17

Tuesday, 23 June

Day Two

It was too early to be morning.

Esben pushed himself out of bed and washed his face. The muscle relaxer he had taken had worked overnight and was still working. At least his back wasn’t awful. Just stiff. Stiff was his normal.

Out a north-facing window, he saw the expected sight of Jorunn on the grass, leading others in a sunrise yoga session. One of the early risers was Kate. Jorunn and the rest were in child pose—the only pose he could name—then shifted to a position with the butt raised high. Very high.

From where he stood—and he knew he shouldn’t be spying, but—he had a perfect view of Kate. Her cobalt-blue leggings contoured her curves from hip to ankle, and a black tank top showed off strong shoulders. The messy bun atop her head drooped to the yoga mat. From the butt-up position, the group lowered themselves then pushed up on straightened arms, raising head and shoulders high, keeping pelvis and legs low. In this position, Kate’s belly spilled out from the bottom of the tank top. He liked her shape, her sturdiness. Pleasantly chubby.

When he spotted Erik watching Jorunn and the others as well, guilt, shame, and anger pulled him away from the window.

At breakfast, Erik asked him, “What’s her story?”

“Who?”

“Kate,” he whispered. “Like, what sort of person is she? Is she single? You know her better than anyone here, aside from her student, I guess.”

Esben noted Erik’s wedding band but shelved the thought. “Kate has a girlfriend,” was what he said.

Erik frowned as he chewed.

Jorunn and Alex took a seat next to Erik. Kate entered the mess hall and grumbled about being too late for the muffins, which were long gone.

“Hey!” she said to them, all smiles as she plopped next to Esben on the wooden bench before stabbing a chunk of scrambled eggs with her fork.

There was plenty of space on the bench, on other benches. But Kate sat next to him, a hand’s width separating their thighs.

“How’s your back?” she asked him.

“It’s better,” he said as he pulled his gaze away from her glistening forearm. To the group, he asked, “How was your yoga?”

“Pleasant as always,” Jorunn said. “Will you join us this season?”

Esben moued. “I do not do yoga.”

“You could do whatever exercises you learned at physical therapy,” Kate said. “It’s less about doing the pose everyone else is doing and more about the ambiance. Like passive peer pressure. You do what you can, what your body needs. I could lend you my mat if you want.”

“You brought your own mat?” Alex asked.

“Yeah. When Jorunn told me she does it every morning here, I figured, why not?”

“Maybe I’ll start doing yoga,” Erik said.

Alex chortled. “Why do yoga when you run every day?”

Esben sipped his coffee, then cradled the mug in his palms.

“Maybe Jorunn could lead an evening session as well,” Kate said. “Though we don’t need someone to run a session. We could just, you know, do it. I know I’m sore after a day in the field, whether I’m on my knees or not.”

Esben hid behind his mug.

Kate’s elbow grazed his. “Anyway, Ben, consider it an open invitation to join in on my own ‘make my back less achy’ session later, before dinner. Loaned mat as an added incentive.”

“If you get Ben to do yoga,” Alex said to Kate, “I will give you my mat.”

“It is a good mat,” Jorunn said. “I chose it for him. And he never uses it.”

Kate smiled warmly at Esben, and he mirrored it before returning his gaze to his coffee. “I will consider it,” he said.

“Well, I never turn down a running partner,” Erik said as he stood, collecting his plate and cup. He gave Kate a wink, but she just kept on eating.

After lunch, the seasoned staff began their first on-site lecture, and Kate was all ears.

When the group reached the roped-off area of the mead hall, Alex and Jorunn joined Kate while Ben followed Erik to the other end of the excavation area.

“The mead hall is a newer discovery,” Erik said, his bare, bronzed arms glistening in the summer sun. “We don’t have a structure over it yet, so we only open specific areas at a time for excavation, such as what you see here, multiple active units following a row of ancient post holes, noticeable by their dark, organics-stained soil. We then rebury the excavation areas at the end of every season with backfill to protect them. One day, we hope to reconstruct this mead hall, as well as the other structures, like they did with L’Anse aux Meadows, the only other known Norse settlement in Newfoundland.”

“The working hypothesis,” Alex said to the group, “is that Meadows, being in the far northern reaches of the island, was the first settlement. Andre Hjem is about 300 kilometers south of L’Anse aux Meadows and aptly named. Our site is dated slightly later, the Vikings’ second home.”

