by Mike Crowson
Chapter 4
Steve was off meeting the ferry again when Gill discovered the entrance to the underground village, for village it was they were now certain. Of course, the excitement of the discovery was marred a little by the realisation that the way in was just where they thought it would be, but one house and several feet of passageway had been uncovered.
A larger slab of stone had been used as a lintel over the opening, just as a similar slab had been used where the house joined the passage. Still, as Alicia said, it was nice to know that they were right and Gill was unreasonably excited by the discovery. She and her team threw themselves with renewed vigour coupled with even greater caution than before into the work of uncovering the entranceway. At almost the same time - before Steve was back anyway - some charcoal was discovered in the sand inside the house.
"We'd better get that photographed before you move it," said Alicia, "but I wouldn't be surprised if it was once a timber supporting the roof, or rather the remains of one."
When Frank was told he agreed with her, saying, "Assuming this house is about the same proportions as those at Scara Brae, that's just where I'd expect to find remains of the roof."
Alicia made a non-committal noise which might have been agreement and, since Steve wasn't around, went to fetch the camera from the cabin.
With the photographs taken, Frank took charge of the careful digging and sieving of the sand. Alicia noted in passing that her 'double failure' might lack skills in exams but had a real instinct for the practical work.
It was during this patient trowel and sieve excavating Alan and Frank uncovered the tip of a bone that could be human, and Alicia was privately ecstatic.
"Did she or he just sit there while the place burnt around him or her, or was he or she already dead?" she wondered.
For a time the whole of those involved in the dig stood and watched as Frank and Alan carefully brushed off the sand and Alicia took far more photographs than were necessary. Eventually she tore herself away long enough to get the other teams back to work. Some of the workers needed a lot of persuading that what they were doing was really of some significance.
"You're digging down through sand that's blown in," she told Gill and Manjy, "and sooner or later you're going to strike the level at which these people had their floor. The village was underground, but there had to be a slope down to the entrance. What you do or don't find when you reach that level may well tell us whether some outside agency was involved in the destruction. At least we know that human remains would be found in this soil, if there are any more."
With that Gill's team, rather reluctantly, started digging again. It was fortunate that they did.
Gill watched the Landrover pull into the field and stop near the caravans. She saw Steve emerge to begin unloading, while she rubbed her back with one hand, sighed and gave her attention again to the dig.
Frank straightened up and climbed out of the house "Here, you take over," He said to Alan, continuing to Alicia, "It's my bet that the victim was hiding in the house when some intruder or other came along and killed him or her before the place was burnt down. Mind you, whether I'll ever be able to prove that is another matter entirely."
"You're probably right about the second but you may also be right about the first," said Alicia. "Do you think you'll get much from the exchange?"
"I'm enjoying this dig. I don't know if it's doing me any good careerwise, it's a bit early to say, but it makes a change from the Mayans. Mind you, these people are a bit primitive by comparison."
"Were they more violent, do you think?"
"Violent? I don't know. I don't know how violent these people were, but the Mayans were pretty rough themselves. By our standards at any rate. Human sacrifice, wars, ruthless games in which the losers were killed and so on. This lot probably weren't any worse than the Mayans and pre-Mayans I shouldn't think. Those were violent times."
Alan discovered that there was, like the houses at Scara Brae, a bed area with stone retaining walls about a foot high. This 'bed' seemed to be full of ashes and the position of the bones suggested that the figure had been lying partly on and partly off the bed. Alan thought this favoured violence.
"If a body was dead already he'd be laid out on the bed and if he wasn't dead he'd be trying to get out, not trying to go to bed." he said.
Alicia had to agree with him but said, "We don't know what happened do we? Let's get on with uncovering the remains as carefully as possible and look for any hard evidence there might be."
Since Steve was around by this time, he took up the camera from where Alicia had just dumped it in the grass and, before anything was moved, the remains were photographed. "I feel like one of those forensic fellas the police use," he said, "You want as much evidence as you can get, I suppose. Shall I fingerprint it? Then he added in a more serious tone, "I've never realised that archeological digs were so serious."
"Oh, we're serious right enough." Alan told him as he and the other workers stepped back out of the way to give him a better field of vision as he photographed remains.
"We're nothing if not thorough." said Alicia.
"I'll give you that one," Steve told her.
While the snapping and the chatting had been going on, Frank had been watching Gill stop her team while she carefully dusted something with a soft brush.
"Look at this!" she called excitedly to Alicia, who tore herself from Alan's excavations and went over to Gill.
"What?" she questioned, peering.
"Looks like more human remains," said Frank.
The two of them stood watching as Gill and her team dusted sand off what looked like heel bones, carefully trowelled away more of the sand and dusted more bones. Feet and ankles were uncovered.
