was a second skull. And this, here: in the furthest corner. What was this? A third?
What was all this?
Now she was working – and working hard. Her hands were wet with excited sweat; she knew that as soon as she told everyone, they would come and take over her cave, but this marvellous cache, this trove of bones, this was her find, she had spent all summer waiting for something like this, she had spent fifteen years waiting for something like this, so she was damned if she was going to give it up without giving it every wallop of energy, this day, this one last day.
Away down the passage, rain was falling, spattering disdainfully on the metal ladder – no doubt blackening the funereal menhirs of the Bondons, up there on the surface; but she didn’t care; now she could see that the cave floor was barely concealing, quite astonishingly, entire human skeletons.
It would need weeks to extract them all properly, but in two hours she could brush away enough dust to get a sense of the age and skull size and maybe the gender. And the wounds.
She stared. Appalled. The light in her headlamp was giving out, but it was still strong enough to illuminate what she had found.
Three skulls had holes in them. Bored holes. Trepanations. The four other skeletons: a man, woman and two children, did not have holes in the head, but they exhibited another, deeply disturbing feature.
Julia rubbed the dirt from her eyes, as if she could wipe away the unlikeliness of what she was seeing. But it was incontestable. The creamy-grey ribs and neckbones of these skeletons were lodged with flint arrowheads. At all angles. The flesh that these arrows had once pierced had rotted away, thousands of years ago, but the stone arrowheads remained, lying between ribs, jammed between vertebrae.
These four Stone Age people had been brutally murdered, or even executed. Shot with arrows from all sides. Overkilled. Ritually. Julia couldn’t help feeling this had something to do with the other skulls, the trepanning, the holes in the head. But what?
Something like revulsion overcame her. An instinctive reaction. She had an urge to flee, to run to the metal ladder and the excised hole of light; to get the hell out. She felt like she had crawled into a modern murder scene: with blood pissed up the walls and a father lying dead with a shotgun muzzle in the mouth – surrounded by the plaintive corpses of his children.
Who would stand in a circle, carefully and thoroughly firing arrows at women and kids? What had driven others to do this? Why did the men with the holes in their heads have no arrows in them at all? Were they the killers?
Grasping her emotions tight, she crawled away down the passage. Julia’s last action, as she left the cave, before she shinned up the metal ladder, was to turn and look at the wholly unearthed skull.
Sitting on the mud, it didn’t appear to be smiling any more. It looked like it was trying to speak, across the distance of the ages. Trying to articulate. Trying to warn.
Chapter 2
Vang Vieng was the strangest place Jake had ever been. Two years working as a photographer in Southeast Asia, from the full moon parties of Ko Phangan, where thousands of drugged-up young western backpackers danced all night on coralline beaches next to raggle-taggle Sea Gypsies, to the restaurants of Hanoi where Chinese businessmen ate the beating hearts of cobras ripped from living snakes while making deals for nuclear power stations, had inured him, he thought, to the contrasts and oddness of tropical east Asia.
But Vang Vieng, on a tributary of the Mekong River halfway up the long, obscure, serpentine little country of Laos (and as he had to keep reminding himself, Laos was pronounced to rhyme with how, not house) had shown him that the eccentric contrariness of Indochina was almost in exhaustible. Here was an ugly concrete town in a ravishing ancient valley – where hedonism, communism, capitalism and Buddhism collided, simultaneously.
He’d been here in Vang Vieng three days, taking photos for a coffee table book on Southeast Asian beauty spots. It had been quite a long assignment, and it was nearly over. They’d finished the tour of Thailand, spent two weeks in Vietnam, they already had Halong Bay in the can.
The final Laotian leg of the journey comprised Luang Prabang, up the river, and Vang Vieng, down here. They’d flown to Vang Vieng from Luang; tomorrow morning, they would cab it to Vientiane, the Laotian capital – and jet back to base in Phnom Penh in Cambodia, where Jake had his flat.
That meant they had just one day left. Then the joy of invoicing.
It hadn’t been the greatest assignment in the world, but then – there weren’t many great assignments left for photographers, not these days. Jake had been a photographer for a decade now, and as far as he could tell the work wasn’t coming in any quicker, in fact it was dwindling. All those people with cameraphones, all that easy-to-use, foolproof technology, autofocus, Photoshop: they made it all so simple. Literally anyone could take a decent snap. With a modicum of luck, a moron with a Nokia could do a decent Frank Capra.
Jake didn’t resent, morally or philosophically, this democratization of his ‘artform’. Photography had always been the most demotic of arts, if it was an art at all. Let everyone join in. Let everyone have a go. Good luck to them.
The pain of the process was merely personal: it just meant that his business was disappearing. And the only answer to this dilemma was either to become a war photographer, to become so brave or foolhardy he could and would take shots no civilian would ever dare to do – and he was increasingly tempted that way – or he could accept boring, commercial, uncreative but comfy assignments – like coffee table books on Southeast Asian beauty spots – where at least the air-tickets were paid for, the hotels were decent, the toilets non-squat, and he got to see the world, which after all, had been one of the reasons he had become a snapper in the first place.
He drank the last of his Red Bull, flipped the empty can in a bag of garbage on the roadside, and got back to work.
Photography.
Wandering down the languid, sunsetting, wood-and-concrete mainstreet of Vang Vieng, Jake paused and looked to his right, and quickly assessed – and took a quiverful of shots of the riverine landscape, framed by a teak-built house and a ramshackle beer-shop.
It was a predictable view of the spectacular karst mountain scenery, across the languid, shining Nam Song river. Long and slender motorboats were skimming down the torpid waters, churning up white cockerel tails of surf: the water was beautifully caught in the slant and westering sun, setting over the Pha Daeng mountains.
The view was predictable, but still gorgeous. And this is what people wanted to see in these books. Lush tropical views of stunning scenery! With friendly peasants in funny hats! So do it.
Snap. A stock shot. Snap. A stock shot. Snap. That was a good one. He checked the digiscreen. No it wasn’t. Jake sighed. This was the last day of work and when would he next make a buck or a kip or a baht or a dong?
Maybe he should have become a lawyer. Maybe he should have become a banker, like half his friends back in London. But his family tragedies and his own wilfulness had combined to send him abroad: as soon as he had reached eighteen he’d wanted to get the hell out of Britain, get the hell out of his own head.
He’d wanted to travel and he’d wanted drugs and he’d wanted seriously dangerous adventure – to rid himself of the ineradicable memories. And to a point his running away had worked, until he’d hit the wall of near-bankruptcy, and he’d realized he needed a job and so he’d remembered his childhood yen
