“What the hell?” Adam grunted, contorting into the pit. Being the size of a linebacker did not lend itself well to a surgical excavation unit like this one. His trowel wobbled in his hands as he scraped away dirt.
The heat was getting to him. Mediterranean summers somehow had both the stickiness of the tropics and the dry heat of the Sahara. According to local legend, this was a bathhouse and temple from just after the time of the Roman conversion to Christianity.
A few amateurish digs looking for evidence of a rumored massacre yielded the usual assortment of common Roman artifacts. If he were being really honest, this site wouldn’t even warrant further excavation if it weren’t for the mag hit.
Nikolas and Sara were mapping the site using a magnetometer to experiment with her new techniques and found a large area consumed by a magnetic spike. Usually, a ‘mag hit’ is just a blip on the map—a coin or a scrap of iron. But this was a massive spike, the kind of reading you’d get from a steel beam or a cannon.
In a 4th-century bathhouse, that wasn’t just an anomaly; it was an impossibility.
The trowel wobbled again. Adam was exhausted. He ran his fingers through his sandy blonde hair in an attempt to keep the sweat at bay. Lying on his back for a minute, he shouted up at Nikolas, “Maybe one of Napoleon’s cannons flew all the way here when the Parthenon blew up.”
“That’s not funny,” he shouted back, “Find that blip!”
So that’s how they got there—a small dig to investigate a tech reading that shouldn’t exist. The site of the modern Basilica of Saint Demetrios was built and rebuilt. Layer on layer of ‘mystery’ that was more popular with conspiracy theorists than with real academics.
No one becomes an archaeologist or classicist for the money. They do it for the glory. At least that’s what he told himself. With that glory, of course, came digging holes. Oftentimes, just to find nothing. So often it felt like chasing ghosts. The only problem was that Adam had dug to the base of the wall and, alas, had found no iron, just a boring old wall, probably the back end of an ancient store room.
Adam stood up to chug some water from his canteen. Getting heat stroke would be embarrassing. Nikolas and Ani were staring at the site map. He always had to laugh at seeing Nikolas in the field. The man was tall and lean. His passport said Greek, but he looked like a slightly more tanned version of his classmates at Oxford.
Ani, for her part, had her usual larger-than-life posture, dark brown curly hair billowing about in the summer breeze. He knew he’d inevitably have to fend off some local suitors at the bar later; though they couldn’t pass for siblings, he treated her like a twin sister.
He scanned the area for Sara. He found the petite grad student had a standard metal detector, trying to see if any other iron bits were lying around. She looked flustered as usual, trying to keep her jet black hair out of her eyes. They’d break her out of that uptight academic persona soon enough—that’s just what happens when you drag a physicist into the dirt.
“Is there any chance that one of your students is screwing with us? Threw down a magnet, maybe?” Adam asked.
Nikolas sighed, “For the millionth time, no. I threatened them with a failure in the course and referral to the dean.”
“Even more reason not to admit it,” Adam replied, squatting back down in the hole. It was then that he saw it: a change in the rock pattern. There was a perfectly square flat stone built into the bottom of the wall.
“Hey, Sara, bring that detector over here.”
Sara walked over and hopped into the trench. She waved the detector over the area, and sure enough, it screamed as if the densest metal object known to man was hidden in the hole.
He reached down to scrape away the next layer of dirt when suddenly the trowel jumped in his hand and stuck firm against the horizontal surface of the stone.
“Holy shit!” Adam yelped. A magnet? Something strong enough to pull a tool through a piece of stone? That didn’t make sense. It did from the standpoint of the readings they were chasing in the first place. Something that magnetic would cause a giant hit. But in the 4th Century, they wouldn’t have had anything remotely this strong. Would they?
Nikolas and Ani wandered over to check on the commotion.
“Question, Nik. Did the…”
“It’s Nikolas.”
“Did the Romans have lodestones, Nikolas?”
