Timeline (9 page)

The restored medieval town of Sarlat was particularly charming at night, when its cramped buildings and narrow alleys were lit softly by gas lamps. On the rue Tourny, Marek and the graduate students sat in an outdoor restaurant under white umbrellas, drinking the dark red wine of Cahors into the night.

Usually, Chris Hughes enjoyed these evenings, but tonight nothing seemed right to him. The evening was too warm; his metal chair uncomfortable. He had ordered his favorite dish, pintade aux cèpes, but the guinea hen tasted dry, and the mushrooms were bland. Even the conversation irritated him: usually, the graduate students talked over the day’s work, but tonight their young architect, Kate Erickson, had met some friends from New York, two American couples in their late twenties — stock traders with their girlfriends. He disliked them almost immediately.

The men were constantly getting up from the table to talk on cell phones. The women were both publicists in the same PR firm; they had just finished a very big party for Martha Stewart’s new book. The group’s bustling sense of their own self-importance quickly got on Chris’s nerves; and, like many successful business people, they tended to treat academics as if they were slightly retarded, unable to function in the real world, to play the real games. Or perhaps, he thought, they just found it inexplicable that anyone would choose an occupation that wouldn’t make them a millionaire by age twenty-four.

Yet he had to admit they were perfectly pleasant; they were drinking a lot of wine, and asking a lot of questions about the project. Unfortunately, they were the usual questions, the ones tourists always asked: What’s so special about that place? How do you know where to dig? How do you know what to look for? How deep do you dig and how do you know when to stop?

“Why are you working there? What’s so special about that place, anyway?” one of the women asked.

“The site is very typical for the period,” Kate said, “with two opposing castles. But what makes it a real find is that it has been a neglected site, never previously excavated.”

“That’s good? That it was neglected?” The woman was frowning; she came from a world where neglect was bad.

“It’s very desirable,” Marek said. “In our work, the real opportunities arise only when the world passes an area by. Like Sarlat, for instance. This town.”

“It’s very sweet here,” one of the women said. The men stepped away to talk on their phones.

“But the point,” Kate said, “is that it’s an accident that this old town exists at all. Originally, Sarlat was a pilgrimage town that grew up around a monastery with relics; eventually it got so big that the monastery left, looking for peace and quiet elsewhere. Sarlat continued as a prosperous market center for the Dordogne region. But its importance diminished steadily over the years, and in the twentieth century, the world passed Sarlat by. It was so unimportant and poor that the town didn’t have the money to rebuild its old sections. The old buildings just remained standing, with no modern plumbing and electricity. A lot of them were abandoned.”

Kate explained that in the 1950s, the city was finally going to tear the old quarter down and put up modern housing. “André Malraux stopped it. He convinced the French government to put aside funds for restoration. People thought he was crazy. Now, Sarlat’s the most accurate medieval town in France, and one of the biggest tourist attractions in the country.”

“It’s nice,” the woman said, vaguely. Suddenly, both men returned to the table together, sat down, and put their phones in their pockets with an air of finality.

“What happened?” Kate said.

“Market closed,” one explained. “So. You were saying about Castelgard. What’s so special about it?”

Marek said, “We were discussing the fact that it’s never been excavated before. But it’s also important to us because Castelgard is a typical fourteenth-century walled town. The town is older than that, but between 1300 and 1400 most of its structures were built, or modified, for greater defense: thicker walls, concentric walls, more complicated moats and gates.”

“This is when? The Dark Ages?” one of the men said, pouring wine.

“No,” Marek said. “Technically, it’s the High Middle Ages.”

“Not as high as I’m going to be,” the man said. “So what comes before that, the Low Middle Ages?”

“That’s right,” Marek said.

“Hey,” the man said, raising his wineglass. “Right the first time!”

:

Starting around 40 B.C., Europe had been ruled by Rome. The region of France where they now were, Aquitaine, was originally the Roman colony of Aquitania. All across Europe, the Romans built roads, supervised trade, and maintained law and order. Europe prospered.

