The Fox Knows Many Things: An Athena Fox Adventure

by Mike Sweeney

It was, seriously, that unreal. Of course this was Bavaria, more mountains and forests and cute little towns with old castles and half-timbered buildings than most fantasy movies.

  It was only then that it hit me. I wasn’t normally so collected or poised. And my speech. Those hadn’t been my typical word choices.

  It must have been the costume. It was only a day trip so I was wearing the outfit. And I was flying in (relative) luxury, so one more step out of my zone of experience. I mean, I really was zipping off on contract to an archaeological dig in Germany like I was, like I was…

  So, yeah. Even though I’d identified myself as Penny, this whole flight I’d been acting like Athena Fox.

  CHAPTER SIX

  OH, YEAH. NO question. This had to be the Autobahn.

  I’d vaguely thought of the fabled Autobahn as some futuristic ribbon of concrete and steel somewhere in in the middle of Germany, probably marked off with yellow and black warning signs and lights so the unwary didn’t drive on to it by mistake. Well, no. It looked like any other freeway. Well, a very clean freeway. The pavement was in excellent repair. There was a certain absence of speed limit signs, but mostly I knew this was the Autobahn because we were on the other side of 120 KPH and I didn’t hear any sirens behind us.

  I was grinning. I felt the need — the need for speed. The driver caught my expression and acceleration pushed at me gently as we crossed 140. The ridiculously green and lush trees bordering the roadway began to blur a little as we whipped past them and the occasional delivery truck trundling along in the right lane.

  Cosimo’s man had met me at the terminal. “Athena Fox,” he had greeted me in a heavy accent, smiling as he handed over an envelope. Okay, yeah, I could get used to that. I slouched back in the seat and adjusted my hat to an even jauntier angle, thinking about it. Yes, I had shotgun. The blonde ended up further back in the Mercedes van, along with a pale, serious-looking American I hadn’t caught the name of.

  At least I assumed he was Cosimo’s. I remembered him from the Atlantis gallery. He’d been the one with the Draco Malfoy hair. But I had no idea who was paying for the van. There was something about some German society for the preservation of heritage or something but it got complicated quickly.

  Speaking of paying. I snuck a look in the envelope. There was a hundred-euro note in it. It had brought friends. Many, many friends. How many zeros had Ariadne left off that scribbled note of hers? No wonder Drea had signed the contract without asking me first!

  “Der Rhein,” the driver murmured. I looked up. All I saw was that this was a more industrial area. Some large plant was to our right. Then the ground dropped away, and we were shooting across a grey iron bridge over dark blue water. The Rhine! It looked smaller than I expected. Hardly large enough for all the stories told about it. On the other hand it also looked deep and swift. I guess Caesar still got props for throwing a bridge across it.

  After that we were back in mixed-use, the tiny geometric fields of farmland to one side and thick forest to the other. A train came up and paralleled us for a stretch, itself passing through scenery so scenic it lacked only the red steam engine to be a shot of the Hogwarts’s Express. Many of the houses I glimpsed through the gaps in the trees were tiled in solar panels. On a green-swathed rise, the tall white spindly shapes of wind turbines rotated lazily. I was going to hazard a guess the Germans were serious about recycling, too.

  The road straightened out after a series of lazy curves and the driver brought our example of fine German engineering back up to a purring one-forty. “Whee!” I half-whispered, the grin returning. Again the driver caught my eye. I felt the acceleration resume and we crossed 160 KPH, hoarding the left lane and crowding the other drivers out. Yeah! I could learn to like fast cars. Fast cars, fast dances…fast food? Maybe. And slow dances were good, too.

  The blond man looked up. Made a brief but pointed “Tz!” noise. The driver took it in good grace and returned us to a slightly more sedate pace. Just as well. The ground was getting more elevation as it wound around various river valleys — tributaries of the Rhine, I assumed — and the road was growing more curves in response.

  We weaved our way around a couple of startlingly abrupt outcrops of rock into a quiet town in a small valley where we picked up a couple more passengers. This would be the actual town, a merger with the complicated name of Bad Münster am Stein-Ebernburg. Am Stein? Like am Main? So this would be the river Stein, then?