“They definitely knew about them. They would’ve called the magnes. Pliny the Elder wrote about them. He told a droll story about a shepherd named Magnes whose iron-tipped staff and nail-studded shoes got stuck to a rock on Mt. Ida. A bit dramatic, but classic Pliny.”
“Classic Pliny indeed,” Adam mused, “Did they use them for anything?”
Ani cut in, “Yes. They believed they could cure gout or be an aphrodisiac.”
“I would categorize the uses as parlor tricks,” responded Nikolas.
“If this is a magnet, it’s a hell of a magnet to grab onto my trowel through a rock,” Adam said as he reached back for his tool, “No way they would’ve had something this powerful, right?”
“Highly unlikely,” answered Nikolas, “But there can be a first for anything. Maybe a meteorite or similar. Either way, it would be exceedingly rare for something this magnetic not to be written about anywhere.”
Adam stared at the flat surface on the wall. He’d looked for the ‘halo’—the tell-tale staining that happens when someone digs a fresh hole into old earth. There was none. The mortar was a continuous, crumbly gray, identical to the rest of the 4th-century foundation. This stone hadn’t been tucked away last week by a prankster. Whatever was in there, it had been sealed behind the stone while the mortar was still wet, sixteen hundred years ago.
Adam continued to clear away dirt, “Well, no changes in the soil compaction. Everything on this layer of soil matches other areas we’ve seen from this time period. So whatever it is, it was buried at the right time. Hey Sara, can you take some pictures? I want to pull out this stone.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll stay up here,” she said nervously, “You may want to toss your phone and wallet. Magnetic fields that strong are dangerous. The closer you get to it, the stronger it will be. Also, take off jewelry or anything metal on you.”
Adam tossed his phone, wallet, keys, and wedding ring up and out of the trench. Sara snapped a picture with the scale. To say she was nervous was an understatement. Something that could set off her detector and attract Adam’s trowel through a wall could be incredibly dangerous. Forget forgery or embarrassment for being set up by a prankster. This could hurt someone.
The stone itself was about 15cm on each side and perfectly square. Adam slowly worked the trowel around the edges of the stone. Digging around whatever this was made it difficult to be careful. The trowel jerked as if by magic as Adam tried to dig further. Eventually, the stone came free, revealing a hollow half filled with dirt. A curved piece of bronze emerged from loose fill dirt inside the hole.
The team leaned in closer. Ani and Nikolas jumped down into the trench for a better view. Sara continued snapping pictures.
“What in the world are you?” Adam asked.
He took out a brush and a wooden dowel to more carefully pull the dirt away. Slowly, an object appeared. A bronze dome over a plate of dark steel. The dark steel plate had evenly spaced marks around the base and numerals still smudged with dirt. The dome had impressed writing, some iteration of Greek from the look of it. Sara took a few more in situ pictures before Adam carefully dislodged it from its resting place in the wall and picked it up.
Brushing it off, the text on the dome became clear.
ΚΡΟΥΣΟΝ ΤΟΝ ΚΩΔΩΝΑ ΙΝΑ ΒΟΗΘΗΣΩΜΕΝ
Nikolas took the object from Adam’s hands and stared at the inscription. Even without the magnifier, the symmetry was bothersome. This isn’t 4th-century work, he realized silently. The depth of the grooves is perfectly consistent. It looks like a CNC milling machine did it, not a Byzantine chisel. He swallowed the thought, hesitant to sound crazy too early in the analysis.
Instead, he nudged his colleague. “Ani, look at the lettering. Tell me I’m not seeing things.”
Ani leaned in until her nose was inches from the bronze surface. “You aren’t kidding,” she muttered, tracing a finger just above the metal. “Look—each letter is absolutely perfect. It could be stamping, maybe? But the edges look cut, not stamped. It’s almost... laser precise.”
Adam hovered just over her shoulder, his shadow falling across the artifact. “Is that even possible for this period?”
“I don’t know,” Sara interjected, standing a few feet back as if the artifact might bite. “It looks awfully manufactured. A little too perfect. Plus the magnetism? My sensors pegged out before I even got within a meter. That thing is putting out a field that shouldn’t be possible without a power source.”
