On Etruscan Time (15 page)

“Oh, che bello,”
said one of the young women, and another voice said,
“Oui, c'est très, très beau,”
and then other voices chimed in, in various languages.

Susanna kept scraping and digging carefully and pulled out another statue.
Uni,
thought Hector. In another few minutes, Susanna was holding the small figure of Menrva. She handed it along with the other two to Ettore, who held them as though he was afraid they would break. She turned back to dig again.

“There aren't any more,” Hector said, before he thought.

“How do you know?” Susanna asked.

“W-w-well…” stammered Hector.

“Well what?” Ettore said.

“Well, there were three important gods, weren't there? And you've found three statues.”

“True,” Susanna said. “But I still think we should assure ourselves, don't you?”

Hector nodded. It couldn't hurt, even though he knew there was no point. He got up and joined the crowd. Ettore was gently rubbing mud off the little gods and pointing out details to the others, who were nodding and looking and standing on tiptoe to see. They moved aside to let Hector in, as though he were a celebrity. One man slapped him lightly on the shoulder and said,
“Bravo, molto bravo,”
and others joined in saying words in other languages that must mean the same thing.

“Do you think they're really Etruscan?” someone asked.

“Without a doubt,” Ettore answered. “Look at the encrustation,” and he indicated the tiny gold balls that made up the decoration. “And their faces and their clothes—they are certainly Etruscan, unless our friend Hector has learned how to make beautiful forgeries.” A few of them laughed, but happily and with no mockery.

“Hector.” It was his mother. She took her hat off his head. He had forgotten he was wearing it. The evening breeze had sprung up, and it felt delicious against his damp hair.

“Why on earth did you think to dig there? Really.”

He hesitated a moment. Should he try again?

“They were there all the time,” was all he could manage.

She studied his face for a moment. Then she laughed.

“Maybe that eye you found is Etruscan after all and it helped you see Etruscan things. You think?” She gave his shoulder a playful shake. “You sure have great intuition. You've saved the dig. Do you know that? These are extraordinary, wonderful objects. No one has ever seen anything like them before. The foundation will be sure to fund more work now.”

“Great,” Hector said. He wanted to be more enthusiastic and really, he
was
glad for Ettore and Susanna and the rest, but he couldn't stop thinking about Arath. The Etruscans in Arath's village were already suspicious of him and the way he seemed to talk with
hinthials.
Cai's accusation of stealing the statues must have been the last straw.

They wouldn't believe him even if he swore he didn't touch those little gods,
Hector thought, his stomach hardening with misery and with held-back tears.
Nobody ever listens.

18

Hector couldn't shake his gloom, even when reporters and photographers showed up at the dig the next day. Someone had cleaned the mud off the statues, and he had to stand next to the table where they were displayed on a black cloth to have his picture taken with them. Over and over they asked him why he had chosen that particular place to dig, and over and over he said, “It just seemed like a good spot, that's all.” Everyone seemed satisfied with this answer, weak though it sounded to him. But he knew there was no point in telling the truth. No one would listen to him, any more than they must have listened to Arath.

The next day, Susanna packed the little gods in sheets of bubble wrap and put them in a wooden box. Two silent men, wearing camouflage outfits and carrying guns, arrived in the afternoon and drove the statues away to Florence in an armored car. His father called and said that Hector had been on CNN.

With the statues gone, the excitement died down and the archaeologists got back to work. Their energy had returned with Hector's discovery, and new volunteers showed up to carve more trenches into the earth. Ettore managed a team of four of the more experienced people who were excavating the temple. Two different foundations and a university were offering to fund the dig.

Even though the danger of being closed down had passed, there was still a sense of urgency. A lot of the archaeologists were professors and graduate students who would have to leave soon to go back to their universities all over the world. Now that the “golden statue find” was making headlines, the archaeologists wanted to take advantage of every minute left to them to see if they could come up with something equally spectacular. One of the students rigged up an awning with cots under it at the edge of the dig. That way, they could take their breaks without going all the way back up to Sporfieri.

