Free The Crossing Places - Elly Griffiths by Elly Griffiths Page A

strangled, clubbed to death. One body found in Ireland had its nipples sliced through.’
    Nelson winces. ‘So does our guy know about all this Iron Age stuff?’
    ‘It’s possible. Take this stuff about sacrifice, the wicker man. Some people think that Iron Age man made human sacrifices every autumn to ensure that spring came again the next year. They put the victim in a wicker cage and burnt it.’
    “I saw the film,’ says Nelson, ‘Christopher Lee. Great stuff.’
    ‘Well, yes. It was sensationalised, of course, but there’s a theme of sacrifice that runs through all religions. Odin was hung on the World Tree to gain all the knowledge of the world. Christ was hung on the cross. Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac’
    ‘What did that mean, “Like Isaac, like Jesus, she carries the wood for her own crucifixion.”’
    ‘Well, Isaac carried the wood on which he was to be burnt. There’s a clear echo of Christ carrying his cross.’
    ‘Jesus.’ There is a silence. Ruth suspects that Nelson is thinking of Lucy Downey, condemned, perhaps to carry the instruments of her own death. She thinks of her Iron Age body. Was she really staked down and left to die?
    ‘Actually,’ says Ruth, ‘there’s one very interesting Bible reference. This one from Jeremiah. “A curse on the man who puts his trust in man.”’
    “I didn’t even realise that was from the Bible.’
    ‘Well, it is. One of the prophets. Anyway, I looked it up and guess how the next bit goes …’ She recites it for him: A curse on the man who puts his trust in man, who relies on the things of flesh,
    whose heart turns from the Lord.
     
    He is like dry scrub in the wastelands,
    if good comes, he has no eyes for it,
    he settles in the parched places of the wilderness, a salt land, uninhabited.
     
    Nelson looks up. ‘A salt land?’
    ‘Yes.’
     
    ‘The Saltmarsh,’ says Nelson, almost to himself, ‘I always wondered about that place …’
    ‘Actually, I think there are a few things that might point to the Saltmarsh,’ says Ruth. She reads from one of the letters, Look to the sky, the stars, the crossing places. Look at what is silhouetted against the sky. You will find her where the earth meets the sky. Erik - an archaeologist I know - he says that prehistoric man may have built structures on flat landscapes like the fens or the marshes because they would stand out so much, be silhouetted against the sky. He thinks that’s one reason why the henge was built on the Saltmarsh.’
     
    ‘But other places are flat. Specially in this Godforsaken county.’
     
    ‘Yes, but …’ How can she explain that she thinks the letter writer shares Erik’s views about a ritual landscape, about marshland being the link between life and death.
    ‘Remember what I said about marshland?’ she says at last.
    ‘We quite often find votive offerings or occasionally bodies buried there. Maybe this man’ - she gestures to the letters - ‘maybe he knows that too.’
    ‘You think he’s an archaeologist?’
    Ruth hesitates. ‘Not necessarily but there’s this word, cursuses.’
    ‘Never heard of it.’
    ‘Exactly! It’s a very technical word. It means a parallel ditch with banks on the inner sides. They’re often found within early ritual landscape but we don’t know what they were used for. At the Maxley Cursus, for example, they found shamans’ batons.’
    ‘Shamans’ what?’
    ‘Pieces of decorated deer antler. They would have been used by the shaman, the holy man.’
    ‘What for?’
    ‘We don’t know, maybe as part of some ritual ceremony.
    Maybe they were like magic wands.’
    ‘This guy’ - Nelson points to the letters - ‘he talks about a shaman.’
    ‘Yes, it’s quite a popular idea amongst modern New Age thinkers. A holy man who works with natural magic’
    Nelson looks back at the list. ‘What about causeways?
    Now I’ve heard that word.’
    ‘Causeways are early pathways, often leading across marsh or water.’