  We climbed again, on roads that became increasingly narrow. At last we were trundling down a dirt road through orchard intermingled with miniature plots of plowed earth. We reached the edge of a mixed woodland, beeches turning silver with the season and fir dropping needles. The driver parked smoothly, then got out to open the doors.

  My flight had arrived at what was apparently called the Frankfurt Flughof at somewhat after five in the afternoon. The drive had taken around an hour. There was still plenty of light out here but the woods were looking rather dim. Our guide led us briskly within, down a rutted path that had been used by vehicles but not recently.

  A small crowd was already there. They had some tables set up, and many had drinks in hand. A pair of torches framed a banner announcing something called the Bayerische Heidentum-Gesellschaft. Who would be the funders of this excavation, I guessed. This was a mixed crowd, some older with that truly cross-cultural tweedy look of academics and dedicated amateurs, others in their prime of life — many of them showing signs of engaging in various rigorous outdoor activities to maintain that prime.

  One or two had bits of medieval garb on them. I caught a glimpse of a Mjolnir amulet around one neck. Asatru? Or maybe he was just really excited about the next Avengers movie. The scatter on the tables said they’d arrived before us and had been here long enough to privately celebrate what it was they’d accomplished.

  Now the screen and projector was going up for a presentation to the rest of us. Who didn’t look local, and none of them looked less local than Vash. Or less…I didn’t know what. He was wearing REI’s best, dressed to survive on the tundra, and holding the most ridiculous wizard staff I’d seen in life. The dark velvet cloak thrown about his shoulders was rather nice, though. Someone should really nick it off him.

  There was a look about the other three, something I couldn’t immediately put a finger on. They were younger, looked financially secure, and were all male. And very white. There was a pinched, mendacious look on their faces, which I immediately associated with long YouTube rants. I didn’t recognize any, this time, but I recognized the flavor. These were more social media people, only from corners of the internet I’d made even more of a point to stay away from.

  To their credit, the German Society of Something-Something seemed equal parts bemused and annoyed by the outsiders.

  There was the usual fiddling with incompatible plugs and a long view of someone’s desktop before the introductory slide popped up. “Welcome to the BHG 2018 Rhineland-Palatinate Archaeological Investigation,” the presenter said. “I am Doctor Newman — of the Freie Universität Berlin — and I am the Project Lead.”

  “Abbreviated ‘FU Berlin.’” Vash had sidled next to me.

  I ignored that. “BHG is those guys, right?” Doctor Newman was going on to thank the people with drinks both as an organization and individually. He was in his fit late thirties and had a pleasant voice with an odd, staccato way of phrasing. I looked at their banner again.

  “Call them the Bavarian Heathenism Society.” Vash was kind in his condescension.

  “Heathen, not pagan?”

  “It’s complicated,” Vash grinned. “Many pagans don’t like using the Roman word, so they go Greek instead.” At my look of incomprehension he explained. “Heathen comes, ultimately, from Hellene. It was used by medieval Germans to describe any non-Christians. Basically, though, these guys are a Völkisch society.”

  “Um…folklore?” That didn’t sound so bad.

  Vash chuckled and it wasn’t a kindly sound. “You really are a
babe in the woods,” he said. “I mean, besides literally.” He followed that with a leer and that was enough for me to move somewhere else. Vash struck me as the kind of guy who might have wandering hands.

  Besides, the preliminaries were finally done.

  “This location — just north of the Rotenfels — was first identified as a potential site by Professor Edward E. Sharpe in the mid-1980’s. The Rhein — as most of you know — was the contested border for most of the Roman occupation.”

  Romans again. Why did it have to be Romans? I’d missed a bit there, but I gathered that in what they called Germania Superior, below the bend of the Rhine…the Rhein…the Romans held both banks and had developed enough to build towns, forts, baths, and a pretty nice villa not far from here. Up North, the Germanic tribes were a little more aggressive. Which, adding a few hundred years, got you Alaric and you know how that turned out.

