Painted Horses (36 page)

The vanished stream tries to resurrect around them, canals rising in the trenches, puddles oozing through the earth. The mechanical pump drones on and on but can’t stay ahead of the seep, percolating from below with the unassailable tidal force of the Thames itself. After her second full day she buys rubber boots, what the Brits she works with call Wellies.

The first exploratory cuttings pierce the slabs of two Victorian basements, bone-bruising work by chisel and maul in pursuit of the ancient course of the stream. The circular scrap of wall that emerges is unexpected though as Audrey Williams tells her hardly a surprise, that you can’t pull a weed in these parts without freeing some long-forgotten thing.

But to Catherine it is a surprise when the wall barely detracts from their original purpose. The rising water whets the others’ curiosity about the stream though she remains fixed on the ruin, unable to cease from inspecting it, from marveling over the fitted blocks at every dinner break or pause.

Layers lift. The curved wall rises, reveals itself into the sacred arc of an apse. Eventually, this is how she will think of it. The base of an altar emerges, and the vanished river is forgotten by everyone.

They uncover perimeter footings and a pair of long sleeper walls, carve down deeper and find hewn and mortised structural timbers, the beams sodden with water and perfectly preserved. A last gift of the Walbrook. Even the developer cannot tear his eyes away as they coax from the earth the slumbering stone footprint of a basilica.

Later with the fever of the thing at full pitch and the headlines shouting and crowds teeming she will look back on those few quiet days when it seemed to belong to her alone and she will wonder at the chance of it. How on earth her fate had fallen headlong into this. Serendipity, Grimes would call it.
We didn’t choose where to dig. The bombs chose for us.

She wonders if she will ever acquire the aloofness the others possess. The steely scientific eye, the ruthless detachment from her own throbbing pulse. She works her trowel into the mud that entombs the stones, the rubber of her Wellingtons slick with the same glorious ooze.

The first time her fingers find a shard of Roman clay. A band of scroll, the figure of a lion. She stares at the shard in her muddy palm, can barely find her own voice to call for Audrey Williams.

If she does not regard herself as overly religious, she knows in that instant she will never, ever seek immunity to the transcendent jolt. Fitting, she thinks, that this was a church. Maybe, she thinks, something out of the sky chose for her.

Bits and pieces emerge everywhere. A buckle, a blade. Features of the building—the foot-worn stone threshold to the narthex, the twin sockets for the door pivots still bushed with iron rings. Seven circles atop each of the sleeper walls, once the basis for seven sets of columns. Someone turns a shovel and finds a flat marble fragment chiseled with Latin.

They invent the cataloguing as they go, alphabetic code scrawled on endless paper bags to denote the location, the layer, the context of the artifact inside. Audrey Williams makes furious notations in tablet after tablet, descriptions and inferences about the structure itself, details of the finds in the bags. Grimes works in the tablets also though he seems mainly to worry over visuals, sketching the soil layers in cross-section as they scrape ever deeper, sketching details in miniature as more and more juts from the ground.

He is a man possessed by photography. He circles the dig like an assassin, stalks with his reflex camera poised, in as primal a mode as Catherine can envision this otherwise rumpled and scholarly person. He sets a trowel on the squared plinth of the altar for scale, leans a shovel against a wall or a joist. Once when he is photographing near Catherine he speaks to her, never wavering from the eyepiece.

“We’re not following the rules on this one, are we.”

“Sir?”

“Of all the tools we have, this might be the one that stops us cold.”

She knows already he is not given to light quips. Not here in the trenches at any rate. She blows a strand of hair from her face, hears the slice of the shutter in the throat of the camera.

“A marvelous device to be sure. Freezes time and that buys us a lot on this one. But think of the future.”

The shutter whispers again.

“In the future there will be no archaeology. No shovels, no trowels. No lively days in the bog. Just column after column of glass plates, reel after reel of Movietone.”

