The Red Man Read online

The Red Man

  Anna Reith

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  Copyright 2012 Anna Reith

  ISBN: 978-1-907623-42-4

  Cover art and design by Anna Reith for Frith Books

  All rights reserved. Except for review purposes, the reproduction of this book in whole or part, electronically or mechanically, constitutes a copyright violation. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, events, and characters are fictitious or are used fictitiously, a product of the author’s imagination. Any similarities to actual events, or persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental.

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  THE RED MAN

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  We began to excavate there almost exactly two years ago. Today, I am the only one left.

  At first, nothing about the dig seemed unusual. We were a small team largely augmented by students from the university. Only Ash, Nat and I had any real archaeological experience of major sites, and none of us could possibly have predicted what we would find.

  It started as a simple exercise; in an area already known to have rich deposits of Celtic and Iron Age artefacts, our task was to scour the thick, fractured mud and swell the ranks of existing samples. Our bosses expected mainly small items—the kind of thing ancient people might have tossed into sacred pools or brooks, the gateways between worlds, in the hope of benediction, salvation or intercession. I can still see Ash, at the time writing a paper on the role of sacrifice in Celtic religious practice, crouching in the dirt with the breeze tousling his dark brown hair. The sun had brought out the freckles on his nose and he had discarded his shirt, bare-chested and khaki-kneed as he sifted through one particular patch of darkened earth at the end of the trench.

  “Hey,” he said, “this is interesting. Looks like pollen.”

  We all gathered around, agreed that yes, it did, and wasn’t it strange to see a deposit like that there? We dug further. Nat—her henna-orange hair piled up on top of her head and bound with a tie-dyed bandanna—suggested maybe we could be looking at bunches of flowers, or garlands of offering. The three of us discussed it, an earnest and protracted huddle in the silt-rich sunshine. A smell of old woodland and the dankness of recently turned earth threaded through the air. Then one of the students cried out, a shriek of glee.

  It was a finger.

  Old, worn almost past recognition—more like a chicken bone wrapped in leather than any fleshy human digit—but it was there. We spent ages debating what to do, how to proceed.

  Urgent phone calls streaked to and from department heads and private mentors. Old friends and colleagues were dragged from their desks to give advice. It took hours to plan every move. Late into the night we worked, painstakingly slicing away at the earth, marking out the area to be dug, preparing the ground to yield its secrets.

  He came to us slowly over the following days. Inch by inch, suggestions and hints, though nothing prepared us for the moment we were actually able to look into his face, a bridge of years across forgotten times. Millennia had passed since light last touched him, but now here he was, revealed in the eerie glow of our halogen lanterns. We hardly dared breathe. The thick clay had preserved him beautifully—a miracle when so much of this area had been broken under bulldozer or plough. A major ‘A’ road ran not half a mile from the field, heavy with traffic and the assaults of modern life. He seemed to stare out at us from his earthen tomb, though his eyes stayed firmly shut, his face crumpled into a perpetual sleep, mouth a tautened death grin and knotted rags of hair clinging to his head. His skin, tanned to the consistency of goat hide and stretched tight over his bones, still bore the tattoos, the marks and etchings that had covered him in life, the majority of his body burnished to a deep, warm ochre colour with some kind of powdery pigment. From that, we drew his name.

  When we took him out of the ground, it was an occasion clogged with onlookers, journalists, academics, and general gawpers. Someone’s wagging tongue brought them running, though I’m still not sure who leaked the information. I suspected Ash. It all fitted so well with his paper, and he took such easy delight in talking to everyone, mentioning his theories and his work.

  We watched The Red Man being carefully laid into his new coffin—a hermetically sealed, thermostatically controlled box which would see him safely transported back to the university for further study, and the observant among us should have realised the date. It was the first of August: among the Celts, the feast of Lughnasadh. Fire marked it, for those ancient believers. Bonfires—bone fires—for the bright one, the reflex of divinity they found in the sun; a blazing, startling god of many gifts, both giver of life and bringer of death.

  Different mythologies have put different names to it, and to him, over time. Even then, varying religions squabbled between themselves, usurping and changing each other’s pantheons. The Irish Celts, the Romano-British incomers… the Druids.

  That night, breathless with thoughts of what our discovery might be able to reveal, we toasted the departure of The Red Man. We sat close to the trenches, bathed in the light of a blazing white moon, full and round as an old sixpence, and drank bottles of warm, flat beer.

  “You do realise,” Ash said, “that we’ll never live this one down? Any of us. Thirty years on, he’ll still be defining all our careers. We’ll never get away from it.”

  We laughed. Sure, we all agreed, Ash probably had a point. But who could begrudge giving their whole career, their whole life, over to something as momentous as this? The Red Man—possibly the most complete, most unique burial of his period ever discovered—would keep us all in employment for the foreseeable future. All he asked in return was our undying devotion, dedication, and… well, what more than that?

  Of course, plenty remained on the dig site to require our attention, so despite the lingering excitement and impatience among the team, we needed to finish what we’d started. Days passed, full of nothing but shards of pottery, the occasional part of a brooch or perhaps something that might once have been a figurine. In any other circumstances, these discoveries would have excited us beyond measure; tiny glimpses into a past we couldn’t hope to recapture. Yet, with him so many miles away, lonely in some pristine laboratory with scientists and historians rubbing their hands in a rapture of indecision over how they should begin to analyse him, I found it hard to think of anything else.

  Study of something so magnificent takes years, naturally. Decades. Just look at the Rosetta Stone, or the Darwinius masillae. Yet the hunger we felt was immediate. Even then we spoke about him incessantly, wondered who or what he’d been. A warrior, a shaman, a willing sacrifice? A criminal, a priest, or a king? How had he lived, and what sights had he seen? We tried to conjure his landscape, his world, around us, weaving possibilities from hope and conjecture. Nat was the first to confess something odd.

  There was a huge team barbecue on the green opposite the village pub, the night before we all left. We’d become quite the local celebrities in our time there.

  Nat spoke to me then.

  “Weirdest thing,” she said, looking at me with pale, drawn eyes. “Last night, I had this dream. There was— I don’t know. Drumming. Flames. I was running through this woodland, but I kept falling, and I felt like I was being watched. There was… something, in the trees. It was horrible. I woke up, couldn’t go back to sleep afterwards.”

  I told her she needed time off, that the madness of these past weeks was enough to send anyone’s imaginati
on spiralling out of control, and she should take a few days completely out of the loop. She gave me a slightly peculiar look, but nodded and promised she’d do exactly that. Her fiancé had a boat they used to spend time on; I got the impression that was what she planned to do.

  So, the chapter closed. I had supposed we would all see each other soon enough, now the heavy lifting and the bone-kicking was done, and the real work had to begin. It’s never the physical completing of a puzzle that marks its end, after all, but rather the deciphering of how it came to be made.

  However, my assumption—that we would remain a team, however loosely joined in our study—proved flimsy and false. Months passed. I heard only infrequently from Ash, who had taken a leave of absence from