Part 16
"Can you show us the artifacts they've found so far?" I said, gesturing toward the storage tent.
Athanasios still watched the trail, like he couldn't hear me. Something in the air snapped, and he looked straight at me. "Oh, of course. This way."
We walked over to the artifact storage unit, and Jordyn gave me a nudge. "Nice going," she muttered. "I wanted to see if he would take us to the dig site."
I shook my head. "Not till we're with everybody else," I whispered back. "It's almost dinnertime. The dig site can wait till morning."
The RV in question had several tables set up under tents, and crates stacked around it, carefully labeled with some kind of alphanumeric code.
Athanasios pointed to the map mounted on the side of the RV, split up into quadrants and littered with tiny symbols scattered all over the place.
"Here's where we've been keeping track of the dig site, where different items are concentrated, where we find things like building remains, foundations, walls--"
Jordyn ran her fingers over the precise topographical measurements. Some places indicated depths of up to ten feet, while others listed measurements in so many dozen inches. The color of the region seemed to indicate which level the artifacts were found in: knives, hair combs, and ceremonial necklaces, as well as pottery shards, dishes, tools, and even bits of clothing.
"These lines," I remarked, tracing the collection of outlines traced over the map, "Are they houses, perhaps?"
Athanasios nodded. "Our findings indicate that these were used as living spaces, for sure."
"Why are some places deeper than others?" Jordyn asked, noting the areas that seemed to be sectioned off, with no dig markings at all.
The dig chief grinned. "That's what this group is capable of, with the modern technology they use. They're equipped with seismic imaging machines, to see what is actually in the space they want to dig. If they penetrate a ways, and there is nothing up to a certain depth, then they know not to dig there. Now these spaces," he pointed to some blacked-out bits, "were blocked off by the team's geologist, because they were deemed unsafe, so we're not even touching those. That way, we only dig in places where the land can handle it--really cuts down on the number of accidents that one might usually see at an archaeological dig!" He chuckled to himself, but as we didn't share in his mirth, he let the sound fade off into a short wheeze and then silence.
I broke away to look at some of the objects in the tops of the crates as Jordyn asked more questions.
"So, what's this path over here?" she pointed to the map.
Athanasios rubbed the back of his head, and stroked his mustache before answering. "Well, we're not entirely sure. Some of FRED's researchers found different accounts that mention some temple on the coast of Macedonia... Your teachers told you that Fourtouna used to be connected to the rest of the continent, right?"
I ran my fingers along the edge of a crate containing a pair of brass candlesticks, etched with beautiful designs. I didn't dare touch them--but they were fascinating to look at, and imagine them sitting in the middle of a rough-hewn table, supporting tallow candles that were the only light source in the dark nights.
"Yeah, we heard about that," Jordyn answered. "So this trail is, what, the path they took to the temple, then?"
Athanasios paused again, and he sounded a little more hesitant as he replied, "The only way to know that, really, is if we actually found the temple site--but we haven't yet. We've been a few miles into the forest already, and a few times, we changed directions because of some new information they found, or our geologist was able to say definitively that a certain path was too overgrown or unstable to have ever been used with any regularity. Nobody's found it yet--but something tells me it might happen very soon."
A huge klaxon ground out in the air overhead, and only then I noticed how dark it had gotten, with the sun nearly setting behind the mountain peak. Daylight gone, the entire camp was now illuminated by electric floodlights on those poles all around the perimeter--and everything beyond those lights was shrouded in heavy shadows.
Athanasios turned heel and waved to us. "Well, that's the signal for dinner. Come, I'll take you to our canteen area. You can meet other members of the FRED team, and ask them your questions as well."
We came down past the RVs, to an open area, more like a plateau, where half a dozen tables stood in two rows. The food was set up on a row of tables under canopies along the forest side, leaving an unobstructed view of the twenty-foot cliff that dropped off into the ocean.
Professor Silver waved to us from the line, where the rest of our group was just a few positions away from reaching the table.
"Jordyn, Priscilla--you're just in time!" He called as we walked up. Athanasios continued walking to another area of camp without saying a word to us.
"We were just learning more about the dig, and what progress has been made so far," Jordyn explained as we grabbed the thick paper plates. Dinner looked to be spaghetti and meatballs in a red sauce, dinner rolls, a salad mix that looked like it wasn't doing too well in this environment, and a small brownie for dessert.
"That's great," Professor Silver responded, heaping on the salad. "Stephanie arranged for us to be at a table with the people who have been selected as kind of mentors for each of you--so we should learn a lot more while we eat, too!"
Sure enough, five other people sat at the table with us. Tony took a seat opposite me, with Jordyn next to him, while beside her sat Greg--the researcher from earlier. He grinned at us. "Nice to see you all again, and have the chance to officially meet," He said. "I'm Greg, and I'm a researcher here on the Fourtouna dig."
