Truth Comes Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind

from Alive in Shape and Color, edited by Lawrence Block

Truth Comes Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind

(from the painting by Jean- Léon Gérôme)

by Thomas Pluck

Originally appeared in Alive in Shape and Color, edited by Lawrence Block.

The cracking of the skulls was performed by a practiced hand. The bowl separated from the eye sockets and teeth. These were no virgin cannibals like the lost colonists of Roanoke, with their hesitation marks. Whatever people had done this had done it before, and had perhaps been doing it for a very long time.

Devin cupped the skull in his palm, reminded of how Danes toasted before a drink.

Skål.

It meant bowl, as in drinking cup.

Emma Frizzell had taught him that. And she had invited him here,

ostensibly for his knowledge of the bronze age tribes who had pillaged and slaughtered throughout the area, but also for the funding that attaching his name to the dig would bring. Critics, including Emma, claimed Devin’s books contained more cherry-picking and cocktail-party conversation fodder than real science, but they fueled great interest in the field, and with that came grants from billionaires’ pet nonprofits, the lifeblood for a science that generated little corporate funding.

“Looks like you’ve found another unlucky bunch who met my boys the Kurgans,” Devin said, hefting the bone bowl in his hands. He was tall and dusty blond with smooth, telegenic features.

“We’re not so sure,” Emma said, gesturing at students working with brush and screen and trowel in the neatly dug trenches, staked and lined and flagged. “It’s similar to the Herxheim site and the Talheim Death Pit in some ways, but very different in others. There’s what we call the well, for instance, which is more of a trash midden. It’s unlike anything we’ve found in the LPK sites before. We’re eight layers down and still hitting finds.” The LPKs, or Linear Pottery Culture, had built small agricultural settlements all over Germany. Until the Kurgans found them.

Emma squinted at the sun’s halo behind his head. She’d sprouted since their time as schoolmates, long-limbed but thick in the hips, dark curls tied with a red bandanna. With her lips drawn back over a cracked front tooth, she resembled one of the skulls herself.

“Any female victims?”

“None yet.” Little red flags waved in the breeze, one for each corpse. “All men and boys, killed in the same ritual manner. The bones flensed with knapped chert blades.” Crude-looking neolithic knives, but sharp enough that modern surgery had been performed with them, and sturdy enough to chisel open skulls, with help from a hammer stone.

“Enslave the women, slaughter the vanquished,” Devin said. “The cannibalism is a new angle, but I’m sure there’s an explanation. A famine caused by drought. Or maybe just to plunder further, they began viewing the conquered as meat on the hoof.”

The Kurgans were named after the burial mounds they left scattered in their wake, each topped with a man-shaped, carved stone menhir. A single leader buried with his sacrificed harem, his trusty copper blade, and a handful of decorative fetishes to aid him in the afterlife.

Devin admired their pluck, the first humans to practice tribal warfare. Some theorized that homo sapiens had dealt it to their bulkier cousins neanderthalensis, but there was no clear evidence. The Kurgans had left plenty: entire villages massacred, with the male bodies strewn about and the women taken. The same old story, still happening today. Less often, if you believed the statistics, which Devin did not. To him, civilization was a thin veneer over humanity’s violent history, and he felt he protected his viewers and readers by reminding them that it was human nature to want what you did not have, and in men’s nature to take it if they could.

“Professor Frizzell!” A student with a beard stood and waved. “Ade found another one of the uh, things.”

Emma bared her cracked-tooth smile. “Tell me what you think after you’ve seen the whole site.”

“Oh, I will.” He handed her the skullcap. “Skål.”

The find was not a skull, but a small stone figure. Adriane, a thick-armed woman with Marcia-from-Peanuts glasses, handed it up. “Careful, Bracken.”

Bracken had runner’s legs and held the fetish in a white gloved hand as Emma brushed the dirt away, baring a crude human figure carved from serpentine. It had a nondescript face, one arm raised, breast jutting below it, the other hand between her legs.

Devin peered over her shoulder. “Must be a fertility fetish.”

The brush revealed a leaflike object between the object’s thighs.

“She’s holding a sword,” Emma said.

“Looks more like an exaggerated vulva. Wasn’t the Venus of Willendorf

found not far from here?”

“Yes, but it’s dated twenty-five thousand years earlier,” Emma said. The

Willendorf Venus had enormous breasts and hips, and gave birth to theories of a prehistoric matriarchal culture. “Look at her pose. One arm thrust high, the other low. Triumphant.”

Devin frowned. The work was rough, the rock encrusted with dull blood- red. Little florets of bluish stone grew at the gouges for eyes, mouth, and crotch.

“Red ochre,” Devin said. “That’s usually on...”

“Gifts for the dead,” Bracken said, gently blowing dust from the figurine’s armpit. “To uh, appease them.”

