CHAPTER TWO
Nahariya, Israel
Present Day
Beneath the intense rays of the Middle Eastern sun, clouds of dust rose from a hillside covered with ropes secured into grid patterns. A small army of swarthy-skinned workers passed baskets of earth from the area of excavation to a pile that would be sifted through at a later time. The sing-song chant to help pass the time was as repetitious as the work, but the native laborers welcomed the tedium; such were the perils of the archaeological dig that kept them employed.
A bright blue tarp shielded the heart of the activity, pretending to offer some relief from the blazing sun. Deep in protected trench, a Caucasian man with a sunburned nose carefully swept away clods of earth from what appeared to be a flat, well-worn surface. Around him, the workers continued to clear the earth away and make cautious effort not to disturb him.
“Well? What do you think? Did we hit floor?”
The man in the hole heard the question, brushing his fine-bristled brush across the flat surface a few more times before straightening. Glancing over his shoulder, he caught sight of tanned, shapely legs.
“It sure looks like it,” he said. “I guess you were right.”
“Of course I was,” knees popped as the figure crouched at the edge of the hole, her shaded face beaming beneath a broad-brimmed hat. Hazel eyes, wide and beautiful, fixed excitedly on the man in the hole. “I told you this was an ancient temple sight, Bud. Now I’ve finally proven it to you.”
Dr. Frederick “Bud” Dietrich smiled broadly at his colleague, his perfect teeth reflecting the brilliant blue of the tarp. “So I’ll kiss your feet later. Right now, I want to get a sample of this floor for carbon testing. Where’s Dave?”
As if hearing his name, Dr. David Peck made a hurried appearance at the edge of the trench. In his hands, a digital camcorder was poised to begin documenting the discovery; he’d been in the very same hole not fifteen minutes earlier when it had become apparent they were on to something. The woman in the broad-brimmed hat smiled into his bespectacled brown eyes.
“We’ve hit floor, Dave,” she said eagerly. “Didn’t I tell you it was here? Didn’t I?”
Dave gazed into her beautiful face, flushed with excitement and temperature. “Yeah, yeah, you were right and I’ll never hear the end of it. Now, move out of the way so that I can record your auspicious find.”
Smiling confidently, the woman rose and stepped aside, allowing Dr. Peck to descend into the trench. As Bud and David swarmed over a very small patch of hard-packed earth, Dr. Rory Osgrove observed the activity with the aura of a conquering Caesar. It had taken fourteen long months of sweat and labor, but finally, she knew she had found what they had been looking for. At least, she hoped so.
Dr. Peck began to record the discovery of the ancient floor, orating a blow-by-blow account as Bud resumed his brush and proceeded to dust away centuries of dirt. Technically, Dr. Osgrove was on a break, as she had been working in this precise spot for the past seven hours until Bud demanded she take a breather. Even as her supervising archaeologist continued brushing away the loose soil where she had left off, Rory was unable to leave and certainly unable to rest.
And the idleness only grew worse. Unable to stand it any longer, Rory collected a smaller, finer brush from Bud’s arsenal of instruments and descended into the trench. Finding a comfortable position, she began to delicately brush the edges of the ancient flooring as Bud watched her from the corner of his eye. Knowing how excited she was, he just didn’t have the heart to scold her for disregarding his order to rest.
“Look how hard packed this stuff is,” she murmured, ignoring the dust billowing up her nose. “Once we clear away more of the debris, the size of the sanctuary ought to take shape.”
“If it’s even a sanctuary,” ever-logical Dr. Peck offered his steady wisdom to off-set his colleague’s enthusiasm. “It could be a number of things, Rory. We’ve discussed this already.”
Rory didn’t look up from her area of concentration. “All of the data supports the fact that this should be an ancient Muslim mosque. All of the artifacts we’ve tested simply strengthen that claim.”
Dr. Peck kept his eye to the viewfinder of the camcorder. “You’re basing your reasoning on fourteenth century manuscripts as well as regional folklore. Other than a few pieces of pottery and polished stone, we’ve found nothing further to substantiate your theory. Show me an ancient Koran beneath this flooring and I just might believe you.”
Rory paused, the smile gone from her face as she focused on her skeptical associate. “How do you think most archaeological sites are plotted and discovered, Dave? Ancient manuscripts have always been a fairly reliable source of information and I spent the better part of my post-graduate work locating this exact site. Are you telling me that I’ve been leading the university and its funds on a wild goose chase without good reason?”
