Lord of All Things Read online

  Around noon Charlotte finally called a halt. They had just passed a little town, no more than a few houses scattered in the woods, and now there was a quiet lake by the roadside, half hidden by trees. It was an inviting spot to rest awhile. They took off their shoes, rolled up their pant legs, and dangled their feet in the water.

  It was pleasantly cool here in the shade, and it felt wonderful to soak their feet. Hiroshi couldn’t remember ever having walked so far in his life. His clothes were clinging to his body, rubbing and chafing, and he was covered in dust; he yearned for a long, hot shower. Tomorrow he would barely be able to get out of bed, that much was certain. And as he was taking his socks off, he had spotted at least one blister on each foot. Of course, he wouldn’t let any of this show. If Charlotte wanted to hike all day, then he would hike all day, and if his feet were bleeding tonight, so be it. He would heal.

  They devoured their sandwiches. They were far and away the best sandwiches Hiroshi had ever eaten, and he wasn’t sure it was only because he was so hungry. Sandwiches with ham, mayo, and finely chopped salad. Sandwiches with fish paste, which Charlotte told him she made herself from her grandmother’s recipe. Delicious. Even the lukewarm water from the bottle tasted wonderful. Little by little Hiroshi got his strength back. He looked up at the treetops and listened to the birds chattering away loudly, and all of a sudden he thought of Dorothy. How he must have hurt her. There was no question he had let her down dreadfully, and he wasn’t proud of the way he had broken it off. Sure, he had to end that relationship somehow, but he could have found some other way to do it, some better way. Even if he didn’t know how.

  At last Charlotte said it was time to get going again.

  “How far have we come now?” Hiroshi asked as he carefully dried his feet.

  “Two and a half million years,” she replied.

  “And how far do you want to go? All the way back to the Big Bang?”

  Charlotte shrugged her backpack into place. “Not long now. An hour or so.”

  They hiked off, more slowly now, less talkative. The trees gave way and the sun beat down. Cars sped past, honking their horns in encouragement, some of the drivers waving at them.

  And then at last Charlotte stopped and said, “All right, we’ve gone far enough. Now I can tell you why I study anthropology. Why it has to be anthropology.”

  Hiroshi would have liked a walking stick to lean on. “Really,” he panted, “it was just a question. If I had known the answer would involve all this, I never would have asked.”

  Charlotte didn’t respond. Instead, she pointed to a spot on the roadside where the remains of some poor animal were smeared, maybe a cat or something else about that size. “We’ve walked just about twenty miles,” she said. “That’s thirty-two kilometers, or three point two million years. And three point two million years ago a woman was living in Ethiopia—actually, we’d better call her a female specimen of Australopithecus afarensis, which was one of the earliest hominid species—and her bones survived after her death. They were excavated in 1974, and she’s gone down in the literature as Lucy. The amazing thing about this find was that so much of the skeleton was found, about forty percent. So we could prove that Lucy was already walking upright most of the time.”

  Charlotte turned around and faced the way they had come. “Now imagine if we were to walk back the same way—don’t worry, we’re not going to, but just imagine. We start with Lucy, our earliest known female ancestor, and walk back through the whole history of human evolution, through all that time, with millions and millions of people being born, having children, dying. They survive ice ages, plagues, and other natural disasters. They migrate all the way around the earth, from Africa to Europe to Asia, then last of all to America and Australia. Think of how far we walked, think of all that distance—and then think of the last fifty steps up to the John Harvard statue. Only fifty steps. That’s the history of every single recorded human culture. Just how likely is it that this was all the civilization there ever was? Thirty kilometers—think of how many times you could take those fifty steps in all that distance. How many other, older civilizations could fit in there, civilizations we know nothing at all about.”

  Hiroshi had turned around as well and was looking back the way they had come. He was trying to remember the whole distance. From a sheerly geometrical point of view, she was right. Fifty steps was nothing. They must have walked fifty steps while choosing where to sit down for lunch and never even noticed it. But those fifty steps represented all of history ever since the Pharaohs.

  “But why do we know nothing about them?” he finally asked. “Wouldn’t these civilizations had left some trace?”

  Charlotte wiped the sweat from her brow. “Maybe they did, but we don’t know what we’re looking at. Think of a CD. Just imagine it gets thrown in the trash, and then our civilization collapses. Ten thousand years from now, someone excavates it. What might they think it is? Maybe a mirror. A piece of jewelry. How are they supposed to know it’s a data-storage medium? How can they read the data? They can’t. It could be they’ve dug up a piano concerto by Saint-Saëns, or it could be some word-processing software, but nobody will ever be able to listen to that music or run that program.”

  “I was thinking more of…buildings, monuments, something like that. Large-scale finds. Stuff that wouldn’t disappear so quickly, that wouldn’t be so hard to interpret.”

  “Buildings survive for centuries. When we’re talking thousands of years, it gets more difficult. But if these—hmm, let’s call them the first humans—if they lived anytime before the last ice age, if perhaps it was the Ice Age that wiped out their civilization, then none of their buildings would have survived.”

