Five

There are moments in everyone’s life, Edward thinks, when you just have to go with gut instinct. Especially at those times when you are faced with a fifty-fifty call, if there’s even the slightest feeling tugging you one way, you’d better do what that feeling tells you.

That’s what Edward convinces himself, and keeps repeating.

Time and again, Mat has to draw his attention back to the pit they’re in, because Edward keeps stopping and looking across to where the girls are working, desperate to see something come up in the mound. Anything.

The morning wears on.

The mood worsens.

The only word they hear is spoken by the voice behind the hedge.

“Eric!”

Edward sighs.

“Let’s take lunch, too. We had an earlier start than normal.”

No one speaks.

*   *   *

Eric is back on his new mound sooner after lunch today. They’re still chewing sandwiches and munching chips when he reappears. It doesn’t seem to bother him that they’re not working, he stands watching, as interested as ever.

Finally Edward can stand it no longer.

“Come on,” he says. “Let’s give the boy something to be proud of.”

Nancy winks at Isabella and taps the side of her head, twice. Languidly.

*   *   *

In half an hour, Isabella shrieks.

She actually shrieks.

“Oh God! I think I found something.”

She has.

*   *   *

The afternoon goes by quickly, as the two girls begin to uncover their remarkable find. Edward and Mat cannot fit in the trench to help, too, but they have abandoned their own dig; it is too exciting not to watch.

They have found a pile of stones, the sort of thing that does not seem very exciting to anyone but an archaeologist.

A pile of stones, but a particular sort of pile, a cairn, and Edward knows that it is very likely that there is a find underneath the cairn.

He has seen one before, and he is impatient. But these things have to be done properly. First the last of the soil must be removed from around the stones, and then the stones must be photographed, and drawn on grid paper, and only then will they be able to lift them, and find out for sure if what they have found is what Edward thinks it is: a Viking burial.

He has a doubt. He has a doubt because the cairn is small, much smaller than the burial sites he has seen before. He worked on one once that was vast. Beneath the stones lay the remains of a Viking longboat, most of the wood long rotted away, but obvious to the expert eye, nevertheless.

This one is small, and will barely have room for a single body, but something convinces Edward that he is right.

He paces up and down behind the girls, trying to stop himself from telling them what to do every five minutes. They know what to do, because he taught them himself. Mat is being more sensible, sitting on the grass by the girls’ trench, helping them when he can, and sifting through the spoil when he can’t.

Eric watches, wordlessly, though sometimes he lifts the hare to his lips.

Finally, they begin to raise the stones. Edward holds his breath, and as they lever away enough of the stones, he turns and actually punches the air, silently.

“Yes,” he mutters under his breath.

Under the cairn is a cist; exactly what he had been hoping for, a box in the ground, with slabs of stone for walls. Essentially a primitive coffin.

A stone box, with a stone lid.

Edward steps into the trench.

“Okay now, people, this is going to take all of us.”

They cramp into the trench, at each side of the lid.

Their fingers curl under what lips of the lid they can feel. Their flesh touches stone, which has not seen light for eleven centuries.

They are silent, but they catch each other’s eyes, and see the suppressed excitement in each other.

Edward is wrong, however, even with all four of them, they cannot lift the lid.

Edward straightens his back, curses.

Then a shadow is cast over the trench, and he looks up to see Eric.

Edward considers the situation. He looks at the boy, young, but strong-looking.

“Do you want to help us, Eric?” he says.

Eric doesn’t say anything, but he places his hare gently on the grass, and climbs down into the trench with the others.

Now it’s even more of a squeeze, but they just manage to find a place to stand.

“On three,” says Edward. “One…”

But Eric is already lifting.

My God, thinks Edward, but the boy is strong. He can feel Eric doing most of the lifting, and they follow his lead, as they shift the stone up and then to one side, and slide it onto the grass.

They look.

“Oh my…” says Isabella.

“… God,” says Nancy.

There are bones in the cist. They are long human bones.

They are somewhat jumbled however, and it takes each of them a moment to realize there is more than one set of bones in the coffin, but it is true, for there below them in the stone box are two skulls.

They start to decode what they are seeing. There is a larger skull, and larger skeleton, and a smaller.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Nancy asks.

Edward says nothing.

“Yes,” says Mat, simply. “The larger one is holding the smaller one. That is how it seems to me.”

*   *   *

Eric steps back, picks up his hare, and goes to stand on his new mound again.

He shakes his head, gently.

“Well, so it is,” he says, though no one hears him.