Peck didn’t reply, refusing to delve into the familiar argument. Having worked and lived with Rory Osgrove twenty-four hours a day for the past fourteen months, he was coming to feel as if he had married her, and, like any married couple, they had their share of spats. But nothing could dampen the fact that there was a good deal of professional respect between them; not even the fact that David himself believed their dig to be nothing more than an ancient trash dump, even if Rory believed it to be the site of a ruined mosque.
So he bit his tongue, unwilling to detract from the reality that they had actually come upon something substantial this day. The more Rory and Bud worked, clearing away the loose debris, the more David began to realize that, perhaps, she really was on to something. Keeping the videotape rolling, he stood back to record the unfolding of events.
High above, the sky began to take on hues of golds and pinks, signaling the approach of a middle eastern sunset. The usual quitting time came and went, but the workers refused to leave; even among the laborers there was a palpable sense of discovery and they, too, were eager to see the results of their back-breaking labor.
When the sun finally dipped below the western horizon, the foreman cranked up the gasoline generator and the mercury vapor lamps hummed steadily beneath the brilliant night sky. Deep in the hole, Bud and Rory wallowed in sublevels of earth several centuries old, brushing carefully, picking, and then brushing again. Slow, steady work as the entire camp hovered expectantly, waiting for the miraculous discovery to reveal itself.
A miraculous discovery that was hardly valuable to the untrained eye, but to the archaeologists it was increasingly significant. By ten o’clock, several feet of flooring had been cleared, uneven and worn, and the activity continued steadily until Bud neared a particularly hard-packed section of earth. Suddenly, his careful efforts came to a halt.
“Whoa,” he muttered, dropping his brush and collecting a bulb syringe. Blowing cautiously at an odd-shaped mound of mud, he set the syringe down and grasped a dental scaler. Rory, covered with dirt and sweat, watched him curiously as he picked at the chalky-white lump.
“What’s wrong, Bud?” she asked softly.
Bud’s brow furrowed slightly, his ice-blue eyes intense as he picked away at chunks of dirt. “I’m not sure,” he replied, retrieving his brush once again. “This doesn’t seem to be… hell, I don’t know what this is.”
Rory set her brush down, peering over Bud’s shoulder. He felt her presence, inevitably distracted from his work. She had always affected him that way, from the first instant he’d beheld her hazel-eyed, chestnut-haired beauty almost two years ago. The very moment the head of the Archaeology and Anthropology Department of the University of California San Marcos had informed him of his new Middle East assignment and the driving force behind it.
Dr. Rory Osgrove was a new Ph. D. that had managed to convince the university’s board of regents that a substantially valuable find was located in the heart of the Turkish city of Nahariya. Enthusiastic and intelligent but lacking the experience of a seasoned archaeologist, the board had been adequately convinced to pursue her petition by assigning two of the university’s premier field professors to aid her efforts.
Drs. Dietrich and Peck had been called in from a minor dig in Cyprus to assist the new Dr. Osgrove at her Nahariya site. Bud had been reluctant at first, considering the very goal of her excavations was outlandish at best. But the moment he gazed at Rory’s eager, beautiful face, he began to think that committing himself to a dig in the coastal town of Nahariya wasn’t such a bad idea after all. And David had agreed, although far more hesitantly; where Bud went, he went, no matter how foolish the venture.
Which was why the dusty, milky mound of earth Bud continued to pick away at disturbed him so. He knew it wasn’t what they had spent over a year searching for; it didn’t belong in the middle of an ancient mosque, considering the holy temples of long ago were devoid of furnishings but for the few things the holy men could carry. No altars, no pews, and nothing that could be considered of any value.
Rory continued to hover over his shoulder, her gentle breath on his ear. Twice, Bud had nearly stabbed himself with his dental pick as he struggled to keep his mind on his work.
“What do you think it is?”
Her voice was breathy, soft, and an erotic chill ran down his spine. Swallowing hard, he realized his mouth had gone dry. “I really don’t know,” he responded steadily, rather pleased that he hadn’t come across like a giddy teenager. Setting the pick down, he collected the bulb syringe once again and blew hard. “It almost seems as if the mud is caked to something. Some sort of…”
Abruptly, a large chunk of earth fell away, landing on Bud’s hand and immediately drawing blood. Rory gasped, clutching at his injured fingers even as Bud himself moved to examine the wound. Their flesh touched in the hurried reaction to study his scraped knuckles and Bud suddenly realized he was inches from Rory’s flushed face.