Then, around A.D. 400, Rome began to withdraw its soldiers and abandon its garrisons. After the empire collapsed, Europe sank into lawlessness, which lasted for the next five hundred years. Population fell, trade died, towns shrank. The countryside was invaded by barbarian hordes: Goths and Vandals, Huns and Vikings. That dark period was the Low Middle Ages.

“But toward the last millennium — I mean A.D. 1000 — things began to get better,” Marek said. “A new organization coalesced that we call the feudal system — although back then, people never used that word.”

Under feudalism, powerful lords provided local order. The new system worked. Agriculture improved. Trade and cities flourished. By A.D. 1200, Europe was thriving again, with a larger population than it had had during the Roman Empire. “So the year 1200 is the beginning of the High Middle Ages — a time of growth, when culture flourished.”

The Americans were skeptical. “If it was so great, why was everybody building more defenses?”

“Because of the Hundred Years War,” Marek said, “which was fought between England and France.”

“What was it, a religious war?”

“No,” Marek said. “Religion had nothing to do with it. Everyone at the time was Catholic.”

“Really? What about the Protestants?”

“There were no Protestants.”

“Where were they?”

Marek said, “They hadn’t invented themselves yet.”

“Really? Then what was the war about?”

“Sovereignty,” Marek said. “It was about the fact that England owned a large part of France.”

One of the men frowned skeptically. “What are you telling me? England used to own France?”

Marek sighed.

:

He had a term for people like this: temporal provincials — people who were ignorant of the past, and proud of it.

Temporal provincials were convinced that the present was the only time that mattered, and that anything that had occurred earlier could be safely ignored. The modern world was compelling and new, and the past had no bearing on it. Studying history was as pointless as learning Morse code, or how to drive a horse-drawn wagon. And the medieval period — all those knights in clanking armor and ladies in gowns and pointy hats — was so obviously irrelevant as to be beneath consideration.

Yet the truth was that the modern world was invented in the Middle Ages. Everything from the legal system, to nation-states, to reliance on technology, to the concept of romantic love had first been established in medieval times. These stockbrokers owed the very notion of a market economy to the Middle Ages. And if they didn’t know that, then they didn’t know the basic facts of who they were. Why they did what they did. Where they had come from.

Professor Johnston often said that if you didn’t know history, you didn’t know anything. You were a leaf that didn’t know it was part of a tree.

:

The stock trader continued, pushing in the stubborn way that some people did when confronted with their own ignorance: “Really? England used to own part of France? That doesn’t make any sense. The English and French have always hated each other.”

“Not always,” Marek said. “This was six hundred years ago. It was a completely different world. The English and French were much closer then. Ever since soldiers from Normandy conquered England in 1066, all the English nobility were basically French. They spoke French, ate French food, followed French fashions. It wasn’t surprising they owned French territory. Here in the south, they had ruled Aquitaine for more than a century.”

“So? What was the war about? The French decided they wanted it all for themselves?”

“More or less, yes.”

“Figures,” the man said, with a knowing nod.

:

Marek lectured on. Chris passed the time trying to catch Kate’s eye. Here in candlelight, the angles of her face, which looked hard, even tough, in sunlight, were softened. He found her unexpectedly attractive.

But she did not return his look. Her attention was focused on her stockbroker friends. Typical, Chris thought. No matter what they said, women were only attracted to men with power and money. Even manic and sleazy men like these two.

He found himself studying their watches. Both men wore big, heavy Rolexes, but the metal watchbands were fitted loosely, so the watches flopped and dangled down their wrists, like a woman’s bracelet. It was a sign of indifference and wealth, a casual sloppiness that suggested they were permanently on vacation. It annoyed him.

When one of the men began to play with his watch, flipping it around on his wrist, Chris finally could stand it no longer. Abruptly, he got up from the table. He mumbled some excuse about having to check on his analyses back at the site, and headed down the rue Tourny toward the parking lot at the edge of the old quarter.