Things were slowed down somewhat by the fact that he or she was lying feet towards the entrance and head outwards, so the skull end of the bones was away from the digging and it was necessary to dig down very carefully through a deep layer of sand.
"He or she must have fallen away from the entrance" speculated Manjy.
"Oh I don't know," said Gill, "he/she may have been pushed."
"Or he may have been dragged there after he was killed, there's nothing to say one way or the other," said Frank looking down from the edge of the trench.
"Well one thing's certain," Gill commented to him. "This is hardly a place to leave a body. This is more or less ground level, so he wasn't buried and they didn't move it or come back for it."
Frank conceded the point. "Yeh," he said, "And it may not even have been male." To Alicia he added, "We'd better get Steve over to take some photographs before we disturb anything and I'm itching to take a closer look."
"Steve's already here," said Steve, who had joined the watchers.
When he had made the photographic record of the find, they returned to uncovering and studying the remains, and it was at this stage that Frank made the discovery.
The ring was made of copper but it seemed to be coated with something which had prevented it from tarnishing or rotting away with verdigris the way that copper tends to do. That the figure had been wearing the ring at the time of its death Frank was in no doubt - a finger bone was still inside it! He was also fairly certain that the body - if you can call a pile of bones a body - had been wearing an amulet or talisman of some sort on a cord, possibly of hide.
Alicia was as inclined to speculate as anybody else. "I wonder whether he was, or she was, trying to get out of the village," she said, eyeing the remains, "and either didn't make it because he was injured or ran into somebody who was lying in wait."
"Maybe," said Frank, "Or he may have been trying to keep out some third party and got killed for his trouble.
"Since you've got all the photos you want, shall I take the ring and the amulet inside, so that you can examine them in the cabin?" asked Gill.
"Yes, take them in," answered Alicia, " They'd be safer in the office. Anyway it's getting dark and it's looking like rain. In any
case, I've worked you all long enough."
Clouds were banking up threateningly to the south west and shutting out the lingering sunset ominously. Gill began the process of picking up the ring and amulet with as little disturbance as possible, while the others downed their tools and turned back across the field towards the camp.
Manjy saw the bird watcher in the distance but paid no particular attention. "Keeping an eye on the nest." she thought in passing. She didn't notice that he had been watching them through his binoculars for some time.
Darkness fell early, but there was no immediate rain. With the aid of the generator chugging quietly under a canvass awning, the whole area was a pool of light and pretty soon the camp broke up. Frank went to sort out a few things and write home, Manjy went to finish that letter to her father, while most of the rest of the gang including Alan, who seemed be popular with the younger volunteers, went into one of the caravans, leaving Alicia and Gill in the cabin with Steve, who was finishing the washing up and putting away.
Frank's letters reflected the sort of person he was. His handwriting was large and bold and what he had to say was colourful and good humoured observation. He was more conscious than one might have expected that his travel and career meant considerable time away from home and his widowed mother.
Manjy's letter was slow and painstaking. She wrote in Punjabi, of course, and re-wrote frequently. Saying "No." to one's father is not something which comes easily to a Hindu girl, so she had tried to avoid an outright negative. She had settled instead on a carefully worded appeal for a marriage partner who would accept her career.
Alan got out his guitar for a sing song but, for want of anywhere else to put it, he had crammed a pack of Tarot cards into the guitar case. Somebody wanted to know whether he could tell fortunes with it and the group was off on a different tack.
"What age do you place the village?" Gill asked Alicia. "If the ring is copper it must have been occupied into the bronze age."
"I've said already that this method of construction began quite far back into the Stone Age and continued as late as the eighth or even ninth centuries AD." Alicia paused. "I'd guess this was built in the later Stone Age, say two and a half to three thousand years BC and continued in use well into the bronze age, but I'm only guessing. The place could have been used well into the iron age, though I should think the people themselves must have been too small to have been Celts," and she picked up the amulet to inspect it more closely.
"You know," she continued, "this amulet has a pattern on it which nobody has explained satisfactorily, though it appears very widely on Bronze Age and later stone age remains."
Gill peered at it. "I've seen it before," she said, "A series of rings linked by lines going across them in the form of a cross."
"But not with a seven point star in the centre. I always thought that was a medieval symbol," added Alicia.
Steve stood listening to them for a moment or two, then picked up the ring.
"Funny how this ring hasn't rusted," he remarked
"Copper and Bronze don't rust," said Gill.
"You know what I mean," Steve told her, laughing. "Anyway it hasn't turned green and rotted."
"No, you're right," Alicia said, "that's puzzled me as well. It appears to be a clear, amber sort of colour, like nicely polished copper."
"It's a fairly small ring," said Steve, holding it up to the light, "It looks as if it would just about fit on my little finger." He placed the ring on his finger before anyone could stop him, had they been so minded, and pushed it down.