In fact, it was absolutely critical that no one become aware of our role in the fake plaque. If anyone were to catch us, at any point, it would be over—for all of us. I would be grounded for years. Well, maybe not years, but I’d be in major trouble. And when I finally did get to leave the house again, I’d be all alone. ALL . . . ALONE. Just the thought made me sick. Seriously. It made me feel woozy. Who would I hang out with? Who would I ride the school bus with? Who would I go exploring with? I did everything with Eric.
I couldn’t imagine how awful it would be for Eric to have to move—new town, different house, and strange school—all without a single friend.
Our plan had to work—no mistakes and no getting caught. We had to trick everyone so that people would come to Sultana.
I had my pages printed and the computer turned off, and I was just putting the bundle of papers away in my room, when Mom and Dad came home. Dad barbequed hamburgers for supper—I had three, in case you’re interested—while Mom did some accounting stuff for the garage on the computer. After dinner, they went for their daily walk around Sultana, and I went to my bedroom and began looking up the right pictures for our message.
It was easier than I thought it would be. Several words were often represented by one or two symbols. For example, a scribe dying was so simple it was almost obvious. A “scribe” was a drawing of a man in front of some sort of box thing—maybe a desk. And “dying” was an outline of a person, all twisted up, like a chalk outline at a murder scene. You didn’t even need to be an Egyptologist to figure that one out.
Other pictograms were a bit harder to find, but turned out to be simple to draw. A “foreign land” looked like two waves with a line under it. And “to travel” was a pair of legs. I smiled as I traced the stickish figures.
Each time I found the symbol I needed, I traced it onto a piece of paper.
The most difficult thing about doing the conversions to glyphs, was trying to stay focused. My mind kept going back to Eric and Rachel. The thought of them leaving for good, and never seeing them again, made me feel like I had swallowed a pillow. Sure, I didn’t want Eric to leave, but it would suck for Rachel too. The bottom line was, I didn’t want either of them to move.
The things I usually worried about suddenly seemed unimportant. Sure, zombie invasions and giant mutant sharks are a threat to public safety, but this was way more serious. Our hoax had to work.
THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up at eight to the grating chirp of my alarm. I never thought I’d ever use it during summer holidays, but I didn’t want to sleep in (and look like a dummy) when Rachel came over. Plus, getting our tablet finished was more important than anything, even sleeping in.
I went downstairs and wolfed down a bowl of Cheerios by myself—Mom and Dad were already at work. Then I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and got dressed. It was still a bit early, so I waited on the couch where I could watch the road through the window. Except I could barely keep my eyes open. When the kitchen clock chimed the hour, it startled me awake. And then, on cue, the doorbell rang. I opened the door, rubbing my eyes.
“Hi, Cody,” Rachel said, panting lightly. She definitely looked more awake than I felt.
She shook off her pack in one fluid motion and set it on a chair. “Check it out.” She extracted a writing pad. “Doesn’t this look cool?” Rachel explained how she’d copied pictograms for various dates from a page in her book, and then changed the dates by mixing the glyphs around.
I looked them over and nodded. I recognized many of the curious shapes that represented numbers from the pages I printed the night before. A lot of Rachel’s glyphs were complicated profiles of people or birds, and she had captured the details perfectly.
I tapped the pad of paper where she had drawn three unfamiliar symbols closely together. “Are these for the king?”
“Yeah, that’s him. His glyphs are a crane on a post, three feathers, and that shepherd’s staff.”
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Well, my book makes reference to a little-known king called Tuthmosis.” She poked the three symbols in front of me. “And apparently, this Tuthmosis guy was kind of greedy, and he was always searching for new trade routes.”
“Excellent,” I said. “So it would be logical—or at least possible—that King Tuthmosis sent a bunch of explorers west across the ocean to find people to trade with.”
“That’s exactly what I thought. And I also made sure that the date of our exploration—and the plaque—falls within the reign of Tuthmosis.”
