Lake of Sorrows

“Your man’s away down here,” Ursula said. She pointed to the white tent, another hundred yards past the excavation site. A lone uniformed Garda officer sat on watch outside, his temporary seat an upturned white plastic bucket. The wind was still strong, and the blue-and-white crime-scene tape marking out the findspot trembled vigorously.

It was hard to imagine what this place must have been like thousands of years before. It must have taken a similar communal effort to make the roads that Ursula and the crew were digging up today, to cut down hundreds of trees, to fashion spikes, to weave hurdles from saplings. Whole villages must have turned out. If bogs had been sacred, then this area must have been a very holy place indeed. There were only sporadic patches of dry land, scattered like islands across the marshy center. What had it been then? A place of offering. Larder. Death trap. Quagmire. Healer of wounds. Nora tried to imagine the time when all this had been wild bogland, crisscrossed by floating roads, a fearsome place roaming with wild beasts and bandits. She played the picture in her head, of the last hundred centuries, from glaciers to forests and solitary meadows, lakes gradually filling in, building up until the peat was ten and fifteen meters deep, dead but undecayed, immune to corruption. Home to strange and primitive carnivorous plants, delicate orchids, clouds of midges.

When she looked up, Ursula was yards ahead of her, easily jumping the drain to the next bank. Nora’s palms began to sweat as she approached the drain, unsure if she could make it across. She saw Ursula turn to watch her, a subtle challenge in her expression. What had she done to earn this woman’s scorn? They’d barely met, and already Ursula seemed to dislike her. She gathered her courage and cleared the drain in one hopping step. Safe.

“Who actually found the body?” she asked.

“I did,” Ursula said. “We were clearing out this drain yesterday, getting ready to start another cutting here. I was directing Charlie Goggles, one of the Bord na Mona lads, who was driving the Hymac, trying to make sure he didn’t put the spoil where the cutting was supposed to be. After he dropped the first bucket, I saw something sticking up out of the peat. Thought it was an animal bone at first, but it wasn’t—it was the bog man’s thumb. Still attached to his hand, which was still attached to his arm, which was still attached to his torso. Poor Charlie Goggles. Nearly pissed himself when he saw it.”

“Charlie Goggles? You don’t mean Charlie Brazil?”

“Ah, you’ve met him. None other.”

When they reached the tent, Ursula ignored the Garda officer’s cautious gesture of greeting and ducked through the flap. Nora followed. The space inside was an oasis of diffuse light and sublime calm after their windy trek across the bog. Stepping inside felt like entering another realm, another dimension. As she looked around, Nora felt Ursula studying her once more, making sure that her anticipation reached full fruition before lifting a corner of the black plastic sheeting that had been staked to the ground over a mound of loose wet peat. Nora’s eyes searched the sodden heap until she saw a glistening, dark brown patch that she knew immediately was human skin. Like the previous bog remains she’d seen, it had an iridescent, slightly metallic cast.

“Do you think it would be all right if I—”

Ursula cut her off: “Do what you like. I’m not in charge of him; Niall Dawson has made that perfectly bloody clear.”

Nora was aware for the first time that she had blundered into a potentially hazardous competition. Archaeologists had their turf wars, the same as everyone else, and maybe it was just the fact that she was part of the museum team that had put Ursula in bad humor. Whatever the politics here, she had to remain neutral. The problems of the living were the least of her business.

She knelt down and realized that she was holding her breath. The peat was wet and crumbly, like very damp, fibrous cake. She removed several handfuls of the stuff and saw how the excavator’s gargantuan teeth had bisected the man at an angle just below his diaphragm, exposing muscle tissue and shrunken internal organs. The thought of such violence done to a fragile human being, even one centuries dead, suddenly made her feel queasy.