“We like to joke it is the settlers’ winter holiday residence,” Ben said, grinning when he received chuckles.

“Unfortunately,” Alex said, “we don’t have any written records hinting toward what this site might have been called or who settled here. So we must compare the artifacts, structures, and activity areas we unearth here to other sites.”

“Funding for reconstruction,” Erik continued, “will probably take a while. It took eight years after the discovery of Meadows for Canada to put the site under national protection, and another ten for UNESCO to name it a World Heritage Site.”

“Andre Hjem was discovered fourteen years ago,” Jorunn said, “but excavations did not happen every year until Esben suggested we create a field school. Andre Hjem is now a recognized and protected site with Parks Canada, though not yet a UNESCO site. UNESCO is, unfortunately, suffering from the same lack of funds as most archaeological firms worldwide.”

Sad but understandable. There were just too many present problems and serious issues expected in the near future for most people to care about what happened a thousand years ago.

“Aside from reconstruction,” Erik said, “we hope UNESCO will advertise Andre Hjem in the same breath as Meadows, generating tourism revenue.”

“He dreams of tour packages,” Alex said to Kate. “A visitor center.”

“He wants to be the site’s poster boy,” Jorunn whispered in her other ear, and Kate snorted.

“Alright, everyone,” Erik said. “Next stop, the cemetery.”

—

Esben watched Kate as they approached the building that covered the cemetery.

“It’s huge!” she blurted, joy written across her face. “I knew you guys had funding, but yeesh!”

Erik unlocked the door to the building and ascended the ramp leading to the platform where visitors could take in a better view of excavations in progress or read various informative posters on the wall.

“You can see why we enclosed this space with a building,” Esben said as he walked around the border of the cemetery. “For one, it protects ongoing excavations from the elements, but also it can be locked, an added deterrent against looting.”

“Was the site ever looted?” a student with red glasses asked.

“Yes, actually,” Erik said as he walked through the crowd on the platform to a poster on the wall that showed a map of the site. “The cemetery was looted by artifact hunters several years before archaeological teams stepped in. But the looters didn’t disturb much.”

“Did they take bones?” another student asked.

“From what we can tell, one burial was disarranged. That person’s accompanying grave goods may have been taken.”

“Were there any burial mounds found here?” a young man with blue hair asked.

“No,” Erik said, “strangely not. And no ships, either. Too far inland. Everyone was buried in the same field, no coffins or shrouds so far as we have found.”

“Is there any evidence of indigenous burials or trade goods here?” an older volunteer asked.

“Not yet,” Alex said, “though we have not yet excavated the extent of the site.”

“Why are the burials excavated at all?” Sam asked. “Wouldn’t it be better to leave them where they are?”

“In most cases,” Erik said, “I would agree. But as this is the only Viking cemetery in Canada, it was deemed of enough scientific and cultural significance for a complete study. Eventually, the remains will be reburied here, in an undisclosed, geologically sound area. The poster you see Professor Roth so carefully examining—”

Kate whipped around at the sound of her name, then resumed reading the poster.

“—is about the burial of a woman we nicknamed the Queen. Not because she was royalty. We can’t know that, and none of the burials suggest such a high status. But she was the first burial we uncovered that was undisturbed with near-perfectly preserved bones. She was of advanced age but healthy and had as burial goods a sword, dagger, jewelry, pottery that had once held mead, and everything else in the burial, including the bones, showed that they’d been in contact with mead. Some believe mead had leaked throughout the burial. But I like to think those who buried the Queen poured the mead over her body as a libation.”

“My kind of funeral,” a student joked.

“My kind of queen,” Kate said, and some of the young women cheered.

When she finished reading the poster, Kate took photos of the posters, students, staff, and of the excavation area. She didn’t stop taking photos until they left the cemetery building.

Kate could deny it if she wanted, but she was a photographer.

Kate found Ben hunched over a standing wooden sifter frame, removing a broken screen. She heard Jorunn in her head, nagging that he shouldn’t be bending forward. He should have asked for help—perhaps he was too stubborn for that.

She took a photo. Of the sifter, of Ben’s hands, his face hidden by his floppy hat. After he noticed her approaching, he flinched, shook his hand, and let the frame fall to the ground.

She grimaced. “Shit, sorry I startled you.”

