Part 18
We hiked back to the main camp and met Kayce and Tony just coming from among the RVs.
I joined hands with Tony when he offered. "So how was your morning?" I asked.
My friend had the biggest grin on his face. "Oh, you'll never believe what we found!"
"Yeah, us too!" Derrick looked about ready to launch into a recital of everything we'd just experienced, but Jordyn interrupted him.
"What were you two up to?" she asked.
Kayce swung his head to flick the hair out of his face. "Well, I got hung up on the idea of using the sun, after seeing that phrase yesterday, so Tony and I were going back over the last few attempts at locating the path to the Temple, watching to see if anyone else had tried to account for the sun's position in following the ancient records."
"Yeah," Tony chuckled. "No sense in trying to start from square one and do all the work ourselves if it's already been done!"
We reached the table of food and started dishing up sandwiches and fruit. I was happy to see a pile of loukoumades at the end of the table for dessert. They weren't exactly fresh like the ones we'd had on the mainland, but they were still delicious.
"Anyhow," Kayce went on. "I found a few rituals that mentioned the sun's specific position, and at least one account that talked about the angle of the sun as it appeared over the temple itself, so I think if we keep going on this, we might actually be successful in finding the temple!"
Jordyn looked a little nervous at this, and Derrick waved his fork at the two guys. "You might want to rethink that after we tell you what Athanasios just told us this morning!"
"Oh, hey you guys!" Laila came striding over and joined our table. "Guess what? I cracked it!"
"Cracked what?" Kayce asked. He looked confused for a moment, but then his face cleared. "Oh, you were the researcher who came in with that rubbing earlier!"
Laila nodded. "Yeah, I got those from a way-marker we found on the trail out toward the village. And you'll never believe what Dane's team figured out from the markings on that stone!" She laid a piece of paper out on the middle of the table. It had some kind of picture key, and a few lines of text written on it.
"This is just a partial translation," she explained, "but it looks like the stone definitely uses this mark," she pointed to a whorling spiral design, "to represent the wind goddess Auraea, and this one," she pointed to a jagged crisscross symbol over a series of wavy lines, "to represent references to a storm god named Trikymios. And then look what the stone said along with it!" She pointed to the translated text.
Tony leaned in to read it out loud to us. "Whoso comes upon this path, him shall lightly tread; make supplication and turn aside for your fate... Is that all?"
Laila's hazel eyes danced as she drummed her fingers on the table. "That's as far as we've gotten since this morning. But isn't it just so cool?"
Kayce was still squinting at it. "What does it mean, though?"
The researcher gathered up her materials and stood. "We're still working on trying to make sense of the thing, so we're not exactly sure what the markings themselves mean, but one thing's for sure--we're definitely on the right track!"
She practically skipped away from us, and as everybody went back to eating their lunch, I stole a glimpse at the locket hanging around my neck.
Whorls on one side. Jagged lines on the other. Auraea and Trikymios.
"Hey," said a voice next to me, and I looked up into Tony's eyes. "Are you okay?" he asked.
I pressed my tee shirt collar over my locket and nodded. "Yeah, I was just... checking to see if I spilled anything on myself."
He was staring at my collar too--was it wrong to feel so uncomfortable about a locket I'd been wearing around these people for as long as I'd known them? Finally, his eyes returned to my face with a smile. "Nope, looks fine to me!"
I rolled my eyes. "Thanks for that," I said, and popped the last honey donut into my mouth.
After lunch, we separated, Derrick heading to the generators, Tony over to the research RV, and Kayce headed to the surveillance RV, mumbling something about satellite imaging. That left me with Jordyn, who was so excited she practically jigged from foot to foot as we waited for Athanasios to show up.
“I just can’t help it!” she squealed. “We’re finally going to see that Temple site Drea talked about—with the underground tunnel and the archways and everything!” She grabbed my shoulders and practically screamed in my face. “We’re gonna get to be just like Indiana Jones!”
“Geez!” I sighed, pushing on her arms. “Back up a little, would you?”
She did, withdrawing a couple paces—but the glee on her face didn’t leave.
I noticed Alexandros standing beside the shipping container with the artifacts, hammering the lid of a crate into place. A strange sort of relief built inside me—he might have been sending off weird vibes on the trip over here, but at least he didn’t make me uncomfortable in the way Athanasios did.
“Hey Alexandros!” I called as I approached.
