by Aaron Elkins
A hundred feet from the crest of the hill, where the path cut through a dense thicket of gorse, was the last of four stiles. Here a ten-foot wire fence had been put up, and on it was a stenciled sign: Archaeological excavation in progress. Visitors admitted only with prior authorization. Wessex Antiquarian Society. A heavy padlock on a thick chain made good the warning.
There was no information on how to get authorized, and he was thinking about climbing the fence and taking his chances with the wrath of the Wessex Antiquarian Society when a puff of wind carried a few syllables of barely audible conversation down from above, from the far side of the summit.
"Hi!" Gideon shouted. "Anybody home?"
Within a few seconds a husky, pink-faced young man came trotting down the path and up to the other side of the fence.
"Hiya," he said. "Want in?" He was an American in his mid twenties, thick-necked and slope-shouldered, with downy cheeks and a healthy farm boy’s smile. A scant blond mustache, painstakingly groomed, but obviously never going to amount to much, glistened on his upper lip.
"Yes," Gideon said. "I’m an anthropologist; an old friend of Dr. Marcus’s."
"Sure, no problem." From the pocket of his jeans he produced a key. Once Gideon was through the gate, the young man closed and locked it again, shaking the lock to test it.
"I’m Barry Fusco," he volunteered.
"Glad to know you, Barry. You’re a student at Gelden?"
"Uh-huh, all of us are. The workers, I mean: me, and Sandra, and Leon, and Randy. Dr. Marcus and Dr. Frawley are profs, of course." He flashed his engaging smile. "Not that they don’t work. I just meant that the ones who do the real work—you know, the peon work—are the students. Not that I’m complaining…" He carried on in this affable if muzzy manner while they climbed to the crest.
Once there, Gideon saw that the summit of Stonebarrow Fell was a grassy, rounded meadow that seemed to be at the very top of a world of rolling green downs and endless sea, with cliff and hillside falling away in every direction. The dig itself was about a hundred feet from the edge of the cliff, and consisted of two wedge-shaped pits about twelve feet across at their widest points, situated like two great pieces of a pie that had been quartered.
There were three people in the shallower wedge, which had been dug down about a foot and a half: a young man and woman about Barry’s age who were on their knees scraping at the pit floor (peon work?), and an older man— not Nate Marcus—who leaned over them, watching closely.
"You just want to watch?" Barry asked.
"For a few minutes."
While Barry climbed down into the trench and got to work, Gideon walked up to the single strand of rope that protected the excavation from a listless group of nine or ten schoolchildren and a glum-faced woman. The rope restraint was hardly necessary: the onlookers could not have been less enthusiastic.
And no wonder. Archaeological digs did not very often turn up bronze masks, or cups of gold, or ancient skulls with jewels in their eye sockets. Mostly, a dig consisted of hour after slow hour of scraping gingerly away at the earth. When something was uncovered, the chances were ninety-nine out of a hundred that it was fragmentary, nondescript, and muddy-brown—a piece of a sooty cooking pot, a two-inch segment of a bone awl, a discarded flake of waste flint or granite; all unrecognizable and of no conceivable interest to the lay observer. And even then, one did not just "dig up" a piece of a pot or a bone tool. One cleared the area around it millimeter by millimeter, photographing it, drawing it, measuring and recording it as one went. The basic tools were the trowel, the hoe, and the brush, not the pick and shovel. As spectator sport, it was far from riveting.
"Mrs. Kimberly, may we please go now?" a fat boy pleaded fretfully. "I’m awfully hungry."
There was a round of stifled giggles, and the unhappy-looking Mrs. Kimberly lined the children up. "You’d think there’d be something to see after coming all this way," she grumbled querulously and marched them off. Barry ran after them to let them through the gate.
It was another minute before the older man looked up for the first time, lifting a pouchy face with eyes as mournful, moist, and droopy as a basset’s.
"Yes?" he said morosely to Gideon.
"I’m looking for Dr. Marcus. Can you tell me where to find him?"
"And you are…?"
"Gideon Oliver. An old friend."
The man sighed lugubriously and stood up. "I’ll see if he’s available." He climbed gravely from the far side of the pit, a small, soft man with little feet who seemed out of place on a field expedition, and made his way fussily around the backfill piles toward a prefabricated building of corrugated metal.
