VIII
"It must be teatime, surely." Fabia pushed her hair back with an impatient hand, setting down her end of the large wood-framed screen while I reached for the next bucket of soil.
Overhead the clouds had thickened and the shadows in our sheltered place beside the trial trench had flattened into nothingness. Unable to tell the hour from the sun, I checked my wristwatch, arching my back in a work-weary stretch. "Another hour yet, I'm afraid."
"Well, this is dead boring." She glared past my shoulder to where the men, several feet away, were sinking ever lower in the trench. “You'd think with four of them digging they'd be able to go a lot faster."
I halted in mid-stretch, surprised. There were only three of them digging, in actual fact—Adrian, useless with a shovel, had been given the less critical chore of passing the buckets of excavated soil over to us to be sieved. But even without Adrian, the men were making quite good progress, I thought, their shovels scraping steadily, persistently, as they scooped up the soil in thin measured layers, moving deeper by stratified levels. If Fabia thought they could go any faster, she'd never tried digging herself. And she'd certainly never held a sieve before today. I was beginning to think I could do the work better without her.
Leaving the sieve on the ground for a moment, I tipped over the next bucket, letting the freshly dug soil spill out onto the fine metal mesh. "I suppose," I said, lightly probing, "as Peter Quinnell's granddaughter, you've been doing this sort of thing since before you could walk."
"God, no." She tossed her blond hair back again and bent to pick up her end of the screen. "This is a first. I've no interest in dead things. I'm like my father, that way."
"Ah." Not wanting to pry, I took a firmer hold on the sieve's wooden frame and we started the shaking motion again, back and forth, back and forth, like two children rugging at opposite ends of a blanket. The clumps of soil rolled and broke and sifted through the sieve like flour.
"I can't believe, sometimes," she said, "that Dad and Peter were related. Dad was so alive, you know? So interested in everything."
I shot a sideways look at Quinnell, laboring single-mindedly in the trench, and thought I'd never seen a man look more alive. But I kept my opinion to myself.
"Peter isn't interested in anything," said Fabia, with certainty, "except this bloody dig. It's all he cares about." And then, as though she'd reached some unseen stopping-place, she switched the subject. "I can't believe you do this for a living, honestly. It would put me to sleep."
I smiled, hearing the note of complaint in her voice and knowing she'd imagined archaeology to be more glamorous. She hadn't learned, as I had, that true archaeologists were not the swashbuckling heroes of Hollywood films, dashing madly around the world from danger zone to danger zone in search of priceless treasures. True archaeologists were scientists. They moved slowly, for fear of overlooking something, damaging something, being inaccurate. For most of them, a single broken bit of pottery—what we in the field called a "sherd"—could be as great a find as Agamemnon's mask.
Hollywood, I reasoned, rarely concerned itself with getting things right. And who could blame it? Who on earth would want to make a film that showed the reality of excavation work, with all its repetition and tedium and endless note-taking? More to the point, who on earth would want to watch it? There was only so much interest one could muster in the act of sieving soil.
"What's that?" Fabia asked, as I picked a small drooping thing up from the sieve.
"Earthworm." I gently set it back where it belonged, on the ground at my feet. Bad enough, I thought, that he'd been shovelled from his peaceful home in the first place, and rattled all around. Tipping out the few remaining pebbles onto the spoil heap, I lowered the sieve and hefted the next bucket, smiling encouragement at Fabia. "Last one," I promised.
The heavy tread of footsteps heralded Adrian's approach. "Last one?" he echoed. "Then you must have more. That spoil heap's not nearly high enough." Cheerfully, he swung two full buckets beside the growing mound of sieved soil and rested, hands on hips, waiting for us to call him names.
Fabia, to my surprise, chose not to call him anything. Instead she ran a hand through her hair, in a self-conscious, womanly way, and her swift upward glance was designed to bewitch the observer. "Adrian, darling, I wonder..." She paused, as though embarrassed, and approached from a different angle. "It's only that I desperately need to go to the loo, you see, and I wondered if you might be a prince..." With a hopeful smile, she held up her edge of the framed square of screening.
"Certainly." Gullible as always, he stepped in to relieve her, watching fondly as she flounced away toward the house. When she'd disappeared from view, he brought his head around to meet my pitying eyes. "What?"
"You ought to have remembered your Greek myths."
"My what?"
"Hercules and Atlas."
"What about them?"
"Didn't they teach you anything at school? Atlas was the chap who had to hold the sky on his back, remember? So it didn't touch the earth. And then Hercules took over for a bit, while Atlas went to fetch the golden apples. Only when Atlas
came back, he wasn't keen to take the sky again, so Hercules said: 'Fair enough, old boy, only I haven't got my shoulders set quite right. Could you just hold this for a moment while I get a better grip?' "