  “…Tacitus, and of course Caesar’s Gallic War commentaries,” Doctor Newman was explaining. Apparently, Sharpe had read every bit of Roman writing that might give him insight as to what the Germanic tribes had been up to before their arrival. Which seemed a funny way to zero in on a pre-Roman site but what did I know. In any case, we were finally getting to the good stuff.

  “We began in the Spring of 2017,” Newman popped up his first new slide. “The 19th-century cistern — uphill of us and to our left — was chosen as our top trig point and marks the outer boundary of the site. We trenched to four meters in the already disturbed area and sifted before returning the backfill.”

  In short they’d rented a backhoe. And probably kept it to remove the overburden once they’d moved on to units. This…this is what I’d been hoping to find here. Seriously, keep the details coming.

  “Before the next digging season, student volunteers from the Freie Universität engaged in MGR studies of the area under investigation.” A slide popped up of a typical MGR plot. At least I assumed it was typical. I’d only seen magnetic gradiometry used once before, at the Shellmound rescue dig. They’d mentioned in passing the effort they had to go through to filter useful information out of the data set. I was looking forward to hearing how Doctor Newman’s team had approached the problem.

  “The first units were established in a scatter pattern across…” Newman continued.

  They what? They just…started digging? Ah, well. On to the phasing, I hoped? I’d drawn closer, almost unconsciously, as he’d gotten into the interesting stuff, and I was now in the front row. I hungered to hear more of the context, as they were burrowing into ground that had seen centuries of conflict, multiple successions of occupation as the borders changed hands, but there was sadly little of that.

  The audience had come for something else. “The first firm evidence we found of the early trade routes we were searching for was the pottery fragment labeled ‘A’ on the next slide,” he said. “Clearly late Geometric ware — of a kind being seen around the same dates in parts of the Mediterranean — it…”

  The audience was being too noisy to continue. I looked again. Typical sherd, quite small, part of a rim. Marked crudely with a repeating geometric motif. And that’s when the Visigoth sandal dropped with a most Teutonic thud.

  “As I was saying,” Doctor Newman raised his voice enough to demonstrate that he could indeed control an unruly class, “It is decorated with a tetragammadion meander. The inferences…”

  Tetragamma…he could call it what he liked. The goddamn pot had swastikas on it. What had I walked into?

  “…have yet to be adequately investigated,” Newman trailed off lamely.

  “Success, Professor!” Vash had also moved to the front of the crowd. “I would think this proves your mentor’s thesis rather nicely.”

  “Do let me finish,” Newman told him a bit crossly. “Fragment A was in assemblage with various unfortunately non-diagnostic sherds. There was, however, a most striking object found in the same layer that includes a diagnostic rim and can be reliably related to stylistic elements of the 8th century…”

  What? No! How could he ignore the law of superposition like that? What kind of cargo cult excavation was he running here?

  “…and my hope is by expanding the scope of the excavation we will eventually turn up proper evidence of an established trade.”

  There was a bit of muttering at the BHG end of the crowd. They’d had their victory party. Paying out for another year of archaeology wasn’t on the top of their list.

  “We might even find leather or even cloth fragments. Similar to the peat bogs, the soil in this region is highly alkaline and…”

  “Acidic,” I said helpfully.

  “What?” Doctor Newman swung on me.

  I hadn’t even intended to speak. I was still mulling over the implications of what I was seeing. “Peat bogs are anoxic and rich in tannins,” I said.

  Doctor Newman turned, slowly, acknowledging my presence in the way one addresses the unwanted guest one had been trying to ignore all night. “I know you,” he said. “I know what you are.”

  Vash was back at it before Newman could say any more. “Forget all that,” he said. “You had them with Fragment A. Edward Sharpe was right. The technology came from here. The art came from here. When the Dorians swept down into Greece at the close of the Greek Dark Ages, they brought the culture of a hardier, more advanced race on their brawny arms and in their iron weapons.”

  Oh, what poetry. He must have stayed up all night scribbling that stuff out.

  “The archaeology is indicative,” Doctor Newman said.

