Truth Comes Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind

from Alive in Shape and Color, edited by Lawrence Block

Truth Comes Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind

(from the painting by Jean- Léon Gérôme)

by Thomas Pluck

Originally appeared in Alive in Shape and Color, edited by Lawrence Block.

The cracking of the skulls was performed by a practiced hand. The bowl separated from the eye sockets and teeth. These were no virgin cannibals like the lost colonists of Roanoke, with their hesitation marks. Whatever people had done this had done it before, and had perhaps been doing it for a very long time.

Devin cupped the skull in his palm, reminded of how Danes toasted before a drink.

Skål.

It meant bowl, as in drinking cup.

Emma Frizzell had taught him that. And she had invited him here,

ostensibly for his knowledge of the bronze age tribes who had pillaged and slaughtered throughout the area, but also for the funding that attaching his name to the dig would bring. Critics, including Emma, claimed Devin’s books contained more cherry-picking and cocktail-party conversation fodder than real science, but they fueled great interest in the field, and with that came grants from billionaires’ pet nonprofits, the lifeblood for a science that generated little corporate funding.

“Looks like you’ve found another unlucky bunch who met my boys the Kurgans,” Devin said, hefting the bone bowl in his hands. He was tall and dusty blond with smooth, telegenic features.

“We’re not so sure,” Emma said, gesturing at students working with brush and screen and trowel in the neatly dug trenches, staked and lined and flagged. “It’s similar to the Herxheim site and the Talheim Death Pit in some ways, but very different in others. There’s what we call the well, for instance, which is more of a trash midden. It’s unlike anything we’ve found in the LPK sites before. We’re eight layers down and still hitting finds.” The LPKs, or Linear Pottery Culture, had built small agricultural settlements all over Germany. Until the Kurgans found them.

Emma squinted at the sun’s halo behind his head. She’d sprouted since their time as schoolmates, long-limbed but thick in the hips, dark curls tied with a red bandanna. With her lips drawn back over a cracked front tooth, she resembled one of the skulls herself.

“Any female victims?”

“None yet.” Little red flags waved in the breeze, one for each corpse. “All men and boys, killed in the same ritual manner. The bones flensed with knapped chert blades.” Crude-looking neolithic knives, but sharp enough that modern surgery had been performed with them, and sturdy enough to chisel open skulls, with help from a hammer stone.

“Enslave the women, slaughter the vanquished,” Devin said. “The cannibalism is a new angle, but I’m sure there’s an explanation. A famine caused by drought. Or maybe just to plunder further, they began viewing the conquered as meat on the hoof.”

The Kurgans were named after the burial mounds they left scattered in their wake, each topped with a man-shaped, carved stone menhir. A single leader buried with his sacrificed harem, his trusty copper blade, and a handful of decorative fetishes to aid him in the afterlife.

Devin admired their pluck, the first humans to practice tribal warfare. Some theorized that homo sapiens had dealt it to their bulkier cousins neanderthalensis, but there was no clear evidence. The Kurgans had left plenty: entire villages massacred, with the male bodies strewn about and the women taken. The same old story, still happening today. Less often, if you believed the statistics, which Devin did not. To him, civilization was a thin veneer over humanity’s violent history, and he felt he protected his viewers and readers by reminding them that it was human nature to want what you did not have, and in men’s nature to take it if they could.

“Professor Frizzell!” A student with a beard stood and waved. “Ade found another one of the uh, things.”