The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [26]
Karen, less politically theoretical, left for daylight in a hurry.
Radic’s instrumented preservation tent was damp and underlit. The dead woman’s chilly stone sarcophagus almost filled the taut fabric space. There was a narrow space for guests to sidle around the sarcophagus, with a distinct risk that the visitor might fall in.
Radic had once informed her, with a lip-smacking scholarly relish, that the Latin word “sarcophagus” meant “flesh-eater.”
Vera had never shared Radic’s keen fascination with ancient bodies. Her sensitive Acquis sensorweb had detected thousands of people buried on Mljet. Almost any human body ever interred in the island’s soil had left some faint fossil trace there—a trace obvious to modern ultrasensitive instruments.
Since Vera was not in the business of judgment calls about the historical status of corpses, she had to leave such decisions to Dr. Radic—and this body was the one discovery the historian most valued. Radic’s so-called Duchess was particularly well preserved, thanks to the tight stone casing around her flesh and the arsenic paste in her coffin.
Still, no one but an archaeologist would have thought to boast about her. The “Duchess” was a deeply repulsive, even stomach-turning bundle of wet, leathery rags.
The corpse was hard to look at, but the stone coffin had always compelled Vera’s interest. Somebody—some hardworking zealot from a thousand years ago—had devoted a lot of time and effort to making sure that this woman stayed well buried.
This Dark Age stonemason had taken amazing care with his hand tools. Somehow, across the gulf and abysm of time, Vera sensed a fellow spirit there.
A proper “sarcophagus,” a genuine imperial Roman tomb, should have been carved from fine Italian marble. The local mason didn’t have any marble, because he was from a lonely, Dark Age Balkan island. So he’d had to fake it. He’d made a stone coffin from the crumbly local white dolomite.
A proper Roman coffin required an elegant carved frieze of Roman heroes and demigods. This Dark Age mason didn’t know much about proper Roman tastes. So his coffin had a lumpy, ill-proportioned tumble of what seemed to be horses, or maybe large pigs.
The outside of the faked sarcophagus looked decent, or at least publicly presentable, but the inside of it—that dark stone niche where they’d dumped the corpse in her sticky paste of arsenic—that was rough work. That was faked and hurried. That was the work of fear.
The Duchess had been hastily buried right in her dayclothes: sixteen-hundred-year-old rags that had once been linen and silk. They’d drenched her in poisonous paste and then banged down her big stone lid.
Her shriveled leather ears featured two big golden earrings: bull’s heads. Her bony shoulder had a big bronze fibula safety pin that might have served her as a stiletto.
The Duchess had also been buried with three fine bronze hand mirrors. It was unclear why this dead lady in her poisoned black stone niche had needed so many mirrors. The sacred mirrors might have been the last syncretic gasp of some ecoglobal Greco-Egypto-Roman-Balkan cult of Isis. Dr. Radic never lacked for theories.
“May I?” asked Montalban. He caressed the cold stone coffin with one fingertip. “Remarkable handiwork!”
“It is derivative,” sniffed Dr. Radic. “The local distortion of a decaying imperial influence.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I like best about it!”
From his tone, Vera knew that this was not what he liked best about it. He was Dispensation, so what he liked best was that someone had taken a horrible mess and boxed it up with an appearance of propriety. So he was lying. Vera could not restrain herself. “Why are you so happy about this?”
Montalban aimed a cordial nod at their host. “European Synchronic philosophy is so highly advanced! I have to admit that, as a mere Angeleno boy, sometimes Synchronic theory is a bit beyond me.”
“Oh, no no no, our American friend is too modest!” said Radic, beaming at the compliment. “We Europeans are too often lost in