Mythology Abroad (4 page)

“There go your knees,” Martin crowed. “Apple juice palsy it is.”

“Up you go, Uncle,” Holl gritted, supporting Keith’s weight on his shoulder. “You’ve had too much for one day.”

O O O

“How do you feel?” Matthew asked Keith the next morning on the way down to the refectory for breakfast.

“I’ll never do that again,” Keith vowed. His face was pasty, with green showing just below the skin. “What a hangover. I think I was sick on the way back, but I don’t remember. My knees didn’t follow me back to the dorm until about 3 A.M. I saw the sunrise then. It was blinding.”

“You might have a little less until you get used to it,” Matthew suggested kindly, without a suggestion of “I told you so.”

“Maybe. Maybe I’ll just go teetotal for a while,” Keith said meekly. Holl had lectured him fiercely on the walk back to the dormitory on the responsible use of talent, and he felt contrite for his indiscretion. Secretly, he was pleased to have created such a realistic illusion, but after last night, he vowed to practice only in private. He felt thoroughly ashamed. After all, he had spent nearly a year making certain that no one would discover the Little Folks’ home and helping them move to a new place on Hollow Tree Farm, isolated from Big Folk. He had nearly blown it all in one night.

“If you can’t hold your liquor better than that,” the elf had hissed at him, “then I’ll have to put a block on you so you can’t use charms at all. I don’t want to have strangers look too closely at me when queer things happen.”

Keith could only agree. He carried his plate to the table and sat down gingerly next to Holl. His head hurt when he moved too quickly, and the sound of forks ringing against plates reverberated between his ears like the clapper in a bell. Holl didn’t say a word to him when he sat down. Keith poured himself a cup of dark brown liquid from the metal pot on the table and let the steam bathe his face, relaxing a knot or two behind his forehead. He shot a glance to his left, but Holl, focused on his breakfast, paid no attention to him.

“Try the tea. It’s strong, but it’s pretty good,” he said to Holl. No answer.

“Are you still mad?” he asked quietly, as he sawed a piece of bacon with his knife. It was louder to him than a hacksaw going through wood and he winced. The taste was like boiled and salted leather, but he felt he deserved no better. A glossy fried egg shone up at him like a plastic display dummy. He shuddered at it, and reached for a piece of toast from an upright rack on the table. It was cold. He scraped butter on it to the tune of Brazil nuts cracking in his ears.

Holl sighed and set down his fork. “No. Do you feel as poorly as you look?”

Keith grimaced. “Worse, I think. They were absolutely right. It feels like your head will come off. There’s got to be more than apples in that stuff. This never happened at home.”

His friend clucked his tongue and shook his head. “Here, then.” Holl spread his fingers and planted his hand against Keith’s cranium. “Breathe in and out, and forget about me.”

Keith closed his eyes gratefully. Instantly, the agony began to slip away from the inside of his head, like wax melting out of an inverted glass. In a few moments, he drew a deep breath. “Oh, that’s great,” he crooned, rocking his head from side to side and enjoying the sensation. “That’s terrific. My headache’s completely gone. I wish you could market that. You’d make a mint.”

Holl watched him with a wry smile curling up one side of his mouth. “I can’t market it. But I’ll give your headache back in full force if you do such a silly thing ever again.”

“I promise,” Keith said fervently.

As she had assured Keith, Miss Anderson repeated her lecture of the day before, and dismissed the class before noon. “We’ll be taking the coach out to the dig site later, to meet the team of archaeologists, and begin work. You may not understand what you’re doing unless you’ve read the text, but please remember to follow their every instruction. We are there to make an accurate record of the past, and any errors, any deviation from the correct steps, could have long-range ramifications. Go have lunch, and meet me in the quad at half past one.”

Like all the rest of the smaller information-gathering branches, the Secret Intelligence Service was second or third priority in getting their questions answered or their projects funded. A lot more attention was paid to the electronic wizards and their toys, but where would they be without the hard work and foot-slogging of the SIS, Michaels wanted to know. With difficulty, he had managed to get assignment of a small car and set out along the M8 in pursuit of the Educatours vehicle. In the most ordinary way possible, the coach had deposited its passengers, O’Day and his accomplice among them, in the heart of Glasgow. With the way the old buildings echoed, it was no problem to hear everything that went on in them. Michaels learned that the “boy” was carrying a formidable knife concealed in a pants pocket. O’Day was not notably a violent man. Perhaps his small associate was the one he ought to watch in a close-up fight. Personnel checks on the others in the tour would have to be made a priority. Unlikely as it seemed, one of them could be O’Day’s contact.