“I’m quite aware.”

The hungry dead might mistake it for blood, and be sated. But here, so many had been slain that a little symbolic blood could never please them all.

Devin reached out. “May I?”

Emma found him a glove, and Bracken handed him the relic. It was cold from being in the earth. Eyeless, with a hungry red mouth. “This isn’t Kurgan. Or it’s something we’ve never found before.”

“We’ve found several. I sent one for spectrum analysis. The blue is vivianite.”

“Does the water have a high iron content?” Devin asked. Vivianite formed when phosphate-rich flesh bonded with ferrous minerals.

“Not too much,” Emma said, placing the find in a plastic zip bag. “But blood does.”

She always had an answer. Devin left her to catalogue the find, and climbed the hill that the excavation had cut in half, and watched the little red pennants wave on the stakes that demarked where skeletons had been found. The human body barely held two gallons. But there had been many. Fields of rich green grew between the dig site and the quaint village up the road. Well fertilized.

Devin wondered if she’d invited him to extend an olive branch.

In ancient history class, when Dr. O’Dell was off on one of his wild tangents, scolding them for thinking that Vikings wore horned helmets, Devin had tried to score brownie points, repeating what his father had told him after a business trip to Copenhagen: that Danish people cheered with skål, because their Viking forebears had drunk mead from the skulls of their enemies.

Young Emma had laughed in her little huff, looked up from her book, and said “Actually, it means bowl.”

Right, Mr. O’Dell said. The Vikings were raiders, but rape and pillage were not their whole lives. That image came much later, distorted by our own cultural lens...

Fat little know-it-all Frizzell beamed and went back to her book, showing off that she knew the material and could pick through O’Dell’s scattershot lectures and read at the same time. She stood out as a brainiac in their magnet school. Rumor was she had been accepted at Princeton, but her parents wouldn’t let her go until she was seventeen. The next day she tried to paw off a copy of The Long Ships on Devin and he’d taken it to stop her from yammering and avoiding his eyes.

The excavation was far from Denmark, though still in Viking country. The bowled skulls and cracked bones of the slaughtered village of Hexenkeller predated Beowulf and his thanes by at least five millennia. The Kurgan hypothesis was O’Dell’s, and as his successor, Devin had championed it with his pop-science books on human prehistory and his lost mysteries show on cable: the Kurgan people had used their technological supremacy to spread their culture, including the language known as Proto-Indo-European—a distant predecessor of modern tongues—across Europe and the subcontinent. It neatly explained the single origin of the root language and the sudden disappearance of the neolithic tribes.

Emma climbed up beside him and pointed to a stake with a blue flag marker not far from the top of the halved mound. “That’s where they hit the first kurgan stone. Fifty yards from the well. This was slated for an industrial park, away from the village. They cut through and hit the gravestones.”

Seven kurgan stones was another anomaly. They had been removed to a museum, and he’d stopped to see them on the way from Frankfurt in his rented BMW. Typical warrior markers, seven men, each carved with mustache and sword. They should have found a bevy of skeletal female companions. But only men, all but seven stripped of flesh, skulls uncapped. A handful also trepanned, with a hole in the front, as if they had been born with a unicorn horn and had it snapped off.

“Any weapons?”

“Seven Kurgan scythes,” Emma said. “The defenders, if that’s what they were, had only chert blades and hammer stones.”

“And what’s in the well?”

Emma shrugged. “We’re only calling it a well. We aren’t sure what it is. Organic material, but no bones. The blades are in the climate-controlled shed with the generator.” She showed him.

The blades had taken damage. If the marks on the skulls weren’t clearly from stone blades, he’d have assumed the scythes had been used on a beheading spree. He snapped pictures with his phone.

“What do you think?”

“It’s ... interesting.” Devin slipped off his brown tweed coat. “I’d like to see the well. Get my hands dirty.”

“Lani’s got the well, but you can sift.”

Devin hadn’t worked a dig since college, and it felt good to shake a screen, sifting for beads, teeth, and bone fragments. He found none in the rich soil. After an hour he put down his sifter and looked down the pit. A slender figure squatted at the bottom, troweling dirt into a bucket with a thin rope tied to the handle and leading to the top, where it was slung over a small pulley. The stones of the well’s edge were ragged and unshaped, meticulously stacked together and cemented with daub, a beehive mound with the top cut off.

“Hello down there.”

A girl with a buzzcut peered up. “Bucket’s not full yet.”

Flat stones were piled beneath the pulley, the rope coiled on top. “This was enclosed, wasn’t it?”

“Yup.”

“How do you get down?”

“Footholds,” Lani called, with unhidden exasperation.

He peered over the edge and sent a pebble tumbling. “My bad!”

