Curse of the amber, p.4
Curse of the Amber, page 4
“Careful, doctor,” he said, pointing at the dark, shallow impression where my boot had been. We watched as the peat slumped to fill in the depression, like a quicksand pit resetting its trap.
“This area is very unstable. That’s why I marked it out first,” he explained.
“I’m not a doctor yet,” I said, feeling the strange need to correct him.
“You will be eventually. If you don’t sink, that is.”
“Right.” I chuckled, trying to find a solid foothold where there was only sludge. “Christ, this is really sinking here. Why didn’t you shout for help?” I asked.
“No need for shouting. You came, didn’t you?”
I nodded, laughing. “Right again.” He had an easy smile that was contagious. It lifted a huge weight from me as the day drew to a quiet close. I took the right corner, as it was the one closest to me, and he stationed himself at the left. We slowly closed the gap between us, pulling at the peat with small tools, sometimes by hand. I caught him stealing a glance in my direction more than once, and something fluttered in my chest, something that hadn’t in a long, long while. He could flirt with me in public if he wanted to, and no one would look at him funny or ask uncomfortable questions—the kind that Alex avoided, and that made me feel insignificant, like I’d imagined the last two years.
“You can call me Azi,” I said, working up a good sweat that felt heavenly after so many hours hunched over a mud-covered table.
“Then I guess it’s only fair that you call me Jakob,” he answered in a glib voice before fading back into the quiet concentration which I had disturbed.
The wall hewn into the peat before us was a little more than nine feet high. Stretching my legs to stand on my toes only made me sink farther. When I finally loosed the chunk above my head that I’d been working on, it came down quickly, and I had to dodge to avoid a face full of peat. I cleared the heavier piece of rubble at my feet. The electric blue of my gloves contrasted starkly with the turf that was progressively blackening as night began its stealthy approach. A wooden shard was encased in the peat which clung to it, lending the mud its weight and substance. I rubbed the peat away, and my thumb caught a curved indentation on the underside of the wood. I turned up the electric lamp to the right of me and held the rotted, stained wood in front of it. What my fingertips had felt was only faintly visible, but the pad of my index finger confirmed that it was there—the thin, scored impressions in the wood, the physical substance of which had long ago been dissolved by the acid in the peat.
I turned my eyes quickly upwards to where the chunk of peat had fallen from. “Hold up,” I said, raising the lantern over my head to get a better view.
“What is that?” Jakob queried, following my gaze to the striations in the dirt that had been just out of reach.
“Willow branches,” I said, my attention roving slowly over the continuous line of riddled dimples and thin, deep incisions in the peat above our heads, seeking a conclusive edge. The angle of the needles’ impressions overlapped in a horizontal pattern. My heart beat double-time; the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. This was different from the other signs of human activity—more significant. “These branches were laid flat,” I mused, excited, “put here deliberately. Hold this.” I passed Jakob the lantern and pulled at the camera strap under my windbreaker. Jakob held the light a foot higher than I could, casting the striations in such an acute contrast that what had been faint in my hands was now unmistakable.
“Just like that,” I said, rotating the focus of my lens to sharpen the view. When I inched closer to the wall to bring it into focus, something solid poked at my hip. I took the shot, several times to be sure, then looked down. Another clump of peat fell away as I stepped back. My heart stopped. What had poked me, and what was now exposed to the open air, was a finger.
Jakob’s line of sight caught up to mine, and was immediately accompanied by an “oh, shit!”
My mouth gaped, camera hanging limply from my hands. I’d uncovered so much with my parents, had seen so many preserved kings and queens, but never had we actually discovered a mummy for ourselves. This was my first.
“Azi!”
I heard Alex calling me impatiently. His voice sounded a million miles away. I didn’t take my eyes off that tanned, leathery finger, all the fine lines and creases of the knuckle made distinctive in the glow of the lamp as the sun dipped away to my left.
“Alex!” I called back, my whole-body rigid with excitement. I was ten years old again, and ready to explode.
