Revenant, p.1
Revenant, page 1
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Revenant
Copyright © 2007 by Olivia Lorenz
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Revenant
Olivia Lorenz
Dedication
Thanks are due to several people, without whom this book would
never have been written. First, to Dr. Karen Hartnup, whose research into Leo Allatius spun off into the world of the vrykolakades and the tympanioi as well as other island and mainland exotika. Secondly, to Professor Robert Arnott, who introduced me to Aegean prehistory;
Professor Michael Vickers at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; and Iain Patterson and Dr. Eleanor Loughlin, both at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
Thanks are also due to ACC, who read and commented on earlier
drafts of this novel, and believed in it; and to my editor Sarah who stepped into the breach at the eleventh hour.
Revenant is dedicated to Val K, with love and hugs.
Revenant
Chapter One
Santorini, 1904
The distant grumbling of the volcano was split by the sound of a
pickaxe striking stone. A group of locals gathered to watch, standing a safe distance from the excavation site on one side of the crumbling wall that marked the boundary of Agios Eleutherios. The tiny church squatted behind them, dazzling white but for the solitary bronze bell tinted green by the elements. Against the brightness of the church, the villagers were like a flock of birds. Black-plumed widows and pied old men leaned forward, heads bobbing as conversation passed between them.
The workman redoubled his efforts, using the side of the axe to
scrape away the loosened soil before striking down again. This time, the pick chipped out flakes of limestone that ricocheted from the trench and struck the workman. He muffled a yelp of annoyance and turned to call out, “Mr. Hunter!”
Jack was already halfway across the site, still clutching a box of pencils and with a large sketchpad tucked under one arm. His foreman Koubelos trailed after him, dragging a tripod and a camera case, his face lined with anxiety at every jolt that made the plates clash within the bag.
“Come on,” Jack said, taking one stride to every three that Koubelos made. The foreman hefted the camera equipment higher onto his
shoulder and tried not to stumble over the mass of twisted strata running through the centre of the dig site.
They had been recording the morning’s find, a Late Hellenistic
bothros, when Jack had suddenly sat up, his drawing forgotten. “Did you hear that?” he’d asked, and Koubelos had listened, hearing nothing but the muttering of the volcano, the lazy knocking and banging from the workmen, and the whiffle of wind through the pumice boulders. But Jack was not listening to such mundane things. Koubelos had watched his
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expression sharpen until he jumped up and began to collect together the equipment in a tearing hurry.
“What is it?” Koubelos had asked.
Jack had not looked back. “They’ve found something. The note
changed. It’s not just soil and tephra. That was rock they just hit.”
“You can hear that?” Koubelos had paused and rubbed a finger in
one ear, and then listened carefully. He could hear nothing more than before, and so, not for the first time, he wondered at the nature of the Englishman.
On an island where most of the inhabitants were small and dark in their looks, it had hardly been a surprise that, when Jack had first come ashore, the old lady who kept the mules on the jetty had run into town screaming of the tall exotiko come to terrorise them. It took a month before people stopped crossing themselves if they saw him on the street, but still he looked like an otherworldly being, pale and blond with a long mournful face like the icons in the Church of the Virgin. The March sun had done no more than brush light through his hair and had brought colour only reluctantly to touch his cheekbones.
Unlike the other English archaeologists who wore tweed to their digs, or the French, who wore all manner of colours, Jack only ever wore black. Apparently he had told his landlady that it saved him from wasting his time in laundry work. The villagers whispered instead that it was indicative of some terrible tragedy that demanded a prolonged period of mourning, but nobody had yet been able to decide what sort of tragedy it had been.
Jack did not help matters by spending most of his time alone rather than with the other Westerners on the island. More speculation arose when he wandered the streets of Fira at dusk, taking the track towards Oia. That particular stretch of road, everybody knew, was rife with vampires as soon as the sun went down.
Father Gregory of Agios Eleutherios had warned Jack of the danger, but the Englishman would not listen, thus proving to half of Fira that he was an exotiko and to the other half that he was merely foolhardy.
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Koubelos had worked on the site for two months now and was mostly convinced that Jack was no more peculiar than any other Western
archaeologist who passed through the islands. It was times like these, though, when Mr. Jack announced he had heard things that no normal human being could hear, that Koubelos’s conviction wavered.
As they neared the place where a knot of workmen had formed to
scoop out the pale earth from the trench, Jack noticed the villagers lined up behind the church wall. He nodded towards them. “What are they waiting for?”
Koubelos shrugged. “There is always interest when a grave is found.”
“It might not be a burial.”
“Rumour has it that there are graves here. The little stone idols you bought from the demarch came from this area,” said Koubelos. “You said yourself many times, the little idols are grave-goods. It was only a matter of time before the men found a tomb here.”
