Spiral: Book One of the Spiral in Time by Judith Schara Page A

loose easily. The removal of the large bone revealed several smaller ones and, embedded in the soil, a skull.
    Her breath sounded unnaturally loud in the muted silence of the pit as her finger tips touched the skull. She carefully brushed the soil away. Soon the skull lay before them, unmoved for two or three thousand years or more.
    “A burial. Or this might be a sacrifice,” Germaine said, gently lifting the skull. “And who were you?” She always wondered. It was part of a person, even though long dead.
    Conan carefully held up one of the smaller bones. “Rib cage bones,” he said. “It looks like this person had been in a fight. See this slash mark? I would guess a dagger, but perhaps a sword.”
    She looked at him with a professional, appraising eye. He was good. He had set the site up without her direction. She had noticed the brightly colored grid markers all around the site before they climbed down the ladder. Off to one side at the bottom were neat piles of buckets, a few trowels, a measuring stick and brushes. She would not have done it any differently. A good man to have along. He caught her eye and flashed another grin. Germaine felt her black mood lifting.
    Conan took photographs as she drew a diagram of the bone placements. The chalky earth was incredibly loose, as though turned deep with a pitch fork. Minutes later, the soil yielded up a long metal piece. She raised it up to the light and handed it to Aubrey. It was bronze, crusted with a light, blue-green patina. He gave her a slight nod. It matched the piece he rescued yesterday.
    “There’s something underneath,” Germaine said. She carefully brushed away more soil.
    It looked like a small hoard: things ritually deposited, perhaps to the gods. A twisted bronze torq lay over a sword broken in two pieces. The sword had been deliberately cut in half. Next to the broken sword lay all that was left of a wooden shield: the copper and iron boss that had decorated the middle. Germaine lifted the boss gently with her trowel and, incredibly, barely visible, a few, tiny slivers of decayed wood lay underneath.
    Germaine felt a wave of excitement and grinned at Aubrey. She felt like shouting! Those slivers of wood were valuable. They might be the key to dating the site. With sophisticated Carbon-14 dating methods, they could identify the date of the hoard and, therefore, all the artifacts found in context.
    She felt happy, for the first time in months. This was why she loved archaeology—discovering things last held in hands from thousands of years ago. She only wished the artifacts could talk to her about their owners, or the men and women who created them.
    Conan took countless photographs. Germaine felt the warmth from his body next to her and tried to ignore him. She filled up pages with drawings of the hoard placement, as each piece was lifted up and placed in a carefully marked, plastic bag.
    Then she stuck her trowel deep into the loose soil and hit something hard. She brushed the soil away and a line of stones emerged. The base of something. Or, possibly, a wall.
    They all pondered the stones for a few minutes.
    Germaine stood up. Her thumb slowly rubbed the ring on her left hand. Intense curiosity made her want to keep digging. She looked at Aubrey, her eyebrows raised in question. They did not want to disturb the context of the site. He raised his eyes to the circle of sky above the pit.
    Finally, he said, “We’ll take a photo and get on with it.”
    No one spoke. The only sounds were the scratch of the brush, the rasp of the trowel, and the swoosh of Conan’s broom, sweeping dirt into buckets to move out of the way.
    Aubrey’s voice broke the silence. “They used to keep rabbits up here in the 19 th Century. Rabbit was a common part of their diet. This might be part of a wall from one of the warrens they built. The rabbits would live and mate down here and when they wanted to catch one for food, they would just close up all the openings except