Barry had returned and was looking at Gideon with frank but somewhat puzzled awe on his open countenance. "Gee," he said, "are you the Gideon Oliver?"
Gideon was asked this from time to time, sometimes by a person familiar with his publications on Pleistocene hominid taxonomy, but a great deal more often by someone who’d read a lurid account of his consulting work with the police or FBI. He had never hit on a satisfactory response.
"Well," he said, smiling modestly, "I’m a Gideon Oliver."
Understandably, this seemed to confuse Barry, so Gideon added, "I teach anthro at Northern Cal."
The serious, friendly face cleared somewhat. "Gee, sir, I’ve sure heard of you."
From a slight vacancy in the smile, it was clear that the young man knew Gideon was someone, but didn’t quite know whom.
The rewards of fame, he thought. "Thanks, Barry, how about introducing me to your friends?"
The other two were absorbed, or pretending to be absorbed, in their scraping, but Barry called to them enthusiastically. "Hey, guys, this is Professor Oliver from Northern Cal." Then, indicating the woman, he said, "This is Sandra Mazur."
From her knees she looked up, and Gideon saw a thin, pale face, long-nosed and elegant in an edgy, horsey way, with sharp, delicate cheekbones over which the skin was tightly stretched.
"Hi, there, Prof," she said brightly. With one hand she took a cigarette from the corner of her mouth. With the other she gave him a sober mock salute, tipping her trowel to her forehead. It seemed to Gideon there was something false in the casual, easy greeting, something that didn’t go with the shadows under her eyes or the tense, almost haggard set of her thin lips. The trowel at her forehead tossed back a few pale, wispy strands that had straggled from under a woolen headband.
"Good morning," he said. "Looks like you have something there." He indicated a small black object before her, lumpy and shapeless, and still only partly coaxed from the earth.
"Yes, I think it’s a leather belt buckle. What do you think?"
"Could be, or maybe a wristguard—you know, for an archer."
"Yes!" she cried. Again Gideon had the feeling she was overdoing it. "These holes could be where the thongs went, couldn’t they?" She bent over it again, crouching to blow away the crumbs of dirt as she loosened them. Her teeth were sunk in her lower lip—to show her concentration?— and when the wisp of fine hair fell over her eyes again, she ignored it.
"And this," Barry said, "is Leon Hillyer."
The third person in the trench was already rising and wiping his hands on his jeans. There was something slightly familiar about the good-looking, self-assured face with its well-trimmed golden beard, the compact body, and the concise, almost prissy movements, but Gideon couldn’t remember where he’d seen him before.
"The skeleton detective," Leon said—a little dryly, Gideon thought, but the intelligent face wore a cordial enough smile and the cleaned hand was extended.
"Right," said Barry, and then, with pleasure as it clicked, "Right, the skeleton detective! Damn!"
Gideon shook Leon’s hand. "We’ve met, haven’t we?"
"Not exactly," Leon said. "I delivered a Grabow Award paper at last year’s Triple-A meeting in Detroit. You probably saw me."
Gideon remembered. The Grabow Awards were three one-thousand-dollar prizes giv
en by the American Anthropological Association for the best student papers of the year, and Leon’s had dealt with the inferring of broad cultural values from ceramic analysis. Gideon had found it rather long on broad cultural values and short on ceramic analysis, but it had been competently done. He remembered being put off by a certain insolence in Leon’s manner, a smug expectation of esteem due him from an audience composed of distinguished men and women, many of whom were two or three times his age.
"I did," Gideon said. "I thought it was a fine paper."
"Thanks. I sat in on your panel on Neanderthal population genetics the next day. I thought you made some damn good points."
This was delivered man to man, one colleague to another, and Gideon was freshly and unreasonably nettled by Leon’s offhand self-satisfaction.
While they had been talking, Barry had begun to pick up crumpled gum and candy wrappers that had been left behind by the school group. "You know the way Dr. Marcus is about housekeeping," he said to Gideon.
"No, I don’t. Is he a stickler?"
It was Leon who replied. "White-glove inspection every day. One tool out of place, one shovelful of dirt where it’s not supposed to be, and we have to stay after class for a twenty-minute lecture."
