On Etruscan Time

by Tracy Barrett

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Author’s Note

  Etruscan-English Glossary

  Italian-English Glossary

  Copyright

  Many thanks to Professor Barbara Tsakirgis of Vanderbilt University for checking the terminology and techniques used by my archaeologists, and the facts about the Etruscans. Any errors that have crept in despite her care are my own. And many thanks to my tireless and sensitive editor, Reka Simonsen.

  Alla memoria di Giancarlo e Benedetta Galassi Beria

  “The distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.”

  —Albert Einstein

  1

  Hector woke with a start. Had he cried out? He glanced at his mother, but her face mask was in place over her eyes, and her seat was still pushed back as far as it would go. So he couldn’t have made any noise.

  He settled back on the hard blue cushion, his heart pounding, and tried to steady his breathing. The nightmare was already fading, and he made no effort to remember it. Whatever it was had left him soaking in cold sweat, and he’d just as soon let it slip away to wherever dreams go.

  He pressed his face against the tiny window, but all he could see was the reflection of his own dark eyes. His father had once told him that the best place to see stars was either in the middle of the desert or over the ocean, where the light from cities wouldn’t drown them out. But even though someone had dimmed the cabin after the movie, he still couldn’t see anything out there. The vibration of the jet traveled from the window down his face, tickling his nose, so he gave up, leaned back in his seat, and pushed his bangs off his forehead.

  The plane ride was boring and long and uncomfortable, but it was just the beginning of what was going to be a terrible summer. Hector had argued and argued that he didn’t want to go away. After a year in Tennessee, he wasn’t the new kid anymore. He wanted to hang out with the boys who were finally his friends, swimming and skateboarding and playing computer games. He swore that he wouldn’t get in his father’s way while he worked. But they hadn’t listened to him. No one ever listened to him. It was as if they couldn’t even hear him.

  The real reason he was going, he thought bitterly, was that they didn’t know what else to do with him. Everyone else’s plans had been more important than his, as usual, so he was just shoved aside to where he wouldn’t be a nuisance. His father was working on a screenplay that his agent had said sounded promising, and his sister, Ariadne, was spending most of the summer with her friend Sarah in Florida, where they were working together in Sarah’s mother’s stationery store. And when his mother’s friends had asked her to come stay with them and help out with a problem they were having, of course she said yes, even though that meant that Hector would have to go too. Whether he wanted to or not.

  So he sat in the prickly airplane seat without even any stars to watch and looked out the window, waiting for the dawn to come. The sky turned pink, then green, then brilliant blue. The cabin lights came back on, and someone put a tray with a roll and cheese on it in front of him. After what seemed like hours, the landing gear dropped with a shudder that made him jump, and then they were rushing down a long runway.

  His mother sat up and ran her hands through her hair. She turned to him and smiled. “Welcome to Italy, Heck,” she said.

  * * *

  Hector slumped in a hard plastic chair while they waited for their bags. His head felt so hot and thick that he was afraid of falling asleep and sliding to the floor if he closed his eyes, so he forced himself to look around. All the signs were in Italian, even the ones with familiar American logos on them. Hertz Autonoleggio. Holiday Inn Alloggio.

  Their suitcases finally thumped down the slide onto the conveyor belt, and they wrestled them onto a cart. His mother pushed it, with Hector trailing behind, into a room marked “Dogana-Douane-Customs,” where two bored-looking men waved them through into another, larger room that was crowded with people.

  Someone called out, “Betsy!” and a tall blond woman flung her arms around his mother. His mother squealed back, “Susanna!” and kissed her on both cheeks, and then they hugged and laughed and talked in a mixture of Italian and English. His mother was explaining why the plane was late, and the other woman was saying that it was okay. They seemed to have forgotten that he was there.

  He stood back, feeling fuzzy-headed and out of place in the crowd of Italians. His mother finally remembered him. “This is Hector, Susi,” she said, and the woman reached down—despite her height she was wearing high heels—and gave his hand a brisk squeeze. “So pleased to meet you, ’Ector,” she said. “You look just like your pictures.”

  He nodded, wondering if he was supposed to say something, but the tall woman turned back to his mother and started talking about the archaeological dig and the town they were going to. Half her words were in Italian, and the half that were in English were pronounced so strangely that he gave up trying to understand what she was saying and leaned against a post as Susanna went to get her car.

  They tossed their bags into the tiny trunk, and his mother held the front seat forward so he could squeeze into the back. His legs jumped as they touched the hot upholstery. He slid over to the section that had been in the shade.

  They stopped once at a kind of truck stop along the highway, and Hector’s mother bought him a sandwich and a soda. He went to the bathroom while they were paying for gas, and it took him a long time to figure out that he had to push a button on the wall to make the toilet flush.

