The Salisbury Key

  Dedication

  To my lovely Jane, as always—to Josh, who created order out of chaos—and to KT, who chased away the wolf from my door.

  Prologue

  Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, June 2007

  A big hand clasped round mine and dragged me up the last few yards of the embankment. “There,” Jason said, pointing out across the plain. “The most beautiful place in the world. And the most dangerous.”

  I couldn’t help but agree with him. Jason Ross, professor of archaeology, Wiltshire University. Fifty-five years old, dynamically gorgeous, his thick grey hair showing traces of blond in the sunlight, brown eyes abstracted with the joy of far horizons. This was our first field trip together—the first alone together, anyway. We’d been coming out here onto Salisbury Plain with excavation groups for three years. He was my postgraduate supervisor and revered tutor. I was his student, thirty years his junior. And I wanted him so much I was just about ready to die of it.

  I dragged my eyes off him and turned my attention to the vista before us. My feigned interest became real as I recognised shapes on the blue-hazed horizon. We’d walked for five hours, but the view was worth it. “God,” I said, shading my eyes. “Is that Silbury Hill?”

  “Yes. And there to the north, Avebury. You can almost see the West Kennet barrow. And behind us, of course…” We both turned, and there were the ancient trilithons of Stonehenge, dreaming their circle of unbroken dreams in the sun. A lark went up above our heads from the yarrow-starred turf. We noticed simultaneously that he hadn’t let go of my hand, and he released it, smiling, colouring a bit, but not in any hurry. “Sorry.”

  My mouth went dry. I had to uncap the water bottle at my belt and drink before I could answer him, aware that my hand shook, aware that he was watching me. “Don’t be,” I said. I held out the bottle. “Here. Do you…?”

  “No, thank you. Are you all right today, Daniel? You seem a bit distracted.”

  I swallowed. It seemed like only yesterday that the Mr. Logan with which he addressed me in his lecture hall was sending shivers down my spine, racking up the pressure of what I had thought then was only a severe crush. But my first name in his mouth was much worse. Like an invisible touch, a caress from one of those broad, well-made hands. “I’m fine,” I said. “Tired, maybe. I was up till all hours with my thesis.”

  “Did you get past your block about underlying geological structures?”

  “Yes. Thanks for the Matfen study. But I still don’t see how I can ever reconcile Devereux’s theories—great as he is—with hard science…”

  “Well, remember that solving the puzzle isn’t the prime focus of your work. Devereux advances a step—in his case, the interaction of human consciousness with the stone circles—and you take another. Someone else somewhere uses your conclusions, and Devereux’s, those of a hundred other writers, and makes the final leap.”

  I looked at Jason, who had straightened up and planted his hands on his hips. He was an inspiring teacher, and a good, kind heart, who somehow found the time to take warm interest in all his students’ lives. I had adored him from first sight across the lecture hall, and had continued my worship—at, I had thought, a good safe distance—in tutorials and on field trips ever since. I couldn’t work out for the life of me why things felt so different today. “All right,” I said. “I’ll try to keep it in mind.”

  “Good lad.” Jason returned his attention to the view. I felt a mix of relief and disappointment as his focus lifted away from me. “I tell you what, though,” he went on after a few seconds. “You’d stand a better chance without that lot down there. We all would.”

  Beautiful and dangerous. He meant the barricades. From this vantage point, they stretched as far as the eye could see—a thin line of crossed poles, strung together by barbed wire. Punctuated every few hundred yards by red-and-yellow notices familiar to everyone who walked or drove regularly across Salisbury Plain—no public access, by order of the Ministry of Defence. They had set up here in 1898 and now occupied more than half of the plain’s three hundred square miles. Jason had campaigned tirelessly for archaeological access within the military zones, and I had joined his fight as soon as he had taught me how much Neolithic, Bronze Age and Roman culture lay there. I’d had reasons of my own too for taking up arms at his side. “Did you have any luck with that application to Colonel Bryan?”

  “That pompous desk-pilot? You’re joking. He had the nerve to tell me to reapply in ten years’ time. They might have finished with it then. What a bloody travesty.”

  “I know. That was one of the things that drew me to you in the first place.” I heard myself and tried to backtrack. “I mean to your course. The chance to fight for the plain.”

