Ysabel

“Behind her.”

Kate dropped her pack and leaned forward over the railing that protected the garden.

“There aren’t…there aren’t any rose bushes here,” she said, after a while.

“No. I think he brought it. Put it here before he went inside.”

“He? Our guy? You mean…?”

Ned nodded. “And he’s still here.”

“What?”

He had just realized that last part himself, the thought arriving as he formed the words. He’d been thinking, reaching within, trying to concentrate. And it had come to him.

He was scaring himself now, but there was something he could see in his mind—a presence of light or colour, an aura. Ned cleared his throat. You could run away from a moment like this, close your eyes, tell yourself it wasn’t real.

Or you could say aloud, instead, as clearly as you could manage, lifting your voice, “You told us you were leaving. Why are you still up there?”

He couldn’t actually see anyone, but it didn’t matter. Things had changed. He would place the beginning, later, as when he’d walked across the cloister and looked at the almost-vanished face of a woman carved in stone hundreds of years ago.

Kate let out a small scream, and stepped quickly back beside him on the walkway.

There was a silence, broken by a car horn sounding from a nearby street. If he hadn’t been so certain, Ned might have thought that the experience underground had rattled him completely, making him say and do entirely weird things.

Then they heard someone reply, eliminating that possibility.

“I will now confess to being surprised.”

The words came from the slanting roof above and to their right, towards the upper windows of the cathedral. They couldn’t see him. It didn’t matter. Same voice.

Kate whimpered again, but she didn’t run.

“Believe me,” said Ned, trying to sound calm, “I’m more surprised.”

“I guarantee I beat you both,” said Kate. “Please don’t kill us.”

It felt so strange to Ned, over and above everything else, to be standing next to someone who was actually speaking words like don’t kill us, and meaning them.

His life hadn’t prepared him for anything like this.

The voice from the roof was grave. “I said I wouldn’t.”

“You also said you’d done it before,” Kate said.

“I have.” Then, after another silence, “You would be mistaken in believing I am a good man.”

Ned would remember that. He’d remember almost everything, in fact. He said, “You know that your face is down in the corridor, back there?”

“You went down? That was brave.” A pause. “Yes, of course it is.”

Of course? The voice was low, clear, precise. Ned realized—his brain hadn’t processed this properly before—that he’d spoken in English himself, and the man had replied the same way.

“I guess it isn’t your skull beside it.” Real bad joke.

“Someone might have liked it to be.”

Ned dealt with that, or tried to. And then something occurred to him, in the same inexplicable way as before. “Who…who was the model for her, then?” he asked. He was looking at the woman on the column. He found it hard not to look at her.

Silence above them. Ned sensed anger, rising and suppressed. Inside his mind he could actually place the figure on the roof tiles now, exactly where he was: seen within, silver-coloured.

“I think you ought to go now,” the man said finally. “You have blundered into a corner of a very old story. It is no place for children. Believe me,” he said again.

“I do,” Kate said, with feeling. “Believe me!”

Ned Marriner felt his own anger kick in, hard. He was surprised how much of that was in him these days. “Right,” he said. “Run along, kids. Well, what am I supposed to do with this…feeling I have in me now? Knowing this is not the goddamn Queen of Sheba, knowing exactly where you are up there. This is completely messed up. What am I supposed to do with it?”

After another silence, the voice above came again, more gently. “You are hardly the first person to have an awareness of such things. You must know that, surely? As for what you are to do…” That hint of amusement again. “Am I become a counsellor? How very odd. What is there to do in a life? Finish growing up; most people never do. Find what joy there is to find. Try to avoid men with knives. We are not…this story is not important for you.”

Ned’s anger was gone as quickly as it had flared. That, too, was strange. In the lingering resonance of those words, he heard himself say, “Could we be important for it? Since I seem to have—”

“No,” said the voice above them, flatly dismissive. “As you just put it: run along. That will be best, whatever it does to your vanity. I am not as patient as I might once have been.”

“Oh, really? Not like when you sculpted her?” Ned asked.

