The rain had stopped. Hector pulled the tarp away from his head, and the cool night air washed over him, lifting the damp hair off his forehead. He pushed back his bangs with trembling fingers and got shakily to his feet. It was a dream, he told himself firmly. Just a dream, and now it’s over. But what did that boy mean by being almost out of time? Just a dream, he reminded himself, as he searched for a toehold in the packed earth. If his mother woke up and noticed he was missing, his life wouldn’t be worth living.
Clouds still covered the moon, and the wind was chilly. He hoisted himself out and, clutching the eye-stone, picked his way around the trenches. He was starting to breathe more easily. Only a few trenches lay between him and the shed and then the path up the hill. But something grabbed his ankle, and with a sickening lurch, he fell face forward into nothingness.
He hit the ground almost right away. What had tripped him up, he realized even as he fell, was not some ghostly hand but one of the strings stretched across the edge of a trench. And this one was fairly shallow, so although he was shaken from the fall, he didn’t think he was hurt. It must be the trench he and Ettore had started earlier that day, the one that Ettore thought would lead them to a temple. All the others were much deeper.
He had dislodged a lot of clumps of soggy dirt in his fall. They were cold and scratchy, and they fell apart when he stepped on them.
More cautiously this time, he made his way through the dig and onto the path that led through the stone arch. The flat rocks that made up the path were as slick as if they had been oiled. He walked slowly and carefully but still stumbled a few times. He shivered as the cold air bit into his wet skin. It started to rain again and soon it was pouring hard. The mud streamed off him until he was as clean as if he had just come out of the shower, with water plastering his hair to his head and running into his eyes and ears.
Standing in his small bedroom, he peeled off his sodden boxers, dropping them next to his bed. He slid between the rough sheets, which felt comfortably warm and real.
Slowly his shivering ceased and he started to feel deliciously drowsy. He had put the eye-rock on his bedside table, but now it cast no light. Maybe it’s tired too, he thought nonsensically as he felt himself slip into a dreamless sleep.
When he woke, Hector could tell that the house was empty. Bright light squeezed through the cracks of the wooden shutters, which someone must have closed while he slept. He sat up, his mouth dry and his belly aching with hunger. And why did he have a nagging feeling of dread?
Then last night’s dream came back to him. Of all the dreams he’d had since arriving in Italy, that one was the weirdest: a light coming from that Greek eye, leading him down to the dig, and then into the trench. He shook his head. Where had that come from? Because surely it had all been a dream. There was no way he would have gone wandering around a strange town in Italy, or anywhere else, in the middle of the night. Especially wearing nothing but a pair of old boxers.
The dream had probably come from the way the sun had reflected off the eye-stone when he’d found it the day before. In the way dreams happen, that reflection had twisted around into a light that sent him a message. The creepiness of those bones had somehow worked their way into the dream, and he was probably remembering the way he’d nearly fallen into the trench earlier but was caught by Ettore, and that’s why he had dreamed about actually falling into one.
But it had been so vivid. He could still feel the cold stones under his bare feet as he walked first down, then up, the hill. He still felt the shock of tripping over the string and tumbling into the new trench. It was as real as if it had actually happened.
His boxers lay crumpled on the floor next to his bed. As he picked them up to toss them into the wicker laundry basket, they felt a little damp from lying on the cold stone floor all night.
Or from getting soaked in a midnight rain?
Ridiculous, he thought. That was just a dream. And he ran down the stairs.
A note in the kitchen read, “Bread on the counter, juice in the fridge. Come down to the dig when you’ve eaten. Mom.”
It was the first time Hector had been alone in the house. The silence and the lack of supervision were relaxing. Now that there was nobody to tell him he had to eat at the table, he took his roll, spread with butter and strawberry jam, into the small living room. He watched music videos while he ate. He eyed the computer longingly, but his mother had threatened him with all sorts of consequences if he touched it. It was for Susi’s work and it was ancient, anyway. He doubted that the connection was fast enough to make instant messaging possible. His mother had said he should write letters to his friends, but he didn’t think it was worth explaining to her how stupid that would be, so he let it drop.
It felt late, somehow, when he went back upstairs to put on his shoes and brush his teeth.
As he was about to start down the stairs again, he hesitated and glanced back into his room. The stone lay on his bedside table, its blue and black eye facing away from him. It looked like a golf ball, cold and lifeless and inert.
So why did he feel as if he had to take it with him?
This was silly. He took a step down the stairs and paused again. Oh, all right, he thought. In his room, he picked up the stone and jammed it into his shorts pocket. Then he took off for the dig. It looked like it was already afternoon, or at least late morning, and who knew what had been turned up in the hours he’d wasted, first by sleeping and then by taking so long over breakfast?
When he got to the excavation, he thought at first that the archaeologists were back in the village taking their afternoon break. Where was everyone? Then he saw a group clustered around the trench where he and Ettore had been working the day before, the one that he’d dreamed about falling into last night. Something important must have happened for them all to be there instead of scraping dirt in their own areas.