Adam looked from the artifact to his teammates to the streets around the dig site, which were filling with cars and people heading home. He saw the panic in Sara’s eyes and the obsessive trance Nikolas was falling into. Ani was... well, she was Ani with any bit of antiquated language - Looking ready to devour the thing whole. He felt a sudden, sharp prickle of hair standing up on his arms—not just from the magnetism, but from the realization that whatever this thing was, their investigation had just gone from basic investigation to something else entirely.
“Okay,” Adam said, his voice cutting through the silence as he moved to cover the trench for the night. “Whelp, mission accomplished! We found the blip. To the laboratory! I need a beer, and we need a new plan. Because this just got interesting. If we keep standing here looking like a bunch of lovestruck teenagers, people will start to ask questions.”
“Yes. Honestly, I think we should get this back to the lab and close the dig site as quickly as possible,” Sara agreed.
Ani looked at Sara with a gleam in her eye. She pulled a rock hammer from her tool belt and asked Nikolas, “Can I see it?”
Nikolas, still dazed and mouthing the words, looked at her and held out the artifact. Ani reached out to grab it before Sara stepped in, “Absolutely not! Nikolas, do you not see the hammer she has? She’s going to hit it!”
“It has literal instructions on it!” exclaimed Ani.
Adam had sat down, pulling off his boots to put on sandals, “I’m with her, let’s hit it.”
“We cannot hit a priceless artifact with a rock hammer. I can hear it now, ‘Esteemed team of archaeologists destroy history-defining artifact,’ I’m not even sure if we shouldn’t bring this straight to the department chair with the documentation and let him figure it out,” stated Sara.
Nikolas nodded, “Agreed. We will not be listening to the glorified shovel bum and the woman who thinks every phrase, bird, and cat she sees in a fresco has the meaning of life. But to the department chair? We should do some tests first before jumping to conclusions.”
“Low blow,” exclaimed Ani, “I can only half tell if you were joking.”
Nikolas’ face was horrified looking at the trowel just inches from the base of the dome. “I never joke when antiquity is concerned. I...” He trailed off.
Thunk! Adam stuck his trowel to the shiny bottom of the domed artifact. It hung there. “I prefer the term Professional Archaeologist, thank you. And my years of field experience tell me that this is indeed a magnet; we can say that for sure,” he said, smiling wryly.
“I forgive you, buddy. Let’s get cleaned up, and I’ll buy you a drink with the real money I made digging holes for the private sector,” said Adam.
Nikolas’ face looked a cross between sheepish and indignant, but he carefully removed the trowel from the artifact and walked towards the car with Sara.
“Weird, right?” Adam asked Ani, staring down at the pit.
“The artifact or our robot colleague?” Jested Ani.
“Both, but the hole in the wall. It would’ve been towards the floor.”
“It was clearly a hiding place. Maybe for a sacred ritual object?” Ani said, her eyebrows raising, “The sort of thing that a mob would massacre a whole building full of cultists over.”
“Why the baths, though?” Adam asked, looking back at the trench. “If you’re a cult with a magic bell, you don’t hide it where people are scrubbing their armpits.”
“Maybe because the baths were the only place soldiers and church leaders wouldn’t think to look for a miracle,” Ani replied.
They were both thinking it. The Massacre at Thessalonica in 390. It was well documented, unlike the supposed goings on at this site. But the circus where the more famous massacre took place wasn’t that far from here. And with all the disturbance on the site, who knew how this object stayed hidden?
“I’d like to be Indiana Jones as much as the next guy, but that stuff doesn’t happen in real life. No bones, no weapons, nothing to indicate a battle happened here.”
“There’s a first time for everything.”
“There sure is,” Adam sighed, picking up his trowel and wiping it off, “All right, let’s go. I need to get out of the sun.”
Made a few updates this morning for continuity! No need to reread. Don't you hate it when you work hard, read it 5 times and then once it's live to the internet you see something obvious?
Great first chapter! Do we get to know the translation of the Greek?