“What?” cried Kate again.

In that same instant there came an explosion of colour in Ned’s mind and then of movement, above and to their right: a swift, coiled blur hurtling down. The man on the roof somersaulted off the slanting tiles to land in the garden in front of them. His face was vivid with rage, bone white. He looked exactly like the sculpted head underground, Ned thought.

“How did you know that?” the man snarled. “What did he tell you?”

He was of middling height, as Ned had guessed. He wasn’t as old as the bald head might suggest; could even be called handsome, but was too lean, as if he’d been stretched, pulled, and the lack of hair accentuated that, along with the hard cheekbones and the slash of his mouth. His grey-blue eyes were also hard. The long fingers, Ned saw, were flexing, as if they wanted to grab someone by the throat. Someone. Ned knew who that would be.

But really, really oddly, he wasn’t afraid now.

Less than an hour ago he’d walked into an empty church to kill some time with his music, bored and edgy, and frightened beyond any fully acknowledged thought for his mother. Only that last was still true. An hour ago the world had been a different place.

“Tell me? No one told me anything!” he said. “I don’t know how I know these things. I asked you that, remember? You just said I’m not the first.”

“Ned,” said Kate. Her voice creaked like it needed oiling. “This sculpture was made eight hundred years ago.”

“I know,” he said.

The man in front of them said, “A little more than that.”

They saw him close his eyes then open them, staring coldly at Ned. The leather jacket was slate grey, his shirt underneath was black. “You have surprised me again. It doesn’t often happen.”

“I believe that,” Ned said.

“This is still not for you. You have no idea of what…you have no role. I made a mistake, back there. If you won’t go, I will have to leave you. There is too much anger in me. I do not feel very responsible.”

Ned knew about that kind of anger, a little. “You will not let us…do anything?”

A movement of the wide mouth. “The offer is generous, but if you knew even a little you would realize how meaningless it is.” He turned away, a dark-clad figure, slender, unsettlingly graceful.

“Last question?” Ned lifted a hand, stupidly—as if he were in class.

The figure stopped but didn’t turn back to them. He was as they’d first seen him, from behind, but lit by the April sun in a garden.

“Why now?” Ned asked. “Why here?”

They could hear the traffic from outside again. Aix was a busy, modern city, and they were right in the middle of it.

The man was silent for what seemed a long time. Ned had a sense that he was actually near to answering, but then he shook his head. He walked across the middle of the cloister and stepped between two columns and over the low barrier back to the walkway by the door that led out to the street and world.

“Wait!”

It was Kate this time.

The man paused again, his back still to them. It was the girl’s voice, it seemed to Ned. He wouldn’t have stopped a second time for Ned, that was the feeling he had.

“Do you have a name?” Kate called, something wistful in her tone.

He did turn, after all, at that.

He looked at Kate across the bright space between. He was too far away for them to make out his expression.

“Not yet,” he said.

Then he turned again and went out, opening the heavy door and closing it behind him.

They stood where they were, looking briefly at each other, in that enclosed space separated, in so many ways, from the world.

Ned, in the grip of emotions he didn’t even come close to understanding, walked a few steps. He felt as if he needed to run for miles, up and down hills until the sweat poured out of him.

From here he could see the rose again between the two pillars, behind the carving. People said she was the Queen of Sheba. It was posted that way on the wall. How did he know they were wrong? It was ridiculous.

Directly in front of him the corner pillar was much larger than those beside it—all four of the corners were. This one, he realized, without much surprise, had another bull carved at the top. It was done in a style different from David and Goliath, and nothing at all like the woman.

Two bulls now, one in the baptistry, fifteen hundred years ago, and this one carved—if he understood properly—hundreds of years after that. He stared at it, almost angrily.

“What do goddamn bulls have to do with anything?” he demanded.

Kate cleared her throat. “New Testament. Symbol of St. Luke.”

Ned stared at the creature at the top of the pillar in front of him.

“I doubt it,” he said finally. “Not this one. Not the old one inside, either.”