It was impossible to see past all the bodies crowded around the edge of the trench. Hector felt awkward trying to push his way through, and he still didn’t know which of the archaeologists spoke English, so he hovered on the edge until one woman moved aside to say something to the man next to her. He took advantage of the temporary gap to squeeze through.
Susanna and his mother squatted at one end of the trench. His mother was pointing at the wall of the trench while Susanna looked as though she was going to burst with curiosity or excitement. Ettore, behind them, leaned forward and tried to look over Susanna’s shoulder. He glanced up and saw Hector.
“You slept too much!” Ettore called over the babble. “Something of interest is here. Can you see?”
“No,” Hector answered. “What is it? Another sherd?”
“Better than a sherd,” Ettore said. He stepped out and brushed the damp earth from his hands. “They won’t let me near it anyway,” he said, glancing at the two women, whose noses were practically pressed against the earth.
“What did you find?” Hector asked.
“A part of a wall, I think,” he said. “A strange thing happened last night. It rained, did you know?” Hector nodded. “And in the darkness, an animal—a dog, probably—fell into the trench. When he fell, he broke the side we had dug. Large pieces of dirt came off and uncovered something flat and red. I think it is an affresco—a painted wall.”
Hector nodded again and swallowed. A dog had fallen into the trench? The same trench that he’d dreamed about falling into last night?
“How do you know it was a dog?”
“A dog?” Ettore looked puzzled. “Oh, you mean what fell in the trench? There’s not much other animals here. It was either a dog or a person, and I don’t think many people like to go out at night in the rain.”
An exclamation from inside the trench made them both look in that direction. Susanna had brushed away more dirt, and even from where they stood they could see that a picture was starting to emerge.
“What is it?” Ettore asked. The two women made no answer.
“Mom!” Hector said, the urgency
in his own voice startling him. “What did you find?”
“Well,” his mother said, “it’s a little hard to tell just yet.”
“Come on, Betsy,” Ettore said. “Why then did you say ‘Wow!’?”
“Because,” Susanna broke in, “because we can’t yet be certain, but it looks like there is a picture here that will answer some questions. A picture of a sacrifice.”
8
A babble of voices greeted this news.
“A sacrifice?” Hector asked, but nobody seemed to hear him. His heart was pounding. He touched Ettore’s arm. “How can they tell it’s a sacrifice?”
“The priests wore special clothes during rituals,” Ettore explained as he jumped back into the trench. He looked up at Hector. “And they carried a knife to cut the throat of what they were sacrificing. Perhaps there is something like that in this picture.”
“What did they sacrifice?” Hector asked, but Ettore’s attention was completely on the wall painting by now, and he didn’t answer.
Hector clenched his fists. Why wouldn’t anyone listen to him? Why couldn’t they tell him what was going on? He might as well be invisible. People were crowding even closer to look into the trench, and he was pushed away.
Well, fine. If they weren’t going to let him look, he wouldn’t try. He walked away from the dig, taking a bottle of water out of the cooler as he passed it. He settled against the boulder a little way down the path. The small amount of shade wasn’t quite enough to shield him from the blazing sun. It was better than nothing, though. He drew his feet up close to him and rested his chin on his knees.
The stone in his pocket dug into his hip. He straightened out his right leg and pulled out the eye. He was glad he hadn’t tossed it away. It was the first thing he’d found on the dig, and even if it wasn’t Etruscan, it was still pretty cool. He rolled it over in his hand until the blue part was gazing blankly up at him.
Maybe someday he would become an archaeologist and dig up something amazing, and the eye would go on display as Dr. Hector Fellowes’s first find. Or maybe he’d wind up being a plumber, and this eye would be the only memory he’d have of his summer as an archaeologist. In either case, he was going to hold on to it.
Sometimes he envied his parents. There was no mystery left for them. They already knew what they were going to do with their lives, because they were doing it. They were married and living in Tennessee, where his father wrote screenplays that nobody produced and his mother taught Greek and Latin to college students. How would he wind up?
I wish this eye was a crystal ball, he thought. He must have spoken out loud, because somebody answered him.
“I can’t help you see the future,” the voice said. “But I can take you to the past.”
He whipped his head around to see who was talking. Nobody. He must be imagining things again. He leaned back against the rock, trailing his fingers in the dirt, which was already dry after last night’s downpour. The soft dust felt almost cool. He let his eyes half close, and the shimmering of the land in the sunshine grew even more pronounced.
He realized that once again he wasn’t hearing anything—no birds, not a squirrel. None of the stray dogs he’d seen in the village seemed to want to come out into the heat. He must be too far from the dig to hear the chatter of the archaeologists.
It wasn’t completely silent, though. The stream made a small rippling sound. And there must be a house on the other side of the hill, or behind some trees, because once again he heard the small sound of a stringed instrument. It sounded as if someone was practicing the guitar, but he couldn’t see where it was coming from. The music was high and sweet and oddly unsettling. He leaned back and listened, feeling like it was pulling him, tugging him to someplace far away. It felt so delicious that he allowed himself to be pulled. Just for a minute, he thought as he let himself drift.
