The Orientalizing Bead

WHEN CLARE THOUGHT OF the trip to Poggio Selvaggio later, what flashed before her was a dreamlike picture of a group gathered round to peer at some small incongruous thing that had assumed mysterious importance. The plan, as it evolved after Clare let Nikki know that Luke was coming, was that Luke would pick Clare up en route, and the whole group would meet at a certain crossroads in Umbria at ten, after William had collected some students at the train station. He would also be picking up two women from the Middle Eastern Institute in London, scholars he’d met at a conference on “The Future of the Past” the year before, who were travelling on to Jordan after a whirl through Tuscany. Carl and Anders Piersen would be coming too, from Chiusi, where they had recently moved into an apartment. Vittorio Cerotti, the inspector, would be along although his wife the Contessa couldn’t make it.

Oh, and how dreadful about Clare’s pen, Nikki said. “That’s a bitch — but hey, it’s sure to turn up.”

LUKE WAS THREE QUARTERS of an hour late. His antique car looked freshly washed and waxed, and the bulky, lionish totality of him looked intensely washed and waxed as well, contradicting the sullen look he gave her. The scrubbing hadn’t dispersed the cloud of pheromones jittering around the inside of his car, as he manhandled it through curve after curve, the ruby snake eye glinting.

When they came to the intersection at the bottom of her hill, he turned west instead of east, saying that Harold Plank wanted her to see the great Orientalizing tombs, just up the valley.

“When exactly did Sir Harold suggest this?”

He shrugged. His resolute blockish silence started to eat up the air. But then a lake of poppies swung into view, blood-red against the surrounding green, and a huge mound rose out of a field, a hill covered in grass and bushes and trees. If the land had not been cleared around its base for ongoing excavation work, this gigantic “melon tomb” really could have been mistaken for a true hill, bigger by far than the hillocks in Clare’s meadow. Of course, this had been built for generations of princely families. But the old question nagged her, the one Marta had tossed aside: where had all the less princely people been buried?

What did archaeologists have to say about that? she asked Luke. He too tossed the question aside. The valley had been the bread basket of Tuscany for almost three thousand years. Any smaller tombs down here — and the Etruscans always placed their cemeteries on a lower level than their cities, he told her, in a superior tone — would have been ploughed under centuries ago. Or they would have been victims of the tombaroli.

“Do you mean professional tomb robbers? Who exactly would they be?”

He shot her a look. “They don’t fill out census forms.”

He turned the car, headed back onto the smaller road that would take them to their meeting place.

THEY WERE VERY LATE. But Luke’s arrival was greeted with delight by the two women from the Middle Eastern Institute, who turned out to be old Cambridge pals. The reunion sparked laughter and merry bursts of Arabic. William Sands looked grim. Nikki took Clare’s arm and thanked her again for getting Luke to come along. Nikki was wearing a black mad-hatter hat and cut-off overalls with a huge enameled poppy pinned to the bib. “Here,” she said, “I found this in the market. It’s for you.” Before Clare could protest, she’d taken the brooch off and was pinning it to Clare’s shirt. Clare noticed her fingers were stained black with a pearly gleam that looked like India ink.

They drove off in a convoy to the upland meadow where the excavation’s other vehicles were parked and the trail to the dig began. Vittorio Cerotti had fallen asleep waiting in his car. By then it was well past noon. Luke took charge of the tweed-skirted British women as if it were his expedition they were on. Clare followed, curious what she might learn from their barky voices ringing through the trees.

She heard them quizzing him about how on earth he had ended up working for “dear old Harry Plank.” Whatever was Luke doing diddling around with the Etruscans? “Darling, we know you’re a Stone Age man at heart! Last we heard, you’d finagled your way in with that team taking another look at Qal’Jalam, now that Iraq has settled down a bit.” Luke said too right, he’d signed on as field supervisor, and in fact he’d come up with one fucking earth-shattering piece of stuff. Unfortunately, the director of that project was such a king-sized prick that the Iraqis had pulled their support and the finds got spirited off to Baghdad, likely never to reappear for another eight thousand years. But anyway, one did have to earn a living, and the Plank Foundation at least gave him a chance to get out of sodding Britain from time to time …