He stuck the side of his left thumb in his mouth, likely having been stabbed by a staple.

“Hope you’re up to date on your tetanus shot,” she said.

He examined his thumb, then tightened the waist of his old, dirt-stained shirt around it. “You have been photographing a lot today,” he noted as he picked up the frame.

“Just documenting. You’ll thank me later when you need press-ready photos of the site and its excavators and have twenty to choose from for any given shot.”

“And how many photos did you take of the cemetery?”

“At least eighty.”

He grinned and finally broke the screen loose from the frame. “There will be no photos of you, though,” he said as he picked up the new screen that didn’t have a tear down the middle.

“I’m sure someone will grab a few. I don’t really like having my photo taken.” Candid photographs of her were almost always unflattering, and she’d just photographed Ben as he toiled, sweaty, brow furrowed in concentration. “I’m sorry. I didn’t ask if you were okay with me photographing you.”

“It’s fine, if they are for you.”

“Me, you, and your records.”

With a staple gun, Ben fastened the new screen to the wood frame. He stood the sifter on its legs, gripped the sides, and rocked it back and forth.

“How’s your back holding up?” Kate asked.

“I will live to see another day,” he said with a smile.

She carried the sifter as they strode to the mead hall locale where students were scraping away at their test units, some of them using a trowel for the first time. The freshly de-turfed area where they dug was thought to be barren of any major features, which made this the perfect spot for first-day student archaeologists.

Experienced archaeologists, like Zoe and a few volunteers, removed last summer’s protective backfill from the active mead hall excavation areas.

Kate placed the repaired sifter next to the one Sam was using. Red-glasses Mina quickly commandeered it, hoisting the boxed screen to its feet while another student, blue-fauxhawk Jake, poured a bucketful of dirt over it.

Kate strolled down the line of sifting screens, watching, examining, expecting students to find many No, that’s just a rock maybe-artifacts and hoping nothing of interest slipped past their over-eager but semi-educated gazes.

When she turned to Ben, he was not looking at the screens but rather at her.

“I found something,” Sam called from the line of screens.

Kate smiled at Ben, who offered a small smile in return, and they made their way to Sam.

“I hope it’s pirate treasure,” Kate joked. Sam crooked a brow at her, and she added, “Kidding.”

“Viking coinage would be a spectacular find, though,” Ben said.

“It’s pottery, I think.” Sam held a tiny triangular chunk of brown in the sunlight.

Ben took the fingertip-sized object, slid on his black-frame rectangular reading glasses, and examined the brown chunk closely. He breathed through his nose as he concentrated, closing an eye. From what Kate could see, the object was rough on the edges but smooth on both planes. It definitely resembled a sherd, which was the extent of her knowledge about ceramics.

Ben looked at Kate over his glasses, then dramatically turned to Sam and back again, then grumbled. He was clearly acting, the way one might with young kids.

To Sam, he asked, “Where is your unit?”

Sam led Ben to their unit, squared off by string and neatly leveled to about hand deep.

“Hey, what’s this?” a student called by his unit where he had half-exposed a piece of what looked like rusted iron.

“I’ll go get the artifact bags,” Kate said, happily trotting to the supply box.

Veholt Field Journal — Day 2

First day at the site. The cemetery building held up well from last year. No rodent burrows this time. No dead animals.

Artefacts were revealed in the new stripped area within the mead hall. Students learned how to record artefact information (datum placement, GPS coordinates from the total station), and to photograph artefacts and properly label artefact bags. Had to ask Prof. Roth to take over the total station.

Standing all day didn’t do much to trigger Esben’s back pain and stiffness. But digging on his knees at a unit, leaning in to look at the total station’s easting, northing, and elevation xyz coordinate reading, lifting anything heavy, or sitting in uncomfortable chairs, or, apparently, fixing sifting screens—these things thoroughly wrecked his body.

By the end of the first day, his back was stiff and hurting, his hips in acute pain. After he finished his journal entry, he took a slow stroll around camp to combat the stiffness. Jorunn, Alex, and Erik were chatting in front of the camp house. Some students were playing football, others relaxing while smoking something other than cigarettes, and some, paired off, appeared to be flirting. Back at the trailer, he found Kate, hair wet from her shower, doing yoga in the space between the trailer and her tent.