***

C
HAPTER FIVE

The coach transported them along the M8 motorway leading to the southwest. Except for Keith and Holl, who were wearing jeans, the boys were dressed in corduroy or twill. To the surprise of the others, Narit had appeared wearing jeans too, and her long hair was braided into a tail that hung down her back.

“Where’s the sari?” Keith had asked. “We half expected you to be formal.”

Narit had laughed prettily, a quiet, tinkly sound. “I wear the traditional dress only to please my grandmother, when I visit her. I much prefer English fashions. They don’t get caught in doors.”

The seating in the coach had worked out much the same way it had the day before. Keith, armed with his camera and a new roll of film, had a seat to himself, and took pictures of the landscape through the thick Plexiglas plate windows.

“Look, there’s nothing special out there. Just houses,” Matthew, behind him, pointed out.

“They’re different from American houses,” Keith said happily. “The slope of the roof is a lot sharper. And you don’t see that many stone buildings around us. Nearly everything is frame and brick. And the color of the grass is different here.” He glanced upward. “So is the sky, though it’s hard to tell through the safety glass. Look! A milestone!” Keith crouched over his viewfinder, fumbling with the focusing ring on the lens.

“Please yourself,” Matthew grumbled, sinking back into his seat. “It’s your film you’re wasting.
Milestones.
”

Holl sat on the opposite side of the coach from Keith, also watching the scenery. They had quickly passed out of the city limits and into reassuringly rural countryside. None of the land lay in the ironing-board flat plains of the American Midwest, so it was unfamiliar and interesting to the eye. When he had excitedly named the characteristics of the hills and valleys they were passing to Keith Doyle, that one had teased him, accusing him of learning them out of a book. It was a fact. He had. So far in his short life, the geographic features he was seeing had been flat pictures to him. He was storing up all his impressions of the wide world, to bring back to the other Folk. So far, this part was big and wild and empty. Keith was correct about the houses, too. They had an air that held them apart from American construction, what little he’d seen of it. But they were hauntingly similar, in a generations-removed way, to the houses of the under-library village in which his Folk had lived. He wondered if Keith had seen the likeness. What connection was there between his folk and the people who lived here? What would his clan say about the resemblance? The younger ones would likely speculate, while the old ones, who might actually know, would very probably say nothing at all. It was frustrating how they kept the younger generations in the dark. But with evidence, he could start a controversy that might bring out useful revelations.

“Say, Keith Doyle,” Holl called across the aisle. “There’s an interesting house coming up here on the side of the road. Take its portrait, will you?”

O O O

The hot summer sunshine slanted down across Keith’s shoulders and burned the tips of his ears while he worked on his patch of earth. The grass on the broad hilltop had been cleared in a section about twenty feet long by six feet wide. The exposed area was divided into sections three by three feet, by pegs to which string had been tied. When the group arrived, each student or worker was issued a pan, a loosely woven sieve, a trowel, and a pair of brushes. Under the supervision of Dr. Crutchley, the Professor of Ancient Studies from London University, they were expected to scrutinize the earth for artifacts, brushing away particles of earth from the marked patch to uncover each layer. The brushings were to be dropped into the sieve and broken up gently to see if there was anything hidden in them. If an artifact appeared, the site was measured and a note was made of where it lay. At least, that was what Keith understood them to want. He had been working for hours on his section, and had found nothing worth measuring or noting. He carefully brushed away the surface of the dirt with the larger, stiff brush, and scooped it into his pan, sifting through it for particles of metal or pottery. At times he would see a spot of another color and work feverishly to uncover it, but it would never turn out to be more than a pebble.

“Not even a toenail clipping,” Keith grumbled to Matthew, whose pitch was across from his. “I never realized that scientists came up with their impressions of our ancestors based on such thin evidence. It’s like finding photographs, when you were expecting a movie. There’s so much in those exhibits in museums I supposed there would be more to see in a site. I think this part must have been the garden. Are they sure this was part of the site? The building boundaries are way over there.” He gestured with his trowel toward the tables where Crutchley’s assistants were sorting potsherds and animal bones. Behind them, inside a square pavilion tent, more of the professor’s team, nearly invisible in the shadows, moved back and forth with flat trays, filled with the results of other days’ successful searching.