William Sands caught up with Clare. She struggled to keep one ear on the conversation up ahead. The women were trying to tease more information out of Luke about that earth-shattering find that had been spirited away. Had he really come on something dating from the Samarra period? At Qal’Jalam? Surely he was pulling a fast one …! He was teasing them right back: “Say no more, say no more — a nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat …!” William Sands was explaining that when they got to the top Clare would find that only a couple of trenches had been reopened so far, but he’d been sure that she would like to get a glimpse of the operation from the get-go. Further up the trail, Luke Tindhall was clearly revelling in the stream of questions the women were firing at him, egging him on. They wondered if his secret might have anything to do with the way he’d recently been spotted snuffling around in Eastern Turkey? Surely he didn’t think word wouldn’t get around …? “Let’s just say the sands of Qal’Jalam offered up a small epiphany,” he finally said. “Meanwhile, in a sacrifice to British archaeology, I have taken on the assignment of minding that considerable stunner you saw getting out of my car, keeping the lollypop warm for Harry.”

Laughter. “Good old Tindhall, you never change …!”

The British voices bounded ahead and were lost in the trees. Clare turned her attention to William’s fine gravelly stream of words.

WHEN THEY REACHED THE top William led Clare to a spot on the re-excavated ramparts, enormous stones that had been first discovered beneath much over-growth by Luisa di Varinieri’s father. The toponym attributed to this hill, “Poggio Selvaggio,” had given Count di Varinieri the clue to start looking around.

“Poggio Selvaggio,” Clare said. “Wooded hill? Or could selvaggio also mean ‘savage’? As in ‘savage hill’? Is that what you think? That it was long ago named by the locals, when there were still a few startling remains of a temple up here, or even a kind of ancient racial memory of all those colossal pagan-seeming buildings before they crumbled into dust?”

William’s fine approving smile helped wipe out the ridiculous chatter she’d just overheard. He said her suggestion was right on. The buildings themselves would have been built of timber. Only the foundations remained of this fortress settlement that once loomed formidably over the plain.

Lake Trasimeno gleamed below, a flat green jewel. William went on to describe how the view over the plain would have changed over the centuries: the marshes of the valley drained by the Etruscans, becoming fertile, only to be let go wild again by the Romans, then the swampy flat land battled over again and again in medieval times. “One of my colleagues describes it as a dance; referring, that is, to the movement of the very landscape over the centuries. So you see,” he said, “that we are not entirely lacking in poetic fallacy in my profession.”

How attractive this quality of his was, so serious, almost without humour. But deep. She thought again how she might want to crack a man like that, and never succeed, never know that some deep unexpected fire was going on inside. She was conscious, too, of Nikki and Anders and Carl a little farther away. Nikki had hiked ahead with the two of them, and now she was making some joke that had them all laughing. What did it mean that Carl and Anders had moved on to Chiusi? Had she, Clare, allowed her imagination to go wild in the matter of William and Anders? Had she really even seen what she’d thought she’d seen?

William reached into the bag slung on his shoulder and pulled out a small clay pan pipe. Without change of expression he began to play, until the rest of the party had gathered around, the haunting mood broken only by a loud cough from Luke.

For the benefit of the newcomers, William then explained what this settlement would have been like during the Etruscan ages. He walked them through the area where the tile-roofed houses would have been, and the workshop where a weaving industry had been pursued and pot-making too, and the storerooms where ceramic vats had been discovered still containing residue of wine — so it was possible to conclude even what sort of grapes these people had grown. He pointed out the foundations of the great temple, and the temple altar — its location verified by the spring of water in the woods, very near. This would have been essential for washing away the sacrificial blood. Nearby, a year ago, they’d found evidence of a healing sanctuary, hundreds of votive offerings, small terracotta body parts, hands, feet, breasts, even uteri and other internal organs, offered by the sick in the hope of a cure. The significant thing about this excavation, he said, was how it was revealing to their team the story of both elite and humble lives, a story quite different — broader — than could be learned in the excavation of a tomb.

A lovely feeling took hold of Clare; to think that a living sense of the past could be recaptured from such small clues as a scattering of loom weights, or the deepened shade of earth where kilns would have been, or the alignment and shape of foundation stones. She watched Carl step into a newly opened trench and run his hands over a column base carved almost three thousand years before, as if conferring with a colleague. Then Anders spotted a sherd of pottery, which proved to hold a fragment of an inscription. Such writing could have had magical intent, he said. The belief was that if one wrote down a name, one was able to affect it.

He raised his voice. “We have in our national museum in

Copenhagen many spear points with words inscribed, to make sure they hit their mark.” Then, louder still, “But when I write the name of William Sands, it will have no effect at all.” He strode off towards that spring of water in the woods.