She covered her head, then swore as it ricocheted off her forearm. “Fuck! If you’re so damn curious, I’ll show you.”

She bounced on her heels to limber up, then jumped, feet landing on thicker stones on opposite sides. She balanced, then spidered her way up to the top, gripped the cross brace and swung over the rim without spilling a stone.

“Like that.”

“Impressive.”

She pointed to a growing quail’s-egg lump near her elbow, skin split in the center. “Could’ve cracked my head open. Fuckers are sharp.”

“I’ll make it up to you.” He held out his hand. “Devin Jarrett. Lost Finds of the Ancients?”

She shrugged. “Then bring me a bottle of the good stuff, rich boy. I take apologies in scotch.”

Hard nut to crack. “Will The Macallan suffice?”

She scoffed. “I drink Islay. Like a shovel full of peat in your face. Work in the dirt, might as well drink it, too.” She pulled a bottle of Volvic mineral water from the shade and chugged from it.

She’d been working hard, and the scent from her unshaved armpits was strong but not offensive, rather like the strong whisky she favored.

“Done.”

“If the doc says it’s okay, I’ll help you down, if you change out of the monkey suit.”

“Tomorrow. I’ve got to check in.”

“Bring the scotch tonight. Ade’s making gumbo. You don’t want to miss it.” She pulled up the bucket and went to sifting.

The camp was far enough from the nearest hotel that the students slept in tents, and Emma Adriane in their own small caravans. If he filmed the show— and it looked exceedingly likely he could sell the episode to his showrunner—they would ship his fitted Benz MaxiMog truck and trailer, and film filler shots of it pulling off the nearby autobahn and rocking into camp. It was part of the image, the dapper Indiana Jones who wore suede-elbow tweed jackets and carried a multitool instead of a whip and top-break Webley revolver, a styled coif in place of the fedora. And he needed a good show, something new, to kick off the next season.

He located the luxury B&B his assistant had booked, a Bavarian cottage right out of a snow globe, with a zimmer frei sign in the window in Gothic letters.

He dropped off his bag and asked for the nearest outdoor shop and the best liquor store. Both were located in the town square between an old church and a tourist trap called the Hexenkeller Witch Museum, little more than a repurposed barn packed with torture implements that might have been antique carpentry tools to the untrained eye. He paid ten euro to examine their foot press and a Pear of Anguish, a studded cast-iron grenade the size of a human fist. The torturer would cram it the orifice of choice, then turn a knob that expanded it like a cactus flower in bloom, cracking the jaw or splitting the flesh. Much more advanced than the stone skull-crackers buried outside town.

The tour guide, an elderly German man with rheumy blue eyes, told him the town’s name meant Witches’ Cellar, after the small alp to its north that protected it from harsh winds. The winds howled around the pointed hat of the alp like a shrieking woman. “The witch of the mountain used to whisper through the shutters, make wives kill their families, and run to the forest to live like wolves.”

“She’s quiet now?” Devin grinned.

He waved a hand at the executioner’s blades and torture devices. “We killed all the witches.”

Devin took a brochure for Violet. Outside, he wondered if there was something in the soil in this part of the world. Other than the bones.

It was a mere hour’s drive to the Bergen-Belsen memorial where little Anne

Frank lay buried with thousands more. Not a place he’d wanted to visit, but his showrunner and lover Violet had family who died there, and he accompanied her pilgrimage. There had been a weight of human suffering in the air that tugged down at his innards like fishhooks, and he felt some of the same in Hexenkeller. At the museum, but more so at the dig, where hundreds had died terribly. Devin felt it at similar sites across the world, but never spoke of it. Just swallowed a chalky Xanax and soldiered on.

In the outdoor store he purchased cargo pants and a button-down shirt that could take roughing up, and in the liquor store he found a Riesling to bring home to Violet, a bottle of a ginger schnapps called Ratzeputz for the comic value—it probably did taste like a rat’s putz—and a bottle of ridiculously overpriced scotch whisky the wizened shopkeeper kept behind the counter. On the drive back he left the windows down. The evening wind was cool and smelled of fresh cut grass. He listened for the banshee howl, but heard only his tires on the asphalt.

The diggers sat on stones around a cook fire where gumbo bubbled in a cast-iron pot. Adriane ladled the heady stuff into tin bowls, while the interns sipped bottles of local beer.

“... fertility was worshiped long before agriculture,” Emma said. “They transposed the two later. Our goddess doesn’t seem to signify either.”

Bracken raised a beer. “Mister Jarrett.”

“I found an artifact in town,” Devin said, and slipped the bottle out of the bag, tilting it so the fire reflected off the gold foil sword on the label. “A 25-year, made with peat from a bog on Islay, where a bronze age leaf blade was found.”