She was staring at his lacerated skin, her lips pursed with concern. “Are you all right?” she demanded softly. Before he could reply, she was turning to the nearest worker, politely but urgently asking the man to retrieve the first-aid kit. Returning to Bud’s fingers, her tender touch was enough to make him forget the stinging cut.
“I’m fine,” he managed to whisper, his heart thumping madly against his ribs. Not to be too obvious that he was enjoying her attention, however, he smiled wryly when her green eyes focused on his face. “You worry like my mother.”
She frowned. “Fine, then. Bleed to death all over the dirt and see if I care.”
He laughed softly. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he was pleased when she didn’t release his fingers. “I’m not ungrateful for the concern, mom – I mean, Dr. Osgrove. Really.”
As Rory and Bud traded weak insults over the top of Bud’s bloodied knuckles, David handed the camcorder over to the foreman and picked up a fine-bristled brush. Brown eyes narrowed in concentration behind the thin-rimmed glasses, he began to chip away at the cavity left by the crumbling mud.
Beside him, Rory and Bud were still bickering over Bud’s lack of graciousness toward Rory’s concern. David knew it was a bluff on Bud’s part, considering he was in love with the woman. And had he not been so concerned with what was coming to light within the caked mud of a dozen centuries, Dr. Peck would have been happy to cast Bud a series of disbelieving glances. But he couldn’t spare the attention.
“Hey Bud,” he called softly, blowing gently at the ancient earth. “You’d better take a look at this.”
Bud tore his gaze away from Rory’s face, his features morphing from soft to serious in an instant. Peering closely at the muddled impression exposed for the first time in over a millenia, he forgot all about his injured hand. Snatching the brush from David, he continued to sweep the dirt away from the underlying relief.
“Christ,” Bud hissed, watching as another hunk of mud broke loose and tumbled to the ground.
“What?” Rory was poised over Bud’s left shoulder, squinting in the dim light of the vapor lamps. After a moment, her expression slackened. “It looks like… like a…”
“A Greco relief,” Dr Peck finished for her. As Bud continued to gently loosen the dirt, David pointed to the faint outline emerging into the heated night. “Look… definitely a Greek etching. Note the rounded cheeks, the cherub influence. And these wavy lines; hell, Bud, they look like vines, don’t they?”
Rory ceased to breathe as she listened to Peck reason out what was emerging from the foundation of her Muslim mosque. Certainly nothing of Greek influence should be here, a paganistic religion invading Allah’s sanctuary. Her heart began to sink as Bud finished chipping away at a small panel of dried earth. When it crumbled away completely, he set his brush to the ground and blew lightly at the surface.
No one dared to move as Bud studied the ancient veneer. The senior archaeologist on the dig with more than eighteen years experience, he clearly knew his field. After a lengthy pause, he sighed heavily.
“It’s Bacchus,” he said quietly, pointing at the vines encompassing the rounded face. “These are grape vines, indicative of the wine god’s mantle. He always appears the same in mythology relief.”
David lowered himself to sit beside Bud, studying the dirty surface. “There’s no way Grecian marble would find its way into a Muslim mosque,” he muttered, neglecting the fact that all of Rory’s hopes were being shattered by his analytical words. “The Muslims considered the Greeks and Romans to be pagans, their ancient temples unclean. In fact, they buried their sinful dead and trash in what they considered to be unconsecrated ground.”
“The grounds of an ancient Greek temple,” Bud concurred.
“A trash dump,” Rory’s voice was quiet. As Bud and David looked to her, varied degrees of regret in their eyes, she forced herself to stand tall and brush the dirt off her hands. No matter if her heart was breaking with the reality of the find, as undeniable as it was, she would not let on.
She would have liked nothing better than to argue the point. Fourteen months of labor and devotion demanded as much, but she realized as she gazed at the worn marble face that she could not, in good conscience, contradict Bud or David’s reasoning.
She should have prepared herself for the moment of failure. But she had been so sure of herself that she realized, somewhat dazedly, that she was unprepared to accept defeat in the least. In lieu of falling apart completely, she squared her shoulders with as much courage as she could muster.
“I guess you were right, Dave. This must have been an ancient trash dump,” before Peck could reply, Rory was making her way from the trench. “I suppose I should have listened to you. When we found shards of pottery and marble, I called them Muslim artifacts and you called them ancient trash. When I indicated that fourteenth century Byzantine manuscripts pinpointed this location, you told me they were open to interpretation. I should have… listened.”