Clare glanced around, wondering how on earth Nikki had taken this.

Instead, she found Vittorio Cerotti, the archaeology inspector, looming at her side.

HE TOOK HER ARM, then dropped it as if this might have been an affront. His whole face flushed; Clare even imagined his pointed beard taking on a fiery reflection as she felt the heat of his discomfort. He started telling her about the vandals that had struck this site during the winter, how he believed some precious votive objects might have been carried off, things that could have imparted considerable understanding about the religious life here.

“Tombaroli?” Clare asked, trying out the word.

Then, remembering Marta’s warnings about Sicilians masquerading as telephone workers, she said, “Would they be gangs of criminals, maybe even Mafia, from the south?”

Vittorio lowered his voice, even though the rest of the group were

peering into a trench some distance away. He said that tombaroli could be almost anyone. They could be from among the local villagers or farmers, or even from the towns. “These can also be people who puff themselves up with a misplaced sense of honour,” he said. “People claiming to be liberating our precious things, rather than letting the bureaucracy seize all the cultural treasures and lock them up in museums.

“The hard truth, however, is that most pieces are smuggled out of the country — all context lost — often broken up to be sold for bigger profit. Bits of the same vase sold to museums or collectors around the world. Even though there are international treaties now to prevent this, the depredation goes on.”

He took hold of her arm again, his beard quivering with the urgency of the message. “I hope, Signora Livingston, that when you write you will make clear that this activity is not to be considered part of our quaint Italian ways.”

He leaned closer. He said that unfortunately he was also compelled to tell her something he hoped she would not write about.

She promised.

She suspected this was what every writer did.

Very recently, Vittorio Cerotti said, artefacts had been turning up that were clearly from this very inland area. Some had been given over to the police by an honest antiquities dealer, others had been discovered after finding their way to a dealer in Switzerland. These were principally pieces of black bucchero with designs distinctive of this region, yes, but slightly different than material from any previously known provenance.

“Therefore we are forced to think there must be current illicit digging going on.” He turned morose eyes on her. “I believe that your uncle may have stumbled on the source of this material and intended to write about it. I fear that after his death some other persons have followed his clues, persons unscrupulous but intelligent. If you could do anything to help such further dislocation of precious knowledge, it would be an enormous service —”

He broke off. Clare followed his glance to the trench where now, instead of peering into it, the whole group was down in the trench itself, examining something the diggers had just unearthed.

WILLIAM SANDS WAS HOLDING a single bead.

Yes it was a tiny object, he was explaining, but a rare one in this context. He called the new students to come close. “Such a find is particularly useful, because it is what archaeologists consider a diagnostic,” he said. “It tells a story.”

As Clare craned forward, she saw it was a brilliant blue. Amazing to think of it lying all those centuries in the earth, then blinking awake to catch the light, like a knowing blue eye.

Indeed it was very old, William was saying, as if catching her thought. The bead would be from the Orientalizing phase, the time when exotic objects began to be imported from far abroad, from Egypt, or the Middle East, a possession indeed exotic in those times, before glassmaking in these parts. To find it here was highly significant, clearly a status symbol among the Etruscan elite, “which tells us much about both the age of this settlement, and who the inhabitants would have been.”

He explained to the students how any find, no matter how small, should never be removed from a trench before the exact find spot is marked by survey instruments, photos taken, the colour of the surrounding earth checked against a chart, after which the object should be zipped into a plastic bag — he took one from his satchel and popped the bead inside — ready to be transported to the conservation lab.

“So,” William continued, “Here we have added verification of the historical importance of this site —”

“Yes!” Luke Tindhall plucked the bag right out of William’s palm.

He unzipped the plastic, removed the bead, then passed it to one of the British women, inviting her to inspect it before passing it around to the others.

“But surely,” he said, “Dr. Sands has overlooked the far wider information one could glean if this bit of glass were sent for chemical analysis!”

He turned to the rest of the group, feisty and delighted. He explained how, by flaking away a sliver of glass and subjecting that to an electron microscope, the composition would indicate where the glass had actually been made, which might in fact reveal a local Etruscan glass-making tradition, a valuable clue to the technical skills in this society, telling much to anyone who cared enough about how the society procured its raw materials and organized its labour force, and even what the political ideologies might have been.