  Hiroshi thought about that. “So how are you ever going to prove they lived?”

  “I don’t know yet. First of all, though, you have to believe that such a thing is possible. If you don’t, you won’t even be able to recognize any traces of them if you come across them.” Charlotte put her hands on her hips. “All those countless legends of a vanished golden age—all that stuff about Atlantis, Lemuria, Ys…perhaps there’s some truth to them after all. Maybe all these legends date back to a time before the civilizations we know about, to another human culture that vanished and was forgotten.”

  “Or maybe they’re just legends.”

  She tossed her head dismissively. “Heinrich Schliemann was told he was chasing a legend. And he found Troy.”

  Hiroshi looked at her and felt a warm glow in his heart. He was proud of her—that was it. Proud of her courage, the way she dared to question everything. Dared to face down the whole world if need be. He liked what he saw. He liked it immensely. Then he looked back down the road and thought of how far they had hiked since morning. It was by no means impossible. He could easily believe that she was right. More than that: he found it hard to believe she could be wrong.

  Charlotte was exhausted. The long hike tired her out more than she had expected—because of the heat, certainly, but also because every extra kilometer felt like twice that. She had never hiked more than twenty kilometers in a day, and now she’d done thirty-two. She felt half-dead. James would be pretty disappointed that she would be good for nothing the rest of the day. At least she had professional hiking kit. The boots were the best that money could buy, from a Canadian company, and the backpack and breathable clothing were future investments for when she went out on excavations—she was glad she had thought so far ahead.

  Hiroshi seemed to be showing no signs of strain. He had just marched along like a robot the whole time. She hadn’t wanted to show any signs of weakness, nor did she want to miss meeting James at the pickup point. They were already late; she could only hope he would be waiting for them. If he had come at all.

  All the same she felt happy. They didn’t have far to go now, and it had all been worthwhile. Hiroshi seemed to have understood why it was so important to her. She t
hought of all the people she had tried to explain her ideas to before now. Perhaps she should take them on a hike like this. She had first had the idea a long time ago, of how people could be made to feel the vast span of human evolution with their own body, but only Hiroshi had inspired her to really go out and do it. Strange. There was something about him that fired up her scientific spirit. Now Hiroshi was asking again about the knife that had fascinated her so much back at the shrine on the Island of the Saints. He wanted to know what she had seen, how old it was, whether she had ever tried to find out more about it.

  “What did I see?” Charlotte thought hard without breaking stride. How could she even explain it? “You can’t even call it seeing. It’s more like feeling. It feels like when you’re standing on top of a street grate and you suddenly realize you’re above a tunnel or a pipe, and it’s at least a hundred meters straight down. Because you can hear an echo that far down. Maybe that’s the best way to describe it.”

  But it wasn’t, of course. There was no way to describe it. Those were just words, not even a pale shadow of how it really felt.

  “I touched lots of really old things in the temple that day,” she persisted. “I thought the knife wouldn’t be any older, but it might be more interesting, because it was a knife after all—maybe people had fought with it, killed with it…” She hesitated. Could she trust him? She shot a glance at him. She had never told anybody about this, never in her life, but with Hiroshi she felt that she could. That he would believe it. “When I was a child, I was always fascinated by objects that had killed someone. Halberds, swords, daggers—they always spoke to me. Not because I got a kick out of people dying, but because I thought those objects might open a door to the other side, to the next world. Even if it only opened a crack. I think I hoped it might help me find out what happens to us when we die.”

  Hiroshi just nodded earnestly. “An interesting thought. I’ve never looked at it like that.” He gazed at her with his dark Japanese eyes. “And? Did the knife ever kill anyone?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know. Up until that moment, touching very old things was like tripping over the curb. I would drop an inch or so and then find my way back. But touching that knife…it was like being pushed off a cliff, falling without end.”

  “That’s what made you scream.”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded and thought about it. “Does that mean you don’t even know how old it was?”

  Charlotte struggled for words. “At some point I just…switched off. I didn’t want to fall any farther down into the past. But by then I’d already gone back a hundred thousand years at least.” All of a sudden she had a vivid memory of that day in the shrine, of the terror she had felt. And she felt vividly, too, the fascination that had driven her on ever since. “An obsidian knife; just think of it! And the workmanship that went into it! If only there were some way of proving that the humans who lived so long ago could produce something like that. It would be a sensation; it would rewrite everything we think we know about human history.”

  “Did you ever try to get the knife examined?”

  “Oh yes. I asked a professor of art history how he would go about it. He called a colleague in Japan who made inquiries with the temple…but the knife’s gone. The temple said they sold it to an English collector, but they had lost his address. The Japanese professor figured they just didn’t want to admit it had been stolen.”

  “Pity.” Hiroshi was thinking hard now. For some reason his footsteps changed pace when he did that. “I’ve often dreamed of that day,” he said at last, and by the sound of it he found it hard to admit as much. “Of the moment you cried out. Sometimes, when I’m dreaming, you scream because I’ve let go. Sometimes you fall. Sometimes I pull you back at the last moment from between the jaws of a monster that has come out from the lake to eat you.” He hesitated. “I remember that moment like I would remember being struck by lightning. It has burnt its way into my heart.”