“Don’t give up,” Matthew said absently. “They wouldn’t still be here if they thought the site was milked dry.”

“Well, this is where Professor Keith Doyle says that they didn’t have either the cooking or sleeping quarters,” he said emphatically, gesturing at his patch with the trowel. “Or anything else of importance, except maybe a footprint from the family pet dinosaur.”

Matthew grinned without looking up at him, but then his expression changed. He began brushing furiously with the stiff brush at a spot in the earth before him, his cheeks pink. “Hoy, help a body here, eh?”

“Do you have something?”

“Here I thought it was one of the ever-present pebbles, but this one’s not shifting,” Matthew explained, his voice increasingly more excited. “It’s red-brown in color. Do you see it?”

Keith dived over to help. “Yeah. Brush away from it. Clear the earth level. Hey, it’s round.”

“What’s there?” Holl asked, from partway up the row of workspaces.

“Don’t know yet, but it looks like Matt struck gold,” Keith said, his eyes shining. What disappointment he had been harboring evaporated in the excitement of an actual find. No matter that it was in someone else’s section, it was an archeological artifact, and he was watching it—no, helping it—be uncovered. He grinned widely as the edges began to emerge. “It’s a covered pot of some kind. And it’s intact.”

The dig staff saw the crowd gathering at the end of the site and hurried over to see what was going on. Miss Sanders, Professor Crutchley’s assistant, a middle-aged woman with light ruddy-brown hair, leaned over Keith’s shoulder to watch as the pot emerged.

“Carefully now. It could be very fragile. Stop using the brushes now, and use your fingers instead. Clear away the earth from its sides with your fingers. There might be small handles, and you could break them.”

“Yes, ma’am,” both youths breathed, working more slowly.

“Stop, Keith Doyle,” Holl’s voice came softly in Keith’s left ear. “I can feel cracks in the fabric. It’s only hardened clay. Stop now and move outward. You’ll have to pick it up from below.”

Keith glanced up at Holl, and pulled away from the edges of the brown jar’s rim. “Matt, let’s move out and break up the dirt. It might widen out further down. We don’t want it to smash just as we’re getting something at last.” He dragged his fingertips along the ground until the pressure of Holl’s hand on his shoulder told him to stop. Matthew, shooting him a curious glance, followed suit, and started breaking up the soil.

“Good, good,” the assistant encouraged them. “Now,
lift
 …”

A collective sigh of joy gusted from the crowd. Between their fingertips, Matthew and Keith held a glazed clay jar with a small round lid crusted in place by more dirt. Its shape was slightly reminiscent of an amphora, except that the foot was flat, and instead of the earlike handles, it had only pinched-looking tabs under the curled rim. At Miss Sanders’ instruction, they set it down in an empty pan on someone’s outspread handkerchief. The assistant dropped to her knees beside Keith and whisked at the jar with a soft brush until the lid came free and rattled in place.

“Well done, you!” Miss Sanders exclaimed. “Someone get the camera.”

Another assistant hurried up. The jar was photographed in the pan. A ruler was laid and chalk powder dribbled around the location in which it was found, and the assistant took another exposure. Dr. Crutchley beamed down on his workers as proudly as if he’d thrown the pot himself. He was a man in his late fifties, with perfect wings of white in his dark brown hair. Between those dramatic temples, wiry eyebrows stood out, just barely not touching above a beak-like nose.

“A perfect example of corded ware, Miss Sanders. I never did expect this site to be another Jorvik, but it is encouraging to find fine specimens of this nature. Very gratifying. It’s an Irish style vessel, isn’t it, except that there are well-preserved traces of paste ornamentation, and the firing is much finer than you would expect. And a lid … not a seal or a stopper. Most unusual.”

“There’s something broken off inside,” Keith said. “I felt it sloshing around when we picked it up.”

The professor gently lifted the lid, and set it down on the cloth. With two fingers, he extracted from the jar a long string of globular, translucent golden beads. “Amber! An amber trading string.” The aged, blackened cord began to deteriorate as he lifted it, and he scooped his other hand underneath to catch the beads before they fell. “A small fortune in tally beads. Well, a good omen as a first find, I’d say.”