“Nice,” Lani said, and patted the flat stone beside her.

Adriane thrust a bowl into his hands and they ate and drank, shielded from civilization by a ridge of alps on one side and forest on the other, a scrim of lights only visible when Devin stood to fill their plastic cups with scotch. After a taste, Lani tapped cups with him and said all was forgiven.

“Tell me your theory about the fetish,” Devin said, and savored the briny smoke of the whisky.

Emma nursed a bottle of mineral water. “I don’t think we’ll ever know, barring an extraordinary find.”

“Come on. I told you what I thought.”

“Still Kurgan raiders, even with seven stones on one mound. Have you ever seen that before?”

“This was bigger than most of their conquests. They lost more men. You’ve found enough bones.”

“But there’s cannibalism,” Adriane said, wiping her bowl clean with a hunk of bread. “The Kurgans didn’t practice it. They bound and killed their captives.”

Devin shrugged. “They got hungry. Bad harvests.”

“My theory is ritual sacrifice,” Emma said. “The victims were malnourished. We found signs of anemia in the bone development. Brains are a great source of fat, for nourishment. Would explain the cracking.”

“And the holes?”

“Healed over,” Adriane said. “Your garden-variety neolithic trepanation.” Nearly ten percent of skulls from the stone age period had such holes, either to relieve pressure from head wounds, or for some unknown rite.

“I read about a guy who did it to himself,” Bracken said. “Like a third eye. Said it felt like... enlightenment.”

“Or maybe he’s just got a hole in his head,” Adriane said.

Emma went on. “We found one woman in the mound. One woman, seven men.”

“A Kurgan shield maiden. Like the new data on the Vikings.” Archaeologists neglected to sex the skeletons in many Viking-era burial tombs, and had assumed warrior meant male. After further study, nearly half were found to be skeletons of women, with healed-over cuts in the bones to signify wounds in combat.

“We’re unsure where she was, originally. The backhoe did some damage. And there were no battle scars on her.”

Devin smiled. “Maybe a queen? Evidence of that primal matriarchy you were so fond of in school.”

“No shit, you believed that?” Lani snorted and covered her mouth.

A log cracked in the fire pit.

The fire flickered off Emma’s glasses. “I was caught up in the wave of the time. The theory that before humans understood lineage, there was a polyamorous, egalitarian utopia, and when men figured out that sex made babies, they put us in chains. It’s a pleasing fiction, to imagine a Garden of Eden where women ruled, but there’s no evidence for it.”

“But it’s almost a universal,” Devin said. “The Greeks had the Amazons.”

“What matters is the story being carried down across so many cultures,” Emma said. “What does it mean? I like to think it’s a seed of guilt in the collective unconscious. Boys growing up, seeing their mommies subservient. Wondering why she can’t be free like they are.”

“Maybe we were once,” Lani said. “I mean, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, right?”

Adriane rolled her eyes. “Wait until you have kids.”

“Not happening.” She finished her dram and held out her cup.

Devin refilled hers and his own, sitting closer. “Maybe women did rule once.

Maybe you should again. The Venus fetishes, like the Willendorf, are dated fifteen thousand years before agriculture. There’s so little known of that era, who’s to say it didn’t happen?”

“Because it’s bullshit.” Emma smirked. “It’s always a joke. Women ran things before there was anything worth ruling, and then men showed us how to get things done. It’s patronizing, and it assumes to be female is to be nurturing, peaceful, and kind. For every heavy-breasted fertility goddess, there’s a Morrigan or a Kali, a bringer of death. The fetish we found here isn’t the barefoot and pregnant kind, she holds up her fist. The question is, was it in triumph, or in warning? Did they worship her, or appease her?”

A breeze whipped up, and Devin suppressed a shiver. Thinking of the Hindu death goddess Kali, with her necklace of shorn penises.

“What was the condition of her skull? This queen you found.”

“We don’t know,” Adriane said.

“No head,” Lani said. “Creepy.”

“We’re still looking,” Emma said. “The excavators violated the integrity of the mound. My guess is they found bones and kept digging anyway, until they hit the first stone marker and damaged their equipment. So some of the bones and relics may be gone or destroyed.”

Devin frowned. “Yet you’re sure it’s female?”

“Hips wider, for the birth canal. But no pockmarks indicating tears of the labral ligaments. Whoever she was, she never gave birth. Which rules out your queen mother idea.”

“Unless it was Caesarian.”

Lani snorted.

“I’m not suggesting she survived the procedure,” Devin said. “But it’s possible she died during childbirth, and bore a chieftain’s son.” “Maybe a virgin sacrifice,” Bracken said.

“She has no healed-over battle scars,” Emma said. “But was killed with metal weapons. And not eaten. No flensing marks. I doubt she was the sacrifice. I think she was a priestess of some kind.”

