Serpent (2 page)

“Hey, Bud,” she said, pulling off her baseball cap and wiping
the sweat off her forehead. “Anything exciting today?”

B
ecker swallowed the last gulp of orange sports drink. “More crushed bones,” he said. “I swear, I have never seen anything like this in all my years of archaeology. It’s almost like this was a dumping ground for dismembered bodies.”

“Sounds like quite a mess.”

“You’d better believe it,” Becker concurred. “And it doesn’t look like ritualistic killing, either. It’s too disorganized, which makes me go back to the body dumping grounds theory. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

Dr. Paz shook her head but the entire time she was eyeing a long table that had a variety of excavated human bones on it. Students were cleaning and cataloging them.
She seemed rather ill at ease, edgy even, but Becker hadn’t noticed. He was too busy contemplating the dismembered body burial ground.

“No,”
Dr. Paz said, clearing her throat softly. “But, then again, this kind of thing isn’t my area of expertise. In fact, I have to tell you that… uh, can we go somewhere private and talk?”

Becker
nodded, following her out of the tent and out into the trees. When Dr. Paz thought they were isolated enough, she dug into her pocket and produced a piece of paper.

“I received this email this morning from the lab in London,” she said quietly. “You know that I sent some bone samples from that skeleton you found down there. I also sent them samples of the dirt surrounding the bones just in case anything organic remained. God, I don’t even know where to begin with this.”

Bud was all ears; he could see that she was acting nervously. It concerned him. “Why?” he asked. “What did the lab say?”

Dr. Paz looked at the paper in her hand. Then, she sighed heavily. “The results from the carbon dating test puts the skeleton between 1248 A.D. to 1300 A.D.,” she said. “
They’re clearly Medieval. The lab also found DNA in the soil surrounding the bones from organic decomposition, but more than that, they were able to extract DNA from the bones themselves. This is what they came back with as to the origins of the skeleton.”

She handed the paper over to Bud, who read it closely
. When he came to the bottom portion of the results where the lab determined the DNA makeup, his eyes widened.

“What in the hell?” he breathed, reading the results over again. “A… a…?”

“Sauropod,” Dr. Paz said quietly. “They’ve classified it as a Sauropod.”

Becker looked at her, confusion rampant in his expression. “What does that mean?”

Dr. Paz sighed heavily. “It means that they’ve classified it as a dinosaur, but that doesn’t make any sense since the bones themselves have been carbon dated to the High Middle Ages.” She shook her head, obviously baffled. “What the lab is basically telling us is that there was a dinosaur living as late as the Medieval period. I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire life.”

Becker’s jaw was hanging open. “A dinosaur?” he repeated. “
In Medieval Wales?”

Dr. Paz lifted her shoulders. “Stranger things have happened,” she said. “Maybe it was a mutated creature that had somehow survived into modern times. You know, legends like dragons and sea serpents have existed for thousands of years and who’s to say there isn’t any real basis for that
? It’s quite possible a lone branch of the sauropod family somehow survived into the High Middle Ages but eventually died off. Maybe nature decided it had no place in the modern world; who knows? There are always the legends like the Loch Ness Monster and other lake beasts. You hear that kind of thing all the time.”

Becker wasn’t convinced; he was stricken with the information in his hand and lifted the paper up as if to emphasize his point. “The Loch Ness Monster is bullshit and everyone knows it,” he said. “But right here – in this paper- an independent lab is telling us that we’ve got some kind of…
Medieval
dinosaur
right here in Wales!”

Dr. Paz nodded her head in resignation. “I know,” she said. “My main goal now is to uncover that entire skeleton and reconstruct it.
I really want to see what that thing looks like.”

Becker lowered the paper in his hand, struggling to collect his wits. He was genuinely blown away by the information. “Me
, too,” he agreed, taking a deep breath as he labored for calm. His gaze moved to the tent where the students were diligently working. “But this really puts an entirely new spin to evolution if this information is accurate.”

Dr. Paz was thoughtful, trying to be clinical about such outlandish news. “There are lots of descendants of dinosaurs that have lived into modern times, so this isn’t completely crazy,” she said. “Alligators, for instance. They
have dinosaur ancestors. So do birds. Remember the movie ‘Jurassic Park’? There are lots of creatures that survived the Jurassic and Triassic periods, evolving into creatures we know today.”

Becker knew that and he, too, was trying to be clinical about the
information. He was a scientist, after all, so in his mind there had to be a logical explanation. “So something like this really isn’t out of the realm of possibility?”

Dr. Paz nodded seriously. “It’s entirely possible, as strange as it sounds.”

Becker pondered that for a moment. “I’ve got some students researching local legends simply because I’m trying to get to the bottom of all of these bodies,” he said. “I’ll see if they can find something about monsters or beasts roaming around out here. There has got to be some kind of local legend. A creature like this wouldn’t have gone unseen.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Dr. Paz said. “You’ll let me know if they find anything?”

“Of course,” Becker said as he handed the paper back to her. “We keep this between us for now, okay? I don’t want this news getting out, at least not yet. We’re going to have a hell of a time defending this.”

Dr. Paz agreed. “I know,” she said, her gaze moving to the tent
where Becker’s students were working. “But I think I have a theory about your human remains.”