The tanned young guide set down the hammer and smiled at me. “Hey! Storm girl! What do you think of the place so far, eh? Not bad for a bunch of foreigners digging around!”
I glanced around; storm girl? Did he call me that merely because of the storm we went through to get here? Or what made him associate that with me?
I turned the topic of conversation back to him. “I think this place is pretty neat,” I replied. “And what about you? I thought you were just the guide—I didn’t know you worked here!”
Alexandros shrugged. “I do sometimes, especially when they’ve got a lot of artifacts to ship.” He patted the crate beside us.
I looked for a shipping label on the side. “Where does FRED send the things they find?”
Alexandros pointed to the large white stamp on the side, that gave an address in Albany, New York, United States. “From Thessaloniki on the mainland, these things usually go to FRED’s main research center, in Albany.”
I squinted at the address, wishing for cell service so I could verify—after all, hadn’t both Chelsea and I tried to look up the address for the facility? Hadn’t we been unsuccessful? Now here was an entire shipping container destined for who-really-knew-where. “And then what? Do they keep all this stuff? Collect it?”
Alexandros laughed and took a seat on a short crate nearby. “Boy, you never stop with the questions, do you?”
I shrugged. “My mom is an antiquities curator for a museum back in Chicago, so I’m familiar with how archaeological discoveries are handled.” And the fact that this organization might be stealing priceless treasures because no such research facility actually exists, I wanted to add.
Alex raised an eyebrow and chuckled. “Well! You are a very surprising girl, Despoinida! I am sorry I cannot tell you more beyond what I have said. I only help it leave this country. I do not know what happens to it when it arrives in your country.”
In the pause that followed his comment, I heard my name hollered from the edge of camp.
“PRISCILLA! ARE YOU COMING?” Derrick had his hands cupped around his mouth like a bullhorn.
I turned around and waved at him. "Yeah I'm coming!" Something in the bushes caught my eye and I glanced directly across the camp.
Herrin stood just within the tree line, his hand resting on the gun slung across his chest. I could feel the intensity of his stare from way over here.
I did my best to ignore him and focus on joining the rest of the group. Tony and Jordyn were already on the back of the slow-rolling ATV. I opted to stay on the ground and walk along with Derrick, Kayce and Professor Silver. The stories about the equipment failure Athanasios told were too fresh in my mind.
Derrick slapped the back of the ATV as if it were a pack mule. "Let's go!" he hollered. Apparently he didn't think twice about our safety. He ribbed Kayce. "Just wait till you see it. The dig site is awesome!"
Kayce snorted and glanced up the trees, where birds screeched at the invasion of their peaceful habitat. "Yeah, I've been hearing a lot about the village they found."
We followed the ATV into the wide clearing. It definitely looked less eerie in the morning than it did the previous evening. Teams of "combers" were already hard at work, digging carefully, in small sections. A table at the center of the deep, wide pit that ran the entire perimeter of the village held the freshly-unearthed artifacts: coins, pottery, shards and the like. Tony and Jordyn hopped down as we all headed to that table first.
"Good morning to our esteemed guests!" Drea greeted us. She had a notebook out, and she was carefully examining each trinket on the table and recording it.
She noticed me staring with my head tilted as I tried to read upside-down, and she rotated the notebook for me. "Wanna see?" She asked. "I'm just keeping careful notes of exactly what we find, and exactly where we find it."
One of the workers behind us gave a chuckle. "Yeah, Drea goes above and beyond the fact that we keep digital records of everything, with video and still cameras."
Drea fiddled with the ends of her sleek brown ponytail. "I just like to be precise, that's all!" she glanced toward Jordyn. "I assume somebody's told you of all the problems we've encountered with technology over here."
I nodded. "Athanasios was saying some weird things were going on."
Derrick laid a finger on a two-handled jug and tilted it to peek inside. "Yeah, but that could have had any number of perfectly logical causes--unexplained doesn't necessarily mean spooky."
Drea arched an eyebrow and moved the jug a little further away from him. "To each their own," she muttered.
"Hey guys!" Dane's voice carried over from another quadrant of the dig. I saw him standing with a few others, everybody covered in a fine layer of dust, their legs streaked with mud. He waved to us. "Come over here! We found something!"
Professor Silver ushered us over to the place where two guys crouched over the ground.
"What is it?" Jordyn asked.
"It's big," Derrick whistled.
It took the two men a whole lot of digging and pushing and heaving to unearth the thing: a large, round stone, with bits of colored glass embedded in it.