  He seemed unwilling to go further. I was with him there. This Dorian thing was intriguingly different. The Ancient Greeks had come from the Northern lands, in one of the successive waves of the West’s own nomad factory? It was a fun idea, but I’d like to see more evidence myself.

  “Of course,” Vash was magnanimous. It might be Newman’s dig but it was rapidly becoming Vash’s show. “The sherds could have come right out of the Kerameikos. The question before us now is whether the ideas originated in the sun-baked lands of the South or in that Northern chill that, as Aristotle wrote, is so conducive to clear rational thought.”

  “The Hakenkreuz never originated in Greece,” one of his peanut gallery spoke up. “It had to have been brought there.”

  “It has been found across a broad swath of archaic cultures,” Vash pretended to ponder. “Among Germanic peoples, in Iron Age Ireland and Britain. And in prehistoric India as well.”

  India. Wasn’t the term “Aryan” originally Indian? Was Vash trolling his fellow travelers a little there? I wouldn’t put it past him. He might be an all-purpose ass, but I’d be willing to bet he was only lauding Sharpe’s theory because that’s where the cameras were pointed this moment and he always made it a point to be in front of them.

  “The larger specimen…” Doctor Newman was trying to regain control. “The larger specimen — I must ask you now not to take pictures as I have not yet had a chance to complete my submission on it.”

  The next slide came on. The audience was at least impressed. No swastikas on this one, but it was a nice bit of warrior, triumphant in victory, spear outstretched.

  Vash at least took it further than that. “This is it,” he addressed the audience. There were enough cameras on him that if this went viral, it would be across the web in an hour. “Here is the true origin of the Greek Miracle. Here is that artistic flowering, the birth of the mighty, mythic warriors depicted with a grace and steel-eyed accuracy never before seen in this world. That art, those warriors, originated in Northern Europe!”

  I was staring in shock. “I’ve seen this,” I said. Or, rather, I’d seen the hole it came out of. “Sharpe’s collection. In Athens,” I got out. This was the missing chunk of Giulio’s pot.

  Oh, that went over well. The crowd was turning ugly. Admittedly, the ones Vash had brought with him had a head start.

  “What are you babbling about!” Doctor Newman was in my face.

  “I saw a Polaroid in At
hens.” The words came out pure Athena Fox, chill and precise. “An incomplete krater in the personal collection of the late Professor Sharpe. Your sherd matches closely in shape and in the style of decoration.”

  “And you studied seriation at what university?” Newman tried to match my chill but the anger was breaking through. “I know what you are. You have no academic background, no professional accreditation.”

  “I can still recognize a shape.”

  “There is no krater,” he dismissed it with a wave. “I would have…”

  “A krater is used for mixing the wine, my fine Fox,” Vash came up behind me. “You think they were holding symposia here in the woods, lounging around sipping watered wine and talking philosophy?”

  That got a laugh. I was losing them.

  “I’ve studied all my life to get where I am,” Newman said. “You don’t have the qualifications to question my work. You aren’t even an archaeologist.” And then the knife. “You’re just a pretty face with a YouTube channel!”

  And that was the point where I lost. I knew that. I’d been an actress long enough to know when you had the audience, and when they’d turned against you.

  “Get her away from me,” Newman growled before turning away.

  “My pleasure,” Vash said. “Beat it, kid. Adults are talking.” He pushed me. I could smell his sweat, feel his meaty hands and I shuddered. “Go on!” Another shove.

  I started walking. Other shouts followed me. I guess I could sympathize. I’d tried to attack their big, world-changing discovery. Made on a budget dig in some random forest because that’s how archaeology worked. I kept going, away from the clearing, into the woods. Blindly.

  I kept moving until I fetched up against a low stone wall or…rim. That cistern they’d mentioned. I wasn’t crying. But they were right. I was a fake. I’d come out here on Ariadne’s money, pretending to be something I wasn’t. Acting as if I deserved collegial recognition from people who had actually put in the time and had the college degrees to prove it. I’d insulted the very science I wanted to support.