“A shaman for whatever the fetishes represent.”

“We’re waiting on carbon dating, but many of the bones in the channels are older than she is. The burial mound came after. Whoever built it capped the well with trash and stones and buried it at the northern terminus of the mound.”

Devin squeezed his cleft chin. “I’m the first to admit when I’m wrong,” he said, and offered to refill cups. Adriane demurred, and headed to her tent.

Bracken and Lani began cleaning up. “We’ve got this,” Emma said. “You two worked hard today.”

The two shrugged and wandered to their tents. Devin pitched in to not feel like a heel. When they were done he poured himself a dram. “Do you still drink?”

“I’ll answer, if you tell me when you became British.”

Devin smiled. “My showrunner demanded I go to a voice coach. Apparently it’s gold with viewers. Now it’s second nature.” He held out the bottle.

“Just a sip.”

She led him to the well’s edge, where moonlight cast deep shadows. The pit’s darkness was abysmal, and conjured Nietzsche’s admonishment about gazing into such things. They looked anyway. The dank smell of cold stone had a tang through it, metallic. Like hands sweaty from the jungle gym in the school playground.

A tingle, low inside. “Lani reminds me of you. Then.”

Emma grunted. “She’s barely older than this scotch. And she’s nothing like me. She’s smarter than either of us were.”

“I was foolish, I know.” They had fumbled with one another at a graduation party at his house when his parents were away. And never spoke of it after. Devin nearly thought he’d dreamed it, because she was gone in the morning.

“What I mean is, she doesn’t need an old man to coach her.”

So that’s what was on her mind.

“Not this again. O’Dell may have been a sexist dinosaur, but you can’t have expected me to throw away my opportunity on principle. He chose me.”

Emma held up a callused palm. “Whoa. I asked you here because you know the Kurgans, and I thought the site could use some exposure. Not to dredge up high school. I’m happy how my career turned out, thank you. I enjoy working in the field, and I hate cameras. If you’ve got some guilt you want to work out? Don’t do it on my account.”

In the dark, her eyeglasses were two black scutes that rendered her eyes invisible.

“I was a young ass,” he said, and put his hand on her shoulder.

“And now you’re an old ass. Sober up before your drive.”

She left him at the pit. He stumbled to the rental and waited for the fuzz in his head to fade. Despite studying the past, he spent little time dwelling on his own. One marriage, two kids. A two-apartment, three-year relationship with his showrunner Violet, which was open as long as they were both discreet.

At the zimmer frei he had asked for a queen bed in case Emma had other reasons for asking him here. The hosts had left expensive milled soaps, and a silky body lotion. He made use of the latter coupled with memory.

His father had been away on business and his mother was ‘playing cards with the girls,’ which meant Devin had the house for the night. He called friends who called friends, and brought weed and girls and 2-liter bottles of coke that were half-filled with vodka. Abigail Kane would only come if she could bring Emma, so he relented, and she sat silent for once, while the rest of them played ‘have you ever?’ until the vodka-and-coke was gone, then raided the liquor cabinet and watched a tape of Blue Velvet and passed out all over each other on the sectional.

Devin had woke to laughter and his parents’ bedroom door clicking shut. He got up to chase them out and quiet Emma Frizzell climbed over him, pressing his hands to her breasts, kissing him with vodka-slicked lips. She was so white her skin seemed to glow in the static of the television. Her breasts were bigger than those of the girls he’d been with at that time so he kissed them and imagined Abby Kane’s face, and when he was rock hard he gave a downward nudge on the back of her neck. I need this.

He insisted until she unbuckled his jeans and took him in her mouth. She wasn’t a girl to fuck and talk about, but if she wanted to blow him, who was he to tell her no? Her combination of prissy inexperience and eagerness was a memory he returned to often, something he would ask countless interns and prostitutes to mimic. When he finished she padded to the sink with her hand cupped to her mouth, and he tucked away his cock and feigned sleep.

He’d expected her to curl next to him, head on his lacrosse-toned shoulder, but heard only huffs of indignity. Through his eyelids he imagined her fat little fists clenched in pique, until the soporific effects of orgasm and liquor lulled him to true slumber.

Tonight, the cotton-ball of moon outside his window solidified into Emma through his closed eyes, soft and white, stalking atop the mound, a night dog sniffing prey. A naked woman sprung from the shadows, tattoos down her rangy limbs, blue and ochre. His skin turned to gooseflesh. The faceless woman held one hand high, and the other held a copper sword between her thighs. She raised the blade and his rear puckered as she dragged the edge up his member.

Devin woke with a gasp, gripping himself so tightly his fingernails left crescents in the skin. He hunched in pain beneath the fat moon’s glare. He clasped the window shutters, then washed himself and returned to sleep.

