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  The only person to see those faces was Guilhem-the-silent, busy tending his vines next to the pale path. He looked at Fiz and then stretched. He watched the boy until the path wound out of sight. Fiz, however, pulled faces right until he reached the curtain wall. Bored is bored.

  Fiz broke into a run at the last, because he felt energy well up within him, unable to be suppressed, and because he was impatient to get home. He was impatient to get somewhere, always, but home was the best of all. He owned those streets and the gardens were his for the plundering and the stream was his playground. Nothing would change that.

  * * *

  26 March.

  The weather was cold and bleak, but the sky was clear, which was all that mattered. Sylvia had dragged them all to the flatness above the caves in order to take advantage of the new moon and to introduce the team to their new horizons, and explain delta T and how she was improving its accuracy and hoped to refine the description of the processes that governed Earth’s rotation. Pauline had cooked an early dinner.

  What struck them all was the brightness above. “It’s like being in the desert back home,” Geoff said.

  “No cities,” Ben replied, “and even the village is dark.”

  “No electricity,” Cormac pointed out.

  “And this place is a desert,” Artemisia said, gently. “That’s why it was named that way. That’s why we’re here. Even in our time there are only six people to a square kilometre. It was never a dry desert. It was always a desert of souls. It’s about how people describe their realities. The people below see this land as empty.”

  After lunch, Artemisia settled down and worked. That afternoon, she found two different ways of calculating prayer times, broadcast them to the rest of the cave dwellers in an e-briefing then settled down to read Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which had been included in her library by a wonderful error. She loved Tristram Shandy. It didn’t make up for the total impossibility that was her research library, but it did give her a refuge when she was unable to contemplate or work with that library any longer.

  Whoever had designed this historical resource was pathetic. She would have prayed for them, if she had still been ten and wildly innocent. Now all she could do was despise their stupidity and cheapness.

  Over dinner, Luke emerged from his world-changing mathematics and top-secret project to remind everyone to look at Artemisia’s list of prayer times. Sylvia made her own little protest at Artemisia. She ignored the double set of calculations and she went out after breakfast the next day, both contrary to specific instructions. Luke said nothing.

  And so they all settled down into an odd, half troglodyte existence. Sylvia continued to ignore Artemisia’s work and Artemisia continued to mock Sylvia in her mind.

  Within five days, Artemisia had a second set of biographies of saints on the go, but they were hidden behind hyperlinks. Anyone who actually clicked on the hyperlink found a satirical version of the same life. Artemisia had mastered these during her various studies: it was almost impossible to be an expert on the lives of saints (even those of Clemence of Barking) and not master the daft satire. If anyone else underground read them, they didn’t say.

  * * *

  The next day was cold and bleak within the slender valley-town surrounded by that desert. The wind blew sharply across street corners and people clustered as if closeness would protect them from the headache and the tears that the sharpness brought. Berta and Sibilla were not talking. They walked past each other, heads turned aside, the wind whipping their cheeks to tears. Guilhem-the-smith heard their confidences and their complaints.

  “Why does she do that? She always sweeps like that and it always moves the dirt right outside my house. I hate it.”

  “Why can’t that woman mind her own business? Do some work for a change?”

  The complaints were the same every time. They always made up. Until they did, however, Guilhem-the-smith turned to his forge for comfort.

  Today, it wasn’t only the two women who fought. Everyone was at odds.

  The only person who had any cheer in the whole town was Fiz’s youngest friend. He was boasting about his diving prowess. “I can dive into the Verdus and come up in Saint-Jean-de-Fos, or even further. I can swim longer than anyone and hold my breath longer than anyone and I know all the currents.”

  Despite the wind and the black weather he offered to prove it. Fiz, naturally, called his bluff. The whole of Saint-Guilhem was spared the bravado for an afternoon as the young man demonstrated that he could indeed dive into a particular pool and come up, miles away. It was a distraction, and a relief to everyone except the boy himself, who came up shivering and had to walk a long way home.

  Spring, Peire thought, they’ll calm down when Spring is here. It’s the season that makes them turbulent. Until then, daily life was full of potential fraught moments. Small towns in enclosed valleys, even with thick walls and private courtyards and many, many places to which one could escape, hurt when they could only look inwards.

  Up to the hills, whence cometh the pilgrims, Peire thought. Seldom as holy as they thought they were, but a distraction. Certain townsfolk would focus on milking those pilgrims and complaining about the whims and fancies of the religious traveller. Less mischief against each other, in pilgrim season.

  Chapter Six

  The Month of Small Things

  It was April. April in the northern hemisphere. The air was full of the scent of spring flowers and of herbs and of hope. Summer was most definitely coming soon. The person most affected was Ben Konig. He stood just outside the big opening and drank in deep breaths of the fragrance before strolling downhill to collect data points for his biomass project.

  Even Sylvia found him easier to work with, although this was partly because they had adopted an almost forced charm with each other. Sylvia flirted. Ben flirted back. Together they kept things going. Artemisia noticed, however, that after Ben had spent a significant time flirting, he was at the main entrance, looking out on creation and swilling the air.