She was out of the hole, moving through the cluster of workers surrounding the trench. As she marched toward the distant camp, David leapt to his feet with the intention of apologizing for her failure and his correct assumption. But Bud stopped him before he could follow her.
“No,” his ice-blue eyes were riveted to the khaki-shorts fading in the distance. “Let her go. We’ll talk about this later.”
David was genuinely remorseful, removing his gaze from the distant figure to focus on his friend and colleague. “I never meant… well, you know, to hurt her feelings. I would have been very happy to have been proven wrong about this whole dig. But what she was saying, Bud… it just never made sense to me. All of this hunting for the crown of thorns that Jesus Christ wore at Mount Calvary. Just what in the hell would a Christian relic be doing in a Muslim mosque?”
Bud shrugged faintly, his heart aching for the lovely young lady he was so fond of. “I don’t know, Dave,” he said quietly, glancing once more at the bias relief as if it contained some sort of curse. The longer he gazed at it, the more he wished he had never found it.
“The university is going to pull the funding for sure now,” Peck’s voice was quiet in his ear. “Rory will be lucky if she isn’t given a desk somewhere in a stuffy office for wasting such a tremendous amount of money and effort. With this disaster, they’ll never trust her again.”
Bud’s square jaw ticked. “But they trust me, and she’ll go where I go. I’ll resign my fellowship if they put her behind a desk somewhere, cataloguing trivial items that a monkey could take care of.”
Peck sighed, his gaze finding hazy white marble covered with filth. Sensing their employers’ disappointment in what had apparently been uncovered, the crowd surrounding the site began to disband as David knelt beside the faded relief.
“What made her think we’d find a Biblical relic in Nahariya, of all places?” he muttered softly, more to himself than to Bud. “I saw her data and although I admit it was powerful, it just wasn’t convincing enough. Certainly not convincing enough to warrant university funds for a complete dig.”
Bud glanced down at his associate, his mind a jumble of thoughts as he pondered the immediate future. When the university was informed of their failure and the site was dissolved. “She’s a biblical archaeologist, Dave. She delves into areas that most classical archaeologists scoff at,” brushing off his hands, he leaned wearily against the side of the ditch. “I don’t have to tell you that the university has powerful backing from both the Lutheran and Presbyterian leagues. Not to mention the fact that three ordained ministers sit on the board of regents. It was never surprising to me that she obtained approval for this dig. Besides, she can be really convincing.”
Still staring at the impression of Bacchus, Peck slowly shook his head before rising to his feet. Even if he had never truly believed in the purpose of the dig, still, it was disappointing that he had been proven right and Rory had been proven wrong. One year and two months of sweat and effort down the drain.
“Well, I’ve had enough for one night,” he said quietly, climbing from the trench. “I suppose we should call Dr. Becker and make a report.”
“I’ll do it,” Bud said quickly; too quickly. When David looked as if he didn’t believe the man’s word, Bud merely shrugged and hoisted himself from the hole. “I want to talk to Rory first. So she understands what’s going to happen.”
Peck emitted a long sigh. “She understands, Bud. She’s understood the potential consequences from the beginning. It doesn’t matter how you confirm the fact that her project is ended; it’s still going to hurt. And you can’t ease the pain no matter what you say.”
Bud gazed into the heated night sky, a billion stars glittering wickedly against the heavens. After a moment, he clucked with regret. “I realize that,” the two men began to move in the direction of the camp. “Still, I don’t want her to feel like she’s failed. We’ve still come up with some marvelous artifacts in spite of everything.”
The smell of roasting pig was heavy as they drew near to the encampment. David eyed the glow from the cooking fires, realizing he was going to miss the rustic atmosphere when they returned to the States. He was quite at home roughing it among the natives, which made him ideal for this profession. And the fact that he had the sensitivity of a rock, as Rory had so delicately phrased his character, made him perfect for a job that took him far away from the normal, compassionate populace.
A sensitivity, however, than was oddly intact this night. “But we didn’t find her crown,” he replied belatedly to Bud’s statement. “To her, that constitutes failure.”
Bud watched the man disappear into the clutter of canvas structures, chewing his lip in thought. No, they hadn’t located their ultimate goal and in a way, Bud blamed himself for the disappointment. Perhaps he could have worked harder. Perhaps there was something here and he was just too blind to see it. Or maybe he should have discouraged the dig from the beginning and saved them all the trouble.
The workers were eating beef and lentils as he made his way to his tent. A quick wash, a change of clothes, and then he would find Rory and try to comfort her. Try to comfort them both.