In the morning he passed Bracken running on the shoulder as he drove to the site, and found Adriane tending a skillet of bacon and a pour-over coffee pot shaped like a wide-mouthed flask. Bracken jogged in, shirtless and sheened with sweat.

“That coffee smells heavenly.” The continental breakfast at his lodging was meager.

She poured boiling water over the grounds and acknowledged him with a grunt.

“Did I say something wrong last night?”

“Just monthlies,” Adriane said.

Lani held out a mug. “Mine’s two weeks early. Fucking bullshit.” “You’re synced,” Bracken said, grinning. “I grew up with my moms, grandma, and my older sister. They synced up sometimes.”

“Ugh,” Lani said. “Creeps me the hell out. Here comes Emma, let’s see if it’s all three of us.”

Emma looked past them. She scratched the wisps of hair on the back of her neck. “Which one of you took the fetish?”

Adriane handed out black coffees. “I left it in the collection shed.”

“I’ll go look,” Bracken said. “Long as there’s bacon when I get back.” Emma studied the trenches through the steam rising from her cup.

“I didn’t touch it,” Devin said softly, behind her.

She put one arm akimbo to block him, and he nearly spilled his coffee.

“You’re an ass, but you’re not that stupid.”

After their quick meal Lani brought him to the pit, smirking at his tourist trap hiking gear. “How much did that cost you?”

She showed him the foot holds in the pit, and tied the rope off and lowered it down the pulley. “Doc Frizz gets on my back for rock climbing it. But you’re too tall. Brack can’t do it, either. This was built when people were shorter.”

Devin avoided the well-worn footholds on the top. The arch of the foot and pebble-shaped toes were evident in the carved stone. Another lost mystery. Who stands at the top of a well? The lower sets were crude, for climbing. The rope burned his soft hands despite using every step. He hit bottom with a grunt and barked his scalp on a stone. He clutched his head and fell back against the wall, blinking, seeing nothing but darkness, no stars.

He clutched for the Xanax bottle he knew was in his tweed suit.

Once during a lacrosse match he’d bumped heads with a teammate so hard that he’d briefly gone blind. He panted, breaths echoing off the close walls of the pit. The dank heady scent now coppery with blood. When his vision returned, the opening above resembled a full moon.

“You okay?”

“Cut my head.” He pressed his palm to his scalp and felt blood pulse from the wound. Pattering on the floor like a leaky showerhead. “Need a bandage.”

Lani tossed down her bandanna. “Keep pressure on it and breathe slow. I’ll get the kit. I’m a medic for search and rescue.”

He wadded the fabric gritted his teeth through the pain. The hooks dragged down his guts. He clenched his eyes shut and red welled through the deep blue. The wind keened across the stones above, whirled down to tickle his hackles.

A long minute and Lani rappelled down, calves and hamstrings flexing. She squeezed down beside him with a penlight. “Let me check your pupils. I heard you whispering to yourself.” She took his head in her hands and swabbed the cut with alcohol which stung like a bastard. He grimaced into her shoulder, tasted her salt.

His father would faint at the sight of his own blood, and Devin had been terrified of inheriting the same unmanly affliction; the first time he skinned his knee crashing his bicycle, he’d been relieved, watching the blood well through the skin. His mother wasn’t home so he cleaned it in the sink and picked the stones out with her fingernail scissors.

“Don’t think you need stitches,” Lani said, dabbing, penlight in hand. “But you should work topside. We’ll hoist you up.”

“I’m all right,” he said, knowing the blackout was a mild concussion, like it had been on the lacrosse field, but not wanting to lose face. He let her tie the rope around his hips and climbed his way out with Bracken holding the rope, braced against the well stones.

He drank a bottle of water he said he’d work slow, lowering the bucket for Lani and sifting what she dug. Bracken did most of the work.

“Sending up,” Lani called, and Bracken pulled up the bucket, spread its contents on the sifter, and shook it as Devin picked through pebbles for chips of bone.

“We found the fetish,” Bracken said. “After we scoured pretty much everywhere, the doc walks out of her trailer with it. Must’ve had a brain fart.”

“What do you think of the site?” Devin asked, eyeing a shard that could’ve been a tooth, but was only quartz. He tossed it in the discard pile.

“I’m just a second year student, but looks like sacrifice to me. Like when

they got overpopulated, they came here and had a feast. The layers, we haven’t narrowed down the aging, but this wasn’t one big slaughter. The doc thinks they did this every few years, to cull, maybe.”

“Just the men.”

“Well, you know. You don’t need a lot of males to reproduce. Like drones in a beehive. You want more, for genetic diversity, but you don’t need that many of us.” He grinned. “My dad was just a sperm donor.”

“He left? I’m sorry.”

