The evening meal was taken in an air of celebration. Everyone, Rhys included, basked in the glow of discovery. As the glow faded and exhaustion from the busy, discovery-filled day took over, Rhys excused himself and went to the Finds tent. Yoshi was already there, poring over coins and calendar in the steady glow of the camp lights in the empty room. Rhys sat down opposite her at a sorting table, watching her make notes in her field journal. Eventually he began a lazy examination of the calendar.
“Rhys?”
Rhys raised his head. Yoshi had laid five coins in a row before her and was studying them intently. A sixth stone rectangle was in her hand. “Do you agree with Dr. Burton about these markers? That they were coins paid in tribute to Ets-eket?”
“Markers?” Rhys repeated, rubbing his eyes. “Dare I suppose your use of that term means you don’t agree with him?”
Yoshi shrugged. “I’m not sure.” Her mouth twisted wryly. “No, sir, I don’t believe I do. Look.” She pushed her journal toward him. An enhanced image of one of the coins was displayed in its flat hologrid. “This is the first marker in this set. The back of it. See the scroll design under the little building?”
“The little building? Not a sacrificial altar?”
“Well, that’s what it looks like to me.” There was a definite note of defensiveness in that. “Frankly, I think it looks more like a… a transport shuttle than it does a sacrificial altar.”
Rhys smiled crookedly. “Whatever. Aye, I see the scroll work.”
Yoshi brought up a second image on the journal. “This is the second marker. Same area.”
Rhys concentrated on the play of looping lines below the squat, raised rectangle Burton had dubbed an altar. His brow furrowed of its own accord before he realized what he was frowning at.
“It’s different,” Yoshi prompted. “A different pattern than the first. And here’s the third…
That scroll, too, was slightly different than either of the others. Rhys rubbed a finger over his lower lip. “Well, they are hand carved. Could be minor variations.”
“Some of them aren’t so minor. There’s a second set with the tower on the back. The scroll work on those is also unique to each piece, almost like a signature. But look….” She adjusted the display so it showed the flip side of the coin. “Here’s marker number one… and number two… and number three. And here’s one from a tower set. The effigies of Ets-eket are identical. Any variation could be accounted for by wear—it’s fairly soft material, almost like, oh, soapstone.”
Rhys picked up the journal and examined it closely, rotating the image on its display. The flame of fascination kindled in his weary brain. “They are identical. These aren’t hand carved, they’re… pressed. Good God, look! Here’s a mold mark!” He ran his finger along one edge of the 3-D image.
“That’s another thing,” said Yoshi, her eyes gleaming, “they’re not stone. But they’re not synthetic either. They’re… smeltered composites. Maybe that’s what the tower was used for. ”
“Or this could be a hoax.”
Yoshi shook her head. “I dated some of these myself. They’re anywhere from 4,500 to 5,000 years old. The Etsatat evidently had some low level technology even then. I suppose they’d have to—they moved those building blocks of theirs from a quarry ten klicks away. There’s something else, too. These ‘wear marks’ of Dr. Burton’s?” She pointed out the feature in the journal image with the end of a tiny scraping tool. “I don’t think they’re wear marks. They’re too… regular. I think these markers were intentionally scored. And I also think they were worn or carried on a thong of some sort. Look how the holes are worn at the top edge.”
Rhys took the coin she offered him and peered at the top edge of it. She was right, it did seem to be scored, if randomly. And the hole in Ets-eket’s headdress was indeed elongated toward the top. He picked up a second marker. This one bore the same scratches along the top edge, but unlike those on the first coin, they continued down one side edge as well. A third specimen had score marks almost all the way around it. Something ticked at the back of Rhys’s mind. “Record keeping,” he murmured. “Not coins, but punch cards?”
“I don’t know, sir. But that would make sense taken in context with the calendar. Maybe the scores represent days.” She nodded to the tablet of stone that lay between Rhys’s forearms.
He glanced at her sharply, then turned his eyes to the calendar. “If you don’t stop calling me ‘sir,’ I’m going to have to cast a spell on you.” His right hand gave an absent tug on the thong of the Pa-Kai spirit bag that hung, always, around his neck. “And don’t think I can’t. It’s well within my shamanistic abilities.”
Yoshi, the words “yes sir” on her lips, blushed and fell silent.
Rhys was fingering the series of representations on the flat hunk of carved rock. “OK, we know these things: Etsat’s rotation is 31.2 hours. The current Etsatat week is divided into nine days and the month is four weeks long; intercalary days are added once a year at new year.” He ran his finger down one side of the tablet. “I’d say that we’re looking at basically the same calendar here.”
Yoshi nodded. “The calendar—if that’s what it is—seems to show one Etsat month.”
“So,” Rhys continued, “Burton thinks the altar represents worship days, the tower and flame represent sacrificial days, and the wagons, days when tribute is collected.”
Yoshi raised dark eyes to his face. “Three sacrifice days, three tribute days and three worship days in every week? Doesn’t that seem…” The word twitched, uncertain, on her lips, then she dropped her eyes.
“Excessive?”
She shrugged one slender shoulder and Rhys knew that had not been what she had been going to say.
“There is the matter of the tribute train depicted on the gate.”
The other shoulder shrugged. “And the dancing slaves?”
Rhys was momentarily speechless. In the three years he’d known her he had never heard Yoshi use that sarcastic tone of voice. “You really don’t like Professor Burton, do you?”
She was toying with the end of the blue-black braid that fell across one shoulder. “Is it necessary that I do?”
“It… it distresses me that you don’t. Drew Burton is an important person in my life. Why don’t you like him?”
The braid’s thong loosened under Yoshi’s nervous fingers. “I suppose… he… reminds me of… Uncle Kenji.”
Rhys listened for a moment to the antiphonal tag team of night insects, using that sparse cover to regroup. “Yoshi Umeki, I don’t believe you’ve ever lied to me before in your life.”
Her hands jerked, the thong disappeared and her unbound hair washed about her shoulders in a black tide. The look she gave him was both tragic and defiant. “I’m not lying! You remember Uncle Kenji. Father’s eldest brother. An odious man—”
“I remember him. What particular odious trait of Uncle Kenji’s comes to mind in this case?”
The insect chorus swelled into the pause. “He was a xenophobe.”
Stunned, Rhys murmured, “Actually, he was a bigot. Your father’s words, I believe.” He got up and went to pour overly-strong coffee into a blue metal cup.‘He didn’t return to the table, instead moving to stare out into a stygian forest night that was interrupted only briefly by the golden glow of camp lights. Funny, how some cliches of dig life were allowed to perpetuate themselves regardless of technology’s advance. Dr. Burton’s camp was like a slightly off-kilter reproduction of its ancestors—indus-trial-strength coffee in tin-enameled cups, camp lights that flickered as if a fuel-powered generator drove them and not the photon core of a time-altered spacecraft. He sipped the coffee; it was comfortingly bitter.