The Find at Gosbecks

Original fiction extract written for Revision Library.

1 Zara Chowdhury had agreed to spend the last week of the summer

2 holidays at the Gosbecks dig only because her aunt Meera had promised

3 her an ice cream every single day, and even then she had not expected

4 to enjoy a single minute of it. Kneeling in a roped-off trench on the

5 edge of a Colchester field, wrist-deep in cool grey soil, sieving the

6 same handful of earth for the fifth time that morning, she was fairly

7 sure her aunt now owed her considerably more than ice cream. The site

8 supervisor, Dr Femi Adeyemi, had explained on the very first day that

9 most of what the team found would turn out to be broken pottery,

10 animal bone, and the occasional rusted nail, and so far,

11 disappointingly, he had been entirely right. Zara's cousin Tomas,

12 three years older and infuriatingly enthusiastic about everything, had

13 already found two coins and a sliver of glass that morning, and kept

14 holding each one up for admiration as though he had personally minted

15 it himself. Zara shook her sieve harder than necessary and told

16 herself firmly that she did not care in the least. It was the pattern

17 that made her stop, halfway through emptying her sieve into the finds

18 tray. A curl of reddish clay, no bigger than a fingernail, lay among

19 the ordinary stones, three faint painted lines still visible across

20 its curved surface. She had already tipped a dozen similar fragments

21 into the discard bucket that morning without a second glance, and her

22 hand was moving to do exactly the same again when something about the

23 neatness of the lines made her hesitate. "Dr Adeyemi," she called,

24 more uncertainly than she had intended, "is this anything?" He crossed

25 the trench in four long strides, crouched beside her, and turned the

26 little fragment over in gloved fingers with a care that made Zara

27 instantly nervous she had somehow damaged it without realising.

28 "That," he said eventually, examining it closely in the grey morning

29 light, "is a piece of decorated Roman samian ware, and a genuinely

30 good one too. Well spotted, Zara." Tomas, for once, said nothing at

31 all. For the rest of the morning Zara found she could not look at the

32 trench in quite the same way. She kept imagining the hands that had

33 painted those three careful lines nearly two thousand years before her

34 own had found the fragment again. She had almost forgotten about the

35 sky entirely until Dr Adeyemi straightened up sharply and frowned

36 westward, towards a bruise-coloured bank of cloud rolling in fast

37 across the open field. "That is not what the forecast promised us," he

38 said quietly, mostly to himself, and then, much louder, to the whole

39 team scattered across the site: "We need the mosaic covered, right

40 now, before this reaches us." Twenty metres away, in the most fragile

41 part of the whole excavation, a section of tessellated floor lay fully

42 exposed, its tiny coloured tiles uncovered that morning for careful

43 cleaning and not yet protected again. Rain falling directly onto

44 exposed, unset ground could lift tiles that had lain undisturbed for

45 centuries. Everyone on site moved at once, but the heavy waterproof

46 sheeting was folded away inside the equipment store, a good two-minute

47 run across uneven, root-tangled ground, and Dr Adeyemi could not leave

48 the mosaic's crumbling edge without risking someone stepping straight

49 onto it in the rush. Zara did not wait to be asked twice. She ran for

50 the store, hauled out the folded sheeting, which turned out to be

51 heavier and more awkward than she had expected, and half carried, half

52 dragged it back across the field, arriving with her arms already

53 shaking just as the first fat drops of rain began to fall. Working

54 quickly together, she and Tomas unrolled the stiff sheet and weighted

55 its corners down with sandbags, while Dr Adeyemi guided them carefully

56 from the mosaic's edge, calling out exactly which sections still

57 needed covering first. By the time the rain arrived properly,

58 hammering steadily on the taut plastic stretched above the ancient

59 floor beneath, the mosaic lay safely hidden underneath it, and the

60 whole soaked team stood breathless under the equipment tent, grinning

61 rather foolishly at one another. "Good work, everyone," Dr Adeyemi

62 said, wiping rain from his face. "And especially you two." He nodded

63 at Zara and Tomas in turn. "That mosaic has survived roughly two

64 thousand years without our help. It very nearly did not survive this

65 particular Tuesday morning." Zara looked down at her soaked,

66 mud-streaked sleeves and, rather to her own considerable surprise,

67 found she was already wondering, quite eagerly, what tomorrow's trench

68 might reveal.