  Artemisia looked at his back, which was just visible from where she sat, and she considered. Ben and Sylvia were both ‘I’ people - if they weren’t in the picture then there was no picture. Ben hides it better, she thought, and contextualises himself using the weather and the air. He stays saner than Sylvia, perhaps, because he can go outside and breathe in lavender and thyme and come back smiling. Either way, the universe doesn’t need either of them at its centre, and they both think it does. How odd. Whoever recruited them didn’t do a good job with that one. They’re going to fight. Sure and sure. And I’m not going to fight, no matter how much Dr Smith goads me.

  Luke walked into the office area. She didn’t have to turn to see him. He had a palpable presence. This was why Luke didn’t have to struggle to get that centrality that Ben and Sylvia squabbled over - all he had to do was enter a room. It wasn’t because he was Great Leader. In fact, he shirked his Great Leadership on a regular basis. It was his charisma. Artemisia felt shamefully glad that he hid himself and his equations in his office so much of the time. She was much more relaxed when his presence didn’t take over the room. It gave her space to breathe.

  * * *

  Fiz had constipation. He had had constipation for so long that it felt eternal. To the whole of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert it felt eternal, too, for wherever Fiz went, whether it was gambling with his friends by the Verdus or trying to steal from someone’s narrow garden, when he caught sight of any person at all he told them loudly of his suffering.

  One day, in church, he finally gave thanks and explained to each and every person near him at the end of the service that God has saved him from the constipation.

  “But He hasn’t yet saved us from you,” muttered Guilhem-the-smith mostly to himself.

  Peire said to the metalworker, “Tu cognovisti sessionem meum et resurrectionem meum.” Everyone within earshot nodded sagely. “Psalm 138,” added the priest.

  “Of course,” said Guil
hem-the-smith, ironically.

  “The Lord sees everything,” the priest continued, looking at Fiz directly, “even your shitting.”

  Fiz excused himself, very quickly.

  He didn’t even notice Guilhem leaning against the church, staring at him neutrally, staring at everyone neutrally. Guilhem ought to have been dwarfed by the huge round tower, but he wasn’t. He was simply there, leaning against the rough boulders at its base, wearing his sword effortlessly as if he were a part of the church’s fortifications.

  Sibilla was too busy complaining about her feet to notice, and Berta too busy arguing with her. She had been complaining for the last month.

  “It’s so far to walk,” Sibilla started her litany.

  Berta interrupted before she could finish. “Go to Saint-Barthelmy,” she said.

  “I hate Saint-Barthelmy. I may have moved house, but I’ve always come here and I always will. My ancestors and their ancestors have been in this parish since the very first Guilhem. Since the saint himself.”

  “Then stop complaining. Every time you go to church, you complain.”

  “My feet hurt.”

  “If you hadn’t bought those second hand shoes”

  “They’re lovely,” and she paused to admire them. “I bought them from a pilgrim, for a good price. Hardly worn. When I wear them I feel as if I’m in Montpellier, walking along the streets like one of those lords from Aragon.”

  “They don’t fit.”

  “I might be in Paris, strolling past a palace. Living the life of the city.”

  “They still don’t fit. You’ll get bunions.”

  After almost everyone had gone, Guilhem was still standing there, not walking through town, but standing arms crossed, leaning against the fortified wall, defending his space. Peire said admiringly to Guilhem-the-smith, safely out of earshot at the top of the stairs (and just around the curve of the wall), “Ensuring he doesn’t belong.”

  “He doesn’t want to belong. He doesn’t want to change and become one of us. He tells me every day that his mother was from the south, but if she was, her affiliations are with Montpellier, not here. And I’m not even certain about that. He speaks with the accent of the Ile-de-France and he walks with the swagger of the Ile-de-France. And we all know what they want, up there in Paris.”

  “They want to own us,” said the priest. “They want to own everything.”

  “And they never will.”

  “Nothing changed when the king claimed us, after all.”

  “It changed for the cities. We’re lucky - we’re a little place.”

  “In the middle of nowhere,” the big Guilhem laughed.

  “In the middle of the pilgrim route, with the abbey to protect us. While the abbey’s strong, we don’t have to fear secular lords.”

  “You believe the abbot, then, that Jesus protects us?”

  “No, I believe the abbot that the abbot protects us. We make him rich with a quarter of our harvests and with our hard work and olive oil, and he keeps us from the king and his politics.”

  “And Guilhem?”

  “He has to stay a stranger.” Peire peeked around the wall and looked down at the man lounging arrogantly, and wondered what it was like to be him. Better not. Better to never be a noble. Better to have one’s place here, in one’s own country than to be a wanderer and alone.

  * * *

  A typical day in the hellhole (as Mac called it, to the right ears) consisted of Tony gardening and computing and stashing samples and recording developments. When Tony wasn’t working, he was watching. Artemisia watched him watch: it was her new hobby. She noticed that everyone reacted differently to it. Sylvia and Pauline developed nervous tics, for instance, while Luke puffed himself up and became magnificent.

