Prologue: On Silbury Hill
Sunset, 2nd July 2012
Conall Astor knew he was probably breaking some law or other. Possibly several. He just wasn’t sure which, nor what might happen should he be caught. With every car that passed he flattened himself against the slope of the hill into the waist-high grass and thorny scrub until the rumble of engines faded. To a casual onlooker his actions would more probably be considered odd than illegal: how many of those driving past that curiously shaped hill on the north side of this B-road in Wiltshire, now silhouetted black against the sunset, would, even had they been able to see him, have cared to question why someone was scaling its steep sides after 9pm on a clear summer’s evening?
The mound towered above him, blocking out half the twilit sky. It’s just a hill, he told himself, but this was no ordinary hill. It seemed insurmountable for a start – the steep sides of the huge pudding-bowl shaped rise presented a natural defence against climbing, and that was after one had ignored the ‘Strictly No Admittance’ signs, clambered over the barbed wire fence and navigated the open, thorn filled moat in which the 40m high mound sat and which this evening, as was frequently the case, was waterlogged from the recent rains.
What’s more, the hill exuded what Conall could only describe as personality; the last time he had felt something akin to this was looking up at the Great Pyramid of Giza many years before – and the similarity seemed apt – like the pyramid this hill was not natural but had been artificially raised, and at roughly the same time in history, some four and a half thousand years previously. The many thousands of tonnes of chalk that made up the dome had been laboriously scooped up from the surrounding ditch by Stone Age farmers and fashioned into a great conical mound for reasons known only to them and long forgotten. Once it had stood out a stark white against the surrounding green hills, but the green had encroached upon the chalk over the intervening centuries so that its too-perfect shape alone betrayed its artificial origins.
Many had argued that this feature, Silbury Hill, now sitting vast and mute beside the Marlborough to Bath road, had been built to be seen from one or several of the various vistas afforded by the surrounding landscape. Conall, however, had never been wholly convinced by that. Why build a hill when all around one was surrounded by hills? Besides, archaeologists investigating the mound had discovered traces of a spiral pathway to its summit and so it seemed logical that it was meant to be climbed. The threat of damage posed by thousands of tourists re-enacting this feat meant that the monument had been off-limits to the general public for some 40 years, but tonight for reasons he would have found hard to explain to any apprehending police officer or National Trust custodian, Conall Astor had chosen to ignore this prohibition. But it wasn’t so much the possibility of being caught trespassing that bothered Conall, but how, if challenged, he would explain what it was he was carrying in his left hand, bundled up in his crumpled jacket…
He had already nearly fallen twice, slipping in the sodden moat, before he had got anywhere near the hill. He was taking a route straight up the north-east side, avoiding an older well-worn winding path to the south-west that was in more direct view of the traffic on the Bath road. With his jacket with its burden in one hand he began his ascent, using tufts of long coarse grass to pull himself up with the other, stopping only to flatten himself to the hill when the headlights of approaching traffic from over Overton hill to the east scoured the hillside.
After a few minutes he reached the flattened summit, dizzy and breathless, nearly falling backwards down the steep slope when one of the dark shapes he had taken as bushes rose up and fled, bleating. He didn’t know who was more shocked, the sheep or him. The top of the hill was wide and covered in undergrowth, save for a central circular scar where in 2001 the land had fallen away to reveal a deep shaft of an earlier excavation. For hundreds of years men had dug into this mysterious hill in search of treasure – local legend had it that the hill contained the body of a King clad in golden armour, buried seated upon his horse; but now thoroughly internally dissected and scanned, and its cavernous holes filled, Silbury had been proven to be empty. Whatever it was it was not a tomb, nor a treasure chest; no Stone Age Pharaoh lay here in state.
Conall sat himself just back from the southernmost lip of the summit, so as to be invisible from the road, and waited until his breathing had calmed; he was thirsty, nauseous and more tired than he ever remembered being; every muscle seemed to ache; he had run most of the way here – but had he been followed? He didn’t know. Anyway – he guessed such apprehensions were unwarranted; events in the village, events that had singularly conspired to put him in this very position, were, he judged, currently occupying the attention of anyone who might previously have stopped him; a lone figure climbing a hill was small fry to the situation within Avebury village itself, and totally unconnected; or so it would appear, though Conall was unable to shake the feeling that the object he carried was more than instrumental in the pandemonium happening to the north. He turned so he could observe the thick column of smoke rising from the village; blue flashing lights blinked at its foot, but there was no trace of the earlier flames, and the sirens, for now, had ceased.
Only now, turning back to the south, did he take from out of the confines of his bundled jacket the object he’d so carefully carried up the hill; it lay within another cloth, charred and reeking of smoke: despite its fragility, though, the contents remained intact: the yellowed bone shell of a human skull, polished with age. Cautiously, respectfully, he turned it in his hands then held it up before him, its empty eye sockets facing his own. Liberated from its hiding place the skull eerily echoed both in shape and hue the newly risen moon that hung low above the hillside opposite, near to full.
For a moment there was no sound save the last hum of a car engine disappearing out of earshot in the direction of Beckhampton to the west and the chink chink chink of blackbirds in the bushes at the foot of the hill.
‘So, what the fuck am I supposed to do now?!’ Con asked.