing to get the visitors to crawl through the tunnel into the Chamber of Plants. Fearing a trap, one of the brutes insisted on being the last one through. Crowded together in the hand-adorned vault, they murmured and blinked at the stencils and held up their own hands for inspection in the light of the burning fat and juniper.

There, most of the joint party waited, in tense comity, with as much physical separation as the vault would allow. Tal, Mem, Kek, the head man and one of his kin entered the tenth chamber with the boy.

Tal immediately began singing one of his mother’s old healing chants and proceeded to prepare the cure. Using one of his long flint blades he cut the succulent leaves and stringy roots into small pieces and when done, he laid the blade on end, propped against the wall. He scooped the vegetation into his mother’s stone bowl. Then he added some bark pieces, shredded between his rough palms. Finally some fresh water from the skin. He stirred and mashed the mixture with his hands until it was moss green and added more water to make it liquid enough to drink.

In the light of the flickering lamps, he kept the chant going, sat the boy up and had his father open his parched lips wide enough to pour in a small amount. The boy reflexively coughed and sputtered. Tal waited and gave him some more. Then more. Until the child had drunk a fair measure.

The boy was laid down on the ground, wrapped in his skin and the men stood over him, two species, sharing one earth, united in the common interest of saving one tiny being.

Tal chanted for hours.

Fresh lamps had to be brought.

Throughout the night, word was relayed to the two clans huddled on the ledge on either side of the cave mouth in wary peace. Tala would emerge and tell the Bison Clan that the child was moaning, or vomiting, or finally sleeping quietly. Uboas would press on her son strips of dried meat before he rushed back to be at his father’s side.

As the first light broke outside the cave, the infant seemed to rally. He lifted his head on his own to accept water. Tal let it be known they would leave the cave because the healing was working. The child’s father grunted his approval.

Then, a catastrophe.

In a wet intestinal gurgle, the chamber suddenly filled with a foul odour as the child suddenly evacuated much of its weight. There was a high-pitched sigh and the little body simply stopped breathing.

The men looked down on the lifeless body in stunned silence.

The boy’s father kneeled and shook him, trying to wake. He cried out something and Kek yelled back at him. By his tone, Tal could tell his son was trying to avert disaster.

Osa slowly rose to his feet. In the low light of the hissing lamps his sunken eyes were the brightest objects in the chamber. Then he let out a curdling scream which seemed from another realm, an amalgam of a man’s cry and a beast’s roar, so loud and reverberating that it froze all the other men into paralytic inaction.

For a lumbering man, he moved like a lion. In a blink he had Tal’s stone bowl in his massive hand. Tal, nor anyone else, had a moment to react. He saw a dark blur as the Neanderthal’s arm swung in an arc and bashed the bowl behind his ear.

The world became bright for a time as if the sun had moved from the sky and made its way through all the chambers of the cave into the last chamber.

He was on the ground, on all fours.

He was aware of shouts in the distance, the sounds of flint thrusting through flesh, great shouts of pain and war.

He heard the sound of men falling, the thud of death.

He lifted his head.

The bird man was towering over him, his beak proudly open.

I will soar, he thought. I will soar forever.

His head was too heavy to keep up. What was that on the ground? He struggled to see it through the pain and fog in his head and the poor light.

It was the small ivory bison, fallen from his belt pouch.

He reached for it as he fashioned his last thoughts.

Bison Clan
.

Uboas
.

Tala was the only one to make it out of the cave alive. It was he who killed Osa by bashing his head against the wall. Kek was smitten by his own brother and Mem fell to one of the Neanderthals. In close quarters men stabbed and stomped and gouged until there was nothing but a bloody mess of humanity.

Tala’s arm was broken, either from a blow that he had struck or one he received, he did not know. He ran into the sunlight crying out in alarm. Tal was dead. The Shadow People had attacked. There must be revenge.

Quickly and brutally, the men of the Bison Clan fell on the frightened Neanderthals. Since they had been obliged to leave their spears at the camp, it did not take long until every one of them, every man, woman and child was run through or thrown off the high ledge.

They had called themselves the Forest People. They were no more.

Tala was head man now. There would be time for ceremony. In the midst of the crisis, the clan simply fell into line and began to obey his commands. And Uboas stoically ignored her own sorrow and busied herself making a wooden and sinew splint for her son’s arm.

All the dead and broken men were dragged out. Except for Tal. Tala ordered that the dead infant, the son of Osa, have his hand cut off before he was carried out. One of the clan men used Tal’s good blade to separate the small finger bones into a bloody pile and then carefully put the blade back against the wall where Tal had left it. The finger bones would be used to make Tala a trophy necklace, but in his haste one of the tiny phalanges was dropped into the dirt, never to make it around Tala’s neck.

The Neanderthals, whether dead or alive, were pitched over the ledge onto the rocks below to join their brethren. The lions, the bears and the hawks would have a feast.

They carefully bore the bodies of their dead down the cliffs for burial in the soft earth beside the river. That was their custom. The clan waited to hear Tala’s decision about Kek. Was he of their clan or the Others?