“Huh?” I said.
Rachel laughed. “Well, we can’t have the date on our tablet be a hundred years before King Tuthmosis was even born. That would give it away as a fake. As long as our explorers leave while the king is ruling back in Egypt, it’ll make sense.”
Man, was she smart. “That’s really good thinking,” I said.
She blushed. “Well—what have you got?”
“What?” I asked.
“Your translations. Let’s see them.”
Sheepish, I showed her the hieroglyphics that I had traced the night before. She took the paper from me, sat down at the kitchen table, and began adding her glyphs to the top, so that everything would be on one page.
“This is going to be amazing once we engrave it onto a tablet.” She put down the pencil and admired the paper. “Very, very cool.”
“How should we do the engraving?” I asked.
“Would it be too hard to carve into a stone?”
“I wondered about that too, but I think we’d just end up smashing it. If we had a huge stone, we could chisel the symbols into it—that’s what they did in Australia—but it wouldn’t work for a small plaque.”
“What if we carved it into soft clay and then baked the clay in a fire or oven?” She pulled a banana from the fruit bowl in front of her and spun it like the Wheel of Fortune. “I think that’s sort of the way the Egyptians did it.”
I nodded. “That would work.”
“But no one in Sultana does pottery, so we can’t get any clay.”
“I’m not positive,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure my aunt Dayna once said that clay is clay—she’s into ceramics and pottery.”
Rachel frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Well, pottery clay is just clay. Right out of the ground. No additives, no nothing—it’s clay. The same as the stuff found under the ground all over southern Manitoba.”
She gave the banana another good spin. It skidded to the edge of the table, but she grabbed it before it could fall onto the floor. “So we just have to find a deep hole and scoop some up.”
“And I think I know where we can get some.”
“Get some what?” Eric pushed open the screen door at the back of the kitchen. He barely looked at us before heading straight for the fridge.
I updated Eric about the clay for the tablet.
“Sure, that sounds good,” Eric said, scanning the inside of our refrigerator. “How come you never have any chocolate milk?” He wiped his sweaty forehead on his shoulder.
“Jeez, Eric,” Rachel scolded, “don’t be so rude. This isn’t your house.”
I laughed. Rachel clearly hadn’t seen Eric the way I had. “Take a glass of regular milk and just add some chocolate powder.” I pointed to the pantry. “It’s on the third shelf.”
Eric closed the fridge door. “That’s not the same at all.”
Rachel shook her head. “Lazy.”
Eric sat down with us at the table, and I told Rachel how we had explored a construction site three kilometres west of Sultana. There, we found an enormous backhoe that was busy excavating the foundation for a new dairy barn. It had been a Saturday, and no one was working, so we explored the whole site without getting caught. There should be lots of clay there.
“Sounds like a perfect plan,” Eric said getting up. “Let’s go now before it gets too hot out.”
After tossing a few drinks into Rachel’s backpack, we all rode past the River
crest and out of town on the gravel farming road.
There was rarely a vehicle on this stretch, so we pedalled side by side and didn’t worry about traffic kicking up clouds of dust and choking us. The sun was already warm on our faces, the sky was cloudless, and I was beginning to believe our plan could work.
“There it is,” I said, pointing at a rutted driveway that went on forever. We could see the backhoe, but we didn’t hear any heavy equipment, so we approached the yard without caution. I mean, even if someone was there, they would just chase us away.
“It looks like we have the place to ourselves,” Rachel said, leaning her bike against a pallet of plywood sheets.
“Maybe not.” Eric walked over to the giant digger, put his hand on the motor cover, and quickly pulled it away. “This thing’s been running today—it’s still hot.”
Rachel surveyed the area again. “We’d better hurry. They may come back any minute.”
I agreed. We all knew the consequences of being caught removing clay from the construction site. The jig would be up, as they say.
