Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Odin. Tacitus had clearly described the god the Norse peoples would worship as Odin.
Sons of Mercury. Sons of Odin.
Here the road begins.
The inscription continued. I had to lean so close that my nose nearly grazed the tesserae, and then pull back, as if I were looking at a concealed 3D image. I had cleaned this section thoroughly, and the mosaic had suffered miraculously little damage. The runes remained very hard to make out, so hard that I began to think the artist had purposely concealed them in the knotwork.
Directions, along the coast southeast of Palermo. I recognized the Norman names of tiny settlements. Some had become towns that remained to this day, while others no longer existed except on our oldest maps.
Coordinates, really, of a kind. The sort of directional language that a Norman knight who had sailed from Rouen would have understood instinctively. Distances rendered in a unit I recognized as a Norman variation of the Roman mille passus. A landmark: one rock among three. A coastline: a bend toward the rising sun. A cliff described in terms that, if I was reading them correctly, could only refer to something in the limestone escarpment on Capo Zafferano, twenty-three kilometers almost directly east of where I was currently crouching in the dirt with my heart in my throat.
I stayed very still for a long moment.
Then I took out my phone.
I photographed everything. Every centimeter of the inscription. The full composition with the tree and the silver-haired woman at its roots and the border text running beneath like a secret the mosaic had been waiting nine centuries to tell someone. I worked methodically, the way I always worked, overlap between frames, multiple angles, with flash and then without. My hands had stopped shaking. That meant I had made a decision, somewhere in my body, that my mind hadn’t yet caught up to.
When I had what I needed, I put my phone away.
Then I took my trowel and, with the same care I had used to uncover it, I began to cover the mosaic back up. Loose soil first, worked gently into the gaps between tesserae. Then the larger aggregate. Then the surface layer, tamped down and textured to match the surrounding undisturbed earth. I had watched enough sites get backfilled to know how it was done. In three weeks, the supermarket’s foundation crew would arrive and pour concrete over this entire section, and the mosaic of the Filii Mercurii would sleep for another nine centuries, or forever, beneath a car park.
No one would find it.
No one except me had found it.
I told myself I had protected the mosaic. I had shielded the site from the kind of attention that would bring in authorities and journalists and rival academics and ultimately the concrete anyway, just with more paperwork. I told myself that as I smoothed the last of the surface soil with the flat of my palm, and I almost believed it.
The pendant at my throat still felt warm.
I reached the coast two hours later, just as the light had started to become golden over the Tyrrhenian Sea. Sicily looked like a landscape, and a seascape, from ancient myth. I drove the dig’s battered Fiat to the nearest point the road allowed and then walked, following a goat track down through maquis scrub that smelled of wild rosemary. In one of my cargo pockets I had my phone and a small torch. In the other I had the water bottle I had remembered at the last moment to bring.
The inscription had mentioned a rock among three. To my astonishment, I found a candidate almost immediately: one part of the looming precipice that jutted further than the two by its side. I stood at its base and looked at the shoreline and saw nothing but rock and sea.
Then I looked at the rock more carefully, passing back and forth, trying to make my eyes focus on different distances to keep from being fooled by the similarity of background to foreground.
The fissure was narrow enough that I walked past it twice before I registered what I was seeing. Not a cave mouth, exactly. More like the coastline had developed an opinion about itself and decided to keep that opinion a secret. The limestone had folded in a way that presented a solid face to anyone approaching from the water and a near-invisible vertical crack to anyone approaching from the land, and only at this specific angle, with the evening light hitting the cliff face from precisely this direction, was the darkness behind the crack visible at all.
I turned sideways and pushed through.
The passage stretched about four meters. It smelled of salt and cold stone. There was something underneath those things, though, something organic that didn’t seem to fit the ocean setting. My mind fastened on the scent-impression of the inside of a chest that had held important things for a very long time.