Clare could almost hear the shocked zinging up of eyebrows among the students at this performance. But one of the Middle Eastern Institute women looked to be stifling a smile. Insider talk began batting back and forth between Luke and the tweedy woman. There was some story they both knew about a bead that had been stolen at a dig in Turkey during a press conference intended to raise funds. “Poor old Ian,” Luke was saying, “The Turkish government was pressed by fundamentalists to shut the dig right down. I believe you were instrumental in helping sort that out, Marianne.”

“But who would want to steal something so small?” one of the students cut in. “Something of no monetary value whatsoever!”

I would, Clare thought.

The bead had come to rest in her hand. She looked down at the bright little object, and felt the weight of centuries. It nestled at the intersection of her fate line and her heart line, precious because of the deep well of information it contained. If it were hers, she would keep it just to herself. Need flared through her, leaving a remembered childish taste, and her fist curled tighter. A tiny sphere containing such an odd balm of consolation. She clenched it. Such a tiny thing. She did want it. Surely a very small thing to want.

No one was looking. She could slip it in her pocket. Later, she would wear it on a slim gold chain near her heart, a secret talisman. She glanced around. Still no one was looking; all were listening to Luke — before becoming transfixed by William’s white-faced reaction as he stepped up and grabbed Luke by both shoulders, radiating such rigid anger that Clare feared he’d crack right open as he shouted, “Enough of this!”

Clare opened her palm and let the bead wobble there. But — how had it happened — she looked again and the bead was gone. She saw it lying on the ground by her boot. She moved her foot to cover it up.

Everyone remembered passing the bead to someone else. Confusion, consternation. After a moment, Clare said, “Let’s search!”

She got down on her knees. Others did too. As she palmed it away from where she had been standing, she had no idea how this would play out.

BUT SHE COULDN’T STAND the look on William’s face. Not just the loss. His realization, too, that someone in the group was to blame for carelessness, or worse.

“Oh eureka!” she heard herself shout.

She handed the bead back to William. His look — as if she were the person he would have expected to solve the crisis.

Then he strode off without a word, and headed down the trail.

“WELL YOU CAN STRIKE that one off the list of duty visits,” Luke said to the tweedy Marianne. He was driving the two women to the station to catch the train on to Rome. “Imagine dumping you on that hilltop after marching you up there in this heat and then waffling on and on, with so little to show. No wonder the bloke’s college is rethinking the funding.”

“It is?” The big one in the backseat with Clare leaned forward, releasing a puff of camphorated air as the seat shifted with her weight. Luke bumped from the field. Clare’s head hit the ceiling.

“They’re about to cut him off,” Luke said. “And so they should. I’ve read the field reports, yards of filler. You saw it today, a huge kerfuffle about what? One bleeding bead.”

“Oh but listen —” Clare said.

Marianne interrupted, “I thought for a moment I’d stumbled into that endless battle waged last year in the pages of The Past Today. Old Warberton hammering away at his pet theory, based on the evidence of a few carnelian beads, that Troy had been just a small barbarian outpost. And Heimlich fighting back.”

“Heimlich out-manoeuvred him all right.”

“Tindhall, you are droll as ever!” Further cries of delight. “Whatever are you doing among the humourless fate-bound Etruscans, when the Middle East has need of you?”

“Inshallah! The will of my employer.”

A burst of Arabic then, out of which popped words that sounded like jamilla and jager and, alarmingly, bint — at which both women flicked a glance at Clare. Marianne said, “Har Batata?” The fat one giggled. Luke shrugged.

“OKAY, WHY DID YOU do that?” Clare asked when the two women had been left on the train platform.

“What, pray?”

“Everything you could to ruin William Sands’s reputation, just for starters.”

“I suppose you think your friend Harry has limitless funds. Listen, there are a dozen worthy projects going on here just now. My job, like it or not, is to separate the wheat from the chaff. Why should any of those scarce resources go to bolster the work of a pedantic pin-sized intellect like Sands?”

“That’s pathetic.”

“Right. I should amend that. An unbearable pedantic, whose ragtag team is harbouring an architect facing criminal charges in Berlin and an hysterical Danish poofter.”

“You’re absurd.”

She closed her eyes. She would not spare him another thought. All that chatter in Arabic. Har Batata! He made her think of those boys who kicked girls in the schoolyard when she was little, just because they were girls. How she and another girl used to keep veering close to the kicking boys. They were the damaged boys; you could see it in their curiously mean faces. It was so easy to get them into trouble, exciting too, to shriek and run away.