  Jason ran a hand into his hair. He was smiling, but he seemed troubled too. I thought how odd it was that such shadows could gather round so brilliant a man on a day like this. They were almost palpable. Then he shook himself back into the moment. “Is that what we’re doing?”

  “Among other things. Aren’t we?”

  “Perhaps, although I’d never described it to myself like that. Maybe I should put you in charge of the cavalry.” He paused, and a second later gave me the tiniest, most undeniable once-over. “You look like a man in search of a good peacetime fight.”

  I blushed. I couldn’t help it—it came burning up like sunrise. I wished I’d worn more than cut-off jeans and a T-shirt frayed half to cobwebs for this trip, and I wondered why the hell I hadn’t, what fantasies had been idling round in the back of my mind.

  I knew I was in better shape than the general run of archaeology graduates. I loved my office, and I loved the detailed, backbreaking immobility imposed on me by a delicate excavation, but I had in me a restless need to be active as well. Not just active, if I thought about it. Pushed physically almost to the limit. In a different world, I supposed that I would simply have joined up and worked off the excess in the plentiful war zones available to young men of my generation. As it was, I spent most vacations white-water rafting or mountain hiking with Outward Bound, and during term time I was probably as often in the campus pool and gym as I was behind a desk. Probably it showed.

  Shivering lightly, I glanced at the ground and adjusted the straps of my rucksack to hide a sudden nipple erection. I said, awkwardly, “Maybe,” no longer even quite sure what I was agreeing to.

  Jason nodded. Briefly he looked like a man enjoying my discomfiture, or enjoying something about me. Then he sobered. “That’s good. I could use an ally.”

  The word became seductive in his mouth, and I smiled. I didn’t know what was going on between my tutor and me out here on the plain this afternoon—didn’t even know for sure that Jason was gay. He lived alone. Someone that bloody beautiful must be doing so by choice, and we’d all just assumed that he preferred the ivory tower to a redbrick semi and domestic bliss. I took hold of his strong wrist, admiring the soft leather cuff that adorned it, wondering at my own daring. “Really, sir. It’s okay. I like being rootless. Means I can wander about all day on field trips with you. Run off to Bali at a day’s notice. That kind of thing.”

  “Bali,” he repeated thoughtfully, not moving out from under my touch. “I did some near-infrared aerial photography work over the temples there.”

  “I know. I read your book. The wakeboarding’s not bad, either.”

  “Not something I’ve ever tried.”

  “Well, it’s never too late for first times.”

  “Isn’t it? You know, I’d begun to think I…I’d had all of mine.” He put a hand on top of mine and disengaged my grip, but unhurriedly. “Anyway. We didn’t come all the way out here to talk about wakeboarding, did we?”

  I wasn’t sure. For once we hadn’t discussed the objective
of our field day at all, and I remembered that Jason sometimes did this with a student when he wanted him or her to find the point unprompted.

  I thought that I’d succeeded. We’d passed by Stonehenge without more than the loving second, third and fourth glances the place called forth from all who came near enough to fall beneath her spell, and continued out for almost fifteen miles across the plain. I’d noticed how, very slowly, the ground beneath my feet was beginning to lift and lower, lift and lower, with a regularity that triggered all my instincts. It had been slight, but unmistakable. Archaeology, not natural history. Work of man. And, at last, we had climbed up onto this sunny embankment. Only five feet high, and possibly explained by an underlying geological feature, but I knew that it was not. Beyond it extended a pure, straight line, out past the barricades, through the golden gorse and into the distance.

  I turned round and sketched with one finger the shapes I had seen in the earth, and then the far-flung line. “A settlement,” I said. “Roman. Possibly earlier too, but definitely Roman at some point. There’s the road. We’re on the vallum line.”

  Jason looked at me. He wasn’t one for extravagant outbursts of praise, but you knew when you’d got it right. He said, “The substrate is probably Neolithic. I got one near-infrared shot from a light plane last year before my pilot was chased off by RAF Lyneham. There are hut-circle marks in the vegetation beyond the barbed wire. Not bad work, Daniel. Not many people would have spotted it from the ground.”