Hector started bringing his summer reading book down to the shady spot and after lunch, while the others dozed or chatted quietly, he tried to get interested in the story of some kid and his troubles with a gang. The situation was so far removed from the quiet heat of central Italy that it seemed like a dream, and he couldn't follow it.

*   *   *

It was their last day in Italy. Hector's mom was up at the house packing and had told him to get down to the dig and out of her way. It was the hot part of the day, so all the cots were taken by someone else, but he didn't mind stretching out on the cool earth. At least there were no chiggers in Italy. He'd be back in Tennessee soon and wouldn't be able to sit on the grass for months, until a frost killed all the invisible biting things.
Odd how something you can't even see is such a pain,
he thought.

He flopped over onto his belly and pulled the stone eye out of his pocket.

Well, at least he had something to remind him of Arath.
I did my best,
he tried to console himself.
I just ran out of time.
Arath would be dead now, anyway, whether Hector had succeeded or not. Dead for more than two thousand years.

Somehow, the thought didn't console him.

It was so hot. He couldn't concentrate on his book, and anyway the pages were getting droopy and sticky from the damp heat. He lay back and closed his eyes. The voices of the archaeologists in the nearby trenches became vague, the sounds mixing up and making no sense. The syllables sounded in a singsong rhythm, guttural consonants melting into liquid vowels.
It sounds like Etruscan,
he thought drowsily. And then he sat up, suddenly alert. It
was
Etruscan, not just mixed-up German and Italian and French and English.

In front of him, the small village had sprung up again. But the broken wall was now neatly mended and painted a cheerful orange. The laughing children and wrestling men were gone, but there was a crowd of people. Hector shrank back, dreading to see Arath tied up and helpless again.

But it was different this time. The crowd wasn't the silent, apprehensive group of that awful day. The people were dressed in what had to be their finest clothes, and gold glittered on their arms and earlobes and in their black hair. The littlest children wore shiny stone necklaces. Hector heard excited talk and laughter, but fuzzily, as though it were coming from a radio that wasn't quite tuned to the station.

As though at some invisible signal, everyone hushed and turned expectantly toward the temple. A tall figure stepped out of the shadowy interior and through the door as the crowd burst into high-pitched cheers. It was a shirtless man wearing a gray skirt that fell to his knees. He was tall and lean, with a smooth, hairless chest.
A teenager, or a bit older,
Hector thought. A dazzling white cloth draped over his head hid his face. A gold band shone on his upper arm, making Hector shrink back as he thought,
Cai?
But no, this man was much younger and more slender than the evil would-be priest.

In his right hand the man held a bowl. Even from that distance, Hector could see that it was filled with yellow grain. The man appeared not to notice the erupting crowd but stood quietly for a moment at the top of the stairs. Then he came down the short flight. The crowd fell silent again and moved aside to let him advance to the big stone fireplace in front of the temple.

Here the man stopped. He extended his arm and slowly poured the grain into the flame. Hector caught a faint whiff of something that smelled like burned popcorn. The man set the bowl down carefully and raised both his arms.

As he looked up at the sky, the cloth slid off his head, and Hector took an involuntary step forward. There was something about that man who was making the sacrifice. He looked—well, he looked like Arath. Older and more serious, but definitely Arath.

Arath looked solemnly around the crowd. When his gaze reached Hector he stopped and stared. Did he see Hector, or did he just happen to be looking in that direction? Hector couldn't tell, and now he felt himself waking up. He fought the growing feeling of coming back to consciousness as hard as he had fought the pull of time. But it was no use. As his dream faded, he saw his own hand reach out to Arath, the stone eye in his palm. He watched the eye slide off and bounce in the red dirt and roll slowly away as the world turned and turned around him until it became the middle of a hot day at the end of the summer, with his mother teasing him for falling asleep.

19

“Are you ever going to wake up?”