“What are you saying now?”

He looked over, saw the strain on her face, and guessed he probably looked a lot the same. Maybe they were kids. Someone had pointed a knife towards them. And that was almost the least of it.

He looked at the sculpted woman where Kate stood and felt that same hard tug at his heart again. Pale-coloured stone in morning light, almost entirely worn away. Barely anything to be seen, as if she were a rendering of memory itself. Or of what time did to men and women, however much they’d been loved.

And where had that idea come from? He thought of his mother. He shook his head.

“I don’t know what I’m saying. Let’s get out of here.”

“Need a drink, Detective?”

He managed a smile. “Coke will do fine.”

kate knew where she was going. She led him under the clock tower and past the city hall to a café a few minutes from the cathedral.

Ned sat with his Coke, watched her sip an espresso without sugar (impressed him, he had to admit), and learned that she’d been here since early March, on an exchange between her school in New York City and one here in Aix. Her family had hosted a French girl last term, and Kate was with the girl’s family until school ended at the beginning of summer.

Her last name was Wenger. She planned to do languages in university, or history, or both. She wanted to teach, or maybe study law. Or both. She took jazz dance classes (he’d guessed something like that). She ran three miles every second or third day in Manhattan, which was not what Ned did, but was pretty good. She liked Aix a whole lot, but not Marie-Chantal, the girl she was staying with. Seemed Marie-Chantal was a secret smoker in the bedroom they shared, and a party girl, and used Kate to cover for her when she was at her boyfriend’s late or skipping class to meet him.

“It sucks, lying for her,” she said. “I mean, she’s not even really a friend.”

“Sounds like a babe, though. Got her phone number?”

Kate made a face. “You aren’t even close to serious.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because you’re in love with a carving in a cloister, that’s why.”

That brought them back a little too abruptly to what they’d been trying to avoid.

Ned didn’t say anything. He sipped his drink and looked around. The long, narrow café had two small tables on the street, but those had been taken, so they were inside, close to the door. The morning traffic was busy—cars, mopeds, a lot of people walking the medieval cobblestones.

“Sorry,” Kate Wenger said after a moment. “That was a weird thing to say.”

He shrugged. “I have no clue what to make of that sculpture. Or what happened.”

She was biting at her lip again.

“Why was he…our guy…why was he looking down there? For whatever it was? Could it have been the font, something about the water?”

Ned shook his head. “Don’t think so. The skull and the carved head were the other way, along the corridor.” He had a thought. “Kate…if someone was buried there, they’d have walled him up, right? Not left a coffin lying around.”

She nodded her head. “Sure.”

“So maybe he was thinking the wall might have just been opened up. For some reason.”

Kate leaned back in her chair. “God, Ned Marriner, is this, like, a vampire story?”

“I don’t know what it is. I don’t think so.”

“But you said he made that carving in the cloister. You do know how old that thing is?”

“Look, forget what I said there. I was a bit out of it.”

“Nope.” She shook her head. “You weren’t. When he came down from the roof I thought he was going to kill you. And then he said when it was done.”

He sighed. “You’re going to ask how I knew,” he said.

“It did cross my mind.” She said it without smiling.

“Bet Marie-Chantal wouldn’t bug me about it.”

“She’d be clueless, checking her eyeliner and her cellphone for text messages. Am I bugging you?”

“No. Does she really get text messages on her eyeliner?”

Kate still didn’t smile. “Something did happen to you back there.”

“Yeah. I’m all right now. Since he left, I feel normal.” He tried to laugh. “Wanna make out?”

She ignored that, which was what it deserved. “You figure it’s over? Just something to do with…I don’t know.”

He nodded. “That’s it. Something to do with I don’t know.”

He was joking too much because the truth was that although he did feel all right now, sitting here with a girl from New York, from now, drinking a Coke that tasted exactly the way it was supposed to—he wasn’t sure whatever had happened was over.

In fact, being honest with himself, he was pretty certain it wasn’t. He wasn’t going to say that, though.