  We made our way down the embankment’s far side. Now that I knew what I was looking for, I could see twin parallels running a familiar eight feet apart—the road, nothing more than a shadow of a memory in the turf, but there, as all the wonderful untouched settlement was there, packed with artefacts, knowledge, evidence of all the thousands of human lives that had come and gone. I felt it all for myself—an itch in my palms, a prefiguring ache in my knees as my body anticipated the hours of excavation—but it was Jason’s longing that transfixed me. Handsome under any circumstances, out in the field in pursuit of his life’s purpose, he was bloody irresistible.

  A fine tension animated every inch of his tall, strong frame. The wind seemed to feel his excitement and feed it back to him, moulding his clothes to his body. Unlike me, he was properly and classily dressed for the occasion: stone-grey North Face trousers and a dazzlingly white shirt whose high-tech fibre would protect him from the sun and dry out in the rain with equal efficiency. His leather kit bag, battered relic of a thousand field trips, swung gracefully from his broad shoulders. I followed him down the ancient trackway, mesmerised.

  Just beyond the settlement’s outskirts the road took a gentle curve. Not great fans of scenic diversions, these Roman road-builders whom I sometimes felt I knew better than I did my living colleagues. But they often built on top of existing Celtic tracks, and they had a healthy respect for the gods they encountered along their invasion routes. An interruption in one of their dead-straight lines often meant a temple.

  Jason was seeing it too, and I came to a stop by his side. The curve was like an embracing arm, stilling the breeze, capturing sunlight to a golden quintessence, filled with lark song and the scent of warm turf. A cluster of gorse bushes flourished here, their flowers bright as the little Adonis butterflies that flickered among them. I looked at the shape of the outcrop. Vegetation over masonry often gave the game away. Jason’s experiments with near-infrared photography had refined these signals to an exact science, drawing on elements of biochemistry and spectroscopy to analyse the differences between undisturbed plants and those which had grown back over ancient foundations. He said, “What do you reckon? Pre-Celtic?”

  What I reckoned was that this was where I wanted to lie down in the sunlight with my tutor and die of the pleasure of his touch. I said, my voice catching huskily, “Or earlier. Is this where you’d start the dig?”

  “I don’t think so. Places like this deserve to be opened up the way they were put down.” He rested a hand on my shoulder, turning me gently in the direction of the barricades, which were blissfully invisible from here. “I’d start from the beginning—over there, in the hut circles. This is close enough to Stonehenge to be one of the construction-workers’ villages.” He swallowed audibly, and the warmth of his hand slid down over my left shoulder blade, the touch at once distracted and intensely aware. “There’s so much to learn, Daniel! Places like this, and all the others like them, buried behind barbed wire. I have to get access.”

  “You will. I’ll help.” I glanced at him, wondering at the note of anxiety in his voice. Passion, I could understand. But Jason at this moment sounded more as if he’d lost something personal and precious beyond the barbed-wire fence. Or maybe I was misreading the shivering tension that had sprung up in the bright air between us. “It’ll be the battle for the plain, okay? And we’ll win eventually.”

  “We will, eh?” He shook his head, passed a hand across his eyes as if brushing away cobwebs or the rags of bad dreams. Then he looked around the gorse-sheltered curve, with its inviting moss-and-turf floor, as if seeing it through new, non-archaeological eyes. As if abruptly seeing it through mine. “You know, you…you’re a good lad,” he said, then didn’t seem to know where to take the observation. “A good student, and—well, it’s nice to have someone around who could take over where I left off. Someone young and…and strong.”

  I allowed myself a faint glint of mischief. The front of his shirt had rucked up beneath his kit-bag strap. I reached out, just careful, unobtrusive fingertips, and pulled it smooth. “You’re hardly past it, Prof.”

  “Well, I’m a hell of a lot older than you are.” That was good—we were talking about something else now. I wasn’t quite sure what, but the subject was a warmer one than his academic succession. “A lot older, and—you’re my student.”

  “Postgrad,” I reminded him. “Not a kid.”

