The Giantess’s Apron

Judith’s boyfriend, thomas, was crying inside the barrow’s chamber and she could think of no way to get him out of it. She had held him, she had tried to drag him, she had shouted at him, she had even cried with him for a few minutes— but nothing had worked. And all the while she’d had to fight back her own claustrophobia and discomfort. It was damp and gloomy in there. It had missed more than two millennia’s worth of sunlight. In the end, she’d made her way out through the narrow entrance alone. Whatever it had once been built for, it had not been built for this.

“Just come out when you’re ready then,” she said. The stones were thick but she knew he could hear her.

The information sign had said the barrow had been constructed for the burial of the dead. But then again, it had said a lot of things. The first objects Judith had noticed on entering were a pile of ash and some shells. They were fenced off with a strand of wire and, according to the sign, were a relic (or maybe a re-creation—it didn’t specify):

A fire had been lit on the floor in the centre and allowed to burn for some time. While it was still glowing, a quantity of stew was poured over it and the fire quenched by covering it with pebbles and limpet shells. The components of the stew, recognisable by tiny fragments of bone, were wrasse, eel, whiting, frog, toad, natterjack, grass snake, mouse, shrew, and hare. It must have been connected with magical practices of some kind.

It was really quite something what archaeologists could resurrect from a few fragments of bone. But the more Judith had thought about it, the more it had reminded her of a scene from a film she’d seen as a child—in which an ancient king had sown teeth in the earth and then watched as they sprouted into skeleton soldiers. How exactly did they know that the fire had burned for some time? How could they tell it was still glowing? Why must that wonderful stew have been connected to magical practices? Who truly knew (apart from the promises of some modern diet books) Neolithic tastes? They knew none of these things for certain. But the imagination abhorred a vacuum and would always wriggle in, like a school of eels. Or wrasses. Or natterjacks.

“What’s a wrasse?” Judith had asked Thomas as they’d stood reading the sign.

“It’s a species of fish,” he’d said. It was the kind of thing he knew without having to look it up on his phone, which she had always found attractive about him. She liked asking questions. She liked finding things out. Ever since they’d met, they’d fitted that way.

“These stones,” he’d said. “Just imagine.”

The archaeologists already had. They’d moved them on logs. They’d carried them from a distant quarry. Or—and this last possibility was added with what Judith sensed was that indulgent nudge and wink that scientists reserved for myths, as though they were charmingly errant children—maybe a giantess really had dropped them from her apron.

Once they’d made their way inside, Thomas had taken out his lighter and started to examine one of the stones more closely. There was something he remembered about them that he wanted to show her.

“Look,” he said. The small flame illuminated a handful of faint etchings: chevrons, lozenges, zigzags; the abstract shapes of forgotten things, or the ideas of forgotten things.

“What are they?”

“Nobody really knows.” Even the information sign had not hazarded an explanation. “They must be some kind of art. Something to commemorate the dead, I suppose.”

“What do you think they represent?”

“I don’t know. They would have been hidden in here,” he said. “They must have drawn them knowing nobody would see them. And they still drew them.”

His voice had begun to waver. Judith tried to guide him in another direction.

“What...