“No, nothing to be sorry about. He was a literal sperm donor. Moms said, why go to a bank when you can buy local? I’m the product of artisanal free- range man juice, from an athletic silicon valley tech guy. I saw him on weekends growing up. We still hang out, run together. Got a half marathon in New Orleans next month.”

Devin frowned, then counted how often he’d seen his own father, and said nothing.

“Hey, did you dream last night? Real weird, like?”

“I thought you did more than dream, the way she hangs on you. Lucky young sod.”

Bracken grinned and looked away. “It’s not like that.”

“We got something, Brack! Get the doc!” Lani’s voice echoed up from the pit.

Something turned out to be teeth. A crescent of them, from the lower jaw.

Adriane was the best digger, but disliked heights. Lani rigged her in the rope and they eased her down. She spent the rest of the day freeing a jawbone from the packed humus.

“This is the best preserved find yet,” Emma said, examining the mandible, wearing gloves. “We’ll have to take much more care in the well. Don’t want to risk stepping on anything. It’s too tight down there. We’ll rig a harness and work in shorter shifts.”

Adriane had bared the rest of the skull. Lani climbed down with a digital camera and showed them photos on its screen. Two eye sockets filled with rich earth, staring up from the pit.

Emma measured the jaw with a caliper. “Adult female.” The lower incisors were well-worn, as were the pointed canines. The molars were not. “I think we found her head.”

They celebrated with dinner on Devin’s expense card, at the local rathskeller. Roasted pig knuckle, wurst in curry sauce, local beer and wine. Devin drove them back to camp, where Adriane started a fire and they poured scotch into coffee mugs.

They drank and huddled around the fire, warmed by the meal, the liquor, and the elation of the discovery.

“Looks like it was Kurgans after all,” Emma said. “Someone cut her head off and dumped it down a well.”

“And buried the rest of her with seven warriors.”

“Maybe she was defiled later. The dating’s not in.”

“That puts the damper on the mother goddess crap. Even guys with serious mommy issues don’t want to behead her,” Lani said.

Bracken grinned.

“Even if matriarchal prehistory is a crock, I’d be willing to give it a try,” Devin said. “You couldn’t muck it up much worse than we have.”

Emma shrugged. “History’s full of horrible women.”

“And that’s what we know,” Adriane said. “We tend to be left out of the record.”

“Countess Bathory,” Lani said. “Bathed in the blood of young girls, to stay young. Don’t get any ideas.”

Adriane huffed. “That’s a myth, but I might try some on my ashy elbows. German air is dry as hell.”

“Delphine LaLaurie,” Bracken said. “She was a serial killer in New Orleans. I’ve been to her house. She tortured her uh, servants.” He looked into his cup.

“And we’re not so weak,” Emma said. “If women had an innate hatred of war and genocide, we would have stopped it.”

“They did in Lysistrata.”

“And Spartan women told their boys to come back with their shields, or carried on them.”

Devin tilted his head. “It’s nice to think about, anyway.”

“Of course it’s nice to imagine a polyamorous paradise,” Adriane said. “It’s only recently in most cultures that women have had any choice in their mates.

Makes you wonder about sexual selection. If we’d have evolved differently, if parents didn’t choose their children’s mates for thousands of generations.”

“I was chosen,” Bracken said.

“We all know the story, turkey-baster boy.” Lani elbowed him.

“I’m more interested in what we’ve been learning by tracing mitochondrial

DNA,” Emma said. “Sexual selection isn’t a hard science.”

“Speaking of hard science, I once heard a biologist say evolution selected the shape of the human penis, so it could scrape out a previous mate’s, uh, semen.” Bracken grinned into his cup.

“You’re done,” Emma said.

Lani snorted. “Whoever came up with that idea needs to study bonobos. They’ve got plenty of competition, and they’re hung like this.” She held out her pinky finger.

“And you’re done, too. Don’t need my students falling in a trench and breaking their neck. Not on my watch.”

Lani wandered off with Bracken, snorting and laughing, and Adriane retired to her tent. Emma permitted herself a last sip. “I can’t tell you what to do, but you shouldn’t drive tonight.”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

Her eyes were hidden by the fire-flicker on her glasses, but he could tell they held no welcome.

“I’ll nap it off. Spare a pillow?”

She smirked and rolled up her coat, left it on a rock.

Alone with the crackling fire, Devin imagined what it would be like to live in the village before the Kurgans wiped them out. Something he did out loud on his television program, narrating the low-budget reenactments. Explaining how though we might look the same as our forebears, the ‘yawning chasm of the ages’ made us practically different species. Language separated us, but also beliefs lost to time.

The darkness hid terrors, and the night sky held a thousand eyes of jealous and ruthless gods who demanded sacrifice. Even the Christian one had asked that of Abraham, as a test. We sacrifice our children to different gods now.

