Free The Orpheus Trail by Maureen Duffy

all the champagne away yet.’
    Hilary and I drove slowly back into town, following the transporterwhere the egg shape now lay on its flatbed shrouded by blue plastic sheeting.
    ‘There’s a little café I know on the front where they do a really hearty breakfast. That should warm us up.’ The cold seemed to have lodged somewhere in my gut and was radiating icicles through my bones. ‘You must be frozen. I’m sorry I got you into this.’
    ‘You weren’t to know. And anyway I wouldn’t have missed it. It’s a pretty routine existence in conservation, no matter what people may think. Weeks of work for often a rather unspectacular result. Whereas who knows where this might be going?’
    As I pushed open the café door I was surprised to see Jean and Harry Bates waving from a table. I waved back.
    ‘Some of our local amateurs: they’re the ones who found the grave. Fortunately their table’s full so we can be on our own without giving offence. You pick a spot and I’ll just go over and have a polite word.’
    There were two others at the Bates’s table, a man and a woman in late middle age that I thought I’d seen at some of our lectures. The four of them had an air of intense but suppressed excitement like children with a secret.
    ‘Hallo, Alex,’ Jean said. ‘We’re glad you’ve come in. Harry’s got something to show you. Go on, Harry.’
    ‘You’ll have to come round here,’ Harry said, ‘and look over my shoulder.’
    Obediently I moved to stand behind him. He was holding a state-of-the-art digital camera, at least four millimetre mega pixels. He pressed a button. The egg sprang onto the little screen. ‘Look at this,’ he said, focusing on a close-up of the floating boy. The image loomed larger, the screen homing in finally on the thing gleaming at the boy’s throat. A small bright square of golden light. ‘Now look at this.’ Another golden square filled the frame, etched with precise markings. ‘Now look at this again.’
    The first bright object took its place but now I could see it was covered with similar marks.
    ‘Tell me what I’m looking at,’ I said.
    ‘This one,’ Harry flicked on the second picture, ‘is the square amulet you found in the buckle from the grave, and this,’ he brought up thefirst one again, ‘is the pendant round the boy’s neck. They’re the same. Except that I think the boy is wearing only a part, not the whole thing.’
    ‘One leaf?’
    ‘That’s it.’
    I felt a shiver run through me as if someone had poured icy water down my spine. In his clumsy way the chairman had been right. We were being haunted. The mayor had been right too. The press the next morning had a field day with child sacrifice and pictures of the ‘ floating boy’. I waited for Jack Linden’s call.

 

    Putative Restoration of a Missing Part of the Derveni Papyrus, discovered in a charred condition on a Thracian funeral pyre by workmen digging a road from Thessalonika to Kavala, January 15th, 16th 1962. The pyre also contained male human remains, weapons and horse accoutrements and was clearly that of a noble warrior. The extant scroll however begins with Zeus, having seized power, swallowing the severed genitals of his grandfather Uranus in order to recreate the entire universe from within his own belly. An attempt has therefore been made to reconstruct what must have been the beginning, describing creation according to the Orphic theogony with the help of the late Professor Guthrie, Fellow of Peterhouse and his groundbreaking Orpheus and Greek Religion.
    ‘First was Enduring Time whom the Greeks call Chronos. Out of Chronos are born Aither or Air and Chaos and Erebos, the yawning gulf and darkness over all. In Aither Chronos fashioned the Cosmic Egg, which split in two to form the heavens and earth, and as it split there sprang from it the winged Phanes in a blaze of light, the beautiful one, creator of the sun and moon and of the men of the Golden Age. And of himself he bore