"Oh, no way!" Drea gasped as the men hauled the stone out of the dirt. She kept a watchful eye on the berm over our heads. As they shifted the stone, the whole ground seemed to move. "Careful--we don't want to displace too much of the land."
They slid the stone halfway out, and the dirt began to shift and fall, when Dane suddenly lunged forward and caught the stone's edge. "Wait!" His eyes were fixed on the wall of dirt behind the stone.
Everyone froze. Dane reached out to touch the uneven wall--and as he did so, the realization filtered around the group that the cracks and lumps in the wall were not random texture, but an actual inscription.
Drea took charge. "Okay, get some boards in here, I want this wall shored up so that nothing dislodges it till we can get a full scan of this! Somebody get me an imager!"
Dane helped the two guys gently shift the wheel out of the way, as a team of workers moved in with boards and tools to brace the dirt around the inscription.
Jordyn stood back with Professor Silver and some others. "That's so cool," she mused. "But why would somebody be inscribing on a wall?"
Dane came walking back, a huge grin on his face. "Prayer walls, we call them," he said, noting our interest in the wall. "It was an ancient practice for some sects: inscribe an important prayer into the wall of your house, and it would supposedly bless the structure of the building, while also creating a consistent orientation for the prayer time. If you always face the wall, you will always be facing the same direction. I don't know about you guys, but I can't wait to learn what this family valued so much to pray about that they'd make a prayer wall in their home!"
"It's the wrong way!" A voice--Kayce's voice--shouted from the other side of the dig. I looked from Derrick and Tony standing next to Drea on one side, to Jordyn and Professor Silver beside Dane on the other. When had Kayce separated from the rest of us?
We shifted out of the corner of the dig site to see the platinum-blond kid staring at the burly dig chief Athanasios as they both stood at the mouth of one of the paths marked by a staff with many colored flags.
Athanasios crossed his arms and glowered at Kayce. "These people have spent many hours researching multiple sources; they have much evidence to support this path to the Temple."
Kayce shook his head. "Yeah, but they're still wrong! Look at the sun!" He pointed up to the sky, where the sun hung toward the eastern side, not quite up to the midday position. "The text we found yesterday mentions the morning sun glinting off the high trees, but look at it!" He gestured to the area, where the vast array of undergrowth and foliage would necessarily prevent the sun from actually glinting of much of anything. "By the time the sun gets to the right position, it'll be way past midday! I'm telling you, this village might be here and that's all well and good, but if you're looking for the Altar of Auraea and the Temple of Trikymios, you're completely on the wrong side of the island!"
"No!" Athanasios cut him off with a wave of his hand and turned away. "We dig here, because here is where the ground is best and most even--the other side of the island is unstable and overgrown, there would be too many problems to even consider building there. What you say is impossible, and I think you do not know what you are talking about!"
Kayce opened his mouth to say more, but Dane walked over to him. "Hey, kid!" he beckoned to the young student. "Why don't you come over here and tell me what you're thinking."
Kayce's narrow shoulders slumped, and he regained some of that bored, scornful expression that he first wore in class when we were all selected. "I was trying to tell him about some of the things Tony and I found yesterday, about the sun and all," he said.
Dane braced his hands on his hips and glanced up toward the sky. "And you really believe that we're not going to find anything remotely temple-ish on this side of the island?"
Kayce wagged his head, and a lock of hair fell into his face. "No, I don't think so."
Athanasios made a scornful noise and rolled his eyes. "All of this work for nothing, he says."
Dane turned and squinted at the dig chief. "But if he's right, then it won't matter how far we dig or how much we discover, if it means we're never going to find the one thing we'd most like to find."
By now, we'd attracted quite the crowd of onlookers. Only a few people were really committed to actively digging things up in various corners.
"Kayce," I murmured. "What about those things Laila was saying? About the waystone and whatnot--"
He shook his head. "It's the wrong place. I know it is!"
Drea walked over from delivering scans of the prayer wall on the far side of the dig. "What's all the commotion over here?" she asked.
Athanasios stomped toward her and threw up his stocky hands. "This boy says we have dug in the wrong place, he expects us to fill all of this back in and set up a new camp on the other side of the island."
Drea tilted her head and squinted at Kayce, who wasn't looking at anybody much anymore. "Oh, really?" she mused. "Then I suppose the tunnel full of religious iconography and sacred relics we've been unearthing in the last week is just a fantastically-crafted decoy."