The three students snickered among themselves and settled back to work.
When the older man still had not emerged from the shed after another minute or two—what was taking so long?— Gideon said, "Looks like you have an interesting dig going. Mind if I come down and have a look?"
"Sure!" Barry said. "You can tell us about the ribs."
"Ribs?" Gideon ducked under the rope and dropped easily into the pit.
Sandra pushed at her sandy hair with the back of her wrist. "We uncovered a couple of broken ribs over there in the northeast quadrant," she said, squinting through cigarette smoke, "and we’ve been arguing about them for days. Everybody but Leon says they’re human. And he won’t give up, because he can’t believe he could be wrong." She turned a bright, toothy smile on Leon.
Leon did not return it. He jerked his head petulantly. "It’s just that I happen to be right."
"Well, let’s have a look," Gideon said.
In the wall of the trench, two sections of rib had been carefully excavated, the dirt around them shaved away so that they lay like an offering to the gods on an eight-inch pedestal of earth. Gideon knelt to look briefly at them, then straightened up.
"What makes you so sure they couldn’t be human, Leon?"
His lips pursed, Leon studied the bones with professional nonchalance. Absently, he took a roll of mints from the pocket of his windbreaker and pushed one into his mouth with his thumb. "It’s the shape. It’s hard to put into words, but they just don’t look human."
"But they’re the right size," Barry put in. "Too small for a cow, too big for a dog."
"No, Leon’s right," Gideon said. "They’re not human; not enough curvature. If you made a cross section of a human body and looked down on the ribs from above, the rib cage would be kind of heart-shaped, sort of like a big, fat apple, with the stem at the back, where the spine is. But a quadruped’s rib cage—a deer, say, which I think this is— would be shaped more like a… oh, like an elongated egg—like a bucket, really."
"Gee," Barry said, "they sure look human to me."
"No, human ribs are more curved, like arcs of a circle. You can see these are much more flattened."
"Yes, it’s caused by evolution," Leon said easily. "In a four-footed animal, gravity would make the weight of the internal organs bear on the front of the rib cage, so it would naturally be shaped like a bucket to hold them in. But a human stands on his hind feet, so to speak, so his organs aren’t supported by his ribs, and they spread out into a nice, roomy circle instead."
He is quick, Gideon thought; no doubt about that. By comparison, Barry’s glazed eyes showed that he’d been left far behind.
"That’s right," Gideon said, "except that it isn’t caused by evolution. Evolution isn’t the cause of anything, strictly speaking; it’s a set of responses, of adaptations—"
"Well, yes," Leon said, "that’s one way of looking at it—" He stopped, seeing that the older man had returned.
"Golly, Dr. Oliver," the man said in mournful apology, "I must have been out to lunch when you said who you were. Nate’s talked about you lots of times." His liquid eyes shone with abashed sincerity. The man really does look like a basset, Gideon thought. Even his ears were baggy.
He shook hands with Gideon, a sincere, confidential two-handed shake, the left hand gripping Gideon’s elbow. "I’m Jack Frawley, Nate’s assistant. I’m an associate prof at Gelden." He smiled weakly. "It’s a genuine pleasure to meet you."
Although he’d never met him, Gideon knew who Frawley was. At one time he’d been a promising scholar, and he’d achieved his associate professorship by the time he was twenty-five. Two decades ago, however, he had published a paper in American Antiquity in which he’d made a string of elementary statistical errors. Published responses had been scathing and brutal, after the time-honored fashion of learned societies, and Frawley had never dared to publish again, as far as Gideon knew.
In the world of academia, that had meant a dead stop to his career, and for more than twenty years he had remained an associate professor at Gelden. When old Blassie had retired two years ago as head of the department, Frawley, the senior member of the faculty, hadn’t even been considered as a replacement, and the younger Nate Marcus had been brought in from Case Western Reserve.
"Well, well, come on back," Frawley said with oily hospitality that failed to convince. "I’m sure you want to see Nate."
Gideon turned to Leon. "Sorry, I hope we can finish this another time."
"Anytime, Gideon," Leon said. "Always glad to hear your views."