Hector rolled over and rubbed his eyes. He wished he could hold on to the dream and believe for just a little longer that Arath had survived to grow up and become a priest. But the feeling of relief slid away as the misery of knowing he had failed took over again.

“You're going to have to get out of this afternoon nap habit when we get home,” his mother said. “After all, they don't have naps in school after kindergart—”

A shout from the dig interrupted her. “Susanna!” called Ettore's voice, hoarse with excitement. “Susanna!
Vieni qui! Ho trovato qualcosa!
Betsy! I found something! Come see!”

Hector, still groggy, turned to look as his mother took off at a trot toward Ettore. Susanna was already there, and they moved aside to let his mother see what Ettore was holding. Hector's fuzziness disappeared as he ran to join them.

Ettore was squeezing water over an object about the size and shape of a notebook. As the dirt washed away in reddish streaks, Hector saw that it was a piece of metal.

“Let me see,” Hector's mother said, and Ettore handed her the metal plate. She caught her breath.

“What is it?” Hector asked.

“Bronze,” Susanna said. “There's written something on it, see?”

“What does it say?” Hector said. His mother was peering at it, her lips moving slightly.

“I can't make out all the words,” she said. “The patina is pretty thick. But some of it's legible. Let's see—it says something about
aisar
—that's ‘gods,' and
turn celu Arath cvil
—that means this was dedicated by a priest named Arath—”

“What?” Hector interrupted. “Named what?”

“Arath,” said his mother. She leaned over the tablet again and then stopped and looked at Hector. “Wasn't that the name—” She stopped again. “Didn't you—?”

“Come
on,
Betsy,” Ettore broke in. “What else does it say?”

Hector's mother was still looking at him.

“Betsy!” Susanna sounded even more impatient than Ettore.
“Su, andiamo!”

His mother turned back to the tablet. “And then something about that same priest, Arath, taking a journey—no, it seems to be
not
taking a journey, about the gods preventing him. Then some words:
alpnu, ruva, thuleri
—” She broke off and read a little more, frowning. “It's hard to say exactly what it means without studying it more closely. Something about thanking a brother from a foreign land and about a demon or evil spirit being chased away or fleeing or something. It's a demon I've never heard of before, with a name like Kai. You ever hear of a demon called Kai?” Ettore shook his head.

Susanna shrugged. “So what does it mean?” she asked.

“I'll have to examine it some more,” Hector's mother said. “First let me copy down what I can make out.”

“I'll help,” Hector offered. They settled under the awning, and he sat on a cot, holding the bronze plate upright on his lap.

“Oh, and look what also I found.” Ettore had come up behind him. He handed Hector his stone eye. Hector turned it over, feeling the now-familiar weight. His hand shook. He didn't understand. How had Ettore gotten it? Had he taken it from him while he lay under the shelter, dreaming or time traveling, or whatever it was he was doing?

“It
is
yours, isn't it?” Ettore asked, watching him closely. “I recognized the crack.”

Hector nodded. “Where did you find it?” he asked.

“In the trench in front of the temple,” Ettore answered. “But it was inside the dirt, not on top.” Hector rolled the blue-and-white ball in his hand, still not understanding. He had lost the eye under the awning, far away from the temple area. It couldn't have rolled all the way down to the trench, could it?

Unless—the thought came to him so suddenly he felt dizzy—unless he had really lost it more than two thousand years ago, not today, and in front of the temple, not under the awning. In his mind, he watched it roll away again, toward that grown-up Arath. Had it gotten trampled and lost in that eager crowd? Had Hector even found it that first day he was digging? Or was it waiting here for Ettore to find it today? And if Hector didn't find it, how could he lose it for Ettore to find it again?

He thought he heard a soft voice say, “Time doesn't work like that,” followed by equally soft laughter, but when he whipped his head around, he saw nothing. He suppressed a smile.
You don't know
everything
about time, Arath,
he thought as Ettore squatted next to Hector's mother and helped her decipher the letters.