  “No. Far from it. But I’m still damn well old enough to be your…”

  He ground to a halt. I knew what he’d been going to say, and it was a thought I wanted nipped in the bud for both our sakes. “Listen,” I said, taking hold of his hand and drawing it down. “I was a very late surprise to my mum and dad. I’m twenty-five years old. I’ve lived alone since I was eighteen. I’ve had three lovers, all men, one of them older than you.” I swallowed. I was launched now. It was over the top or a lonely death in my self-dug trench. “I know exactly what I want, and…I know what you want too.”

  His grip clenched tight round mine. “Oh. Daniel.”

  We got as far as the nearest patch of sun and shade between gorse bushes. Jason folded down onto his knees, pulling me with him. A frantic rustling near at hand made me gasp—Christ, was nowhere safe, even in the middle of this wilderness?—and he shouted with laughter as two sheep and a rabbit shot out from a ditch between the roots. I’d never heard such an uninhibited sound from him, though he laughed readily and often, a welcome warmth on rainy digs when someone had punctured the strata and ruined a long week’s work. He never got angry, not about stuff like that. He was a good teacher. He was a pillar of the Salisbury academic community. Everybody loved him—and, after three years of slowly increasing mutual respect and friendship, he was about to love me.

  Disbelief hit me. I had dreams like this—of being alone with him in some vast, beautiful place, and suddenly out of the wild blue yonder he would make a pass at me. I hit the turf, laughing too, and dragged him down on top of me. “God, Jason! Yes. Come here.” He was solid—his weight knocked a breath from me and I sucked my next one from his lungs, reaching up to intercept his clumsy, shyly offered kiss. I tangled my fingers in his hair. Oh, I wasn’t dreaming now. My subconscious had never provided me with the press of his rising cock against my thigh.

  He moaned and tore back, catching his balance on his arms. “Oh, sorry.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “I haven’t done this in a while. I’ve thought about it, though—how it might be with you, I mean—and I meant to
be so…”

  I cupped his face in my hands. If I held him there, so his hair caught the sun, it was like looking into the face of a lion. “Subtle?” I suggested unsteadily. “Gentlemanly?”

  “Mm.”

  “Be those things next time.” I let him go, returning luxuriantly to the broken kiss. This time I opened my mouth for him, and when he shuddered, I pushed a hand down between our tight-pressed bodies and stroked his shaft over the fabric of his trousers, bringing him to full and impressive erection. His tongue flickered urgently against mine. Heat burned down through me, sweet as the sunlight all around us, the hot blue sky above. The scent of crushed cotton and fresh sweat filled my nostrils, and my cock surged hard against his. Our hands collided, fought for the privilege of undoing buttons and zips. He had the easier job—my cut-offs were so old that their silver buttons slid out of their holes almost of their own accord. His zip and kit belt gave me more trouble, and I swore softly, laughing against his mouth, feeling him moan and chuckle in return.

  Then the underwear was out of the way, his pants round his thighs—mine too as he signalled me with a touch to lift up so he could tug my briefs down—and we both caught our breath, sobering. Flesh to flesh. Engorged shaft pressing hard and hot to kindred skin. “Daniel,” he said huskily. “You’re so beautiful.”

  I bit back a cry. I had no problems with self-image, but to hear it from him sent a wild ache of pleasure and longing through me. He made me want to display myself to him. I shifted awkwardly, grabbed the hem of my T-shirt and pulled it up and over my head, feeling the same urgency to bare my skin as seized me when I hit the beach somewhere foreign and hot. I wanted his sunlight. And his mouth on me—God, yes, after one long hungry stare, he had leaned to plant an almost-reverent kiss to my breastbone.

  “Are you sure?” he whispered, and I didn’t know how he could think I had any doubts, flat on my back with my cock trapped and throbbing under his belly, but nevertheless I put a hand to the back of his neck and guided him down to suck my left nipple into his mouth. The flesh there had puckered almost too tight to endure a touch, and I flinched helplessly, then groaned, relaxing in jolts as his circling tongue undid me. It might have been a while for him but he was catching up fast. Made a brief, shattering dive for the other nipple—I arched up, gasping, trying to thrust myself into his mouth—then began to move, slowly, in big measured thrusts. His arms closed round me, driving off the trace of fright I had surprised myself by feeling when the powerful rhythm began. “Daniel,” he whispered against my ear. “Dan, let me fuck you.”