Read Online The Sacrifice Stone by Elizabeth Harris - Free Book Online

you?’
    Adam hesitated. ‘I’m — No. Of course not. I just feel that it’s important to be objective, and to accept that sometimes the facts don’t quite support the scenario that we want them to.’
    ‘The facts speak for themselves! Here we have a ...’
    Beth walked away. Neither of them will notice, she thought, and anyway why should I be a silent audience to their arguing? It’s just as well I didn’t want to contribute, they weren’t going to let me get a word in.
    She was, she discovered, pleased to have the chance to circle the arena on her own. Okay, they both know more about it than I ever will, but that doesn’t mean I particularly want to listen to them holding forth the whole time. By myself, I can pick up the atmosphere, listen to the memories ...
    She pulled up the thought: it was absurd to imagine any sort of impression of the past could be absorbed from inanimate material, and her scientific self told her not to be so stupid. It’s not like me to be fanciful!
    Yet as she moved on round the shadowy gallery, following it slowly as it circled the arena, the impressions she had received the previous afternoon came back. Only now that she was right inside the amphitheatre, they came more strongly.
    Far more strongly.
    To her right, the wall of the gallery was broken at intervals; sometimes the arches gave on to steps that went up into the sunlit arena. But sometimes the steps went down into the darkness.
    What’s down there? Dare I look?
    It seemed her courage wasn’t going to be put to the test; the downward flights of steps were blocked off after the first couple of worn treads.
    Then she came to one that was open.
    I don’t want to go down, she thought as her feet took her from step to step. Four, five, six. It’s dark. I might fall.
    Ten, eleven, twelve.
    The air tastes old, as if it’s been shut away too long. And there’s a smell — oh, God, a smell of leather. And of sweat.
    Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen.
    People were shut in down here, there’s no doubt — I can smell urine, but it’s not animal, it’s human.
    Eighteen, nineteen, twenty.
    And she was face to face with a heavy wooden door, latched and bolted with iron, an iron grille let into it at eye level.
    She peered through it.
    The cell was roughly ten foot square, and the only light came through the grille. But she could still see, or she thought she could: then she rubbed her eyes and looked again, and the cell was empty.
    What might have been there, if I’d looked two thousand years ago?
    Leaning against the door, she closed her eyes and imagined. On the floor of the cell sat men clad in short leather tunics, silent, still men whose heads drooped and who exuded palpable despair. From somewhere above came the tolling of a bell, and the sound of some sort of machinery clanking into action — it could have been a hoist being wheeled down.
    The cell breathed with a low collective sigh; for an instant the men appeared to shrink into themselves, then, one by one, they got to their feet.
    Released from the trance, she turned and fled back up the steps.
    I’m a scientist, she reminded herself. I’m not meant to have an imagination, it goes against the popular image.
    She walked on round the gallery. Reaching a wider arch that led up to an area of seats above the arena, she went to sit in the sunshine. The boys had got fed up with careering round the upper tiers and had gone down into the arena, where they were pretending to be bullfighters, one waving an imaginary cape, one being the bull, fists with pointing forefingers to the sides of his head. The third — the littlest — had been excluded from the game and was sitting glumly watching.
    ‘Plus vite !’ the small matador shrieked. His companion obligingly speeded up, tripped, and fell on his face in the dust. Oblivious, his friend adopted a pose, then, to pass the time while the other one got up and dusted himself off, began to pick his nose.
    Catch a matador doing that ,