He held out his hand. She took it, eyeing the tumble of rock doubtfully.
The moment his warm, strong fingers closed over hers, a sense of security swept through her. With his help she scrambled up the rock pile. Then she halted, gazing in amazement at the paintings revealed along the raw stone within. He let go of her hand and stepped away so that he did not block her view.
“It seems a miracle the taggers haven’t found these yet,” Bird whispered in awe.
“Perhaps they are satisfied to remain in the caves closer to the shoreline,” Mikhail said.
They stood in silence, Bird playing the lantern over a mural painted in blacks and reds, with fading chalky smears here and there. Roughly painted people and animals had been grouped around a central space, doing activities that seemed to relate to everyday life. She studied them with interest as she fumbled for her sketchpad.
She was going to ask if she should begin drawing now, but when she turned to Mikhail, she saw him standing a few feet away with his eyes closed. His head was tipped slightly upward as he leaned lightly on his cane. The headlamp—at least, it had to be the headlamp—reflected light over him in a faint shimmer that she found eerily beautiful. Was he listening to something she couldn’t hear? Or had he merely gotten a headache in the close, humid air?
Reluctant to disturb him, she quietly slid her drawing things out, swung her backpack behind her, and perched on a flat stone so that she could rest the sketchpad on her knee. She had been hired to do a job, so she might as well get to it.
She began sketching, carefully copying one group at a time. She had done two groups and was beginning on the third when she became aware that there was a pattern to all the little figures. There was always one person turned toward one of the other groups, as if each of those was a link in a chain of activity.
Bird set her sketchpad down on the flat stone and stepped close to the rock wall, examining the mural more carefully. She noticed that the black figures, seen from six inches away, were not complete silhouettes, nor were they as rough as they seemed. Though the stone they were painted on was coarse and uneven, the painter had stippled tiny crests along heads here, the suggestion of a tail there. All the figures had tiny slits for eyes and mouths, not only conveying a surprising amount of expression, but also showing the direction their faces were pointed.
When she took a step back, she stared again at the groupings, and made a discovery.
Many of them were looking at the chalk smears, which—she realized when she trained the lamp right on them—were actually very faded figures. Symbolic figures, it looked like, doing symbolic things, for how else did you explain a human mother carrying a child-sized lizard with wings? And larger winged lizards, too. Or were they...?
Mikhail opened his eyes and bent over her sketchpad. “These are excellent.”
“But they’re wrong.” She sighed. “I have to start over.”
“Wrong? I confess I haven’t examined them more closely, as I was . . . I had another task first.” His voice faltered.
She held up her lamp, frustrated as the beam from his headlamp obscured his face. But she could hear confusion in his quiet voice.
“What is it?” she asked.
He held up a hand. “I think, right now, it’s more important to ask what you have found.”
They stood together, her shoulder brushing his arm, as they studied the mural.
“I missed the second set of figures,” she said. “See? It’s like they’re having a war with the others, maybe. I think these chalky ones are much older than the others. You might even need an expert on Alta California, when California was a part of Mexico in the early 1800s...”
Mikhail slowly shook his head. “I believe those are far older than that.”
“You mean the Chumash and the Gabrieleño, before the Spanish came?”
“Older. I mean the time when humans, and others, first wandered through this area.”
“Others?” she repeated.
“Others as in . . .” He looked away, then back, meeting her gaze. “Not human. Or rather, only sometimes human.”
Her first thought was, he’s kidding, right? Then, Oh, no, I hope he’s not about to tell me about his abduction by aliens.
But those steady silver eyes were completely sane, and his husky voice rang with sincerity.
And here it was, another change in the regular tread of her life. This one hinted at wider possibilities, the wild ones that had been dutifully snipped and tucked under the construct of responsible adulthood as she grew up. If Mikhail told her he’d been sucked up into a flying saucer and examined by little gray men, then she’d believe in little gray men.
Bird drew a breath, aw
are of the sense of wonder she had so loved as a child, when anything might happen, and magic beckoned beyond the fog, beyond the sunset, and in the very air of those days when she woke up full of joy.
It was that sense she had tried so hard to capture in her books, written for other children like her . . . that sense she had lost, she thought forever, when she stood in that courtroom listening to the man she’d married itemizing her failings.