Keystone (2 page)

The sun broke through the
slow-moving clouds and bounced off the glass side of the Faculty of Humanities
building before plunging into the depths of the dark, cool water of an
ornamental pond. The sound of birdsong broke the silence of the square, and a
couple passing by stopped to hold each other in a loving embrace. Overhead, the
vapour-trail of a passenger plane connected the two banks of grey cloud,
through which the deep blue summer sky could be seen.
 

Moments later
the sunlight retreated from the water, past the glass side of the building and
up into the sky as the clouds connected once more.
 
The loving couple broke their hold on each
other and moved on.
 
The optimistic
chaffinch sang in bursts for several minutes before silence returned.
 

Gail Turner
rushed past without noticing any of this because she was, as usual, late.
 
The glass doors of the building slid open as
she approached, recognising the tiny chip embedded in her forearm.
 
The chip ID system could, technically, record
her every movement around the campus, although it was effectively rarely used
for anything other than opening doors and logging on to computers.
 

The security
guard looked up in surprise as she burst into the long connecting corridor
which led to the main foyer.
 
Recognising
the short, dark-haired woman, he shook his head and returned his gaze to the
small tablet computer propped up on the desk in front of him.
 
Gail crossed the foyer and took the steps to
the second floor two by two, ignoring the lift.
 
She knew that she would be the last person there, so she didn’t have
time to wait while the machine made its way down to the ground floor to pick
her up.

Being late for
a lecture during the first year of your degree was par for the course, in your
second year excusable, and in your third and final year probably a bad idea.
But being late at the end of your master’s degree, for a study group that only
had three other members and was supposed to help lay the foundation for the PhD
she intended to begin that year, was bad even by Gail’s standards.

She pushed the
door inwards softly and slid inside.

“Sorry,” she
said quietly as she closed the door behind her.

The two other
students looked up in amusement and she got a reprimand from Mr David Hunt, in
the form of a quick shake of the head and an almost inaudible tut, which was
about as severe as reprimands went where David was concerned.
 
It was in his office that the study group was
being held, and Ellie Pyke had to make space by shifting a huge pile of
manuscripts and ring-binders from the chair beside her.
 
Gail sat down, rescued her tablet from the
mess of her handbag, flipped open its cover and sat back in her chair before
looking at them all expectantly.

David gave her
a wry smile.

“Anyway, as I
was saying before Mrs Turner decided to pop in: Burynshik has really forced us
to recontextualise pretty much every other site in Europe and central Asia,
from the late Palaeolithic to the early Mesolithic.”

Gail leaned
forwards and tucked her tablet against her chest. She may have been late, and
she may not have done all the reading she should have, but there really was
nothing like a David Hunt monologue to really capture the imagination.

What always
amazed Gail was that despite her interest in the subject, no matter how
fascinating the prospect of uncovering artefacts that had been lost to the
world for hundreds or thousands of years, she would always end up late to most
things.
 
As one of the more mature students,
being thirty-two while most others were in their early to mid-twenties, her
excuse to David, should the subject ever come up, was that she had a family to
look after and a house to clean.
 

This wasn’t
true of course; not that she didn’t have a family, taking George out of the
equation would have broken his heart, but rather that as children weren’t even
on the radar and George mostly worked from home, there was honestly little for
her to do other than study.

“I can’t
believe that no one knows where that structure came from” a voice said beside
her.

“Sorry?” Gail
looked up over her coffee cup on the table. The study group over, they had gone
to the Faculty’s small café for one of their usual mid-morning chats. “Oh,
sorry Ellie, I was thinking about my research proposal.” Ellie’s face was a mixture
of sympathy and amusement. Gail slumped down on the table and stared at her coffee,
which was cooling down nicely.
 
“It’s
useless. One minute I think I’ve got it, and then before you know it I lose
interest and give up,” she sighed. “I don’t know, I just look at the way David
talks about his research and I get it, you know?”

Ellie nodded.
“He does make it sound interesting, for sure.”

“It’s not sounding
interesting, it
is
interesting.
That’s what I want, something big, something different,” she looked out of the
window at the clouds moving across the sky; it looked like rain. “I give up,
it’s useless. I’m useless.”

“That’s true,
you are,” Ellie agreed. “You have a degree in politics, which you aced by the
way, you used to work for a Member of Parliament, then you did a second degree
in archaeology, now you’re just finishing your master’s degree, and you’re
about to submit a research proposal to do a PhD,” she counted everything out on
her fingers. “You see? Absolutely useless, I mean, what have you been doing
with yourself?”

One of the
reasons Gail loved Ellie was for her sarcasm. And she was right; her career
path had been a little odd, starting in politics and ending up here in the
Faculty of Humanities café over a decade later worrying about her PhD thesis.
It was always the first question that came up when people found out what she
did: how did you end up moving from politics to archaeology? And every time her
answer was the same.

Gail had
always wanted to make a difference. She had wanted to change things for the
better and really achieve something. For as long as she could remember she had
been ambitious, and deep down inside had felt that she was destined for
something big. A first-class honours degree in Politics and International
Relations had been her first step along that path, after which she had opted
not to continue as a postgraduate but instead take a position working as an
assistant for her local MP. Which was where it had all started to fall apart.

There had been
nothing wrong with her employer, far from it: Janet had been just as full of integrity
as Gail aspired to be. But gradually, over the several years she worked with
her, she had become frustrated and disillusioned with the inner workings of
politics. It was a job in which she felt she could make little real difference,
despite Janet’s assurances to the contrary.