Eric leaned his bike against a portable toilet. “Rachel’s right,” he said, pulling a cookie out of his pocket. “You guys get the clay, and I’ll stand guard in case someone comes back.”
Rachel shook her head. “He’ll do anything to get out of doing the dirty work,” she whispered.
“And where did he get those cookies?” I wondered out loud.
I took Rachel to the largest part of the barn’s excavation. “I think this is where they’ll milk the cows.” I indicated a huge area surrounded with concrete forms. We jumped over the steel bars that lined the perimeter and walked to the middle of the barn. “And this must be for collecting the cow manure,” I said, pointing at the eight-foot-deep trench that ran down the centre.
We had forgotten to bring a bag or container for storing the clay, so we prowled around the construction site looking for something appropriate, while Eric’s eyes roved the horizon for surprise visitors.
“This will work,” Rachel said, stooping over a pile of plastic-wrapped Styrofoam panels. She pulled a pocket-knife from her shorts, flicked open the largest blade, and cut a towel-sized piece of plastic from the bundle.
I stared at her, impressed. She had to be the only girl I knew who carried a knife.
“I think we’ll need this too.” I yanked on a ladder that was weighing down a second pile of Styrofoam. The clay that had been excavated was spread out all over the site, but we wanted the fresh, damp stuff from the bottom of the trenches.
Rachel pointed at something over by a shed. “And we’ll need that.” She hurdled over stacks of lumber and steel, and retrieved a shovel.
We returned to the trench and lowered the ladder into the void. “Ladies first,” I said, tossing the shovel in the pit.
Rachel rolled her eyes, but grabbed the top of the ladder without hesitating. “Thank you kindly. You are a gentleman.” And with that, she disappeared down the rungs.
I followed her to the bottom and we made our way along the cool trench. There was no water in the pit, but a damp, earthy smell engulfed us. Had I been alone, it would have creeped me out (I think that’s called claustrophobia), but I felt comfortable with Rachel by my side. Well, actually, she was ahead of me. The trench was only three feet wide, so we couldn’t walk side by side.
We stopped near the centre of the trench where the clay seemed especially fresh. Rachel crouched and ran her fingers across the moist earth surface on her right.
“It’s so smooth, Cody. It’s almost like glass or something.”
It was hard to see clearly in the trench because we were in the shade, so I put down the shovel, reached out, and groped at the muddy wall.
“No.” She grabbed my hand and moved it. “Over here. Feel this.”
“That’s incredible,” I muttered touching the earthen wall. “The earth has been smeared so smooth from the backhoe, it actually feels like pottery clay.”
“Yeah,” she whispered in awe. “This has to be the stuff we need.”
I smiled, feeling more confident that our scheme would work.
Or so I thought.
Rachel had just picked up the shovel to start digging when we heard a shout from above. It was Eric. “A TRUCK IS COMING!” he screamed.
Startled, Rachel dropped the shovel on my foot.
Ouch!
Ignoring the pain in my toe, I sprinted to the ladder and scurried up—just enough to see what was happening. Eric was standing in the open, twenty feet away from the trench. And he was staring at a rapidly approaching cloud of dust.
I jumped down into the pit again.
“He’s not kidding,” I warned. “There’s a half-ton truck coming up the drive.”
Rachel trembled. “What should we do? Should we all hide?”
“There’s no point in Eric hiding—he’s busted. If he tries to run now, he’ll just look guilty. But we might as well stay down here and see what happens.”
“What do you mean?” Rachel’s eyes widened.
“It may only be some guy who needs directions,” I said. “Let’s just see what happens.”
“And the bikes? If he sees our two bikes, he’ll know something’s going on. They could charge us for trespassing!”
I had totally forgotten about the bikes, but I was pretty sure they were hidden from view by another pallet of lumber. “I don’t think they’ll see them, as long as the person doesn’t walk around.”
I said a silent prayer: Please don’t walk around.