All along the street, it seemed to him that he saw only lovers, couples strolling arm in arm, the woman with her head on the man’s shoulder. They were at ease with each other, having no need to speak, just enjoying the surroundings. Each one he passed made him more irritable, and made him walk faster.

It was a relief when he finally got to his car, and drove home.

Nigel!

What kind of an idiot had a name like Nigel?

The following morning, Kate was again hanging in the Castelgard chapel when her radio crackled and she heard the cry “Hot tamales! Hot tamales! Grid four. Come and get it! Lunch is served.”

That was the team’s signal that a new discovery had been made. They used code words for all their important transmissions, because they knew local officials sometimes monitored them. At other sites, the government had occasionally sent agents in to confiscate discoveries at the moment they were first found, before the researchers had a chance to document and evaluate them. Although the French government had an enlightened approach to antiquities — in many ways better than Americans — individual field inspectors were notoriously inconsistent. And, of course, there was often some feeling about foreigners appropriating the noble history of France.

Grid four, she knew, was over at the monastery. She debated whether to stay in the chapel or to go all the way over there, but finally she decided to go. The truth was that much of their daily work was dull and uneventful. They all needed the renewed enthusiasm that came with the excitement of discoveries.

She walked through the ruins of Castelgard town. Unlike many others, Kate could rebuild the ruins in her mind, and see the town whole. She liked Castelgard; this was a no-nonsense town, conceived and built in time of war. It had all the straightforward authenticity that she had found missing in architecture school.

She felt the hot sun on her neck and her legs and thought for the hundredth time how glad she was to be in France, and not sitting in New Haven at her cramped little workspace on the sixth floor of the A & A Building, with big picture windows overlooking fake-colonial Davenport College and fake-Gothic Payne Whitney Gym. Kate had found architecture school depressing, she had found the Arts and Architecture Building very depressing, and she had never regretted her switch to history.

Certainly, you couldn’t argue with a summer in southern France. She fitted into the team here at the Dordogne quite well. So far it had been a pleasant summer.

Of course, there had been some men to fend off. Marek had made a pass early on, and then Rick Chang, and soon she would have to deal with Chris Hughes as well. Chris took the British girl’s rejection hard — he was apparently the only one in the Périgord who hadn’t seen it coming — and now he was behaving like a wounded puppy. He’d been staring at her last night, during dinner. Men didn’t seem to realize that rebound behavior was slightly insulting.

Lost in her thoughts, she walked down to the river, where the team kept the little rowboat that they used to ferry across.

And waiting there, smiling at her, was Chris Hughes.

:

“I’ll row,” he offered as they climbed into the boat. She let him. He began to pull across the river in easy strokes. She said nothing, just closed her eyes, turned her face up to the sun. It felt warm, relaxing.

“Beautiful day,” she heard him say.

“Yes, beautiful.”

“You know, Kate,” he began, “I really enjoyed dinner last night. I was thinking maybe—”

“That’s very flattering, Chris,” she said. “But I have to be honest with you.”

“Really? About what?”

“I’ve just broken up with someone.”

“Oh. Uh-huh. . . .”

“And I want to take some time off.”

“Oh,” he said. “Sure. I understand. But maybe we could still—”

She gave him her nicest smile. “I don’t think so,” she said.

“Oh. Okay.” She saw that he was starting to pout. Then he said, “You know, you’re right. I really think it’s best that we just stay colleagues.”

“Colleagues,” she said, shaking hands with him.

The boat touched the far shore.

:

At the monastery, a large crowd was standing around at the top of grid four, looking down into the excavation pit.

The excavation was a precise square, twenty feet on a side, going down to a depth of ten feet. On the north and east sides, the excavators had uncovered flat sides of stone arches, which indicated the dig was now within the catacomb structure, beneath the original monastery. The arches themselves were filled in with solid earth. Last week, they had dug a trench through the north arch, but it seemed to lead nowhere. Shored up with timbers, it was now ignored.