Professor Silver sat at the far end of the table from me. He pointed around the table at all of us. "Okay, so, for those who don't know our names yet, we have Tony and Priscilla over at the far end--Tony's studying history, and Priscilla has her focus more specifically on archaeology. Then there's Jordyn, our geology major--"
"Right on!" Said the girl on my side, sitting between Kayce and Derrick.
"--Then over here beside me we have Kayce, who's our anthropology major, and the student beyond him is Derrick, our engineering student." Silver let all the new people look us over and said, "Say hi, guys."
We all gave awkward little shoulder-waves and mumbled "Hi."
Greg took charge. "That's great! All right, so from our team we have Dane, our cryptologist and linguist," he pointed to the guy with dark, close-cropped curly hair and tanned skin sitting on his other side from Jordyn.
Dane nodded to Kayce. "I think it sounds like you and I are going to be working pretty closely, and that's awesome."
"Then next to him we have our mechanic Kaity," Greg went on, gesturing to the girl next to Dane.
I liked her open, friendly eyes and her springy blonde ponytail. She giggled a little at Derrick's expression. "We've got a lot of equipment around here--I can show you how we keep things running smoothly out in the middle of nowhere!"
"Then on that side," Greg pointed across the table. "We have Drea, our geologist--"
She put her hand up, and Jordyn gave a shy high-five, "and last of all," he indicated the guy sitting next to me, "Our historian, Tamis."
Tamis had the dark skin and mono-lidded eyes I recognized from some of the Filipino kids I'd met at school growing up. He grinned and shared a quiet nod with Tony.
Greg, meanwhile, looked at me. "Since you're the archaeology major, you'll be working closely with me," he said.
Jordyn turned back from glancing around at the other tables. "And all these other people," she gestured to the full crowd. "Do they have specific roles here, too?" People chatted, laughed, argued, jostled each other, and generally acted like students in the campus food court, themselves.
"Yes and no," Greg answered. "Some of them are part of one team or another, but a lot of the people you see here are the ones who do most of the digging, in the places we tell them to."
"Athanasios showed us a map of the dig site," I said, breaking open my roll to pull off bite-sized pieces. "The site itself looks pretty big, but it kind of branches off in different directions. What's the significance of that?"
Greg and Dane exchanged a glance, and Tamis spoke up. "That more has to do with the varying interpretations of the texts we're using to guide our excavations."
Dane wiped up the last bit of sauce with the rest of his roll and added, "The language we've found that mentions the island of Fourtouna at all uses a dialect of Greek that's so old it's fallen from use--and Greek, as you know, is one of those languages where not just word form changes meaning, but syntax as well."
Kayce nodded, but Jordyn tilted her head. "Syntax?"
Dane leaned in, warming up to the subject. "Think about it in English. We have specific rules for how we phrase sentences, like My dog is brown. Those rules are consistent, and changing the word order would not change the meaning of the sentence--it would remove meaning altogether."
Derrick snorted. "Is dog my brown," he quipped.
The cryptologist nodded. "Exactly. Well, in Greek, the syntax is usually given in order of significance. For example, if the Greek person wanted to place significance on the dog, they would say Dog brown is mine. Or perhaps they considered it most important that you knew the dog belonged to them, so they would say Mine is brown dog. Get how that works?"
We all nodded. Broken down like that, suddenly the parts of the Greek passages I'd seen in my mom's book made sense. A lot of the sentences did begin with the word Fourtouna, or some other reference to storm, wave, or rain. After all, those were the most important words in the sentence.
Dane pushed aside his plate and pulled a pen out of his pocket as he flattened a crumpled but still clean napkin in front of him. "Well! In this dialect, not only are the words sorted in order of importance, and meaning is derived from that," he began scribbling down a string of symbols. "But certain words change meaning based on where they are in the sentence." He showed us the block of text. "This is what we've had to go on, the principal passage we're using for direction-finding."
Jordyn leaned forward and squinted at the napkin. "What do you mean, sentence?" she asked. "There's no punctuation."
A few groans issued behind us, and I glanced over to a few people at the next table, elbowing each other and gesturing to the napkin in Dane's hand. I guessed they were part of the linguistics team, and I could tell they were struggling with the same problems that we students found totally mystifying.
"Exactly," Dane grunted, laying the napkin down among us. "There are a few words that are close to the modern Greek words, like plai for side, and kato for down, peripatos for walking..." he circled the words in question. "But at the same time, Greek is such a complex language, that the same words could have several different meanings--side could refer to your side, or it could mean *the opposite side of something beyond you, or down could mean across the hill or straight through the dirt... All dependent on which words were most important, and which order the writers recorded them in."
Tamis wagged his head. "That's what makes this so hard, and why we have to keep changing direction and shifting back and forth. We head back to our base in the States, work over every permutation of the passage that we can, come back to the island, dig for two weeks, adjust our heading, looking for any more signs, figure out something new that tells us we're headed in the wrong direction, and pack it in to go home again so we can start the cycle all over!"