The truck made more and more noise as the tires crunched over the spilled gravel near the work site. We waited anxiously for the vehicle to come to a stop. It seemed to take forever, but finally we heard the motor quit. Then a door opened and slammed shut again.
“Only one person,” I whispered, stating the obvious.
Rachel nodded. “I wonder what Eric’s going to do?” She sounded calmer now.
Above us, we heard a man speak. “Hi,” the voice said. “Is Peter around?”
After a lengthy pause, Eric replied, “No, he went to the restaurant for breakfast.”
“What restaurant?” The man asked, sounding suspicious.
“The only restaurant,” Eric said.
I groaned. Don’t be mouthy, Eric! Not now.
Eric added, “The Rivercrest. It’s over there. In Sultana.”
I imagined Eric pointing toward town.
After another painful silence—a silence that made me really nervous—I heard the man say, “What are you doing here?”
“Uh oh!” That was Rachel.
“I have diarrhea,” Eric answered.
“What?” The man sounded like he was getting mad.
I looked at Rachel. She had no any idea what Eric was up to either.
“I had to use the port-a-potty,” Eric said.
This time I imagined Eric pointing at the construction site toilet.
“Well,” the man said, “why didn’t you just go home?”
“I was fishing over there, and I was going home, but then I had to go to the john. So I came here.”
Silence.
“Do you want a ride home?” the man said.
“No thanks. I’m going fishing again. And anyway, I’m not supposed to take rides from strangers.”
Rachel and I waited uneasily for a response from the man, but heard only silence. A few minutes later, the engine finally roared to life and we heard the truck drive away.
A few seconds later, Eric was grinning down at us from the edge of the trench. “Man, was that a close call or what? I didn’t think he’d ever leave.”
“We might as well forget about the clay and just leave right now.” I reached for the ladder and began climbing. “It won’t take him long to go to the Rivercrest and realize you lied.” I gestured for him to move out of the way so I could lift myself out of the trench.
“I never lied,” Eric said, stepping to the side. “Pete’s at the restaurant.”
Rachel
came up behind me. “Who the heck is Pete, anyway?”
“Don’t you guys have any faith in me?” Eric pretended to be hurt. “Look.” He pointed to the door on the backhoe.
Rachel and I turned. On the scratched door was a decal that said: PETE’S BACKHOE SERVICE.
“When we rode past the restaurant this morning,” Eric went on, “I noticed there was a dump truck in the parking lot that had the same sticker on the door. So I just put two and two together.”
“You know, Eric,” Rachel said, “that was actually pretty quick thinking.”
I nodded. “Yeah, it was. I was going to yell at you for being cheeky to that guy, but you got us out of a sticky situation.”
“I saved the day.” Eric beamed with pride. “Just like Indiana Jones. Now hurry up and get that stupid clay before someone else shows up. I’m all out of lame excuses . . . and cookies too.” He wasn’t lying. His cookies were gone except for all the crumbs that clung to his shirtfront.
Rachel didn’t waste any time. She scampered back down the ladder into the trench.
I turned to follow her, but before I got to the ladder I looked over at our bikes. The handles were clearly visible, but the rest of the frames were hidden. There was no way of knowing what our visitor had seen—or what he might report.
In the excavation trench again, Rachel and I took turns digging out and trimming a chunk of clay into a nice brick-sized piece. Then, when we had our prize wrapped and bundled in plastic, we headed back to Sultana.
CHAPTER 6
ERIC PICKED UP the clay and tested its weight by bouncing it lightly in his hand, like a pitcher about to throw a baseball. “So now what?” he said. “Should we cut off a slab and start engraving?”
That was a good question, because we never talked about how we would actually make the plaque.
I sat down on the bench of the picnic table in Eric and Rachel’s backyard. “Egyptians carved hieroglyphics in tombs by smearing the stone walls with clay or mortar first,” I said. “Then they engraved the soft clay before it hardened. Couldn’t we do something like that too?”
History in the Faking Page 3
