It wasn’t as close as the map made it out to be. I arrived, red-faced and out-of-breath, with the fierce wind coming off the sea quickly cooling me off.
I trailed through the parking lot, along a grass path mowed into the field that led to the Abbey and waited for that feeling. The one that would guide me to the right spot.
In a bit of a daze, I walked, gaze on the ruined arches and ancient columns standing alone among the ruins. The landscape was so different from Turkey, but the sound of the ocean was the same. Pausing, I closed my eyes. The ocean was farther away, and there was more traffic, so it was difficult at first, to pick it out. But when I did, I focused on it. The rhythmic rush of water reminded me of my pulse in my ears.
“Where are you?” I asked the universe. Opening my eyes, I studied the landscape. Mounds of green grass, stone walkways, the ruins of the Abbey, deep sunken parts of land…”Where are you?”
Why did I think it was here? What led me here?
The Abbey had its roots in purely English and Viking history. There were no Roman roads running through it, but the shard had to be here.
Where?
I stared out at the ocean, imagining the Viking longships coming upon this place when it was only a village.Prestebi, the Vikings called it. The word came to me as my thoughts tumbled over each other.Village priests.This spot was important. Important enough that the Romans brought an elaborately carved jet piece here.
Not once had it occurred to me that I wouldn’t find it. It was only now, faced with a massive space and the fact that I was planning on excavating without permission, that the enormity of my undertaking hit me.
It was an illogical decision made after what amounted to a day’s worth of research. I’d been studying the Lighthouse at Alexandria for two years.Two years!
“Where are you, you son of a bitch?” The traffic in the distance picked up, like a convoy of trucks were rolling by. It made the ground vibrate beneath the soles of my feet.
I walked toward the far wall, framed by the ocean in the distance.
Where are you? Where are you?
For crying out loud, the road hadn’t seemed wide enough for the amount of eighteen-wheelers that would make the ground shake like this.
The closer I got to the stone wall, the worse it got. There was an incline, a gentle, but rectangular shaped sloping in the grass that suggested a long-lost storehouse, or guesthouse of the Abbey. The grass was soft from all the rain, and I lost my footing, skidding down the side and only stopping when I landed in the puddle at the base.
The palms of my hands scraped the stone, hard enough it took off a layer of skin. I shook out my hands, blew against the sting, and studied where I’d ended up. The stone wall, dark from the rain and green with moss and lichen obscured my view of the ocean and the road.
The saturated ground absorbed the vibration of the unseen trucks, but the pooled water rippled. I stood, and felt my boot fill with water.
“Gross.” A wet sucking filled the air as I lifted my foot, pulling it out of the muck. Limping to the wall, I held it with one hand, hissing when the raw skin of my palm skimmed the stone. With my free hand, I jerked my foot out of my boot, turned it upside down, and watched a stream of dirty water pour out of it. “Fuck.”
I grasped the tag on the back of the boot, forcing my foot back in. The toe scraped the wall, dislodging a huge piece of moss that fell with a slap onto my boot. “Double fuck.”
I kicked it clear, bent down, and grasped the tag at the back of my boot to get my heel into it. As I did, I glanced at the wall, and froze.
Dropping to my knees, I scraped the moss away with cold, aching hands and stared with amazement at what I saw. It could have been mistaken for a fading yellowish-orange growth on the rock, but when I scraped away at it, the color brightened, and I could read a shape.
It looked like an uppercase “T,” except for the two small arms on either side of the short perpendicular line. A mathematician would look at this, and immediately recognize a numerical symbol, but a classicist saw something else.Isaw something else. In Archaic Greek alphabets, this symbol came afteromega.
I could just make out further letters, but they were weathered, faded.
“There you are.” I don’t know what made me say that out loud. I touched it, pressed my fingers against the shard. Somehow, perhaps over years and years, it had become embedded in the stone. But however it got there, here it was. I scraped at the stone around it, but the blocks were uneven, and only one corner of this was visible. Along the other side, the one hidden from view, I may be able to see the rest of the shard.
“There you are,” I said again, but thought to myself.Finally. Finally.The clouds seemed to open up at that moment, drenching me from head to toe.
“Oxford, eh?” a deep voice asked behind me.
Water ran into my eyes, but it didn’t obscure the towering form. Dark hair plastered to his face, Achilles glared at me. Behind him, Paris stood. His blond hair was soaked, and nearly as dark as Achilles. Though Achilles spoke to me, it wasn’t me he was looking at. Neither one of them were. Both had eyes only for that one Greek letter that seemed to gleam despite the darkness.
“What are you going to do?” It was a funny question to ask. Paris strode forward, blue eyes piercing. He lowered to his haunches beside me, and his hand shook as he reached toward the symbol. Just before his skin would have come into contact, he pulled away.
It hadn’t really occurred to me what to do after finding it, but now I knew the right thing to do. I should call the Ioannou Centre. They’d pave the way for an excavation at a historic site like this. There would be permits and carefully made plans.
But now I didn’t know.