On Etruscan Time (3 page)

His mother was obviously too involved in what she was doing to pay any attention to him. So what was he supposed to do all day? All summer? He turned and looked down the path they had taken from the town—it went along the side of the dig and then disappeared around a little hill.

Odd-shaped trees stood all around. One kind had a tall, branchless trunk that suddenly burst into a flat green canopy at the top, and another was long and skinny, its branches so tight that you couldn't see individual limbs.
Just like umbrellas,
he thought,
some open and some shut.

Away on his left was a stand of silvery green trees. They were small, with leaves so close together that they created a dense shadow on the ground.

“Those are olive trees,” said Ettore, who had appeared at his elbow.

“Olives grow on trees?” Hector asked.

“Certainly,” Ettore said. “Where did you think they grew?”

Hector shrugged. He had never really thought about it. They tasted as if they were made in a factory.

“And there”—Ettore pointed past the olive trees—“are some grapevines, for the wine.”

Hector didn't know what to say next. He glanced over at Ettore, who was looking at him thoughtfully.

“So, what are you going to do?”

“About what?” Hector asked.

“About today,” Ettore answered. “Are you going to watch?” Hector shrugged. “Maybe,” Ettore said, “maybe I could have you do some work. Would you like that?”

“What kind of work?”

“You could be an archaeologist,” Ettore answered. “You could be a—what do you call an
apprendista,
someone who works and learns at the same time?”

“An intern?”

“Something like that,” Ettore said. “But more young, usually.”

“Apprentice?”

“Ecco,”
Ettore answered. “Would you like to be an apprentice archaeologist?”

“Sure,” Hector said. “That would be great.”

“Okay,” Ettore said. “First I have to ask Susi. But I'm sure she'll agree.” And he walked over to where Susanna was talking with Hector's mother.

Hector felt a surge of excitement. It had never occurred to him that he would actually get to do some archaeology. Suddenly the summer didn't look so bleak. What if he found a statue? A gold necklace? A house with paintings on the walls, like in Pompeii?

Ettore came back. “It's okay,” he said. “Usually our apprentices are college students, but your mother says you're good at following directions, when you want to. True?”

“I guess so,” Hector said. “What do I do first?”

Ettore showed him the toolshed and found him some spare instruments. He told Hector how important it was to stop and get Ettore or Susanna to look at anything he found before he moved it, and how fragile a lot of the old things were.

“First, look for a while,” he said. “Then, maybe this afternoon, you can start work.” So as Ettore responded to someone who called his name, Hector wandered around the dig, looking in one trench after another.

It was fascinating, what they were doing. One man was shaking dirt in a sieve. Another used a cloth to wipe a piece of what looked like a broken plate and then showed it to the woman next to him, who exclaimed at it before carefully sliding it into a plastic bag. Most of the people were sitting in trenches, scraping or brushing at the walls or floor. Ettore was pointing at something and talking to a freckled woman who was holding something that looked like a dentist's tool. She nodded as she scraped at the wall of the trench, saying,
“Sì, sì, d'accordo.”

Ettore glanced up and saw Hector. He smiled, his homely face crinkling as he squinted into the sun.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“It looks so neat,” Hector said. “What are they finding in there?”
The tomb of a powerful king? A treasure trove?

“We're mostly getting broken pots in this place.”
Oh. Broken pots.

“We think it must have been like a garbage place,” Ettore went on. “You see how it's far away from where people lived, so they didn't have to smell it from their houses.”

Hector leaned over the edge, trying to see what was in there, and nearly lost his balance. Ettore grabbed his arm.

“
Attento!
” he said. “You'll fall and break some bones. Yours will heal, but the ones we have found don't know how to do that anymore.” Hector backed up. All he could see in the trench were some knobby gray things. How could anyone tell what was something old and what was just ordinary stuff that you find in the ground?

This trench was only one of many, each with ruler-straight edges, marked off by the strings he'd seen earlier. On the orange stakes, numbers were written in black marker.

“We'll leave this place to Susanna,” Ettore said. “She won't let anyone else touch the bones until she's finished with them.”

“What's she going to do with them?” Hector asked.

“Remove them carefully, making notes and taking pictures to show in what position they are,” he answered, leading Hector away from the trenches, down the path. “That way maybe someone can tell how the owner of the bones died and why his body was thrown in the garbage instead of being buried. The Etruscans, like all ancient peoples, were very careful to bury their dead in the correct way. It's one of the things that societies care about the most. So it's strange for a person to be treated like garbage, or like an animal.”

Worse than an animal,
Hector thought, remembering how carefully his father had buried their old dog, Zephyr, in their backyard last winter. The people in this village must have really hated the person whose bones Ettore had found.

Ettore stopped in the shade of a small tree. They were in a flat place not far from the trenches, where no one had dug anything.

“Susanna says you should start here,” Ettore said. “We don't usually find things in places like this, and we don't think that the village came out in this direction. So you don't have to worry that you will accidentally ruin something. I can show you how to dig with care, and when you have proven to me that you know how to do it, Susi will let you in the trench.” He handed Hector a small, pointed trowel, a fat paintbrush, a flat-bottomed sieve, and a notebook and stubby pencil.

“Now watch,” he instructed, and with the point of his trowel began scraping at the red dirt. When he hit something hard, he worked around it, brushing away the loosened soil, until a rock slowly showed its shape.

“Just a stone,” he said, pulling it out and tossing it aside. “But if it were something that looked interesting, you would stop and call me. You would make a note about where you found it and then sketch it.”

“I'm not too good at drawing,” Hector said.

