Nine

They spend the following day working carefully at the dig, and while Nancy and Isabella begin to lift the bones, Mat and Edward start to make some progress with their trench.

Once more, Eric watches from a mound, clutching his hare tightly.

They’ve gone really deep now, and have found something that looks like cut wood, not as exciting as the other trench, but possible evidence of settlement, and if the full picture of the cist is to be made clear, they need to build up an impression of the surrounding environment, too.

“Should we prop?” Mat asks Edward, mid-morning.

Edward looks at the trench.

“Not yet. No. If we were deeper, or the substrata less coherent, I would say yes.”

Mat doesn’t look convinced.

“Are you sure? We’ve gone much deeper, even this morning.”

Edward knows the boy is right, really; the pit is deep. But they don’t have time to go and buy wood on the mainland and make the props and fit them, when all he really wants to do is see what the bones are showing.

“We’re okay. We’ll press on.”

Mat takes one last look at the ground level, now some way above his head, and back at the ladder they use to climb into the trench, and then he bends to his work again.

*   *   *

Eric stands sentinel, watching Nancy and Isabella. He has come a little closer today, and holds the hare tightly to his chest, stroking its back from time to time.

The girls lift each bone very, very carefully, as if they are dangerous, because they are so fragile they could shatter at any moment.

As far as they can see, there are no remains of clothing, but there might be microscopic fragments that can be identified in the lab, later.

Then Nancy sees something.

“Hello,” she says. “What are you?”

Apart from the bones, the grave has seemed bare, but now they have untwined the arms of the man from the arms of the child (as she likes to think of them), and lifted the child’s skull and ribs, she has a better view of the adult.

“Something here!” she calls.

Edward doesn’t hear, but Mat does.

“They’ve found something. Shall we go and look?”

“No…” says Edward. Then, “Yes, dammit. Come on.”

“I’ll be right there,” Mat says. “Just finish this.”

Edward climbs out first, up the ladder, and over to the cist. Mat turns to follow, and is halfway up the ladder, when something catches his eye.

In the end wall of the trench, behind the ladder, just below the surface, something is poking out of the soil.

He pulls his trowel from his back pocket, and takes a little scrape.

What he sees intrigues him so much, he makes another little scrape. And then a bigger one. He sees metal, and now he carefully digs a whole chunk of soil from the side of the metal.

He realizes what he is looking at, and jumps in fright. His feet slip on the damp rungs of the ladder, and he flails at the earth as he falls, dislodging a vast section of the wall, which falls away freakishly.

He shouts, but he’s already lying at the bottom of the trench, covered up to his chest in the fall.

Now, almost half exposed, the back end of a bomb hangs above his head.