Part: 2/5 (read part one)
Wordcount: 1,327
Synopsis: Amy and Lyle go over the pictures from the day’s work. A restless night follows.
“Man, that’s about enough to knock me out,” said Lyle, pulling off his heavy knit cap as we staggered into the lodge at long last. None of us could really claim to be mountaineers. People who probably could had reassured us that nothing between the site and the lodge was particularly rugged. It was more rugged than any of us.
The lodge was a sprawling building with walls like a fortress. Constructed partially from native rock and partially from massive timber, it had withstood the worst Mt. X could conjure. Yet, standing in the fire room at its heart, I could still hear the wind wailing and roaring through the saddleback. A fine grit of ice crystals raced out of the dark and dashed against the heavy glass in the windows. I untangled my musty scarf from my wet hair and unzipped my coat while Lyle conversed with our guide. The guide was a wind-burned St. Bernard of a man with a restless shock of red hair and bright blue eyes shrunken by perpetual snow-blindness. He was close-mouthed about the boy king. He only knew as much as we did.
I was waiting for my turn with Lyle. The rest of the team broke up and migrated out to their designated places in the lodge for the night. Lyle and I had developed some rapport early on this trip. I reminded him of his sister back in Edinburgh. He was the information hub for the expedition. I’ve always liked information, especially when the inexplicable happens. Surely, Lyle had a theory.
He bid the guide goodnight and turned to me. He could see the questions in my face, and now that the exertion of the hike had worn off, he seemed ready to talk about the day’s findings. “Got the photographs?”
“Do you want to review them?” I asked, repositioning the strap of my camera bag on my shoulder.
He pulled back the wet sleeve of his coat and scowled at his watch. “We’ve got time to take a look over them.”
Good. Then we can get the whole thing out in the open. I returned to my room to change into dry clothes and pick up my laptop. It was a small room with a bed that creaked like a nest of racoons and a tiny window, plastered with snow. I emptied my camera, pocketing the memory card and leaving the battery to charge. The cold drained it fast. Lyle said to meet back in the fire-room. I grabbed my laptop and went back out.
He was waiting for me at a table by the wall, surrounded by stapled stacks of paper and a glowing e-reader. He cleared a spot for my laptop and I joined him. As I opened the laptop I glanced toward the windows. “How bad is the storm?”
“Bad enough that the locals admit it’s a storm. It won’t clear up until tomorrow afternoon. That will set us back a little. But what have we got?” He moved his chair over to see the screen better. I opened the camera card.
We skipped through some general pictures of the site and moved on. He spent a while analyzing the steps we uncovered leading down into the cave the day before. He had opinions on how they were constructed, but couldn’t decide if they dated from before or after the tomb was built. They had completely uncovered the steps and were making their way into the tomb before anyone noticed the characters carved into the stone over the door. I saw them first. They were simple, angular and runic. They had found similar characters on a slab of basalt under a lake in the valley. No one had been able to translate it, and it seemed unrelated to any other finds in the area. This would be the first time we discovered a similar script.
Someone dug up a handful of pottery just inside the door, ashes here, ashes there, fragments of a bone flute and what might have been tubular bells. Then there were the markings that first tipped off the locals that this might be the tomb of a boy king. They outlined the ghostly nearly-destroyed figure of a child with a star on his forehead.
There were dozens of careful shots of the worn-down writing scratched on the walls. It looked different from the runes. More modern, perhaps. But still, there was no way to translate it. If only we could understand what was written on the mausoleum itself. Maybe it would explain a great deal.
We spent some time staring at the sheepskin with the crest painted on it. Little remained of the pigment. There were shadowy stains where we could guess it once created images and designs. We identified traces of red and blackish pigment and a grimy yellow that Lyle said had once been green. About a quarter of the crest was still visible. It was a wreath of foliage with a star hanging over it. I could make out the faded outline of a bird, or some winged creature in the middle of the wreath. It took about five minutes for Lyle to see it. He might have been stalling.
I clicked to the next image and it hit me deep in the chest like an electric pulse again. There was the child sleeping in his crypt. “He’s so perfect.” It was all I could think to say yet. I glanced sideways at Lyle. He gazed mutely into the screen.
“If the bog mummies could see this.” He sat back in his chair and rubbed his fingers together. “The construction methods on the crypt date from the bronze age. We haven’t got much reference for the script, but it’s safe to say with the changes we see in it that this tomb was in existence and possibly a pilgrimage for these people for a long time. It sure would be nice if we could translate some of it. What do you suppose they had to say about this kid?”
We moved on. No one seemed to have much to say about this kid anymore. But I would have liked to know what we all were thinking when we settled into our rooms that night.
As for me, my mind refused to stop. At about one a.m. something occurred to me. What if this society had only ever had one boy king? Supposing in some tender early time in the establishment of their civilization, somehow this child became their adored ruler? At his tragic premature passing, his people had embalmed him through some infallible method, lost to science. In that mountainside tomb, they continued to pay tribute to a dead king—their eternal ceremonial monarch, and the boy-king of legend.
A strange move for a budding civilization, but maybe a lucky one, in the end. A dead king had no reason to go to war, and no lust for conquest. Sometimes the best thing these little civilizations could do was keep to themselves.
At around two, the wind was howling unbelievably loud and the little heater in my room was barely sufficient to fight the chill of Mt. X. I decided to get up and seek out that huge central open fireplace that heated the lodge like a lurking volcano. Surely, I wasn’t the only one struggling to sleep through this wind.
The fireplace room was wonderfully warm, but deserted. So, I contented myself with the company of some hot chocolate and sank into the corner of one of the semicircular couches ringing the fire. The heat was already making me sleepier than I had been in my bed, and I propped my feet on the edge of the fire ring. The wind moaned outside in the dark and I thought of the cave in the mountainside, with the cuneiform writing and the bone flute fragments…and the ashes.
And a child’s voice woke me saying, “I can’t sleep.”