  “Yes,” said Charlotte before she could stop herself. “Mine, too.”

  He looked at her. She had never seen such an open, vulnerable look on his face. “I think that ever since then there’s been some connection between us,” he said. “I never knew it all these years, but I felt it the moment I saw you again. It was no coincidence we met.”

  Charlotte felt herself shrink inside. She had to stop him from talking this way. She was breathing heavily but said nothing.

  Hiroshi gave her a searching look. “Don’t you feel it, too? Don’t you see that there’s some extraordinary connection between us?”

  This was the moment she had been afraid of. “Hiroshi,” she said with all the tact she could muster. “I’m just about to announce my engagement. You really mustn’t get your hopes up.”

  He didn’t reply. In that moment his face showed nothing at all. Inscrutable Japanese.

  After another ten steps, he spoke. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  Charlotte sighed. “There is a connection between us, yes,” she said. “A childhood friendship. That’s something special. A friendship like that couldn’t happen later in life. That’s why I want to keep it how it was.”

  It still didn’t answer his question. He was silent in thought for a while, and she was expecting him to say as much when instead he said, “Is that how you feel?”

  She stopped and turned to face him, looking straight into his eyes as though they were children again, playing a game. First one to look away loses. Had she and Hiroshi ever actually played that one? She couldn’t remember. They had always been so serious. “Yes,” she said. “That’s how I feel.”

  But even as she spoke she knew she wasn’t telling the truth, that there was something else between them, something she didn’t want to admit. And she saw in his eyes that he would never give up trying to find out what it was. Never.

  Hiroshi realized he would need all his strength, that he would have to wait a long time for Charlotte, that his resolution would be tested to the limit. But what had he expected? The hand of fate was at work here, nothing more, nothing less. Everything that happened—and everything that didn’t—meant something, even if he didn’t understand its meaning straightaway. He would need staying power, though. “Stand like a mountain,” as they said in the martial arts. Well, there were ways to do that. He breathed in deeply, drawing the breath all the way down, the way his father had taught him. His American father, who felt so at home in the time of the samurai.

  They reached a parking lot where a gleaming 4x4 was waiting, the kind of gas-guzzler that did fewer miles to the gallon than a twelve-ton truck. It was painted in a camouflage pattern, as though the driver were about to set out for war, but it was also as clean as a whistle and polished to a high shine. He wondered whether it had gone off-road even once since the day it was built.

  The man leaning up against the mudguard, arms crossed, had to be James Michael Bennett III, Charlotte’s fiancé. The billionaire’s son. Hiroshi had done his homework, of course. If you borrowed a Harvard student’s password, you could learn all sorts of things on the Harvard intranet. James Michael Bennett III also studied anthropology, though he was on so many sports teams that it was a wonder he ever had any time left over to study. There was also a great deal about him on the public Internet. He was part of the Boston jet set and was the heir to a company worth billions of dollars. That was all the excuse the newspapers needed to report on all his championship cups and gala dinners and the general social whirl. He was also damnably good-looking in the accompanying photographs. Hiroshi was surprised how unimpressive he was in real life. He seemed abstracted, pale, not quite there. If he had any particular gifts that marked him out as a leader for the business his father had built up, Hiroshi certainly couldn’t see them.

  James kissed Charlotte absent-mindedly, looking at Hiroshi mistrustfully as he did so. He was clearly wondering what the two of them had been doing all day. He didn�
�t trust her. He was worried about something. Hiroshi would have liked to know what Charlotte saw in this guy, but he couldn’t begin to guess. The good looks that served him so well in the newspaper photographs seemed somehow vacant from up close. He looked as though he’d been airbrushed. Hiroshi wondered whether he might have had plastic surgery done to look the way he did. But Bennett was rich. Even if you didn’t know that already, you could see it.

  Was that it? Did she love him because he was rich? Was she in love with the prospect of a carefree life in the lap of luxury, big houses with swimming pools, an army of servants? Was she in love with the private jet, the costly jewelry, the holidays, and hotels? Hiroshi realized that the very thought unleashed a turmoil of emotions in him he could barely control. He was almost glad to be so exhausted—too tired to get really angry.

  James put out a hand for him to shake in the usual hearty American manner. Would he crush Hiroshi’s hand in his? He tentatively responded, but it turned out that no, the guy wasn’t quite so primitive after all. Almost a pity; it would have been easier to despise someone like that.

  “Hi,” James said as they shook hands. “I’m JB.”

  “Hiroshi. As in Nagasaki.” A silly joke, but it usually helped people remember. He had said it automatically, and now he was sorry he had. It made him sound eager to be friends. But he didn’t want to be friends. James was his rival. His enemy.

  The second he had let go of Hiroshi’s hand, James paid no more attention to him. “I thought you’d never turn up,” he told Charlotte reproachfully.

  “I told you it could be a little later,” she protested.

  He opened the driver’s door. “It’s no fun standing around in the woods on my own for hours,” he said, settling in behind the wheel. “Okay, where are we going?”