He looked at his watch. “I should check in before lunch, I guess.” He hesitated. This part was tricky, but he was a long way from home and the guys who would needle him. “You got a phone number? We can keep in touch?”

She smiled. “If you promise no more comments on my roommate.”

“Marie-Chantal? My main squeeze? That’s a deal-breaker.”

She made a face, but tore a sheet out of a spiral-bound agenda she pulled from her pack and scribbled the number where she was staying and her cellphone number. Ned took from his wallet the card on which Melanie had neatly printed (in green) the villa address, the code for the gate, the house phone, her mobile, his father’s, the Canadian consulate, and the numbers of two taxi companies. She’d put a little smiley face at the bottom.

When she’d handed the card to him last night he’d pointed out that she hadn’t given him their latitude and longitude.

He read Kate the villa number. She wrote it down.

“You have school tomorrow?”

She nodded. “Cut this morning, can’t tomorrow. I’m there till five. Meet here after? Can you find it?”

He nodded. “Easy. Just down the road from the skull in the underground corridor.”

She did laugh this time, after a second.

They paid for their drinks and said goodbye outside. He watched her walk away through the morning street, then he turned and went back the other way, along a road laid down two thousand years ago.

CHAPTER III

The morning shoot was wrapping when Ned got back. He helped Steve and Greg load the van. They left it in the cathedral square, illegally parked but with a windshield permit from the police, and walked to lunch at an open-oven pizza place ten minutes away.

The pizza was good, Ned’s father was irritable. That wasn’t unusual during a shoot, especially at the start, but Ned could tell his dad wasn’t really unhappy with how things had gone this first morning. He wouldn’t admit that, but it showed.

Edward Marriner sipped a beer and looked at Ned across the table. “Anything inside I need to know about?”

Even when Ned was young his father had asked his opinions whenever Ned was with him on a shoot. When Ned was a kid it had pleased him to be consulted this way. He felt important, included. More recently it had become irksome, as if he was being babied. In fact, “more recently” extended right up to this morning, he realized.

Something had changed. He said, “Not too much, I don’t think. Pretty dark, hard to find angles. Like you said, it’s all jumbled. You should look at the baptistry, though, on the right when you go in. There’s light there and it is really old. Way older than the rest.” He hesitated. “The cloister was open, I got a look in there, too.”

“The important cloister’s in Arles,” Melanie said, dabbing carefully at her lips with a napkin. For someone with a green streak in black hair, she was awfully tidy, Ned thought.

“Whatever. This one looked good,” he said. “You could set up a pretty shot of the garden, but if you don’t want that, you might take a look at some of the columns.” He hesitated again, then said, “There’s David and Goliath, other Bible stuff. Saints on the four corners. One sculpture’s supposed to be the Queen of Sheba. She’s really worn away, but have a look.”

His father stroked his brown moustache. Edward Marriner was notorious for that old-fashioned handlebar moustache. It was a trademark; he had it on his business card, signed his work with two upward moustache curves. People sometimes needled him about it, but he’d simply say his wife liked the look, and that was that.

Now he said, looking at his son, “I’ll check both tomorrow. We’ve got two more hours cleared so I’ll use them inside if Greg says the stitched digitals this morning are all right and we don’t have to do them again. Will I need lights?”

“Inside? For sure,” Ned said. “Maybe the generator, I have no idea how the power’s set up. Depending what you want to do in the cloister you may want the lights and bounces there, too.”

“Melanie said they do concerts inside,” Greg said. “They’ll have power.”

“The baptistry’s off to one side.”

“Bring the generator, Greg, don’t be lazy,” Edward Marriner said, but he was smiling. Bearded Greg made a face at Ned. Steve just grinned. Melanie looked pleased, probably because Ned seemed engaged, and she saw that as part of her job.

Ned wasn’t sure why he was sending the team inside. Maybe taking photos tomorrow, the sheer routine of it—shouted instructions, clutter, film bags and cables, lights and lenses and reflectors—would take away some of the strangeness of what had happened. It might bring the place back to now…from wherever it had been this morning.