“That's okay,” Ettore assured him. “We have an artist who will make a good picture. And a photographer. You just need to show enough of what it looks like so that we can identify it later.”

“How do I know if it's something interesting?”

“Well, if it looks as if a person made it. Like if there's a straight line. Or—” He sketched a shape in the air with his hands.

“A right angle? Like the corner of a square?”

“Exactly. You hardly ever find right angles and straight lines in nature. Or circles. So tell me if you find something round, except a golf ball or something like that. Also if you find something of a color that isn't the same as the dirt.”

“Or if it's made of gold.”

Ettore laughed. “Right, if it's gold then certainly stop and call me. And I will call Susanna, and she will call the newspapers. Now you take a turn.”

Hector picked up the tools. The dirt was harder than he had thought and at first he scraped either too hard or not hard enough, but soon he was getting approving nods from Ettore. Small puffs of dust flew into the air, leaving grit in his teeth.

“The dirt down in the trench is a little different from this,” Ettore said, “but you're learning the technique. Just practice for a while. And remember, call me if you find something interesting.” He went back to his own work.

So Hector scraped and brushed, uncovering a few more rocks and a tree root. It wasn't very hard work, but it was hot in the sun, and it was getting kind of boring. A rivulet of sweat ran into his eye, stinging. All this work for a piece of a pot? What a long summer this was going to be. For a moment his mind wandered to the green hills of home, where his friends were probably staying up all night watching videos and spending all day at the lake.

Then, in the little hole he had dug, he felt a scrape against the tip of his trowel. He dropped it and picked up the brush. He swept dirt away from whatever it was, and something flashed at him so brightly that he had to squint to keep tears from coming to his eyes. What could be shining like that, under the dirt?

He put up his hand to shield his face from the blinding light. He felt a small twitch of fear deep in his belly, but stronger than the fear, stronger than the pain to his eyes, was an overwhelming desire to hold the thing that glowed. He felt like he was dying of thirst and the light was a glass of cold water. Like he was six years old and the shining thing was the best Christmas present in the world. He wanted it desperately, without knowing why or even what it was.

Carefully, he used the trowel to loosen the last bit of earth. He dropped the trowel and picked up the brush, smoothing away the powdery red dirt.

And the thing was revealed.

4

Hector reached toward the light, which was making his closed eyelids glow deep red, and his fingers curved around something smooth and cold and round.

As he gripped it, he was struck by how quiet everything was. Evidently somebody had turned off the radio, and the archaeologists must be too busy to talk. Still, out in the country like this, it was odd not to hear birds singing. And the leaves weren't rustling, even though a light breeze brushed against his skin. The only sound—and it was one he had not heard before—was the faint strumming of some stringed instrument, like a guitar, only muted. It seemed to come from all around him, and the notes excited him, although he couldn't have said why.

When he cautiously opened his eyes again, the bright light from the stone had gone out. It must have dazzled his eyes, though, because the colors around him were muted, gray and white. The olive trees seemed almost transparent—he could practically see the hills through them. He turned to look back at the dig and rubbed his eyes. The toolshed looked like a shadow, and he would swear that he saw the faint outline of another, larger building near it. And who were those people walking around? They didn't look like the archaeologists. Were there really people there, or was it some trick of the light? He couldn't tell for sure.

He stood up, feeling like he was moving in slow motion. What was this? Was he having some new problem with the time change that made him groggy and slow? But he wasn't sleepy; he felt more wide awake and alert than he'd ever been before. It was just that the world around him looked faded. His fingers loosened, and the rock dropped out of his hand.

From down at the dig came a sudden burst of laughter, followed by quick chatter in a foreign language. The sound of the radio, playing an American rap song, was clear and loud. A motor scooter sped down the path from the town and buzzed out of sight around the hill. And now the day was bright again, with a warm yellow light that made everything look solid and comfortable. The toolshed stood squat and real, and there was no other building near it, not even an outline. The shadowy people were gone—of course, he told himself, they had never been there to begin with—and the only person walking around was Susanna, bending over trenches and talking to the people digging in them.

The exhilaration disappeared, and suddenly Hector felt as exhausted as at the end of field day at school.
What just happened here?
he thought, then shook his head to try to straighten out his mind.
Did I go to sleep and have a strange dream about a glowing rock?
But no, the stone lay on the ground in front of him. It was no longer dazzling—if it ever had been—and he picked it up and looked at it. It was just a chunk of white rock. Nothing out of the ordinary. But there was a hole near the tree root about the same size and shape as the rock, so he hadn't dreamed digging it up.

He rolled the rock around in his palm and saw that on the other side was a blue circle of stone surrounding a smaller black one. It looked like an eye.
Weird,
he thought. He glanced toward the dig and started to call Ettore but then reconsidered.
How can I tell him about the light?
he wondered.
And about the way that it felt like I just had to pick up that stone? He told me to call him as soon as I found anything interesting, and this sure is interesting. He might get angry that I didn't say anything.

The exhaustion moved over him again, dragging his eyelids down, pulling his chin toward his chest. He sat down, leaning against the tree, the rock loose in his palm.
I'll just shut my eyes for a few minutes,
he thought.
And then I'll think of what to do.
Once again the world grew dim and sound faded away, but this time it was the familiar hazy sensation of normal sleep that was overtaking him.

*   *   *

He was standing at the edge of a crowd of people, gathered together in a tight but silent group. The light was clear but strangely pale, like when you open your eyes under water in a swimming pool.

Everyone was looking in the same direction, toward a brightly colored building that looked vaguely familiar to Hector as he turned to see what they were all staring at. It was larger than the other structures around it. Nobody was talking. Even the babies and small children were still.