Finally he lowers the device, hefts its mass in his hands.

“The past will come through a lens and never vanish. You and I, miss, will constitute no mystery. We will appear to the future, and the future will already know us.” He gives her a sidewise wink. “You see why I’m ambivalent.”

They exhume the head the last day of the dig. The builder’s slumbering crane towers over the lot, its long boom already positioned.

Beneath the fourth layer of flooring in the narthex the point of a trowel traces the shard of a tile, strange against the material around it. Another broken tile alongside. Features of a roof, concealed within a floor. Why.

The tile pops free like the lid of a jar and a gasp goes up. The eye of a god peers from the hole, one hollow pupil trained toward them beneath a brooding ridge of brow. The rest of his features remain buried. “Half-sunk,” mutters Grimes. “A shattered visage lies.”

He is recorded where they find him and then exhumed further. Old iron has through the centuries oxidized across his marble face like a port-wine blotch, like a continent of pigment gone awry. Parted lips and tips of teeth, an ugly break where head and neck once met. A scar from the kiss of a blade, a blow delivered in antiquity. Finally his curls and a sort of cap, a cone-like article with the top flopped forward.

A Phrygian cap, Grimes calls it. He runs his fingers over the stains on the face and murmurs, “Sugar,” and Catherine is not sure whether he refers to the granulated discoloration, or simply to the sweetness of the find in these final, fleeting moments. Her own nails, dull and blunt though they are, gouge like spikes in her palms.

“Well boys and girls. We aren’t dealing with a Christian chapel at all. You’ve been playing with the pagans.”

At the time she has only the vaguest notion of his meaning. A loitering features man from the
Times
snaps a shot of the head in the noonday light, and Grimes calls an end to the effort. He departs with an almost jarring lack of ceremony. For Catherine’s part, despite the blaze in the window she rides the Cambridge train in a private fog, unable to accept or even fathom in any satisfactory way that Walbrook is behind her.

Mithras Tauroctonos, Grimes declared him, the cap on his head a dead giveaway. God of the Invincible Sun. Then he was gone and the dig shut down, before she could ply him for more.

She paces the soles out of her shoes on the longest Sunday of her life, then cuts out of lecture Monday and installs herself in the Haddon Library the second the doors open.

Catherine had the faint sense she’d encountered the name before, probably in
The Golden Bough
, a book she kept secret from her mother for years. The library has an original two-volume printing from 1890, an edition Catherine regards as itself something of an artifact. She wills herself not to get sidetracked, to stay with the task at hand.

Mithras worship does appear, though Frazer is slim on the details. She gathers the Roman incarnation borrowed from an earlier Persian deity, introduced to the empire by legionnaires and by the second century a favored cult of Roman soldiers. By the end of the third century the sect comes into direct and at times violent competition with Christianity (her mind flashes to the buried head, the gash in the stone of his jaw), eventually to have its star fade entirely.

The only treatise devoted exclusively to the religion is a fifty-year-old manuscript by a French scholar named Cumont. Catherine has never heard of him but comes to like him in the two hours she spends with his study, a rather amazing exercise in inference. With no scripture or liturgy to work from, Cumont pieces together the cult’s rites and sacraments from physical evidence alone. An adorned column in one ruin, a mosaic in another. Depictions of the Tauroctony, the central symbol in which the god overpowers and slays a sacred bull.

Born of a rock, he descends with the bull into the murk and mystery of a cave, beyond reach of the unconquered sun. The god’s temples are thus emblems of the underworld, built wholly or partially underground. She thinks again of the Walbrook, the other secrets it might contain, kept for the future not by initiates but by the glitter and glass of London’s very first high-rise office building. Mystery cult then, mystery cult still.

She steps squinting out of the dusk of the library and moves past a newsstand and in the high autumn light she misses the headline altogether. Ten steps along her mind processes the accompanying image and she turns back.

