The sun set early and rose late this time of year, and most days it wasn’t able to penetrate the thick fog and low clouds that hung over the island. The weak grey light was all that distinguished the daytime from the near-constant darkness.
It was the perfect cover for the figure moving quietly through the trees.
He moved slowly, his breath releasing long steam columns that quickly disappeared into the cold.
The woods around him were perfectly still, and the thickness of the air muffled the sounds of his feet into utter silence. The only sound he could hear his was own breath.
And the only light he could see was the warm glow from the small cottage at the edge of the woods. He approached, nearer and nearer, until he could see a figure through the foggy window. He crouched down in the treeline, just outside the reach of the light.
Bent over her laptop, long hair coiled into an absent-minded knot at the nape of her neck, his prey was concentrating. He could feel the threads of her energy dancing through the cottage and spiraling out into the night sky. Towards the stars, towards the sea, towards him.
He licked his lips. Closed his eyes. Took a deep, steadying breath.
When he opened them, she was staring out at him, squinting. His pleasure was forgotten as his breath caught in his throat. For a long moment neither of them moved.
Blinking sleepily, she sighed and looked away from the window, taking a sip from her small glass. He relaxed when he realized that she hadn’t seen him. It was just strange luck. She stretched her arms above her head and stood up gingerly to make her way to the bathroom.
He released a long, chuckle-bounced breath and settled back into position.
It was surprisingly easy, the watching. People often don’t realize what holes they leave open in their lives that someone else can take advantage of. Keeping to a schedule, always taking the same path, never noting the face of the barista or bus driver or cleaner. A person doesn’t realize they’re vulnerable because they don’t expect to be exploited. And she was one of them.
It was a cloudy night and she was alone, laboring in the cozy kitchen.
So predictable, so reliable. There were others he could watch, but she was the most delicious.
Elliott awoke the next morning feeling focused. She reviewed the conversation she’d had with Nik for the hundredth time as her kettle screamed cheerfully in the background. It seemed almost too easy; send some recruitment emails for next year’s field school, review the hiring files, make recommendations, and plan her vacation. The relief she felt at not having to dive again for the rest of the year made her feel lighter than air.
She sat down at her breakfast and work table with her French press and began to make a list. She decided to deal with the touchiest subject first. She had to call the dive shop at the north end of the island. They might grumble at the sudden loss of income this close to Christmas, but Elliott had no doubt that Nik would find some way to compensate them. Have them empty the tanks, try to order her own compressor, go for a visit to retrieve her gear. If she brought them some early Christmas bourbon, that should smooth things over there.
Then, email her old department at Leiden to put out feelers for the field school. She decided to reach out to her old undergrad adviser at UConn too. Like any good nerd, she had kept in touch with him after graduation. The field school excited her, and she made a mental note to plumb her contacts for other schools that might be interested, particularly ones that might also be interested in the maritime branch.
She knew that Öland was littered with sites from nearly every major historical epoch, but she had very little idea about the specific sites. Where would the kids dig?
She had better have a look at those files.
She decided to start with the two other administrative director positions. Her own position as head of the maritime sites was already well established, although not as methods-driven as she would’ve liked, but the position description for the terrestrial site director was more specific.
It explained that the hire would oversee projects at sites that were scheduled for cultural heritage management, which was a fancy way of saying ‘sites that were famous’. She flipped through Nik’s few candidates until she stopped at a name she knew. Elliott had heard of Reza Ayaan because some of the projects he had worked on in Syria were now major tourist attractions. Having him on the team would be a major boost to the island’s publicity. Nik had written “Sandby Borg?” on Reza’s CV and Elliott’s mind danced with possibilities.
Sandby Borg was an Iron Age ring fort on the coast and the site of a famous massacre. She could already see the summertime community events, the tours, the reenactments, the students bent over their trenches. Nik was right; Reza was a very good fit. What he had accomplished in Palmyra was nothing short of monumental. Elliott groaned at her accidental mental pun and put him at the top of the pile.
The third administrative position was a bit less coherent. Nik wanted to hire an experimental archaeologist, but someone who would oversee all kinds of ambitious building projects. His handwritten notes in the margins of the position description painted a picture of a historical village of some kind. North paddock, rebuild sites, local materials, forge?, walk-through village, signage and scicomm, accuracy.
He had underlined the word ‘accuracy’ several times, and Elliott’s mind immediately went to the one person she knew who would jump out of her skin at an opportunity like this. She flipped through the candidate files until she came to the name Priscilla Harrison. She could hardly breathe. Nik was asking for her recommendations for a site administrator and had short-listed her very best friend in the world.
Elliott forced herself to read through the rest of the candidates as objectively as possible, but even she was forced to conclude that not one came close to her old friend. She placed her at the top of the second pile.
Excitement dancing in her limbs, she methodically cleaned her dishes, opened up her laptop, and began writing a few emails.
It turned out that the field school was an easy sell. For most archaeology students, field school is the best part of their degree. Like a botanist, biologist, or linguist trekking through exotic jungles to document previously unrecorded species or languages, archaeology field school was a student’s character-building rite of passage. Often in remote or challenging locations (but sometimes in the quiet and picturesque plains of the English Midlands), the field schools of the world employed undergraduate labor in the pursuit of post-graduate research goals.
They typically lasted 4-6 weeks, during which time each student acquired sunburns from the long hours bent over the trench, sore muscles from hauling endless buckets of dirt, an unending pile of filthy laundry, some not-for-polite-company stories, a couple of lifelong friends, and the knowledge and skills to carry them into their future careers.
