38

Friday, 31 July

Day Forty

For the first time that summer, the weather decided to be hot. Hot enough for Kate's feet to swell and sweat in her boots.

Ben was sweating, too, and when he voiced his embarrassment to her, she pointed out that he was far from the only one. Everyone was feeling the heat, and everyone was dressed for it. Some of the young men, and Erik, had taken off their shirts. Kate noticed how self-conscious this made Ben, so she kissed him on the cheek in front of everyone, raising several eyebrows. He kept his shirt on, but he no longer looked morose.

“Maybe I should take my tank top off,” she suggested, only half-joking. “Normalize bras as acceptable hot-weather attire.” Ben’s eyes were pleading, but she couldn’t tell if they were saying Please or Please don’t. She grinned, kissed him full on the mouth, and whispered, “Okay, maybe later.”

The building that protected the cemetery was well-ventilated, with the front doors and window slats open. But today there was no breeze, not a lick. The world was eerily still and way too hot at 33°C, and by thirty minutes to lunch, Kate was suffering. She stood on her knees and chugged from her water bottle, the contents no longer chilled but nonetheless satisfying. She let some of the water dribble onto her neck and chest. Whatever—it was hot.

It was the last Friday of the field season, and everyone was hustling. Come Monday, everyone would leave, save for Ben, Alex, Erik, and Jorunn, who stayed the extra day to officially close the site. Kate would have stayed, too, but she’d read the dates wrong and bought a return ticket for the student return date. She would have changed her return flight, but there were no open seats.

The open mead hall units had been cleaned down to natural soil, so most students were either helping to close that locale or focused on the cemetery where a dozen open units still needed mapping and photographs, and where a student had partially unearthed a horse skull.

A horse skull. Four hundred years too early.

Because of course something interesting and completely unexpected would be found three days before the field school closed for a year.

Jorunn was glowing with excitement and disbelief and, certainly, summer heat. “There should not be horses,” she muttered to herself as she paced back and forth, deep in thought. “Why is there a horse?”

Though it pained her to do so, Jorunn agreed with Alex that the best course of action was to rebury the skull and cover the unit with a tarp and soil, then revisit it next summer. The skull, Jorunn conveyed to the students, could be part of a complete horse burial or a sacrificial offering, meaning the settlers had transported a horse across the Atlantic Ocean from Iceland. That, or a settler had brought with them a horse skull, which raised an entirely different set of questions.

A mix of rock, country, English, and French songs played over someone’s portable speakers. Kate was brushing clean a man’s foot bones, his skeleton complete down to the last phalanx, and his grave goods consisting of a dagger so rusted it was practically dust. Off to the side, Ben and Alex spoke in French. Kate had never bothered to learn the language, as perfecting her Spanish had become far more pressing. Hearing those foreign words so different from Norwegian slip off of Ben’s tongue was a treat, and she sometimes asked him to speak them to her. Not even dirty talk. Just…French.

As Alex and Jorunn left the cemetery building, Alex hollered in the least intimidating holler ever, “Ten minutes!”

Cédric, an experienced volunteer who had arrived with his friend Michel a few days ago, bellowed out, “DIX MINUTES!” His booming voice, combined with his blond, loc-like matted hair, gave him the appearance of a skinny lion.

Kate’s wrists hurt from cleaning around the burial all morning, so she shifted her weight to her elbows, bringing her face closer to the bones. She didn’t consider that her butt was up in the air until she heard a man whisper, “Check out ce cul!”

She almost ignored it, almost convinced herself that she’d misheard. No one else seemed to notice, but she knew that word perfectly well, having recently learned it from Ben and being so close to Spanish and the phrase Clara lovingly uttered often about her wife.

Check out that ass.

Kate peered around, searching for the source of the comment. Only three men in the building were not working: Ben, Cédric, and Michel. And she knew what Ben sounded like when he talked about her ass. He was too far away to be in whispered earshot anyway.

Michel and Cédric, both twentysomethings boasting farmer’s tans, stood by the total station, grinning and stifling their laughter. Kate rose to her feet and averted her gaze from the shirtless men as she refilled her half-full water bottle from the massive communal water jug.

After Ben left the cemetery building, Michel muttered to Cédric about a chef, certainly meaning Ben or Erik and not some culinary expert. Kate pressed her lips together to hide any reaction and pretended to look over the students’ excavation progress as she kept her ear trained on Michel and Cédric.

When Cédric whispered a comment about Mina’s ass after she bent down to pick up her field journal, Kate had to put an end to it. She turned to face them both, and they met her gaze with pleasant nothing to see here smiles.

“Hey,” Michel said to her with a nod. “Ça va?”

Kate attempted a smile, but it ended up a tight-lipped sneer. “I’ve got a bad case of swamp ass,” she said. “Thought you’d wanna know, seeming as how you’re so interested in butts today.”

Cédric turned grey, and the two men shared wide-eyed looks with one another.

In a voice laden with contrition, Michel said, “Sorry, Professor Roth.”

“Right,” Cédric said. “Sorry.”

“Nope.” Her ponytail swooshed as she shook her head. “Not good enough. I’m too hot, too tired, and too busy to put up with harassing bullshit. I want you gone. Now.”

“Harassing?” Cédric’s deep blue eyes widened. “We were only talking.”

“Get your kits, get your gear, and go.” She nodded at the cemetery building doors. “You’re not welcome here.”

The men stood there, staring, until Cédric said, “Fuck this,” and mumbled something in French to Michel. The two volunteers gathered their tools, then, as they left, Cédric turned back and spat at the ground.

Kate stood, arms crossed, as the men departed, passing Ben on his way back to the cemetery.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

Outside the building, several men began to argue in French, Erik shouted in Franglish, and Jorunn yelled at them all in several languages.

Kate sighed. “Oh, I’m just fending off some light sexual harassment.”

Ben’s expression soured. Through gritted teeth, he growled, “What?”

She patted his chest. “Don’t worry. It was only words. And I took care of it. I can slay my own dragons, remember? Though you might want to talk to the other staff about it—sounds like they’re having a lively discussion. I gotta get back to work.” She pecked his cheek, then knelt at her unit to finish cleaning an ancient man’s toes.

When Kate looked across the cemetery, Mina caught her gaze and mouthed, Thank you.