“Ah,” Ariane said, “you think it was looters.”
Bard was right with her. “You think,” he supposed, “that the engine block is now sitting in a display case in the private gallery of some wealthy collector on Cradle.”
“That is not an unreasonable supposition,” Doc admitted, in a tone that, however, made it clear that no such idea had actually crossed his mind. “But it strikes me as unusual for looters to go to so much trouble to give a ceremonial burial to the driver.”
“If it was not valuable as loot—as a collector’s item—then what possible value could the engine block have had?” Kath Two asked.
“It was valuable,” Doc said, “as iron. As a several-hundred-kilogram sample of pure metal that could be melted down and cast into other shapes.”
“Is there anything in the universe less valuable than iron?” Bard scoffed. “We have been living inside of giant chunks of it for five thousand years.”
“We have,” Doc agreed, and with a small movement of his hand caused his grabb-chair to withdraw from the grave site and begin picking its way back toward the excavation. Remembrance threw an unreadable look over her shoulder and followed him.
They reconvened and viewed the pit through fresh eyes. Ty pointed out a place where the gray ash was freckled with tiny red-brown spots, and guessed that someone had worked there with a hacksaw, sprinkling iron sawdust on the ground, and that the tiny flakes had rusted. Slipping the ash between his fingers he produced a few bright sparks of clean metal. Bard found a scarred wedge of dense wood, battered on its fat end with many hammer blows, and guessed it had been used to part the engine block into pieces that could be more easily carried. Beled, continuing to circle the perimeter, came up with a pole of hard wood somewhat more than a meter long, neatly rounded at one end, snapped off sharp at the other. “They broke one of their shovels,” he said. Holding the pole before him, he rotated it until he was able to see an inscription that had been stamped into the wood. “Srap Tasmaner,” he announced.
“Let me see that,” Doc said.
Beled handed it to him. Doc gazed at it for a while without speaking. The longer he looked at this seemingly trivial piece of debris, the more he drew attention to himself, until the others were all standing there silently watching him. His deeply hooded eyes were downcast and it was difficult to tell whether he was focusing all of his mental powers on the thing, or fast asleep.
Finally he rotated the pole until its sharp end was pointed downward, and used it to scratch a letter into the dirt.
C
“You read this, Beled, as a letter S, but as you probably learned in school, it was once used to represent a number of sounds including the one we write as K.”
He wrote a K beneath the C.
“The next few letters are familiar and we write them the same way in Anglisky.”
CRA
KRA
“You misread the fourth letter as a defective P. A natural mistake since we no longer use the old glyph F, which it resembles. Instead we use the Cyrillic phi.”
CRAF
KRAФ
“The next two letters are TS, for which we have a more wieldy one-letter substitute in Anglisky.”
CRAFTS
KRAФЦ
“The next three are the same in English and Anglisky.”
CRAFTSMAN
KRAФЦMAN
“Craftsman,” Beled said, reading the bottom row. “But what of the R at the end?”
CRAFTSMAN ?
“When it’s enclosed in a little circle, it’s not a letter to be pronounced at all, but a sign that this is a sort of commercial trademark. Or I should say ‘was.’ It was a trademark five thousand years ago, apparently.”
About halfway through this lecture on ancient and modern orthography, Ariane had become intensely focused, and for the last part of it had been holding one hand over her mouth. “I have seen its like in the Epic!” she exclaimed through her fingers. “New Caird’s landing on Ymir. Vyacheslav went out the airlock to clear ice from the docking port. He used a shovel just like this one.”
“You are saying—” Kath Two prompted Doc.
“I am saying that this shovel handle is itself a five-thousand-year-old ’fact that could fetch a high price on Cradle,” Doc said, lifting it up and brushing the dirt from its broken end. Ariane snapped a picture of it and thumbed at her tablet. “It was thrown away,” Doc continued, “because it was of no use to its owners, who knew that they could get wooden poles anywhere in Beringia just by cutting down a tree.”