On Etruscan Time (8 page)

“I need to tell you something,” he said.

“Just a little nap.” She went back to sleep.

Well, so that was that. She wasn't going to listen to him. He might as well be invisible.

“What's wrong?” asked a voice behind him. It was Ettore. “Are you sad, Hector?” He stopped talking when he saw that Hector's mother was asleep. He motioned to Hector to move away a little.

“Are you sad?” he asked once again. Hector hesitated. What could he say? That a boy had taken him back in time to an Etruscan village? Ettore would tell the others, and then they would laugh and say he'd been dreaming. So he just shook his head.

“You
look
sad,” Ettore noted, his head on one side, considering Hector's face. Hector shrugged. “Are you missing your father and your sister?”

“No,” Hector said. “I don't see much of them even when we're home.”

“Your friends?”

To his surprise and embarrassment, Hector felt his face turn hot and his eyes sting with tears. He looked away so Ettore wouldn't see, but the man didn't appear to mind.

“It's too bad there are no other kids here,” he said. “Shall I ask in the village and find out if there is someone who wants to play with you?”

“No,” Hector said, so loudly that he startled himself. “I mean, no, thank you.” Did Ettore think he was five years old and needed someone to
play
with?

“Okay,” Ettore said. “Why not be an archaeologist for the summer, then? You are good at it, and you could be a help. Really,” he added, as Hector hesitated. “I'm not saying that the way you say to a little boy, ‘Oh, what a helper you are.' I mean it. You found the most important sherd of this summer, and I myself walked past that same piece a dozen of times without noticing it. What was it that made you want to dig it out, anyway?”

Hector said, “I don't know. It just looked different, somehow. Like it didn't belong.”

“Good eye,” Ettore said approvingly. “So, you want to be an apprentice archaeologist?”

Hector nodded. It was either that or watch the same music videos over and over again until they went home.

“Bravo,”
Ettore said. He took Hector to the shed and showed him the different implements the archaeologists used and his own most useful tool, a small notebook in which he carefully wrote down where each piece of pot, scrap of metal, and broken brick was found. This was the whole point of the dig, he explained. Sure, it would be great to find a beautiful statue or a pot of gold, but the things that excited archaeologists were usually small, and uninteresting to other people. A coin with the picture of a ruler whose dates historians knew, a vase shaped in a way that no one made until a certain time, a written text mentioning a historical event—these were the real treasures for archaeologists. Hector concentrated. What Ettore was saying helped keep him from thinking about what he'd seen that afternoon.

“When we study these things we learn about the people who made them,” Ettore explained. “It's like going back in time. These were our ancestors—not just mine, but yours too, since the Etruscans helped the culture of Rome take form, and the Romans went all over Europe, and the Europeans went all over America. If we know where we have come from, we understand
us
a little better. For example, if that building over there is a temple—” He stopped talking and shook his head ruefully.

Hector glanced up to see if a cloud had covered the sun, but no, the sky was still an unbroken, piercing blue. Then why had he felt a chill, deep enough to cause a shudder?

“It
is
a temple,” he said without thinking, and then flushed.

“How do you know?” Ettore asked.

Hector shrugged. He couldn't say, “Because I saw it when it was whole.” He wouldn't know how to explain it. And Ettore would tell him he'd been dreaming or think Hector was a baby playing make-believe.

“I just bet it is,” he said lamely.

“I bet it is too,” Ettore agreed. “But I won't be sure until I find more things.”

“What kind of things?”

“I won't know until I find them. But temples usually had an altar. There might also be some holy objects. In a museum is a famous bronze model of a liver that an Etruscan priest used when he looked at the liver of a sacrificed animal to see the future, so he could know what the different shapes on it meant. If I found something like that…” His voice trailed off.

“You'd be famous,” Hector said.

“I would be famous,” Ettore agreed, and he laughed. “But more important is that the foundation that pays us would notice our dig and would give us more money. If we don't find something big soon, our money will run out. We're running out of time.”

“And what would you and Susanna and everyone else do then?”

“I don't know,” Ettore said shortly, as though he didn't want to talk about it. “I don't like to think of it. So hold your eyes open and find me a liver of bronze or a book of linen or a tomb with beautiful paintings, and I won't have to worry about it.”

“I'll do my best,” Hector said. It sounded like a big responsibility, and even though he hardly knew Ettore, he felt the urgency behind the man's joking words. If the dig closed, there would be no reason for his mother to stay and they could go home and he would have the rest of the summer there. But somehow that didn't seem so important anymore.

Besides, he'd had a strange feeling when he was helping Ettore before. It wasn't excitement and it wasn't curiosity. It was a kind of satisfaction, as if he was doing something he was
supposed
to be doing. Like scratching an itch. He made up his mind that if there were something to find here, he would find it. So after lunch he set to work.

He worked for what seemed like hours. It felt good to keep busy, because the heat was making him drowsy again, and the activity kept him focused. Also, this way he had something to think about other than that crazy kid.

His fingers were getting cramped, so he decided to take a break. He laid down his tools and hoisted himself out of the trench. His mother hadn't joined in the digging, but then she was there as a language expert, not as an archaeologist. She was sitting under a tree with the fat book open on her lap. He walked past a trench to get to her. Some of the diggers looked up at him as he passed, and they smiled. One said,
“Ciao!”
which he answered in Italian, earning him the usual grin.

“It's going to take them all summer to get anywhere if they just use those tiny tools,” he told his mother.

“It would take a lot longer than one summer,” she said. “They started this dig almost five years ago. But some parts are more dug out than others.”

Hector flopped down next to her. He rolled over onto his back, looking up at the dark-green leaves. He wondered where that strange boy had gotten to.

“Mom?”

“What?”

“What happened to the Etruscans?”