“I suppose they want to see if I can raise the dead, as Kera Eutimia is fond of saying,” Jack said lightly. “Or if I embrace the corpse as my long-dead brother. It is supposed to be my brother that I’m mourning, isn’t it?”
“I would not know,” Koubelos said, his gaze fixed on the ground.
Jack sounded amused. “Of course not.”
The workmen stood back as Jack and Koubelos approached. They
began to point into the trench, talking loudly and making exaggerated claims as to their role in the discovery. The man with the pickaxe leaned upon it and shook his head when Koubelos questioned him, instead
gesturing from the damaged capstone to the blunted end of his pick.
It was obvious to Koubelos that Jack was only half-listening to the chatter of the workmen, nodding politely whenever there was a pause for breath. He put down the sketchpad and pencils, his full concentration reserved for what had been revealed in the trench. Lapped by the pale earth was a capstone roughly six inches thick, set flush against the sides of a stone-walled coffin that measured some five feet by three.
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“This is a cist burial,” Jack said with authority, silencing the
workmen. “It must be prehistoric.”
Koubelos watched, marvelling at the Englishman’s control over his excitement as Jack walked all the way around the grave. He made a show of checking his pocket-compass, even though the church, a
perfectly good indicator of direction, was right beside him. He turned his back to the church and held the compass over the grave.
“Perfect north-south alignment,” Jack said. “Open it.”
There was a mutter of protest from the workmen, quickly hushed
when Jack glared at them.
Koubelos chewed the ends of his moustache. “Perhaps we should
wait for Father Gregory.”
Jack looked genuinely astonished. “Whatever for?”
The foreman lifted his shoulders in a slow shrug and spread his
hands wide as if the answer was obvious.
“Oh, come on,” Jack said. “That’s ridiculous.”
Koubelos gave up and gestured to two of the workers to remove the capstone. As the men pushed and heaved at the block, Jack crouched at the foot of the grave, his hands clasped together beneath his chin as he waited. The villagers ventured forward, leaving the safety of the church to join the rest of the workmen. They shoved at each other to get closer until, with a sharp crack, the handle of one of the pickaxes broke.
Nervous laughter flittered around the group, and then one of the women gave a shriek, pointing into the grave.
“Bones! I can see them!”
Jack rubbed his forehead and waved at the men to continue with the removal. Koubelos hesitated, glancing at Jack with more words of
“May the saints deliver us,” Koubelos said instead, snatching off his cloth cap and kneading it between both hands. “What in God’s Name happened to it?”
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The villagers and workers crossed themselves hastily and backed
away. Jack crawled along the side of the trench, seemingly oblivious to Koubelos’s muttered prayer. He appeared to be transfixed by what lay within the coffin. Koubelos ventured closer.
A skeleton, wholly perfect, curled up on its right side, its knees tucked up so tight beneath its chin that it had surely been bound into that position. Its arms were crossed over its thighs as if grasping its ankles, and the skull was turned to face downwards, its jaw gaping into the cold stone beneath it.
“A contracted burial,” Jack said, gesturing to Koubelos to start taking notes. “Just as at Pherendaki. But the skeleton… It’s so well preserved!
On Naxos there’s hardly anything—a cluster of grave-goods, a few long bones and ribs. But not a complete skeleton. This is wonderful.”
Koubelos grunted, noncommittal, and then made an involuntary
sound of revulsion as Jack reached into the grave and touched the skull.
“Male,” Jack continued, stroking his fingers across the back of the cranium. “Let me just check…” He paused as the skull rolled into his hand as he tried to turn it. With a soft curse, he picked up the detached skull and held it carefully against his chest, lying almost flat on the ground, half in, half out of the grave as he examined the spine.
“Mr. Jack, please,” Koubelos said. “Take care that you do not fall in.”
Jack rolled over, still cradling the skull, and looked up at the
foreman. “I want him raised. Fetch the sheets.”
Koubelos made a helpless gesture. “But Father Gregory…”
“Father Gregory is a superstitious old fool!” Jack snapped, startling Koubelos. “And so are the others, who clearly would much rather gossip like old women than do any honest work.” He glared at the workmen who had taken refuge in the churchyard.
Koubelos bowed his head at the first sign of anger he’d ever seen from the Englishman, but his voice was level as he said, “Raising the dead without the say-so of a priest is not honest work.”
“Well, then. I’ll do it myself.” Jack gently settled the skull back in the grave and got to his feet, dusting off the clinging red dust as he did so.
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He gave the foreman a blistering look. “Do you think you could bring yourself to photograph the skeleton?”
“Yes, Mr. Jack.”