“Come on, Azi, we’re done for the day!” he shouted.
“I don’t think so!”
His boots sloshed quicker and closer together, hearing the triumphant tone in my voice.
“What?” he cried, stopping at the edge of the pit, out of breath.
I tore my gaze from the digit to Alex, and simply pointed. His eyes widened, and he shouted to Pryce, who was not far behind, before coming into the trench with us. Jakob pushed the lantern into Alex’s hands the minute he descended, and without further discussion, we chipped slowly, slowly, slowly away from the peat in front of us. Lanterns from the rest of the site were snatched from their posts and brought here, surrounding us in a bright yellow haze as Jakob and I fought the fog as hard as we could without being careless with what lay in front of us. A small crowd had gathered—students who had caught a second wind on the eve of discovery, and even some new faces, colleagues whom Dr. Pryce had called when the unearthing of the first bog body on Anglesey was imminent.
The crooked finger that had heralded the body was connected to a hand, then an arm, then a shoulder. Seconds and minutes passed like hours as I traced the curve of the deflated, once powerful shoulder up the neck, careful not to dislodge the rusted hair that fell lazily there until I caught sight of the jawline, still intact. My brush was caked up to the hilt with peat as I brushed at the chin, seeking and finding lips, the bridge of a nose, and finally, two eyes.
Cheers pierced the golden-speckled night. I couldn’t catch my breath. I just continued to gaze in silent awe at the head that hung solemnly before me. The eyes were firmly closed as I dusted off the brows and forehead, causing some hairs to come loose from the peat and fall across the face. The eyelids were closed, smooth and calm, but his lips, the fine lines still distinctive, were puckered. At turns, he appeared in sleep and in agony, like he couldn’t decide which. Taking in the whole of his face, as well as the individual angles and features, the man was striking, so vivid in his un-sleep that I just stared for a long time, taking in his portrait with painstaking detail.
“Just like Tollund Man,” Jakob finally said. “Like he’s sleeping and is gonna wake up any moment. He’s perfect.”
He nudged me back to my senses, gesturing to the camera hanging loosely about my neck. My fingers felt the coolness of the night as they fiddled with the settings, allowing for the abysmal lighting conditions. I didn’t dare use a flash on such delicate skin, settling instead for perching Alex’s hand in just the right position to cast a revealing light on the face.
“Can’t you hold still?” I cried. Alex’s hand shook and it frustrated me to no end. He scowled, but I got my shot.
“Your turn,” Alex said to Jakob, handing him the lantern dismissively and looming over the body. He offered his hand to me to help me back to where he was. “Come on,” he said, pulling me back and taking the camera off my neck. He made to hand it to Jakob, but I caught the grip.
“No,” I insisted. “This one is his.”
Jakob was as embarrassed as Alex was seething. I stood firm.
“It’s ours,” Jakob finally interjected. He pulled at the bottom of my windbreaker and wrapped a muddy sleeve around my shoulder, the deliberate squishing sound he produced causing me to laugh.
Alex took the camera from me with a grunt, but I didn’t care. I smiled broadly and didn’t let his sour attitude spoil the moment. Jakob was light on his feet, carefree as he switched places with Alex, who did his best not to touch me as he stood beside me. I was still smiling, only this time it wasn’t genuine. He stepped away from me as soon as he could.
“Can we get out of the mud now, please?” he whined, extending his arms above his head to be hoisted out of the pit by two other grad students who had brought the wide, flat planks that would keep the body safe as it was extracted from the bog.
I lingered, not taking my eyes from the body as planks were shoved under his feet, behind his back, and on either side of him.
“Sorry,” I whispered, as the man’s face, hidden from the world for millennia, was once more packed in dirt and the final plank of his coffin nailed shut. I brushed my numbed fingers against the wooden box as it was lifted by stalwart hands out of the bog. Dr. Pryce hoisted me out of the trench for the night, shaking both my hands heartily and kissing my cheeks in congratulations.