It also occurred to him that he’d like a picture of that woman on the column. He couldn’t have said why, but he knew he wanted it. He even wanted to go back in to look at her again now, but he wasn’t about to do that.

His father was going to walk around town after lunch with two cameras and black-and-white film to check out some fountains and doorways that Barrett, the art director, had made notes about when he was here. Oliver Lee had apparently written something on Aix’s fountains and the hot springs the Romans had discovered. Kate Wenger had just told him about those. She just about forced you to call her a geek, that girl.

For the book, Ned’s father had to balance the things he wanted to photograph with pictures that matched Lee’s text. That was partly Barrett Reinhardt’s job: to merge the work of two important men in a big project. His idea, apparently, was to have smaller black-and-white pictures tucked into the text that Lee had written, along with Marriner’s full-page or double-page colour shots.

Ned didn’t feel like looking at fountains. He knew what he did need to do. Greg was going back up to the villa to upload the digitals from this morning and check them on the monitor. He was also going to confirm by phone the arrangements for shooting in Arles, about an hour away, the day after tomorrow.

Melanie handed Greg detailed instructions about that, printed in her usual green ink. Ned saw a smiley face at the bottom of the card. He was pleased to see he wasn’t the only one she did that to.

He rode back with Greg in the van, changed into a faded-out grey T-shirt, and shorts, clipped on his water bottle and pedometer, put the iPod in its armband, and went for a run. He had essays to write here, and a training log to complete for his track coach. Both were homework, really.

The running was better.

Melanie had told him the night before that if he went down their laneway and turned right at the road instead of left towards town, then kept going as it curved back uphill, he’d end up eventually where the road ended at some area where people biked and jogged in the countryside. She said there was supposed to be an old tower up there to look at.

It irritated him, as usual, that she was organized to the point of planning his training routes, but he had no better idea where to go, and there wasn’t a good reason not to try that path.

It was a steep downhill on their little road past the other villas, and then steadily back up for a long, winding way along the ridge above. Up-and-down was good, of course. Ned ran on the cross-country team, this was what he needed.

He’d begun to think he’d gone wrong before he finally came to the car barrier. On the other side of it he found the trail. There were arrows on a wooden pole pointing one way towards a village called Vauvenargues and in the other direction to that tower Melanie had mentioned. Someone went by on a mountain bike towards Vauvenargues. Ned went the other way.

The tower wasn’t far. The trail continued down and around it towards the northern edges of Aix, it looked like. Ned didn’t like to stop during a run, no one did, but the view from up here was pretty cool and so was the round, ruined lookout tower. He wondered how old it was.

This whole place was just saturated in the past, he thought. Layers and layers of it. It could get to you, one way or another. He took off the earbuds and drank some water.

There was a low, really lame fence around the tower. A sign said it was dangerous to cross and a bigger fence had been authorized and was coming, but there was no one in sight now so Ned went over the railing and then he bent and stepped into the tower through a crumbled opening in the honey-coloured stones.

It was dark inside after the sunlight. There was no door anywhere, just the one broken opening. He looked up in a high, empty space. He could see the sky a long way above, a small circle of blue-black. It was as if he were at the bottom of a well. There were probably bats, he thought. There must have been a stairway once, winding up, but there was nothing now. He wondered what this had guarded against, what they’d been watching for up here.

He felt himself cooling down too much in the shade, not good. You pulled muscles that way. He stepped back into the sunshine, blinking, and gazed down at the city. There was an aqueduct in the distance, on the far side of Aix, vividly clear. After a moment, Ned spotted the bell tower of the cathedral in the middle of town, and that brought him back to this morning. He was nowhere close to wanting that.

He turned and started running again, back the way he’d come, but with the stop and cooling down and jet lag, he had lost his rhythm. He found it harder going than he should have, past the car barrier and downhill now along the road. It was a good jogging route, though, had to give Melanie credit. Next time he could go the other way at the signpost, keep going, log his proper distance.