Koubelos busied himself with setting up the tripod and fitting the camera onto the pedestal, and then he inserted the plate and prepared to take the first photograph. Just in time he remembered that Jack insisted on having some sort of object placed by a find to indicate its relative size, and so he opened the box of pencils and selected one still unsharpened.
Koubelos put it as close to the side of the grave as he dared and returned to the camera.
He peered through the viewfinder and took the photograph. By the
time he was ready for the next, the pencil had disappeared. Koubelos muttered, going over to where it had lain. He could see the slight depression it had made in the soil. He looked towards the grave. The ground surrounding the trench sloped down from the coffin, so the pencil could not have rolled away by itself. Perhaps the breeze had moved it, although Koubelos could not recall feeling anything beyond a slight whisper in the past few minutes.
He took a few steps forward and peered into the grave. With a start he jumped back, making the sign against the evil eye. The skull laughed up at him, its jawbone yawning at a rakish angle. Koubelos was certain that Jack had put it back as he had found it. He was sure that when he had taken the photograph, the skull was lying facedown. Now here it was looking at him and grinning.
Refusing to be spooked by a pile of bones, Koubelos looked for the missing pencil. He spotted it protruding from the ribs on the underside, and so he knelt to work out a way of retrieving it without having to touch the skeleton. Using a second pencil, he began to tap the first out from beneath the curving ribs, but soon it was stuck against something.
Irritated, Koubelos put a hand in to seize the pencil, only to drop it again immediately as his fingers came out stained a deep blood red.
“What are you doing?” Jack asked as he came back carrying a long
stretch of linen. “Koubelos! You’re as white as… hmm.” He dropped the
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sheet onto a rock and walked over to the foreman, who held out his hand in mute appeal.
“Rust,” Jack said. “Where did you find that?”
“I thought it was blood,” Koubelos said, embarrassed now that the initial fright had faded. He wiped his hand against his trousers and then inspected the faint red-orange tinge smeared into his fingertips.
“Why is there rust inside the grave? The stone has no oxides in it.”
Jack crouched and looked inside.
Koubelos waited for him to exclaim at the way the skull was laying, or at the presence of the pencil between the ribs. Instead, he continued to talk about the rust until Koubelos risked a glance towards the head of the grave. The skull was facedown, exactly as Jack had left it. And the pencil… Koubelos looked at the ground, expecting to see it there. It was not.
With an inward sigh of relief for his sanity, he put his hands into his pockets, only to withdraw his right hand when he felt a painful jab. He unfurled his fingers and stared at the missing pencil, which had
managed to sharpen itself between the grave and his pocket.
Koubelos forced his attention back to Jack, who had leant into the coffin and removed a small, misshapen lump of rust from beneath the bones. He approached the graveside unwillingly, wishing he could ignore Jack’s excited chatter about the new find. He would rather be at the other end of Santorini, or better yet, on another island, than continue with this dig.
“Iron,” Jack said, holding up the fused mass. “How fascinating! A pity that this is the only surviving piece. It looks like a link from a chain.”
Koubelos shivered involuntarily. “A chain, Mr. Jack?”
“So it would seem. Look here.” Jack indicated the faint trail of
reddish dust scrolling across the bottom of the coffin and smudging over the upper ribs and arm of the skeleton.
“The corpse was chained,” said Koubelos, his nervousness increasing.
“That is not a good thing.”
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“It certainly is not,” Jack agreed. “I was hoping for a Bronze Age burial, but this would suggest a much later interment.”
“It suggests much more than that!” Koubelos stepped back from the grave. “Evildoers were chained after death to stop them from walking again. The capstone, also—too heavy for a man to lift alone. This was a wicked man, Mr. Jack. We should cover him again.”
“We shall do nothing of the sort.” Jack stood up and fetched the
sheet, unravelling it and handing one end to Koubelos. “Hold it steady.
Don’t drop it,” he said, taking the other end and preparing to step into the coffin.
“Please!” Koubelos said, panicked. “It is most unwise to cross a
corpse.”
“This is a skeleton,” Jack said. “Not a corpse. There’s a difference.”
Koubelos continued to complain, the end of the cloth shivering as he gesticulated. Jack told him sharply to shut up and stop moving about, and then began to slide his end of the sheet beneath the bones.
The operation was easier than Koubelos expected, and within a few minutes the skeleton lay on the ground beside its coffin, its bones yellow against the cloth. The move had dislocated many of the smaller bones, but Jack was more concerned with a thorough examination of the top of the spine.
Koubelos kept his distance, casting glances towards the now deserted churchyard as if he wished he could seek refuge there. He tried to concentrate on taking the notes that Jack was dictating at high speed, but faltered when he realised the pencil he was using was the one that had fallen into the grave. As he surreptitiously swapped it for a new pencil, he was certain the skull winked at him. But how could a skull wink?