The foundations of the temple, awash in people. Men in business attire, suited and tied and utterly incongruous against the mud and jumble of the earth. More so the women and girls, white gloved in their Sunday dress and balanced on high heels over the apse, the trenches, the wobbly gangplanks. Catherine feels her ire rise, a sense of personal violation. She can’t help it, does not even try to tamp it down. Instead she feeds it, purchases her own copy and wanders back to her room reading as she goes.

She arrives to a note on her door from the housemistress instructing her to ring Mrs. A. Williams, London. A number she doesn’t recognize, which she relays to the operator on the handset in the hall. Audrey Williams picks up before the second ring.

“There you are. I fear I’ve turned your landlady quite against me but it couldn’t be helped. I’ve been trying to get you for hours.”

Catherine cuts her off. “Have you seen the paper?”

“Oh that’s the least of it. Any chance you can get down here first thing?”

Catherine barely hears her. “All those ridiculous gawkers, like tourists in their own bloody country . . .”

She prattles on a bit, and intuits a distance at the other end. “Hello? Are you there?”

“I am. You’re right; it is their own bloody country. And the gawkers just won us two weeks to keep digging. Can you be here on the first morning train?”

Catherine feels herself squirm. “Of course.”

“You need to simmer down, love. Who do you think it is we’re doing this for?”

She disembarks at Cannon Street station before eight the next morning, pads down the cobbles with the workmen and bankers. The only girl in pants. She can smell the river a block away, its odor as familiar as her father’s Indian summer clambake, the fire pit dug in the Tudor’s garden and the seaweed driven from the coast. The tide must be in. She crosses the street and rounds the corner onto Walbrook.

She remembers the pandemonium around Frank Sinatra a decade ago. Swooning if not hysterical bobby-soxers, absurd scenes outside the Paramount Theatre. This is the first thing that springs to mind. Midway down the street a police line holds back a crowd of onlookers, people hell-bent on a glimpse of the temple.

Not long ago she would have been the only one, lurking at the edge of a dig like a trout along a current. Now it takes an escort of two bobbies to get her through.

In the afternoon they find the neck of the god, deeper down in the same small pit, bearing scars of the same severing stroke. Grimes remains on site though he is now almost totally at the beck and call of journalists and officials and Catherine can sense his mounting frustration, knows this is not his purpose or desire. At the dinner break he presses his camera upon her and explains its focus and flash, the urgent angles of sunlight and shadow.

She knows he’s stepping on a limb. Audrey Williams has taken over his sketching and his notations but she is as able as Grimes himself and who would think otherwise. But this? Catherine holds the camera, feels her knees about to knock.

“Sir, are you sure?”

He is already shuffling to his duties, his suit and his tie unsmudged. “We learn as we go, miss. Stop calling me sir.”

The crowd continues to mass when the workday closes, hundreds of office workers and executives queued by the police down the street clear past St. Stephen’s and on around the corner to the Bank of England. By dusk only a fraction has shuffled past and part of the line has tried and failed to storm the police barricade. With the temple and the dangerous wet trenches descending into darkness the diggers walk off for the day, through a gauntlet of catcalls out of a frustrated, jilted mob.

To Catherine’s shock Grimes throws his own barbs back. “Egyptian thieves, are we?” he barks. “Watch yourselves, now. Watch you don’t kill what you love.”

So it proceeds for the better part of a week. Catherine remains in London, overnighting at Audrey Williams’s flat. Other statuary emerges—Mithras’s forearm and hand, his taut knuckles wrapped around the hilt of a knife whose iron blade has long disintegrated.

Finally another head. Not Mithras but Minerva, her neck wrenched from her torso, which is never recovered, her blank eyes like eggs in her skull.

Goddess of art and war, the ultimate deity. Audrey Williams holds her up to the onlookers in the dusk and in the long hush that falls Catherine senses some luminous refraction angle off the stilled mass of them, and she gets it. She sees the throng, and she sees herself.