Gideon?…Hear your views? What the hell kind of way was that for a grad student to talk to a professor he’d just met? But then, why shouldn’t he be sure of himself? And why should he, Gideon, be ruffled by informality from someone not much more than ten years younger? Was he already looking jealously over his shoulder at the next generation of bright young anthropologists? Now there was a tendency to be watched.
As they walked toward the corrugated-metal shed, Frawley clasped Gideon’s forearm and moved closer. There was stale pipe tobacco on his breath. "Now, Gideon," he said confidentially, "—may I call you Gideon?—I’d like to share some thoughts with you in all candor."
Gideon’s vague unease defined itself more sharply. People eager to "share" things with him put him off— particularly after a one-minute acquaintance. So did people who squeezed his arm—men, anyway—conspiratorially or otherwise, and leveled shiny-eyed, straight-shooting gazes on him. And he’d never been much of a fan of the double handshake.
"Damn!" Frawley unexpectedly exclaimed. Not looking where he was going, he had stumbled over the corner of a narrow trench not far from the shed.
"What is it?" Gideon asked. "A test pit?" With a little luck, Frawley might forget about his candid thoughts.
"A test pit, yes. Nate thought there might be a barrow here, or some buildings, with their surface features obliterated."
Gideon could see no reason to think so, but then no one had believed there was anything at the site of the main dig either, except for Nate. "You didn’t find anything?"
"Nothing. A foot and a half below the surface we hit glacial till. I mean the Riss glaciation—Middle Pleistocene. We certainly weren’t going to find anything interesting under that; it’d be two hundred thousand years old, at least."
Gideon smiled to himself. Two hundred thousand years. That was about where things began to get interesting, as far as he was concerned.
But not as far as Frawley was concerned. The older man urged him on—with a hand at his elbow—and then, as they approached the door to the shed, he squeezed Gideon’s forearm once more. Whatever it was he wanted to tell Gideon in all candor, it looked like Gideon was going to have to hear it.
&nbs
p; "Yes?" he said.
Frawley heard the coolness in his voice. The hand fell from Gideon’s arm, and the sober face, which had been staring directly up into Gideon’s, retreated with its sour tobacco smell.
"Well, it’s only that you should know that, in all candor, Nate isn’t quite himself. He’s been very…" He pursed his lips, chewed his words. "What I mean to say is that he’s, well, terribly determined to prove he’s right about the Mycenaeans bringing the Wessex culture with them to England."
"You don’t agree with his theory?" Gideon asked.
Frawley looked aggrieved. "Do you?"
It was a fair if surprisingly direct question. "No," Gideon said. "It made a little sense in the thirties and forties, when no one realized the extent of Bronze Age commerce. But now it seems pretty simplistic to invent a three-thousand-mile sea voyage when long-term trade contracts explain things a lot better."
"Well, there you are," Frawley said, vaguely mollified. "But that isn’t my point. What I’m getting at is the idea—I think I might well say the fact—that this… obsession of his is getting in the way of his objectivity. All this defending himself, and this fighting with the Antiquarian Society….Well, I think maybe it’s affected his judgment, made him a little…well, paranoid."
The hand darted out briefly to touch Gideon’s arm again. "Now, I don’t mean to imply he’s not doing a top-notch job. No, sir, no way, not for a minute. What I’m trying to say is"—here the sincere and shining eyes were turned full on Gideon again—"that he needs help, your support. He’s made some wonderful contributions. He’s a wonderful person, a great man."
What, Gideon wondered, was this all about? A little judicious, not-so-subtle backstabbing by the loyal, passed-over senior faculty member? But why to Gideon? What did he have to do with it?
Frawley drew himself up, manfully putting the lid on his emotions. "Shall we go in now, Gideon?"
FOUR
FROM Jack Frawley’s tone, Gideon half expected to walk into the parlor of a funeral home, and was relieved immediately at the friendly, familiar clutter and jumble of an archaeological workroom. Most of the small interior was taken up by two pushed-together old tables on which were several newly put-together pottery sections, the beads of glue still fresh on them; a few blackened, unidentifiable scraps of metal; and five or six small paper bags labeled with thick, black numbers. There was also a corroded but impressive bronze dagger, next to which lay the golden nails that had studded its hilt and the few rotten slivers of wood that were presumably all that remained of the hilt itself. Obviously, it had been a productive dig so far.