He was my brother, he declared, and one of us. He would be treated in death as a member of the Bison Clan.

The young man’s decision was well received and there was a sense of confidence that he would also know how to honour their extraordinary leader’s bodily remains. He withdrew back into the cave. He would sit beside his dead father, drink the Soaring Water, and when he was done, he would know what to do.

It was nearly sunset when the clan finished restoring order to their world. They ascended the cliffs one more time and gathered around the cave mouth.

Tala emerged, spoke to them clearly and with resolve, waving his one good arm for emphasis. He had soared with the bison herd and in the distance, he saw the bird man flying into the cave and disappearing.

He had his answer.

Tal would be left in the Chamber of Plants, in the sacred place he had created. He would have his soaring bowl with him. He would have his ivory bison. His best flint blade. His bird man would be his company. No one would ever enter the chamber again.

Whereas the other ancestors dwelled around their camp fires in the sky, the great Tal would forever dwell inside his painted cave.

Luc still had several hours until dinner with Isaak. He lay on the hotel bed, his computer, warm on his belly, ready to doze off and retreat to a sanctuary of oblivion. His email inbox was staring him in the face. He wavered in indecision whether to snap the laptop closed and let it be for now.

Instead, he clicked on the message from Margot.

He had to do it some time, why not now? Take the bitter with the sweet, have a glance at the last happy interlude in a life. The message line simply read: H
UGO
’
S
PHOTOS
. He took a deep emotion-choked breath and clicked on the attachments.

A series of a dozen jpegs downloaded in a daisy-chain of embedded images.

He scrolled down and took each one in.

Shots of Luc, Sara and Odile, strolling through Domme.

Table shots inside the restaurant – Sara and Luc together, Hugo, with a cheesy grin, his arm slung around Odile, a hand resting casually on her bosom.

Then a group snap of the four of them, taken by the waiter, a selection of house desserts spread on the table. You could almost hear the laughter.

At the bottom of the scroll there was one more photo.

He stared at it. It didn’t fit – its presence made no sense.

He clicked to render it full screen.

It was an oil painting, on a yellow wall. A young man, of the Renaissance perhaps, seated and staring suspiciously at the artist. His face was long and effeminate, his hair flowing onto his shoulders. He had a black foppish hat, a white shirt with impossibly puffy sleeves and, most strikingly, his shoulder was draped with a rich fur coat from a spotted leopard.

What was this doing on Hugo’s mobile? Did someone use the camera after he was dead? Who would take a dead man’s mobile phone to a museum and use it to photograph a painting?

The date of the photo time marked in crisp digital display: 11:53 p.m.

What was it the gendarme had told him at the crash scene?

Luc was sitting on the edge of the bed now, raking his hand through his hair over and over, as if the static electricity would fire more synapses in his brain.

Another conversation came back to him, flooding into his consciousness with startling clarity, a snippet that was accessible, that his mind must have tagged for future use.

At the welcome party for the excavation, the council president from Périgueux, Monsieur Tailifer, had been gushing over the local lore.

‘The Resistance struck the main railway line, near Ruac, and made off with a fortune, maybe two hundred million euros in today’s money, and some very famous paintings, let me add, including Raphael’s
Portrait of a Young Man,
all on their way to Goering personally. Some of the loot made it to de Gaulle and was put to good use, I’m sure, but a lot of that money and the art disappeared into thin air. The Raphael was never seen again.’

Luc was breathing heavily now, as if he’d just finished an anaerobic sprint and was air-hungry, repaying his oxygen debt.

He clicked on to Google Images and entered R
APHAEL
’
S
P
ORTRAIT OF A
Y
OUNG
M
AN
.

And there it was. The same painting, on a website devoted to looted art recovery.

The caption read: T
HIS MASTERPIECE REMAINS MISSING.

Luc was a man who knew his way around museums and what’s more, he loved everything about them. In ordinary circumstances he would have savoured the experience of discovering a new museum, particularly one located in a charming nineteenth-century hotel perched on a pleasant knoll on the banks of the Marne.

He would have inhaled the mustiness of the exhibit halls and been captivated by the complexities of off-limits storage areas. The Museum of National Resistance in Champigny-sur-Marne, had a collection rather more recent than his usual haunts, but all museums shared a pleasing commonality.

However, this was not an ordinary moment in his life and he rushed through the entrance hardly noticing the environs.

At the ticket booth he breathlessly announced ‘Professor Simard for Monsieur Rouby,’ and paced while the attendant placed a call.

They had talked less than an hour earlier. Luc had reached the curator after a frenetic series of calls had shunted him from museum to museum, archive to archive, all over France. His request was quite specific, which helped, but he was getting nowhere until a sympathetic elderly woman in Corrèze, at the Museum of Resistance Henri Queuille, mentioned that thirty boxes of archival material pertaining to Luc’s topic of interest had been sent to Champigny-sur-Marne for cataloging and preservation.