Becker looked at her curiously. “What’s that?”

Dr. Paz reached into her pocked and pulled out a long, slender piece of bone. Upon closer inspection, Becker could see that it was a fang or sharp tooth. Silently, Dr. Paz motioned for Becker to follow her back over to the tent where she went to one of the tables and lifted up a femur bone. She looked at Becker.

“Do you remember telling me that it looked as if these bodies had been hacked apart or dismembered by
knives or chisels because of the hack marks in the bone?” she asked.

Becker nodded. “Yes,” he said, looking at the bones spread over the table. “
All of the bones have those marks.”

Dr. Paz shook her head.
“Watch this,” she said. Then she took the long tooth and held it up to one of the hack marks in the femur bone. It fit the shape perfectly. When Becker saw that, his eyes threatened to burst from his skull.

“No…,” he gasped.

Dr. Paz nodded as she looked at the tooth, fitting into the hack mark like the last piece of a perfect puzzle.

“Yes,” she whispered in return. “Th
is is a tooth from that skeleton. These are teeth marks in the bone, not hack marks. Your bodies weren’t in a big battle, Bud. They were eaten by that beast out there.”

Becker didn’t think he could be more astonished than he already was. He took the femur from her, and the tooth, and fitted the two together perfectly
.

“Holy
crap,” he gasped in astonishment. “So there were human sacrifices to it?”

“That’s as good an explanation as any,” Dr. Paz replied.

As Dr. Becker’s overwhelmed mind was trying to digest the information, one of Dr. Paz’s students came rushing into the tent.

“Dr. Paz,” the girl called breathlessly. “
Dr. Becker, you both need to come.”

Dr. Paz was already on the move with Becker right behind her. “Why?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

The student shook her head. “Nothing’s wrong,” she said. “But we were moving away some earth just like you instructed and we came across something.”

“What?”

The student looked between Dr. Paz and Dr. Becker, excitement in her face. “We thought it was a piece of wood or a log, but it wasn’t,” she said. “We came across a broadsword buried in the earth.”

Dr. Becker stepped forward. “A broadsword?” he repeated. “Are you sure?”

The girl nodded firmly. “The steel of the blade is black from the acidic soil that it’s been in, but the hilt is still there.” A grin spread across her face. “It’s gold, Dr. Becker. It’s a big, beautiful Medieval hilt and it looks like there are stones in it. It’s absolutely gorgeous.”

Becker was really curious now. “
Let’s go take a look.”

The girl nodded and rushed
off with Dr. Becker and Dr. Paz hot on her heels. The mystery in the marsh was deepening.

⌘

A knight, he traveled, lone and weary,

Upon a road so nigh.

Upon this road, a wraith came leery,

And moved the knight to by.

“Behold,” said he,
“I clearly see,

Your heart is not content.”

“Be wise,” it replied, “and know, forsooth,

That all is not as it seems.

Your road is long, and your path is wrong,

For you have entered the realm of the Serpent.”

~ 17
th
Century Welsh Chronicler

Year of Our Lord 1283 A.D., the Month of April

Reign of Edward I

Castle Questing, Northumberland, England

“She did not simply disappear, but I would wager to say she is holed up somewhere in the castle. Woe betide the man who finds her for she shall not make capture easy.”

The grim prediction came from an elderly man, big and dark and battle-scarred, and a patch over his missing left eye. He was old, that was true, but the gleam in his one good eye was as youthful and strong as it had ever been. The Wolfe of the North, Sir William de Wolfe, gazed at the men surrounding him, his expression wrought with tension. There was battle in the air.

“We checked all of the usual places, Father,” a big, brawny man with blond hair and hazel-gold eyes informed him. “She is nowhere to be found.”

“She
is
somewhere,” William repeated steadily. “I would suggest you are fully armed as you search. If I know my youngest daughter, and I believe I do, she is armed and lying in wait for one of you hapless souls to come across her. She does not wish to be captured so heed my advice; she has a tendency to go for the neck so if I were you, I would take all steps to protect myself should you happen to find her. She will fight like a caged beast.”

The brawny blond man grunted, perhaps in disapproval, and glanced at the men around him; four of them were his brothers,
including his twin, and they all had the very same thought when it came to their youngest sister, the Lady Penelope Adalira de Wolfe.
Mayhap you should not have raised her as a knight, Father. She can best every one of us if she puts her mind to it.
They were all thinking the same thing but no one had the courage to speak it.

No one dare
d lecture The Wolfe; to do so was a sign of disrespect and all of them had the very greatest esteem for their father. But even infallible men sometimes had a weakness; in William’s case, it happened to be his youngest child. A surprise baby that was born when both of her parents were well past their prime, she had been doted on and spoiled ridiculously, and when she had shown interest in doing what her older brothers were doing, William had not the heart to tell his cherubic little Penelope that she could not do what the boys did. He let her do it. The older she grew, the more strong-willed she had become and now he was facing the results of his lack of parental control. It was about to bite him in the arse.

“’Tis yer own fault, English,” came the softly uttered voice of their mother, her words infused with a heavy Scots accent. “Ye taught
Penelope well and now ye must pay for yer sins. She has yer cunning and she willna be snared. If she truly wishes tae hide from ye, then ye’ve taught her enough that she can stay away quite adequately.”