“Someone’s cache, sir?” Miss Sanders inquired, picking up the pan containing the jar and lid.

“Impossible to say until we’ve examined the entire site. It might have been interred with a shallow burial, not uncommon for wealth as grave goods.…” The two scientists drifted away to the table, offering speculations to one another, and exclaiming over the artifacts. The second assistant followed respectfully with the camera. Matthew and Keith watched them go with open mouths.

“They’ve forgotten all about us,” Matthew said, a little indignantly. “We passed a miracle, and they’ve forgotten we exist!”

“Oh, carry on, you lot!” Miss Sanders called over her shoulder.

“There,” Keith grinned at him. “That’s better.”

Enthusiasm rekindled, Keith doubled his efforts at searching, breaking up even the tiniest pieces of earth in his sieve and shaking them through. Miss Sanders had hinted of a shallow burial. There might be a skeleton here some place. Most likely, it would be cremated fragments in a funerary urn, which was relatively small and easy to overlook if you weren’t digging smack over it. The others were coming up with small artifacts, or fragments of larger items. With respectful hands, Holl was turning over a green, flaking piece of metal that could have been a bronze axe head. The two ladies and Edwin were standing back so the assistant could sprinkle chalk along the outline of a long bundle that lay exposed across their three sections. Keith’s patch still showed no signs of yielding up anything interesting.

He went on digging, undaunted by failure. Since his patch was adjacent to Matthew’s, it was possible that there was something hidden there, another clue to the solution of the puzzle of the Bronze Age settlement that had once been there. With a mighty heave, Keith tossed the earth from his sorting pan over his shoulder and bent down, trowel in hand, to start over filling it up.

“What are you doing, lad?” a voice roared from behind him. “More care! More care!” Arrested, Keith tilted his head back until he was looking straight up into the face of Dr. Crutchley, face red above the collar of his white short-sleeved shirt over which he was wearing a sleeveless knitted waistcoat. Over which someone had inconsiderately sprinkled a truckload of dirt. Keith swallowed guiltily.

He sprang to his feet and began to brush off the protesting professor. “Uh-oh, I’m so sorry, sir. I wasn’t watching where that was going.”

“Take it more slowly in future,” Dr. Crutchley ordered, batting irritatedly at the front of his waistcoat, which sent clouds of gray dust floating into the air. “I came over to compliment you lads on the skill you showed at bringing out that pottery piece, but it may have been a fluke! You could be missing something working at a pace like that, or worse yet, destroying it in your haste. More care is needed. Or perhaps it would be better if you stopped what you were doing and helped to catalog our finds instead?” He pointed the stem of his pipe toward the table. Keith followed his thrust and shook his head vigorously.

“Oh, no. I’d rather help out finding things, sir. Normally I’m good at digging things up.”

Crutchley flicked particles of dust off one arm with a decisive finger. “Yes, though more like a surgeon exposing tissues, boy, and less like a dog burying a bone.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

“I admire your initiative, but keep the energy for endurance, not speed. Carry on.” The professor walked away, reaching into his back pocket for a tobacco pouch and plunging the bowl of his pipe into it.

“Ooh, that was a rough ticking off,” Edwin said under his breath.

“Hah,” said Keith, going back to digging, but much more slowly. His face was invisible to the others, but his ears were red. “That was nothing. I’ve been chewed out by experts.”

As the sun began to throw longer shadows over the dig, the team called a halt to the work. Some contrast was useful, as it threw the edges of hidden objects into relief, but if the angle was too great, pebbles began to look like potsherds. Gratefully, Keith and the others creaked to their feet and exercised stiff legs and backs. Miss Sanders and the male assistant made tea inside the square tent, and distributed it to the workers in stained, chunky pottery mugs.

“From the look of these,” Mrs. Green quipped, “ceramics skills haven’t changed much in forty centuries.”

“Man hasn’t changed significantly over the ages,” Dr. Crutchley replied, settling down in a canvas director’s chair with a sigh. “In my opinion, only his tools have advanced in sophistication. Well, that was a good day’s work. I thank you all, especially our newcomers. Now we like to sit down and have a chat over what we’ve done today. What you Americans would call the ‘recap.’” Keith grinned at Holl, and the others chuckled.