The Translation of the Bones Read Free Page A

termite mounds, the inner depths a honeycomb of rooms, jewel-embedded marble, windowless. Lost courtyards in which lonely women hid. Stella had got completely lost in the hill palace of Udaipur on her honeymoon with Rufus. One minute Rufus had been there, taking photographs and batting away the touting guides, the next minute he was not. She was in a narrow roofless space with doors at each corner opening onto spiral staircases, where the only light came filtered through fretworked pale stone. She chose the stairs she hoped would lead her in the same direction she and Rufus had been following; he must have gone on without her; she would find him at the top. But at the top there was only a narrower room lit by one dim bulb and she no longer knew whether to go left or right. She felt the panic of a lost child, of a dreamer in a hostile and strange city. This unimaginably complicated place was a maze, a prison; designed as such by one beleaguered ruler after another, each one insisting on his own accretions until there could be no one living who had kept count of all the rooms. It was all too easy to envisage being trapped in one and beating as ineffectually as a moth against the solid wood and brass inlay of its heavy door.
    “The spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars; the owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasiab,” Stella said under her breath. The women of the emperorsand the sultans: had they found consolation in the scarlet petals of the roses in their secret gardens, in the soft breath of a sleeping child?
    Some nights, when she could not sleep, Stella got out of bed and crossed the landing to Barnaby’s room, untenanted in term-time. It faced onto the street and there was a street-lamp right outside, beyond the railings, which turned mist into gold on autumn nights, made raindrops bright as fireflies. Stella would lean her head against the glass, feeling its coldness, watching her breath cloud it, sensing the London smell of dust. If she closed her eyes and counted to ten before she opened them again, he would be standing on the pavement looking up, his collar turned against the damp, in a mandorla of light. Who he was she never knew, only that she needed him to be there.
    The next day was a Friday. Fidelma O’Reilly was woken by the need to pee. She had been drifting in and out of dreams for what seemed like hours and in those dreams there had been toilets with locked doors, corridors that she was lost in, until finally she let go luxuriously of a great cascading stream. Fidelma’s dreams often contained a bursting bladder. Of late she had begun to fear that the release which was so carefree in her dreams might signify a real event; that there would come a morning when she would waken to a mattress stained and stinking, wet sheets already cooling as she slept.
    But this morning she woke in her chair. It took her a bit of time to hoist herself out of it and stand up. Her legs were cramped and stiff. Hold on, my darling, she saidaloud to herself. Get a good grip on yourself down there, my girl.
    In the bathroom she pulled up her skirt and plopped down onto the specially adapted lavatory seat. Long ago she had dispensed with underwear; the elastic gouged red tracks on her skin and there was no call for that. When she had finished she shivered involuntarily and wondered, not for the first time, why that happened. Little girls shivered every time they went; she remembered that. It was a sort of pleasure, she supposed, that warm flow of liquid running from the secret places. One of the best, now she came to think of it: there was nothing like the relief of going when you really had to, like thirst it was; it’s worth working up a real thirst just for the pleasure of its quenching. Sometimes she’d let her throat grow dry as the last scrapings of a scuttle before she drank cool water down.
    A picture came to mind of a thirsting man, beads of sweat like teardrops, well-toasted from the sun. Lifting