He was jolted back into alertness by a movement in the trees. A dog or something, he thought. But he didn’t hear anything, and surely a dog would make some noise. It must have been his imagination, he decided. Then he saw it again. Now it looked like someone was walking toward him. He sat still in the shadow of the rock, hoping whoever it was would go away. He didn’t feel like making the effort to talk to anyone, especially if they didn’t speak English. But the shape kept moving toward him.
As the figure approached, Hector could see that it was a boy with straight black hair. He sat up taller and squinted. The boy’s clothes were weird—some sort of long white shirt and a pouch hanging around his neck that flopped on his chest as he walked. He looked familiar. Had Hector seen him in the town? No, he hadn’t seen anyone there near his age except for some of the archaeologists. This kid couldn’t be an archaeologist. Then it came to him. This was the boy who had been sitting on top of the arch, who had later shown up in his dream. It was a little embarrassing to see a stranger he had dreamed about, even though there was no way the other boy would know about that.
The boy walked up without speaking and sat down by the stream. He fixed his dark eyes on Hector, his thin brown arms wrapped around his shins. He looked so cool in that robe that Hector felt fussy and overdressed in his shorts with all their pockets, his shoes with multiple laces, his striped shirt.
The boy sat in silence, still looking at Hector with large, unblinking eyes. Hector cleared his throat. He felt like he had to say something, but before he could speak, the other boy said, “I can’t take you to the future. But I can take you to the past.”
“What?” Hector asked, startled.
“You wanted to see the future,” the boy said. “I can’t take you there. But I can take you to the past.”
This must be another dream, Hector thought. But it feels so real. As real as that dream about the midnight walk to the dig, and falling into the trench.
“Who are you?” Hector asked.
“Arath,” said the boy.
“What kind of name is that? German?”
“No,” the boy answered. “It’s Rashna.”
“Rashna?” Hector asked. “You mean like ancient Etruscan?” The boy nodded. “Why did your parents give you an Etruscan name?”
“Because I am Etruscan,” the boy said matter-of-factly.
“But I thought the Etruscans died thousands of years ago?”
“Well, I lived here thousands of years ago. But I haven’t died.”
“You’re nuts,” Hector said nervously. “You can’t be thousands of years old.”
“Oh, no,” the boy answered. “I’m twelve.”
“Okay, fine,” Hector muttered. If this was some kind of joke, he didn’t want to play along. He stood up and brushed the dirt off the seat of his pants. Maybe the crowd around the trench had thinned and he could go back and see what they had been so excited about.
But as he turned, he caught sight of the valley. He must have fallen asleep, because now it was cool evening and the long shadows made everything look different.
But it was more than the change in light. Something was terribly wrong.
The dig—where was the dig? Where was the shed, and where were his mother and Ettore and Susanna?
Instead of the blue-jeaned and T-shirted Americans and Germans and Italians, small people with copper skin and long dark hair were walking in the flat area where the trenches should be. Hector swung around. The hill still rose above him, but the houses were gone, and a thick forest covered its steep slopes. Where there had been a crowded town splattered on its sides now there were just a few low buildings. He looked back down to where the dig should be, disbelief crowding every thought out of his mind. Instead of a silver-green olive grove in the distance, tall, dark trees now cast a heavy shadow. In place of the trench where he’d found the broken pot, there was a pile of wood scraps and pieces of pottery, and behind it stood a magnificent, colorful building with a double row of columns in front and an inhuman, brightly painted face glaring down from the peak of the roof. He had seen that building before, but that was in a dream—a dream where so
mething terrible was happening to that same boy. But now there was no silent, waiting crowd, and the boy was sitting next to him, hands unbound, no tearstains on his cheeks.
Hector swallowed hard. “What’s happening?” he whispered. “What did you do with them?”
The other boy didn’t answer, but he, too, rose to his feet and watched the activity with his hands on his hips, a smile curling his mouth.
There were lots of people. The littler children were naked except for a pouch hanging around each of their necks, and the adults weren’t wearing much either. Some were talking, some were repairing a wall, and two young men were wrestling and laughing as older men looked on and shouted what sounded like encouragement.
Arath turned to Hector. “Welcome to my home,” he said softly.
9
For a moment, Hector could only stare and blink, his mouth hanging open. Then he managed to sputter, “Your—your home? What are you talking about? What have you done with all the people? And the dig? And my mom?” Without waiting for an answer he tore along the path down to where the dig should have been.
In a few seconds he was in the midst of all those dark-haired people. They strode past him as though they didn’t see him. Two women came by, and one of them almost bumped into him.
“Hey!” he protested, backing up. She didn’t pay any attention but said something to the little girl with her, who nodded and ran off to join a group of naked children playing with what looked like marbles or jacks in the dirt.
What was the matter with her? Was she deaf? Or just ignoring him?
Something was weird about the sunlight, but he couldn’t figure it out. And then he saw. He had no shadow.
On Etruscan Time Page 5