Priscilla Sum

Part 26--Have Faith

The sun dipped closer to the horizon, but we didn't seem any closer to our goal. The trail seemed to go on and on, with no definite endpoint or deviation--the latter unless Derrick looked up from studying the GPS device and told us to turn this way and that. For a while, it would seem that we were headed toward the middle of the island, but then Derrick would sing out, "Okay, now this way!" and he'd take off toward the edge of the island.

Kayce unfolded the map, which I saw was marked with pencil notes in the margins. He frowned and scanned these, looking for something in particular.

His puzzled eyes caught me watching, and he sighed. "I tried to put in as much as I could remember of the different accounts and references. By all rights, at this point," he pointed to a long note with a string of Greek words, "we should be seeing some sort of..." he broke off without finishing his thought as he crouched down to run his fingers over something in the dirt.

Tony leaned over his shoulder, peering at whatever had caught Kayce's attention. "What is it?"

"I thought I saw something..." Kayce scraped away the dirt with his fingers, all around a certain point. The more he dug around its angular sides, the more we realized that it was definitely a shard of something. He pushed away the hard clay dirt, until he could finally dislodge the thing. "Ah-ha!" He crowed, holding it up so we could see. "A piece of something! It's definitely man-made--look at the design."

I stared at the bright-red baked shard in my hand. Now this was archaeology! "Judging by these marks here," I pointed to the scrapes along the edge, "this was probably some kind of sacrificial crock."

Jordyn came up to see. "What about a sacrifice?"

Around the next bend, we could still hear Derrick yell, "Hey! Where did everybody go?"

I spread my arms. "Okay, everybody start looking for more shards. We've got one piece of evidence that we're headed in the right direction, but I think it would be better if we found more pieces of the pot."

"Got one!" Tony sang out, pulling a red shard out from deep in a tangle of tree roots.

"Here's another!" Jordyn's excited squeal came from the other side of the trail.

Altogether, we found five pot shards, relatively close together.

I smiled as Jordyn held a small bag from among our supplies to put them in. It felt good to know that we'd presumed correctly, to imagine the line of worshippers trekking out to the altar site, one of them carrying a red clay pot. Maybe he stumbled, maybe there was an attack of some sort--but smash went the pot, and there it lay for how many centuries before we managed to pick up these last few pieces.

Derrick was waiting on a rock, scratching its surface with something in his hand, when we finally caught up to him.

He stood as we approached.

"Finally, you guys got here!" he chided. "I was waiting a long time, wondering if you'd all just given up, or I was being pranked or something." He stopped and noticed that we were all grinning. "What did I miss?"

I rolled my eyes and waved my hand. "Oh, not much... just the archaeological find of the century!"

Derrick's reaction was instantaneous. "WHAT?" he gaped.

Jordyn burst out laughing. "Way to over-sell," she teased me. "We just found a bunch of pot-shards, is all."

"Aw, man, really?" Derrick scuffed his toe in the dirt. "You all find some ancient artifacts and all I found was this lousy bead stuck in a crack on the rock." He opened his hand and showed us the rounded, scuffed surface.