“At first it was kind of like what happened to the American Indians when the Europeans came,” she said, laying down her book. “The Romans killed most of the Etruscans and took their land. And then the ones who were left just blended in until after a while they weren't a separate group anymore. Their religion and traditions mixed with the Roman ones until you couldn't really tell which was which. Then their language got lost, mostly anyway.”

“What do you mean, mostly?”

“There are some grave inscriptions in Etruscan, but all they say is that So-and-So, son of Such-and-Such, aged some number of years, lies here.”

“Not too exciting,” Hector said.

“No,” his mother agreed. “That isn't quite all that we can read, of course. Once in a while, some small written text is found, but still, a lot of the words are unclear. It's very frustrating, like the Etruscans are trying to talk to us and we can't understand them. That's why a find like your sherd is so important. Anything we can discover with writing on it helps us to figure out a little bit more about them. Almost all their culture has been lost. The Romans weren't big on preserving other peoples' ways of life.”

“So there couldn't be anyone around today who's really an Etruscan?”

“Well, some people here say they're Etruscans. Ettore, for one. But there was so much intermarriage for centuries and centuries that I doubt there's anyone alive today with only Etruscan blood. Why?”

“Oh, nothing,” Hector mumbled, and he got up and went back to the trench. He worked until he could tell by the cooler air that it was getting late. When he hoisted himself out, he saw that everyone else was packing up too, and he joined the line of tired people heading up the hill to dinner.

Instead of the soup they'd had for lunch, dinner was spaghetti with meat and hardly any tomato sauce, and then thin slices of pale beef and some kind of stringy green vegetable that he didn't recognize. He saw the others pouring a few drops of vinegar on it, so he did too, and was surprised at how good it was.

As one of the ladies took his plate away, he suddenly felt as though he had been hit by a truck. All he could think about was crawling into that narrow little bed in Susanna's house. He looked at his watch. Eight o'clock Italian time, so it was early afternoon at home.

He realized that his mother and Ettore were watching him and laughing.

“What's so funny?” he asked.

“You,” his mother said. “You look like you did when you were two years old and missed your nap. Come on. Let's go back to the house.”

He stumbled up the uneven stones, dragged himself up the stairs, and pulled off his shoes. “You can skip brushing your teeth tonight,” his mother said, but he heard her distantly, as though she were a TV in another room, and was asleep almost before he lay down.

*   *   *

He was in thick, swirling mist in a timeless in-between place. Somehow he could feel that he was not in the present and not in the past. Three figures stood before him, tall and beautiful and strange-looking, with pointy little smiles and huge, dark eyes. The man had broad shoulders and slim legs, and his hair fell in thick ropes down his bare back. The hair of the two women was bound tightly, and their long noses made their pale, thin faces appear very proud. One wore a long dress. The other had on a shorter skirt, and she carried weapons like a warrior.

“We have chosen you,” their three voices said together, although their mouths didn't move.

Hector bowed. He didn't know what else to do, but this must have been correct, because they bowed back gravely. Then they spoke together again.

“We are eternal. We are not of this time, and we are not of that time.”

“I am Uni, the earth, the mother,” said the woman in the long dress. “I am life. I am eternal. I am beyond time.”

“I am Tinia, the sky, the father,” said the man. “I am strength. I am eternal. I am beyond time.”

“I am Menrva, the mind, the daughter,” said the woman with the helmet and spear. “I am thought. I am eternal. I am beyond time.”

They looked at him in silence. Was he supposed to answer them? What could he say? “I am Hector”? But then they faded and the air cleared, and sound and smell and touch returned. Once again he found himself in that first dream-place: the open square, the temple, the crowd. It wasn't exactly the same, though. This time, the sun was lower in the sky, and the people seemed more puzzled than anxious. Arath was there, kneeling with his head bowed, long dark hair falling forward, and his hands were bound behind him. Even without seeing his face, Hector recognized him this time.

Arath looked up then, his expression bleak. He caught sight of Hector and pleaded with him. “Please,” he said hoarsely. “Please help me.” But Hector felt frozen.

The boy's wrists were tied together in a way that looked painful, with the rope knotted very tightly. The man standing next to Arath said something sharply, and although Hector couldn't follow the words, he knew that Arath was asked who he was talking to. Arath nodded in Hector's direction and said something that must mean “that boy.”

Another man, with a handsome but cruel face, strode over to Hector. It looked as if he was going to walk into Hector and knock him onto the hard earth, and Hector threw his hands out to keep him away. But the next instant the man passed through him as though he wasn't there. Hector felt a kind of shudder go through him, but that was all. He looked down at his body, his arms still stretched out to keep the man from running into him. Was the man some kind of ghost? Then Hector realized that he could see through his own feet to the dirt below.
He
was the ghost.

Before he had time to wonder at this, the man turned around to face Arath and said something harsh. Somehow Hector could understand him: He was saying that no one was there, that Arath was calling demons to do evil work. Arath protested, but his words were swallowed up in the shouts of the crowd. The cruel-looking man strode forward, grabbed Arath, and dragged him away, out of sight, into the temple.

The crowd fell silent, as though waiting. Suddenly screams and sobs burst from inside the temple. A woman in the crowd cried out and tried to push her way into the painted building, but other people held her back, speaking soothingly. She dropped to her knees and wailed, a high-pitched despairing sound that cut through Hector like a cold knife.

Hector suddenly found he could move, and he too tried to squeeze through the crowd to see what was happening, to make the screams stop, but everywhere he turned he was met with an angry, shouting face. He got confused and turned around to the point where he no longer knew where the temple was. And still the screams continued, making Hector's heart race as he imagined what might be going on. He tried to push against the wall of people, but his hands went through them. They didn't even react, and he realized that they couldn't feel him. He felt frustration building up in his chest until he wanted to explode with it.