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outrage she realized that she might not be the first here after all.
As much for the principle of the thing as anything else, she fished pegs and string from her pocket and
marked out a square of ground. Another pocket yielded a miniature digger's kit: trowel, hand-fork, probe, stiff
wire brush, all rolled neatly into a tool-holder. Bernice began to dig.
Instinct or luck had led her to choose exactly the right spot. Careful digging revealed the shape of a long thin
segmented bone. Gently Bernice brushed away the earth. She was looking at the skeleton of a finger - a
finger that ended in a long, sharp claw.
With growing excitement Bernice went on working. She uncovered a second finger, a third, fourth and fifth,
and finally the skeleton of a giant clawed hand.
She sat back on her heels, considering. Presumably the rest of the creature was buried here. Using the hand
as a basis for estimation it must have been an animal of colossal size.
Some now-extinct beast, the planet's equivalent of a dinosaur or a mammoth? But it had been buried at the
base of the Tower, with an altar watching over it. An altar used for human sacrifice. A sacred beast then,
something the inhabitants of the planet both feared and worshipped.
Carried away with the excitement of her find, all danger forgotten, Bernice went on digging. She uncovered an
immensely long straight bone, the equivalent of the ulna in the human arm. But the radius, the bone that
should be connected to it, was missing. Some scavenging animal perhaps? Bernice fished out a magnifying
glass and studied the bone. The ligaments connecting ulna to radius were not torn but severed, cut through
with a sharp tool.
Bernice was outraged. Not only was she not the first, which was quite bad enough, but the site had been
desecrated, vandalized! A potentially priceless specimen had been ruined. And who knew how much more
damage had been done?
She raised her eyes to check the site for further damage, and found that someone was standing over her.
She raised her trowel defensively, and then saw with relief that the newcomer was a woman in an expensive
looking grey travelling cloak with a fur hood. She looked neat, elegant and utterly composed. In a crisp,
authoritative voice the woman said, "Who are you, and what are you doing here?"
The voice, the manner and, come to that, everything else about the woman got right up Bernice's nose.
Including her appearance - no, especially her appearance. Bernice straightened up, very conscious of her
muddy field boots, mud-stained jeans and scruffy safari jacket.
"I might ask you the same questions."
"You might, but you'd be ill-advised to," said the woman sharply. "I know what I'm doing. You presumably
don't or you wouldn't be here at all."
"I'm an accredited archaeologist and I'm making a preliminary study of this site - which happens to have been
vandalized." Bernice went over to the attack. "Do you know who's responsible?"
"Vandalized? How?"
"Something's buried here, some immensely large creature."
"I know that. What do you mean, vandalized?"
"At least one important bone is missing from the skeleton. For all I know others may have been taken." The
newcomer was silent for a moment, staring not so much at as through Bernice.
Abruptly she said, "An archaeologist, you say? Off-planet, presumably? This world doesn't run to such
luxuries."
Luxury indeed! thought Bernice Summerfield.Supercilious bitch! "I'm on a grant from the Ellerycorp
Foundation," she said, naming one of her old employers at random. "This is just a preliminary survey. We'll
be mounting a full-scale expedition later."
"Not if you've got any sense you won't. The political situation here is extremely unstable - and there are other
problems too."
"Such as?"
"You wouldn't understand if I told you. Are you staying in the village?"
Bernice nodded without speaking.
"I advise you to get back there straight away. It will be dark soon, and this place isn't safe after dark. Get
yourself off this planet and don't come back." Unexpectedly the woman smiled. "It's not always a good idea,
you know, digging up the past."
With a nod of dismissal she turned and strode away. Bernice noticed for the first time that a grey horse was
waiting quietly, reins dangling, at the edge of the burial ground. The woman swung herself gracefully into the
saddle and galloped away.
"I hate horsy women," muttered Bernice. "One of the local aristos no doubt, thinks she owns the place and
probably does."
She looked up at the sky, realizing it had got suddenly darker.
"Still, I think I'll take her advice about getting back to the village." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]