  The food looked terrible. But when he settled back into his seat and Susanna took off at what felt like a million miles an hour, his first reluctant nibble of the sandwich and swig of the soda took him by surprise. They were so full of flavor that he ate and drank slowly, prolonging the pleasure as the thin ham melted on his tongue and the sweetness of the soda intensified the meat’s saltiness.

  It was hot in the car, despite the open windows, and Hector fought to keep his eyes open. He lay on his back as well as he could with the seat belt pinching his middle, his feet up on one armrest and his head, cushioned by his arm, on the other. He stared out the window from between his knees.

  He didn’t realize he’d fallen asleep until a jolt woke him. He sat up, his eyes gritty and his mouth dry, and looked outside. While he was sleeping, dark clouds had rolled in, and it looked as if it were about to rain. They had left the highway and were winding up the side of a hill on a narrow road. His mother and Susanna were quiet.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Oh, you are awake,” Susanna said. “This is Sporfieri, the little city where the archaeologists live while we are working. Our house is—” and she gestured up the hill.

  Another jolt. The road switched back and forth up the slope. A wall of huge dark stones seemed to hold up the hillside
rising next to them. By twisting his neck and peering upward, he could see houses clustered above. The small buildings squatted comfortably next to each other. Yellow light came from some of the windows, and there was the occasional flicker of a TV set.

  They pulled up in front of a narrow house that looked just like all the others around it. How could Susanna tell one from the other? Hector and his mother yanked out their suitcases while Susanna fumbled with her keys.

  But before she could open the door, it was flung open from inside by a tall, slender man with sandy hair and an ugly but smiling face. Hector’s mom said, “Ettore!” and kissed both his cheeks.

  “How are you, Betsy?” the man asked. He had less of an accent than Susanna did.

  “Oh, you know,” his mother said, and laughed. “We had to change planes twice, and we missed our connection in—”

  Was she just going to talk to this guy and forget he even existed? But the man caught Hector’s eye and took a step toward him, right hand outstretched.

  “Hector!” he said, and shook hands vigorously. Hector looked questioningly at his mother. “We have the same name, you know,” the man went on. “I’m Ettore,” accenting the word on the first syllable, “Ettore Bartolozzi. I am an old friend of your mother’s. I work with Susanna at the dig.”

  “Why are you here, Ettore?” Susanna asked.

  “I came to tell you something, both of you. All of you,” he corrected himself, smiling at Hector.

  “Well?” Susanna said.

  “We learned something while you were in Rome, Susi,” Ettore said. “Something so strange that we can’t really believe it. I knew you would be furious at me if I didn’t tell you right away—”

  “Ettore, speak,” Susanna said. “What did you find?”

  “You know that hole that we thought was for garbage?” Susanna nodded. “We analyzed some of the things we found in it. And it isn’t garbage. Or at least not normal garbage.” He paused, obviously enjoying the suspense he was creating.

  “You want to guess what we found?”

  “Ettore!” both women said at once.

  “All right, all right,” he said. “We found bones.”

  “So?” Susanna said. “Often there is bones in the garbage. Bones of pigs. Bones of sheeps. Bones—”

  “Human bones,” said Ettore.

  2

  Sometime in the middle of the night, Hector woke up and for an instant didn’t know where he was. His eyes refused to focus. The room was dark, but there was enough light for him to see the door, the windows, the furniture. They were all in the wrong places. Then he remembered—he was in Sporfieri, in the little room next to his mother’s. Everything whirled around in his head before settling down. There was the window facing the narrow street. Opposite it was the door leading to the hallway, and between them was the big piece of furniture that took the place of a closet.

  He lay back down and sighed, feeling wide awake. Susanna had said he’d slept a long time in the car, and then after they had eaten the bread and fruit that Ettore had put out for them, he couldn’t stay awake. He looked at the clock that glowed on his bedside table and did some quick math. Only eight o’clock at night at home, and he’d been asleep for hours. Weird.

  Now what? The house was so small that if he turned on the TV in the tiny living room it would wake up his mother and Susanna, and anyway, he didn’t think watching TV in Italian would be very interesting. He glanced at the book on his bedside table. No, he had the whole summer to read that.

  He got up, though the stone floor was so cold that his toes curled in protest. He pushed open the heavy wooden shutters and looked out. The house they were sharing with Susanna was near the top of the hill, and below him he saw a few dozen small buildings, crammed together on the crooked streets. They reminded him of mushrooms—not in the way they looked, because they were square, not round—but because of the way they were clustered, like clumps of mushrooms on their lawn in Tennessee after a rain. And they looked as if they had grown there, instead of being built.

  It was not quite silent. He heard a buzzing, like one of those motor scooters that had darted around their car, and the small sound of a radio or a TV came from someplace nearby. He heard men talking, sounding like they were giving orders, and a thud, like metal hitting wood. But that was all.