The anthropology student lifted his head, and his eyes gleamed once more. "The what?"
Jordyn gave a subdued squeal beside me.
Drea grinned and she beckoned to us. "Follow me. I've got something to show you guys."
The geological supervisor led all of us back toward the main road. When Derrick started drifting toward the ATV again, she said, "Don't bother with that. It would only be a short ride before we'd have to go on foot anyway."
Derrick pulled a weary face as he rejoined the group. Just then, Kaity came walking toward us down the road we were about to take. She had some kind of mechanism in a cart she pushed in front of her, stopping every few paces to make sure the uneven ground didn't tip the whole thing over.
The mechanic gave a grin and a nod as she trundled past us, but as she did, the cart gave a lurch, and Kaity stumbled--but Derrick moved fast enough to catch the cart before it tilted too far.
"Oh frack!" Kaity gasped, coming to a stop. She raised her eyebrows with a look of approval at Derrick. "Thanks for saving me."
"What's that, Kaity?" Drea asked.
Kaity nodded toward the thing in the cart. "The engine from one of our, uh, generators was acting up," she stammered. "I've gotta take it back to camp to figure out what's wrong with it."
"I'll go with you!" Derrick volunteered.
"Dude," Kayce needled him, "I thought you were all pumped to see the tunnels."
Derrick tilted his head toward us. "No, Jordyn was excited to go underground. I, um, don't do well in small spaces." He locked eyes with the professor, as our chaperone. "So, can I go?"
Professor Silver shrugged. "Suit yourself. We'll be back by dinner."
Derrick nodded and snapped a quick salute. He held the cart steady as Kaity pushed, headed back the way we came.
"Let's keep going," Drea called to us. "We've only got a few hours before sundown, and I want to be back by then."
As we made our way down the sloping, winding path, I noticed Professor Silver glancing around at each of us every few yards or so, like he was keeping a head count. Was he afraid of losing one of us or something?
We arrived at the mouth of the tunnel: a high stone arch that seemed built right into the slope just above the village dig site. I noticed that the stones had ridges and shapes carved right into them.
"What do these mean?" I pointed at the array of hand-sculpted stones.
Drea pursed her lips and shook her head. "You know, I noticed it too, at first--but I haven't been able to make sense of the shapes. Not even Tamis, who is usually our patterns guy, can make head or tails of it, so we figure if it's not natural erosion, it must just be for effect, without any real meaning.
It's not like a culture this ancient and devoted to just make pretty things for the sake of having pretty things, I thought. Not when everything else on the island has some kind of significance.
"Hey, wait a minute!" Tony called after us, as we all gathered inside the tunnel. He remained outside, tracing his finger over some of the rocks while fiddling with something in his other hand. "Some of these rocks have a pattern that's also on this coin here." He held up the other object that glinted in the sun.
My first thought was How did Tony get away with taking one of the coins from the village dig site? but Drea didn't seem to notice that in favor of the connection he'd just made. She took the coin and examined the rock closely.
"Wh--I don't believe it!" She gasped with her eyes wide. "You're totally right! Our artifacts team had been wondering about some of the strange coins that didn't match the other drachmas and obols that actually had monetary value--but I see it now! These rocks correspond with those strange coins!" She whipped out her radio. "Village, this is Drea, come in!"
A gravelly voice responded, "This is Village, over."
"Athanasios," she instructed, "send a couple of your crew out here with those coins carrying the odd stamp. I want them comparing the stamp to the carved rocks around the entrance to the tunnel."
Tony grinned slyly as he took another coin out of his pocket and flipped it, watching it twirl in the air before catching it in his hand. "Who would have thought it, am I right?" He murmured casually.
Jordyn was beside herself. "Oh my gosh, this is so exciting!" she gushed. "What if there's some special significance to the value of these specially-marked coins, that help us understand their connection to the proposed temple?"
Tony rubbed his chin. "Yeah, or to the worship of Auraea and Trikymios? That would be something, wouldn't it?"
Drea was still wagging her head. "Okay people--they've got head lamps and hard hats for everybody. Let me show you what we've found so far." She gave Tony an appreciative grin. "And if any of you see anything else," she addressed us as a group, "don't hesitate to say something! Looks to me like FRED has been coming to this same spot for so long, we've taken quite a few things for granted!"
I scooted closer to him, glad that our preexisting friendship allowed me to stay close to him without feeling like I had to explain how I was protecting him from the potential of a demonic attack from somewhere on this island.
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