“Can you believe it?” he said, his hands trembling in mine, his eyes lit up like a schoolboy’s.
“Not hardly.” I couldn’t tell which of us was shaking the other.
His smile stretched all the way back to his ears. “Well, you’ve done it now. No going back,” he said. “I really wish I could keep you. You could teach this old dog a thing or two.” His smile settled into a thin, even line as he said, “Your parents would be proud of you.”
“They sure would,” Alex said, coming up behind me and pressing his fingers into my shoulder. “I am too.”
I took in Alex’s face for the first time in days. The smile there seemed genuine, but for some indefinable reason, I wasn’t entirely convinced that it was. There was something about the way his bottom lip pushed against the other that made me uneasy. It reminded me of a pouting child who had discarded an unwanted toy and only regretted it at the sight of another’s enjoyment. After all his sweet talk about trading the desert for the bog and carving out a name for myself not linked to my parents, he appeared simultaneously surprised and disappointed—I couldn’t decipher why, and it bothered me.
I drifted away from the site, following the floating lanterns and the obscured men who carried them like formless wraiths wandering toward their vehicles. A whistle turned my attention behind me. Jakob, carrying the lantern we had used in the pit, swung it above his head and to the right at a blue pickup.
“Can I buy you a drink, doctor?”
“I told you, I’m not—”
“You will be after today,” he interrupted. “So how about it?” He lifted the lantern again, illuminating both our faces. His eyes glittered like emeralds.
“You can buy me two.”
5
“There’s another one!”
I leaped out of my chair at Jakob’s declaration and raced with him back to the northwest corner of the site where all our efforts were now concentrated. Not even a quarter-mile from where our first body had been found, Alex and two others were unearthing another corpse.
I ran so wildly my foot slipped at the edge of the pit and I slid down to the bottom. Jakob yanked me to my feet and tried, unsuccessfully, to wipe the muck from my back.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I insisted, wading over to where Alex was digging. “What did you find?”
“A leg, so far,” Alex answered, wiping his forehead on the corner of his elbow and smearing mud on his face.
I smirked. “I thought you didn’t like getting dirty.”
Alex’s face turned beet red. “It’s my dig. What else should I be doing?”
“Your dig?” I repeated, incredulous. “Since when?”
The hue of his cheeks deepened to a dark purple, but the man standing to Alex’s right sliced through the dense air.
“I’ve got an arm,” he declared.
I cocked my head, studying the depression beside the shriveled, leathery leg that Alex was exposing up to the hip. The tanned edges of the abdomen sunk back into the peat, then disappeared.
“I don’t think the left one’s attached,” I said. “You would have come across it by now.”
Alex grudgingly looked up from his work and nodded his head in the affirmative. “Go over there and look for it,” he snapped, pointing off to his left. His helpers looked up at him, then at each other, before turning their eyes back to their work without saying a word.
I opened my mouth to bite his head off, but Jakob pulled me away to hunt for the detached limb. “Come on, forget him,” he whispered.
“That arrogant bastard,” I cursed under my breath.
“I know, I know. Don’t worry about it. What do you want tonight? Indian?”
I grimaced. “I do love Indian, but again?”
“All right—burgers?” he suggested.
“Yeah. On me this time.”
“Deal. So, what will we call this one? Anglesey Man B?” Jakob asked, pulling away a chunk of peat with a hand-held trowel and tossing it to the ground behind him.
“Anglesey Man—is that what we’re calling ours?” I asked.
“What else would we call him?”
“Anglesey Man,” I repeated. “I like the sound of that.”
“Uh—how do you like the sound of Anglesey Man C?”
I turned to him, confused.
“Call me stupid, but that’s another right arm.”
A third limb hung suspended in the peat right in front of us. It was only paces away from the others.
“Didn’t find your leg,” I shouted over my shoulder. “Will another arm do?”