"That's not saying we haven't made some awesome discoveries while we're here," Greg concluded. "I mean, you could fill a whole museum exhibit hall with the stuff we've found, and every time we're about to give up, some new piece of evidence emerges that seems to tell us we're on the right track." He caught Professor Silver's eye and chuckled. "Don't worry, even if we don't find the temple, we can still make sure you all learn enough about archaeology to make this trip worthwhile."
"That's right!" Drea cheered. "In fact, we just broke through a tunnel last week--you can't really see it on the map, but it looks man-made, down past some of the dry wells we've encountered. I can't wait to show you!"
"Oooh! A tunnel!" Jordyn gushed. "I bet it leads right to the temple!"
The geologist chuckled. "That is, if we don't hit a wall of dirt where it collapsed or something!"
"Oh, there you all are!" Stephanie came walking up behind us, with Athanasios close behind her. "I see you've been making introductions!" She grinned at us and came to stand at my end of the table. "Who's excited to get started tomorrow?"
Jordyn's hand shot up. "I am!" she squealed.
Kayce, meanwhile, was examining the napkin Dane had written on. "Oh, hey," he looked up and tapped the papery surface. "There's this word, ilios--that's sun isn't it?"
Dane nodded. "Yeah, but then there are a bunch of positional words, and we haven't been exactly sure where the sun is supposed to be. We've tried angling our digging according to the sun's position, but there are so many variables. Plus, if one considers that the gods they specifically worshipped here were storm gods--there's not a lot of sun to be had during a storm, let me just say!"
I glanced up to the starry night sky spread over us. "Do you think they used the sun for direction-finding, the way sailors used the stars?" I mused.
Kayce was still scratching out English phrases under the block of Greek text. "It's possible. I mean, it would be interesting to see how much significance was placed on the sun in the historical texts--"
"Okay, whoa!" Professor Silver cut in with a laugh. "I think that's enough fun and games for one day. We should really get some rest, so we can capitalize on an early start tomorrow."
I caught the low rumble of Athanasios' voice behind me, and when he finished, Stephanie spoke up.
"Tell you what--Kayce, after breakfast tomorrow, you and Tony can head over to the library bus, and Greg can show you around--I think your idea bears merit, and I can't wait to see what comes of it!"
We all stood up as the kitchen staff stopped by with plastic tubs to clear away the dishes.
"Hey." Tony stepped closer to me, and wrapped his arms around me. A shiver seized my whole body as I suddenly realized just how much the temperature had dropped due to nightfall. "Want to show me that map you were looking at, and those crates of artifacts?"
I nodded, my head rubbing against his shoulder. "Sure, it's this way."
We finished looking over the map of the dig site, where I could kind of see the discolored trails marking suspected lengths of tunnel, under the markings that delineated the surface-based digging, while Tony whistled in appreciation over the gleaming jewelry and pots and dish fragments they'd found.
In the end, I yawned too many times and didn't quite get his quips, so the two of us wandered back to the tents.
"Goodnight, Pris," he murmured softly.
"Goodnight," I whispered back.
Inside my tent, Jordyn had climbed to the very corner of her bed and was lifting her cellphone at an awkward angle, her hands shaking as she tried to hold the phone still and send the text.
"Almost... got--no!" She dropped her hand and shook it out as she tossed the phone, the "Failed to Send" notification clearly visible on the screen. "Darn it--cell service is so spotty out here!"
"Yeah," I murmured, slipping into my pajamas. "They really do depend on satellites for more than just imaging."
Jordyn sighed. "I was just trying to send my Mom a text, telling her that we made it and I'm really excited for what we're going to be doing." She crawled into her sleeping bag and fluffed her pillow.
I yawned again. "I'm sure Stephanie has a phone in that fancy RV of hers--she'd probably let you use it to call home if you ask her tomorrow."
"Yeah!" Jordyn seemed to like that idea. "We can go together--I'm sure your mom would be really excited to hear about the cool artifacts you're going to get to find out here."
My mom... "Sure," I murmured, and rolled over to signal that I wanted to sleep.
My chin trembled, and I felt my throat tightening as I thought about my parents. Where were they? Had the demon really taken them? I reached up and grabbed the locket hanging around my neck.
"Mom, Dad..." I whispered, as if they could hear me. "If you're listening... I miss you. I wish I knew what happened--and I wish I could see you again!"
I heard the rustling of the trees outside just before a gust of wind blew back the tent flap, and pushed its way up to my face. A cool breeze fluffed my hair, and I felt a warmer sensation, like a hand, caressing my cheek at the same time. I looked up, imagining where my mom's face would be, if she stroked my cheek like that. I could clearly picture her smiling down at me. I fell asleep with a smile on my face.
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