  The moonlight turned the houses bluish silver instead of the yellow or brown they must be. Something about the light made them look fake, as if they were flat house fronts on a stage. He shivered a little and imagined something coming from behind them, some strange, dark thing. He leaned out the window and looked around. Nothing was out there, as far as he could tell. But you could never be sure. Those deep shadows could hide anything.

  “Can’t sleep?” Hector turned around quickly. But it was just his mother, wrapped in her bathrobe, her curly dark hair messy around her face. He suddenly wished he was little again so he could go bury his face in her soft robe. She would take him to bed and rub his back until he fell asleep. But he was eleven, and she hadn’t done that for years.

  He shook his head. “Me either,” she said.

  “What did that guy Ettore mean about human bones?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “They look human, but there isn’t a specialist on the team here, so they sent the bones to a lab to be analyzed. We should find out more tomorrow. I mean today.” She yawned. “I didn’t stay up much later than you did, although I tried. But then when I went to bed I couldn’t fall asleep. I drank so much coffee to stay awake and was so excited to see Susanna and Ettore that now I can’t unwind. Anyway, it’ll take a few days to get on Italian time.”

  “I wish we could just stay on Tennessee time,” Hector said, knowing he was being unreasonable but wanting to keep her there talking a little longer.

  “Time doesn’t work like that,” she said. “Once we start eating meals when everyone else does and going to bed when they do, we’ll feel more comfortable, just as though we had always been on Italian time. And then when we go home, we’ll have to adjust all over again.”

  He groaned, and she laughed. “I know,” she said, reaching out and smoothing his hair. “But the sooner we get started, the easier it will be. Go back to bed and lie there with your eyes closed, at least. The sun will be up in a few hours, and that can be your signal that it’s okay to get up. Will you try?” He nodded, and she said, “Goodnight, then,” and went back to her room.

  He lay still, but his eyes kept popping open. He forced them shut and said to himself, I can open my eyes after I take a hundred breaths, but no fair cheating and breathing fast. He started counting: One, innnnnn … ooouuuuut … two, innnnnn … ooouuuuut … In between counts, he pictured time zones spread around the world. He imagined the earth turning and the sun shining on some parts of the globe while others were in darkness. Sixteen, innnnnn … ooouuuuut … So if you traveled backward fast enough, would you wind up arriving earlier than when you left? Something was wrong with that, he knew, but as the globe twirled in his mind, he couldn’t think what. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine …

  * * *

  When Hector woke again, a faint pinkish light was coming through the window. That meant the sun was rising and he could get up. He pulled on the clothes that were lying on the floor. He should probably unpack his suitcase, but there was plenty of time for that.

  On his way down the hall, he paused and looked into his mother’s room. She was still asleep, or at least still in bed. He thudded down the stone stairs. Susanna sat in the kitchen, wearing a bathrobe, her blond hair swept up loosely. She was reading a newspaper and sipping out of the tiniest cup he’d ever seen. She must not like coffee very much, Hector thought. But then why was she drinking it?

  “Good morning, ’Ector,” she said, laying down the paper. She looked as though speaking cost her an effort. His father was the same way in the morning.

  “Buongiorno,” he answered carefully, and was rewarded with a grin.

  “Breakfast,” she said,
gesturing at the counter. “I don’t know what you eat, so I bought some American food and some Italian food.” There was a tiny box of cornflakes and a plate of brown rolls. They looked dry, but to be polite he picked one up. It was warm.

  “They are new,” Susanna said.

  “Fresh?” Hector asked.

  “Yes, fresh,” Susanna said. “They make them there.” She waved her hand vaguely in the direction of the street.

  “They bake at night?” Hector asked.

  “They make them all the night so we can have fresh bread,” she said. “All but Sunday. Sunday morning we don’t eat fresh bread, so the baker can sleep and go to church with his family.”

  That explained the voices and the clanking he had heard in the night. He took a bite of the roll. It was hollow, with a crust so crunchy that little bits flew all over the table. The inside of the crust was soft and delicious. He took another bite even before he’d swallowed the first one.

  “That form of bread is called a rosetta,” Susanna said. “It is the typical bread of Roma. Thousands of years ago the Etruscans made bread in that form. But you don’t know about the Etruscans, I think.”

  “I do know a little,” Hector said. “My mom gave me a book. They were people who lived in Italy more than two thousand years ago, before the Romans, right? And they had a mysterious language. My mom says that lots of the things that most people think the Romans invented, the Romans really learned from the Etruscans, like gladiators and aqueducts and telling the future by looking at the insides of animals.”

  “Very good,” she said, nodding. “And the village of Sporfieri is built on top of a very, very antique Etruscan city. We archaeologists are here to learn about the people who lived in that city. Nobody knows very much about the Etruscans, so any small thing we find is a treasure. We don’t—didn’t—haven’t found many good things. This is our last summer. The money for digging is almost gone.”

  “Is that why you asked my mother to come?”