He stood below the trailer’s awning, hands in his pockets, peering down at her. Not leering—it didn’t feel like leering. He was studying. Learning. And wondering how she bent that way. How anyone bent that way.

When Kate flowed into the position with the butt low and the head high, she smiled up at him.

“Hey!” She popped up from her pose and onto her feet. “You here to join me? ’Cause Alex was right. He has a nice mat.”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“You can start by showing me the exercises your physical therapist taught you. Anything else might harm you. Have you been doing them? The stretches?”

He grimaced. “No. Not lately.” Kate just smiled at him, and he had to look away. “I know, I know.”

“Okay. I’m not your doctor. Whatever. But your back hurts, right? And the stretches helped?”

“They did.”

“Maybe they’ll help me, too. My back aches sometimes. Obviously less than yours. I should probably learn whatever you were taught. I’ve never been to PT.”

“No?”

Her ponytail swished when she shook her head.

Esben crossed his arms over his chest and stared at Kate’s purple yoga mat.

She was tricking him into doing yoga.

“You’re sneaky,” he said.

“I know. But I can’t search for exercises online right now, and Jorunn isn’t sure what is safe for bad backs. So…” Kate took a step closer and, with exaggerated coyness, bit her lower lip before asking, “Teach me?”

—

On Kate’s yoga mat, Ben jutted his left arm out in front of him and his right leg behind, held position, then switched to the opposite limbs.

“You’re watching me,” he said, not annoyed but not thrilled.

“Well, I’m studying your form and learning the stretches. I could avoid looking upon your person entirely, but you’d have to be one hell of an instructor to help me get it right.”

He switched limbs again and wobbled, then winced as he righted himself.

“Oh, now I remember,” she said. “Pilates. Cat-bird. Bird-dog? There are animals involved.”

He laughed and nearly lost his balance again. “So you know them already.”

“Some are familiar, sure. But I didn’t know they were physio-approved.”

The opposite-arm-and-leg-point stretch made her thighs and butt feel amazing. She followed it with a cat pose, arching her back. Dogs point, cats arch. Something like that.

“Sometimes my wrists hurt,” he said.

“Yeah, mine too. You can make a fist, align your wrist to your arm, lock the joint, and use your entire arm to support your weight. It also helps to remove weight from your thumb. I’ve had my fair share of thumb pad strains.”

He did exactly as she suggested. The position exquisitely revealed his padded arm muscles.

“I don’t remember,” she said, “from when we were younger. But I bet you could lift a lot of weight before your back went out. I wouldn’t recommend it now. Not without a doctor’s say-so.”

Her gaze remained fixated on his robust forearms.

“I only began to not struggle with shopping bags several months ago,” he said. “I had become so weak in the stomach and the back.”

“I guess that makes sense. The planes support each other. When one side collapses…”

He relaxed onto all fours.

“Need a break?” she asked.

He rocked his body back somewhat, then rocked it forward, a move that might’ve been to loosen his hips. She joined him and discovered that, yes, it made her hips feel good. The joints moved slowly, tiny muscles receiving tiny stretches.

They rocked slowly side by side, her on the grass and he on her mat, until Jorunn, Alex, and Erik came over. Kate sat back on her heels and ignored Erik’s ogling. Ben grunted as he stood.

Alex placed before Kate his rolled turquoise yoga mat. “As promised,” he said to her. To Ben, he asked, “How does it feel?”

“Eh, good. It was less yoga than the stretches I should have been doing for the past year.”

Jorunn smirked. “Dinner in five minutes,” she said, then left with Alex and Erik.

Kate turned to Ben, hands on her hips, giving him her best disapproving look. “A year, huh?”

He failed to hide his sheepishness, then picked up her yoga mat, and she grabbed the one Alex had given her.

“It is odd,” he said, “having pain like this. The stretches are meant to help, but often, I am in too much pain to do them. And on the days I feel little pain, I think, ‘Oh, I do not need to do the exercises because I feel alright.’” He opened his trailer door and placed the mat inside. “It is psychological as much as physical. Knowing this does not make me any more sedulous, however.”

Kate tossed Alex’s mat inside her tent. “You’re not in more pain now, though, are you?”

“No. I feel good. At least for now.”

As they walked toward the house, she found herself wanting to hold his hand. The urge had come out of nowhere.

She avoided walking too closely astride him, and during their meal, she sat across from him, not next to him.