The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [69]
Half a mile past Lullington, I edged the car into the grass beside the road, hoping we could extract it when we were finished—and hoping, too, that no wide lorry or hay wagon would need to pass on this Sunday morning. While I was lacing on my walking shoes, Holmes examined the verges up and down the intersection of footpath and roadway. I could see that he found nothing of interest.
We left the motor and set off along the pathway to Windover Hill. This was a section of the prehistoric South Downs Way, the ridgeline path worn by six thousand years of travellers that crossed the chalk landscape from Winchester to Eastbourne, dotting the hills with villages, dykes, forts, burial mounds, and monuments such as the one we were approaching.
As with many archaeological artefacts in Britain, the age, purpose, and design of the Giant, or Long Man, engender vigorous debate. Fifth Century or Fifteenth? Does he represent a farmer, or a warrior? Had the original details been smudged with the centuries, or had he always been an unadorned drawing in the turf? Solar calendar? Religious site? Or an elaborate thumb of the nose to the priory that faced it?
Whatever his date and purpose, the Giant was now the stark outline of a big-headed figure, hands held out to grasp featureless lines as tall as he is. Whether these lines were originally farming implements, spears, or something else entirely only adds to the debate.
“You know Hughes' theory of the Long Man, in that Kipling book?” I called at Holmes' back as we walked, eyes on the ground.
“That it was carved by fairies?”
“Better than that. It's the sun god, Phol, holding back the gates of darkness.”
Holmes glanced over his shoulder. “Is there a sun god Phol?”
“Well, there is a set of Medieval incantations that indicates Phol is another name for Baldur, and Baldur is sometimes depicted standing in the gates to the underworld. And don't forget, Polegate is just over the hill.”
He did not dignify that with a response, merely saved his breath for climbing.
The air was rich with the mingled odours of fresh-cut hay and a dawn breeze off the sea. Birdsong rose up with the light, to join the bleats of sheep. The sky shifted from pale rose to cloudless blue, and the corduroy surface of Windover Hill, terraced by ten thousand generations of meandering hoof, turned to rich green: August had been wet, before we arrived.
The morning was perfectly beautiful, and I could have walked forever. In minutes, I rather wished we had.
It was clear where the dead woman had lain, both from the heavy traffic of many booted feet and from the marks that had gone before them.
“She was actually killed here,” I said.
“One rather suspected as much,” Holmes mused, hunkered down over the gruesome stain. “It's quite a trek with a dead weight slung across one's shoulders.”
“Would you say her throat was cut?”
“They've trampled into invisibility everything but the main area of pooling, but assuming that mark over there is blood and not tomato sauce from some idiot constable's luncheon pail, then I should say yes, the distance indicates arterial blood.”
“Did she struggle?”
“We will know when we see her, and her clothing. The ground here and along the path is too torn up to say.”
I stepped away from the gore-soaked centre of his interest, and bent to study the surrounds, looking for anything that would suggest how, and why, a woman died—a stranger, yes, but very possibly one linked to me by her marriage and my own.
We quartered the ground around the Giant's feet for two hours, gathering bits of paper, cigarette ends, the odd stub of food from the lunch of hikers' picnics, anything that might have been left in recent days. Holmes, bent double with his strong magnifying glass, found some odd dark grey crumbs, a substance that puzzled him although I thought they looked like pebbles, or even gristle from someone's sandwich. Halfway between the figure's feet, a metre from the edge of the blood, he found an untrampled smear of ash, which he gathered assiduously. He spent a long time near a wide