I lost all track of time as we carved the corpse out of the bog. He was submerged upright, like the others. The head was in slightly better shape than Anglesey Man B, but a chunk of his shoulder was caved in, and both of the legs were missing.
“Look, look!” I cried as I brought the level of excavated mud nearer to his head.
“Those don’t look like willow branches,” Jakob commented.
“No,” I said, scanning the impressions encircling the head like a halo. “They’re thick and braided, like wicker.”
“A wicker man? Seriously?” Jakob quipped.
I grinned. “You got it. I want to make a mold of this. What do we have?”
“There’s a plaster set back at the lab, I think. I’ll make a run.” He kissed me on the cheek and scrambled out of the pit.
“Thanks!” I shouted and pulled my camera out of my bag to take a dozen more shots. I felt a lumbering presence gather over my shoulder and turned around to find Alex glaring at me.
“What the hell was that?” he grunted.
“The impressions here are different from the other one. These are more woven than botanical.”
“Not that.”
“What?” I asked.
His eyes narrowed to murderous slits. Laughter bubbled up in my throat so fast I almost choked—he’d seen Jakob kiss me.
“What?” I dared him. “What’s the problem, professor?”
He remained silent—I knew he would. He would never say anything out loud, in public. Why he’d brought it up at all was a mystery.
He swiveled on his heel and rejoined his team without giving me an answer. There was no talking to him after that. On our last day, when I showed him the cargo list for what we were taking back with us, he exploded.
“Are you insane? This was our dig!”
“And we only found as much as we did because of Pryce’s help,” I countered.
“Is it Pryce, then? Did he pressure you into this, because if he did, I’ll—”
“No,” I insisted.
His eyes widened. “Then how in God’s name could you let them keep two of the bodies? Two!”
“Because I want Anglesey Man!”
“Who cares which ones we get?”
I shook my head, furious that the first honest conversation we were having about this excavation was over turf. His protests rang in my ears as someone desperate to stay relevant, to take control of a project he’d given minimal thought to. It was obvious now that he’d never expected this dig to matter at all. Why encourage me then? Why waste my time? I couldn’t wrap my head around it. But he’d left me to my own devices so long that I hated him stepping on my toes.
“Anglesey Man is the most complete—he’ll tell us more than the others will.” When he didn’t respond, I played my trump card. “It’s my name people will see first on anything published,” I reminded him, balling my hands into fists at my sides to keep the rest of me from shaking. “I made the proposal. I made this dig happen, and I’m taking the body I want back with me.” Anglesey Man was the one I wanted. His was the face that came to me in my sleep, that possessed my days and would fill the pages of my dissertation. He had had an effect on me, more than the others. Whether it was because he was the first, or because of the conditions, I couldn’t tell. But the prospect of leaving him in another team’s hands was too much of a sacrifice.
I took several deep breaths, curling my toes inside my shoes, finding any way I could to squirm in my place without letting Alex see. He stayed silent for several seconds, each tick of the clock stretching to its extremity. His face reddened with every passing moment. The animus in his eyes told me he hadn’t forgotten our publication agreement, and that his annoyance stemmed from the fact that I hadn’t either. I relaxed the pressure of my fingernails against my palms and blinked, trying to cool my own ire before either of us said something we shouldn’t. Alex caught the gesture, and thankfully followed suit.
“Fair enough,” he answered, the fire fading from his cheeks as the hard-set line of his lips upturned in one corner.
“Thank you,” I said, relieved. He came closer, standing a head taller than me and looking down into my eyes. I was afraid he would kiss me and went stiff as a statue.
Satisfied, he laughed under his breath. “Good for you.” With that, he left. I rubbed my eyes, passing my hand quickly through my hair. I groaned at the prospect of having to do that again, greasing the small wheels in my head that might just conjure a way for us to never have to work together again. At a loss, I groaned louder.
“It might be a while until you hear from me, but I promise to share everything,” Dr. Pryce said, taking my bags out of his trunk and laying them on the sidewalk outside Cardiff airport.