Mammon, for instance. Devin had wanted the best for his children, but split with his ex over pushing them to compete to get into the city’s best pre-K programs. He’d recalled when his mother sat him down after two years in the magnet school. We expected more of you. Look at your father. You’re tearing his heart out.

He never wanted his children to feel how he had that day. Didn’t she think he could provide for their children? Let them live. You never know what might happen, his ex had said. Meaning he might die young of a heart attack like his father.

Devin had been on his first book tour. By the time his mother called, the old man was a buried artifact for future archaeologists to find. I didn’t want to upset you, now that you’ve finally found your way.

Devin snorted awake. The fire was reduced to embers. Laughter echoed from the dig. He buttoned his coat against the chill wind.

His head was fuzzy, his cock painfully erect. A carefree groan came from afar. He stepped closer, following the lines of cord to avoid a fall. The moon had lost a sliver and rode low in the sky. He’d been out for hours. And missed something good.

Boots in the dirt, socks as well. Bare footprints on the paths. He could use another hour of sleep, but a little voyeurism might perk him up for the drive home.

Lani would be on top, of course. Lean and tattooed. His cock led him like a dowsing rod.

No silhouettes writhed in the tents. The muted sounds came from below. His multitool had a small penlight, and he used the beam to follow the path through close dirt walls toward the well.

A low moan, pleasure with a hint of pain, from around the earthen corner. He leaned to see.

Instead of tan tattooed skin, pale flesh glowed from above the pit.

Emma frog-squatted on the edge of the well, bare feet planted in the footholds. Naked but for smudged handprints that marred her skin.

“Where are your glasses? You’ll fall in.”

“I’ve been in.” Her smile a wide drunken rictus, she rocked to a silent rhythm. Breathing in little huffs, wisps in the chill. He stepped closer.

She laughed at the tent in his pants. “So desperate. Just like you were then.”

“Hey. You wanted me.”

“Of course I did.”

She was in the most unflattering of positions, hunkered and leaning, drooping like those outrageous Venus fetishes. Her eyes slick little stones in the light. His hand crept like a spider, unbuckled his pants.

She beckoned him closer.

Her curls were untied, snaking over her shoulders. Closer, he saw the handprints weren’t dirt, but smears of blood. Her handprints and others, patterned like cave pantings. Blood pattered into the pit from between her legs.

He gaped. She laughed her awkward little heave, and swung the chert knife. He stumbled back and twine snapped.

He hit the opposite edge of the earthen wall. He heard his leg snap, the blessed chill of shock blunting the agony as he crumpled into the trench. Alone with the wind’s keen and the white blur of the moon.

Feet slapped the dirt beside him. He blinked and the moon became Emma, in a crouch.

“I need help,” he croaked.

“Always what you need. Do you remember now?”

Sweating with Emma outside O’Dell’s office, watching through the frosted glass while the professor consoled Tara Branigan, their only competition. Tensing as the stoic valedictorian scurried out the door and down the hall as if wounded. Devin’s heart had pounded and he sank his fingers into Emma’s soft white forearms like clay.

Don’t fuck this up for me. I need this.

No tears. Her fists knotted in rage. Her shoes slapped the institutional gray

floor and she fled. O’Dell squinted out the cracked door, waved him in with a conspiratorial smile. No Frizzell? Emotional girl.

“I’m sor—”

Emma cupped sticky fingers to his lips. “She’s a blood goddess. You fed her. Woke her.” She patted her belly, low. “She thanks you.”

He gripped her arm. “You will get me out of here!”

She stabbed the stone blade into the meat of his thumb. He tore it open yanking away, stared at the gaping red mouth in his skin.

“She showed me what was before. The Kurgans, and their mounds? They aren’t monuments to warriors.” Huff. “They’re wards, to keep things in. Her. Us.”

The multitool had landed just out of reach. He clawed for it, and she thumped his ruined leg. The pain wrenched his eyes shut.

My cattle you were, and so you shall return.

The blue-ochre witch from his dream spoke behind his eyes. He screamed. Blood washed down the eyeless face, and her shriek became a cackle.

“You need some of us to breed!”

Laughter from above. Lani and Adriane leered down with blood-slicked faces.

“She chose,” Lani said. “You’re meat.”

Bracken cowered at their feet, naked and stunned. A neat hole in his forehead trickled blood down the bridge of his nose.

“She says it’s better if you do it before puberty,” Adriane said. “Stone age lobotomy.”

Emma gripped him by the hair and pressed the skull cracker to his temple.

Devin whimpered as the flaked stone razored into his flesh. “Tell me your name!”

“Mother,” Emma said, and swung the hammer stone.

—

©2017 Thomas Pluck