It was at that
time that she met George, and everything changed. Seeing how unhappy she was in
her job, he encouraged her to go back to university to pursue something she
loved, not become bitter working in something she was quickly losing faith in.

So politics
went out of the window, and in came a degree in archaeology. Because alongside
her burning desire to make a difference in the world came a passion for ancient
civilisations: of the scarce vivid memories she still had of her father, her
fondest were of going to ancient Roman ruins with him. He’d pick her up in his
arms and explain everything to her in amazing detail, so much so that her early
childhood dreams had been filled with chariot races, gladiators, vast temples and
the Roman Forum.

Ellie had
heard all this before. She knew how much Gail loved archaeology, she just
needed a spark to get going again.

“Look, we’re
both just frazzled from working so bloody hard on our master’s, so having to
think about what we’re going to work on for the next four years is a bit like
asking someone if they fancy swimming the Channel right after finishing the
London marathon,” she joked. “The only difference between me and you is that
I’m just going to take what I did in my master’s and build my research on that.
But you’re not me, you need a new challenge. I’m sure something will come up,
it always does.”

Gail scoffed
and took the first sip of her coffee.

“That has to
be cold by now,” Ellie commented.

“You know I
always drink my coffee cold!” Gail replied with a grin. “And no, before you say
it, it isn’t easier to ask for iced coffee. It’s not the same.”

Ellie looked
back at her and laughed. Four years earlier they had happened to be sitting
next to each other in their first lecture, ‘The Archaeology of the Roman World’.
Whether it had been that they shared the same sense of humour, or simply the
fact that they were both the same age, they had instantly clicked. They had
spent the next three years pretty much joined at the hip, even going so far as
to choose parallel dissertation topics. Gail had then gone on to do a master’s
in Social Archaeology, while Ellie had taken Ceramic and Lithic Analysis,
something Gail had always loathed since her first taster unit as an
undergraduate.

Now, here they
were about to do PhDs. And along with her husband George, Ellie was the closest
Gail had to family.

“You’ll find
your Burynshik sooner or later, I know you will.
 
Just make sure it is sooner rather than
later: you’ve pretty much got a September deadline for your proposal, which is
less than ten weeks away!” Ellie exclaimed. “Why don’t you ask David if you can
look into those Caspian Sea structures with him?”

“I don’t
know,” she mused. “I do find it really interesting, but then is that really a
good idea?”

David Hunt
obviously enjoyed his subject matter enormously, and his enthusiasm always
rubbed off on his study group, but he was by no means what you would call a traditional
academic, having written more than one bestseller on the subject of ancient
conspiracies and so-called forgotten history.
 
His theory was that the history of the human race had been vastly
underestimated by scholars, and that there were advanced civilisations tens of
thousands of years before the rise of even the earliest known written records.
This usually led to unfortunate parallels with Atlantis theories, which never
went down well with his peers, regardless of how enthralled his students were.

He was in the
middle of investigating some new finds in Kazakhstan; pretty much all of his
spare time was spent on site, and he was preparing to return for the summer
break.

The rapidly
receding waters of the Caspian Sea had uncovered some perplexing archaeology
near the small town of
Burynshik
, on the north-eastern
coast of the country. What the remains had once been was certainly nothing
unusual: wooden posts sunk deep into the mud, forming the foundation of what
had almost certainly been small buildings above the water, possibly a fishing
village.
 
The technology and architecture
were similar to that found in early northern-European Iron Age settlements,
before the arrival of the Romans. But experts had started to scratch their
heads when the results of dating analysis had returned from Moscow State
University.
 

At first, they
had tried to use radiocarbon dating, and their first samples were found to
contain less than five percent of Carbon-14. This meant that the wood had to be
over twenty-thousand years old.
 
Not
believing this to be the case, further samples were sent to Moscow, all
returning similar results. The wood was also sent to Cambridge in England, to
be dated using dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating.
 
The combined results were conclusive: the
Burynshik remains did not fit into any known long tree-ring sequences, meaning they
could not be chronologically linked with any other wood found to date.
 

As he had told
them this, he had put his tablet on his desk and leaned forward, fixing them
all intently with his gaze. He then almost whispered, as if letting them in on
a closely-guarded secret, that the structures were confirmed to be between
23,560 and 23,760 years old.
 
The general
intake of breath from his small audience made him smile, and they had finished
the study group with an animated debate on the subject of dating accuracy and
sample contamination.

In the café,
Gail was now scrolling through her notes on the site while Ellie went to get
another cup of tea. She was just about to open a browser and start surfing the
net when David Hunt’s face popped up on the side of the screen.

She tapped it.

“Hi Gail,” he
said as his face filled the screen. “Studying hard, I see?” he smiled.

“Just having a
chat with Ellie about your dig, actually,” she told him.

He grinned.
“Excellent! Look, I’ve got some great news. Do you want to come and see me in
my office?”

As Gail walked
with Ellie along the main corridor of the Department of Archaeology, she
thought about Mr Hunt and his passion for upsetting the natural order of
things. In her mind, such a tack was a bit risky for her thesis; knowing her
luck she would be shot down in flames for it, and she couldn’t risk her PhD
like that. She and George had invested heavily in her academic career and had
spent the last four years relying principally on his income. To throw
everything away now wouldn’t go down well.

“What I really
need is a good mystery that doesn’t involve upsetting half the department!” she
said aloud, causing strange and amused looks from a group of future first-year
students being shown around the campus.