A prehistoric people lived here, she pondered. They never knew iron or bronze.
Lily tried to stay calm, but a feeling of astonishment crept over her.
Then excitement, followed by urgency. She missed the archaeologist's fussbudget passion for prudence. She scraped and dug furiously at the hard-crusted soil. Every few minutes she stopped and painstakingly brushed away the loose dirt with a small painter's brush.
At last the artifact lay fully exposed. She leaned over for a closer look, staring in awe as it glimmered yellow under the bright white from the Coleman lantern.
Lily had excavated a gold coin.
A very old one, by the look of the worn edges. There was a tiny hole and a piece of rotted leather thong on one side, suggesting that it had once been worn as a pendant or personal amulet She sat back and took a deep breath, almost wanting to reach down and touch it.
Five minutes later, Lily was still crouched there on her knees, her mind trying to create a solution, when abruptly the shelter's door opened and a large-bellied man with a blackwhiskered, kindly-looking face stepped in from the cold, accompanied by a swirl of snow. He exhaled clouds of steam as he breathed. His eyebrows and beard were matted with ice, which made him look like some frozen monster from a science-fiction movie until he broke into a great toothy smile.
it was Dr. Hiram Gronquist, the chief archaeologist of the four-person dig.
"Sorry to interrupt, Lily," he said in his soft, deep voice, "but you've been pushing too hard. Take a break. Come back to the hut, warm up and let me pour you a good stiff brandy."
"Hiram," said Lily, doing her best to stifle the excitement in her voice, "I want you to see something."
Gronquist moved closer and knelt down beside her. "What have you found?"
"See for yourself."
Gronquist fumbled for his reading glasses inside his parka and slid them over his red nose. He bent over the coin until his face was only inches away and studied it from every angle. After several moments, he looked up at Lily, an amused twinkle in his eyes.
"You putting me on, lady?"
Lily looked at him sternly, then relaxed and laughed. "Oh, my God, you think I salted it?"
"You've got to admit, it's like finding a virgin in a bor dello."
"Cute."
He gave her a friendly pat on one knee. "Congratulations, this is a rare discovery."
"How do you suppose it got here?"
"There isn't a workable gold deposit within a thousand miles, and it certainly wasn't minted by the early inhabitants. Their level of development was only a notch above Stone Age. The coin obviously came from another source at a later date. "
"How do you explain the fact it was buried with artifacts we've dated within a century either side Of A.D. 300?"
Gronquist shrugged. "I can't."
"What's your best guess?" asked Lily.
"Off the top of my head, I'd say the coin was probably traded or lost by a Viking."
"There is no record of Vikings sailing this far north along the East Coast," said Lily.
"Okay, maybe Eskimos from a more recent time frame traded goods with the Norse settlements to the south and used this site to camp during hunting expeditions."
"You know better, Hiram. We've found no evidence of habitation after A.D. four hundred."
Gronquist gave Lily a scolding look. "You never give in, do you? We don't even have a date on the coin."
"Mike Graham is an expert on ancient coins. One of his specialties is dating sites around the Mediterranean. He might identify it."
"Won't cost us a nickel for an appraisal," said Gronquist agreeably.
"Come along. Mike can examine it while we have that brandy."
Lily donned her heavy fur-lined gloves, adjusted the hood of her parka and turned down the Coleman. Gronquist switched on a flashlight and held the door open for her. She stepped into the agony of the numbing cold and wind that groaned like a ghost in a churchyard. The freezing air struck her exposed cheeks and made her shudder, a reaction that always seemed to sneak up on her even though she should have been quite used to it by now.
She grasped the rope that led to the living quarters and groped along behind the protecting bulk of Gronquist. She stole a glance upward. The sky was unclouded and the stars seemed to melt into one vast carpet of shimmering diamonds illustrating the barren mountains to the west and the sheet of ice that ran down the fjord to sea in the east. The strange beauty of the Arctic was a compelling mistress, Lily decided.
She could understand why men lost their souls to its spell.
After a thirty-yard hike through the dark, they entered the storm corridor of their hut, walked another ten feet and opened a second door to the living quarters inside. To Lily, after the abominable cold outside, it was like stepping inside a furnace. The aroma of coffee caressed her nostrils like perfume and she immediately pulled off her parka and gloves and poured herself a cup.
Sam Hoskins, neck-length blond hair matching an enormous blond handlebar mustache, was hunched over a drafting board. A New York architect with a love for archaeology, Hoskins allowed two months a year out of his busy schedule to rough it on digs around the world. He provided invaluable assistance by rendering detailed drawings of how the prehistoric village might have looked seventeen hundred years ago.
The other team member, a light-skinned man with thinning sandy hair, reclined on a cot, reading a dog-eared paperback novel. Lily couldn't remember seeing Mike Graham without an adventure book in one hand or stuffed in a coat pocket. One of the leading field archaeologists in the country, Graham was as laid back as a mortician.
"Hey, Mike!" Gronquist boomed. "Take a look at what Lily dug up."
He flipped the coin across the room. Lily gasped in shock, but Graham expertly snatched it out of the air and peered at the face.
After a moment he looked up, his eyes narrowed doubtfully. "You're putting me on."
Gronquist laughed heartily. "My exact words when I laid eyes on it. No gag. She excavated it at site eight."
Graham pulled a briefcase from under his cot and retrieved a magnifying glass. He held the coin under the lens, examining it from every angle.
"Well, what's the verdict?" Lily asked impatiently.
"Incredible," murmured Graham, captivated. "A Gold Miliarensia. About thirteen and a half grams. I've never seen one before. They're quite rare. A collector would -probably pay between six and eight thousand dollars for it."
"Who is the likeness on the face?"
"A standing figure of Theodosius the Great, Emperor of the Roman and Byzantine Empires. His position is a common motif found on the face of coins from that era. if you look closely, you can make out captives at his feet while his hands hold a globe and a labarum."
"A labarum?"
"Yes, a banner bearing the Greek letters XP and forming a kind of monogram meaning the the name of Christ." The Emperor Constantine adopted it after his conversion to Christianity and it was handed down through his successors."
"What do you make of the lettering on the reverse?" asked Gronquist.
Graham's eyeball enlarged out of proportion through the glass as he studied the coin. "Three words. First one looks like TRIVMFATOR. Can't make out the other two. They're nearly worn smooth. A collector's catalogue should give a description and Latin translation. I'll have to wait until we return to civilization before I can look them up."
"Can you date it?"
Graham stared at the ceiling thoughtfully. "Coined during the reign of Theodosius, which, if I remember correctly, was from A.D. 379 to 395."
Lily stared at Gronquist- "Right in the ballpark."
He shook his head. "Sheer fantasy, to suggest fourth-century Eskimos had contact with the Roman Empire."
"We can't rule out the infinity of chance," Lily persisted.
"Once this gets out, there will be a flood of speculation and hype by the news media," said Hoskins, inspecting the coin for the first time.