  Luke wrote on everything. His main goal was the Big Project that would Change the World. His main tools were his brain and his whiteboard marker, which were obviously connected at some deep level. He wanted the first datastream to arrive more than anything. Whenever he was stymied, he craved that datastream with its twenty-first-century view of the transit. His brow would lower and he would bang his fist on random objects, urgent for answers. One day, Artemisia thought, he will break something.

  He didn’t talk about his work. He was either on show and influencing the world, or he was, like Tony, deep in his own thoughts, the Big Brain working. Every now and again, he’d remember he was head of the expedition and take charge, or stop at someone’s desk and force them into conversation. The whole team was happiest when these moments passed.

  Sylvia was a splendid multi-tasker. She made her observations of the sky, and added her measurements into her delta T work; she evaluated rocks for erosion data, and she did about half the everyday administration. Whether it was half or less than half depended on the state of her tussles with Konig. Artemisia loved watching these.

  Konig was a mystery, but an amusing one. He was very easy on the eye and had a splendid voice, and she fell for neither. Lucia had taught her that. “Never believe externals,” she had said, often and over again. Artemisia determined early on that he genuinely cared about the expedition’s success and so she did what he asked. He wasn’t a real person to her, however, until the occasion he came in with a question. “Is it a bad year this year?” he asked. “The grapes are slow. It could affect vintage.”

  That was when she realised that his love was wine. Not science. Not world domination. Science and world domination were things he was prone to, merely. Not his passion. It gave him a different intellectual footprint to the others - he approached his work with a different mindset. This fascinated her.

  “I have notes on vintages,” she said. “On my thumb drive. I’ll hunt them out for you.”

  On that typical day, Mac might be doing almost anything, and Geoff Murray would be wandering around, whistling, or lounging in a comfortable chair, pretending not to work, his eyes noticing everything. He especially noticed Konig’s lists and maps.

  Konig was made of lists and of maps. ‘Laundry lists’, he called one, and ‘Distribution’ the other. Lists of species from the region, from similar regions, from regions that might have been similar at different periods. Maps showing distribution. He was a man of lists and a man of maps.

  If you wanted to see the questing knight show from under the administrator, you asked him if something was on his list, and when he found it wasn’t, he would add it in half a dozen places. Then he would update a map. And he would be supremely happy. And every single woman in his vicinity would bask in that happiness. There’s something about a good-looking man radiating dynamic joy, Artemisia thought, as she handed over a sample.

  She noticed that Tony also handed samples over, though he did so without drawing attention to himself. Tony didn’t flirt with anyone, male or female. But he did make sure he had extra plants to give Ben, always. How much of this was because they both worked with plants? Both she and Mac speculated, but out of the way, where no-one could hear. They didn’t speculate for long. Tony was so very private; it was impossible to know anything about his sexuality.

  “It’s very frustrating,” Mac said.

  “It’s very cool,” Artemisia retorted. “His face is so expressive.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Yes, it is. He’s an inward soul. He’s maybe the most inward person I know. He internalises everything. He’s not a verbal person, either. He doesn’t need to talk.”

  “You’re right about that.”

  An hour later Luke had everyone perched on the hillside, watching travellers. The man was consistent only in his inconsistency: his policy was as the cock on a weather vane. “Just this once,” he’d announced, “We’ll watch the travellers and get a handle on what we’re avoiding. We can’t minimise knowledge of us by our environment without knowing that environment.”

  There was an irregular traffic of pedlars, merchants, specialist traders, linking the town with Aniane. A few headed through the back paths, past the time team’s hi
deout and into the mountains. These were the ones of whom the team had to be wary, and it was these they were poised to analyse.

  Nothing happened. Artemisia used the binoculars and then the camera when Luke wasn’t watching. She took pictures of the castle and the wall flowing down from it and the towers that hobbled the wall right to the village. She talked herself through the castle and its relationship to the town, yearning to talk it out loud, to hear it spoken. Her big surprise was how very small it was. It was a castle that protected by looking dangerous. It saw; it was seen: it did nothing.

  No need for impossibly long mule trains to supply, because there was no big garrison that needed provision. One visible person (no mail glinting out from beneath very ordinary clothes) wandered around the walls. She pored over every single bit of castle material she could find and finally came to the conclusion that it might be a variant on an old-fashioned motte-and-bailey structure, with the town itself being part of the defences, or the whole thing might be a deception intended to persuade people not to invade in the first place.

  “I don’t know castles,” she despaired, “I only know saints’ tales. And I don’t even know the right saints’ tales. Wrong region, wrong stories, wrong century. It’s all wrong.” And she went back to her research into castles, knowing as she did that anything she thought was likely to be a complete waste of time. Except the pictures. At least, this once, she had pictures. She processed the photos for sending, hoping that Sylvia wouldn’t disallow them as taking up too many valuable megabytes. Artemisia was hungry for answers.

  * * *