Elliott had loved field school and attended two different ones as an undergraduate, once on an Iron Age Celtic ritual site near Aberystwyth on the Welsh coast, and once in Denmark at a Bronze Age shipbuilding site. During her PhD in The Netherlands, she had volunteered and coordinated and tagged along with the undergrads whenever her intense schedule would allow. For her, the daily monotony had been far outweighed by the fleeting moments of discovery, when small pieces from the digs had come together to create a clearer picture of how the sites had evolved over time.
Early on, she had discovered that she was very, very good at archiving and record-keeping, and at keeping her cohort of students cheerful and engaged. She still treasured the relationships she had formed during those few weeks of archaeology sleep-away camp in Wales and Denmark, and often found excuses to meet up with her old friends during her frequent conference and research travels.
Promoting the Öland field school to universities and professional archaeology companies was incredibly easy because it was such a unique concept. The huge island she was becoming so fond of was connected to the Swedish mainland by a 6 kilometer bridge, so while it was an enticing location, it wasn’t too deep in the hinterlands.
And it had been quietly and continuously inhabited for millennia, so it contained enough archaeology from every age to keep a dozen universities busy for decades.
As she drafted her pitches, she began to understand why it wasn’t so hard for Nik to convince the funding agency, some shady corporate entity called Discoveries Corp., that they stood to make a pretty penny with attendance and usage fees by establishing a permanent base and giving it a few seasons to build a reputation— and they were right.
The known sites already had everything for every archaeologist and Elliott could easily imagine how she would have squirmed with excitement as an undergraduate. Neolithic pottery (Cavemen!), Bronze Age metalwork (Romans!), Iron Age building construction and shipwrecks (Vikings!). There was rock art and countless samples of writing that would entice the classics students; there were coins and other underwater detritus to be discovered and cleaned up by the conservation and archiving students; there were endless shipwrecks for the divers; there were forts, cairns, ship burials, standing stones, gravesites; it was basically an archaeological theme park.
According to Nik’s vision, there would be 5 or 6 different academic dig projects running simultaneously during field season, just for professors and their students. He also wanted to establish contracts with 2 or 3 commercial archaeology teams, headed by professional archaeologists who could afford to hire their grunts. Elliott wasn’t as confident about that; a lot of commercial archaeology was due to government regulations and was usually limited to construction sites or roadworks. What would they do when these weren’t needed?
That was Nik’s problem, she supposed. He wanted the compound to be full of people, and she would do her best to supply the academic side. The camp structures themselves could sleep as many as 200 people, and if Nik saw his visions realized, she expected that the most junior members of some teams would even be forced to sleep in tents.
A few weeks and dozens of excited email exchanges later, Elliott was getting ready to leave Öland for the holidays. She had spent her time in academic bliss, finally working on all the articles that she’d dreamed up during those wistful moments when it felt like her PhD would never end, things that were only tangentially related to that overwhelmingly demanding research topic. Responses to her calls for expressions of interest in the field school had flooded in, often from schools Elliott hadn’t even contacted. People were enthusiastic, and why shouldn’t they be?
Nearly everyone in her academic community had heard of Nik, but Elliott was no unknown herself. Her PhD work on the symbolic importance of hearth structures in Bronze Age Baltic coastal settlements had synthesized a number of her interests, made her an expert in several important areas, and gained the attention of the wider academic community for its thorough detail and innovative research methods.
She had become a rising academic star in her own right from those early, teasing publications, and now that word was getting around that Nik Trevalo had hired her fresh out of grad school for a six-year contract, her fame was beginning to grow.
Securing lucrative employment thinly disguised a post-doc was unheard of for a newly minted PhD, and Elliott planned to use this to jump-start her own career in academia and maybe even establish her own field school someday. She had plans, and Nik was instrumental in helping her achieve them.
She decided to spend her last night on Öland with Tom and Inga, who had also offered to drive her to the airport the following morning. She was dearly looking forward to spending time with her friends, and smiled as Tom’s headlights lit her windows. It was so deep into the winter that there were only about seven hours of daylight, and half of that was thin and sad. Elliott would have hated it, if she hadn’t been so obsessed with spotting the Northern Lights. They were rare this far south, but even more precious when they made their appearance.
Elliott had taken to driving out alone to the windswept alvar on clear nights to try to catch a glimpse.
“Hop in, it’s freezing!” came Tom’s cheerful greeting.
“Coming!” she yelled, dragging her suitcase to the porch, and taking one last look around her little home before locking the door and scurrying over the thin snow into the warmth of the lumbering vehicle. Everything here was rugged, tough, and built to last.
“Inga has put together quite a surprise,” Tom said, “It’s Saint Lucia Day today, did you know?”
Elliott did know, but she wanted Tom to tell her about it anyway.
“Well, we’re having some guests for a dinner party, but that’s about the extent of it,” he chuckled, “Inga has been cooking all day. She’d never admit it, but I think this is her favorite holiday.”
Elliott chuckled too. Inga was serious bordering on severe, but she had opened her heart easily to Elliott and appointed herself her surrogate maternal force from the moment they’d met.
Well, from the moment that Inga had found out that Elliott had moved all the way to rural Sweden to work for someone she had never met, in a place she’d never seen. It had seemed to set Inga on edge, and she always asked Elliott incisive questions about herself and her situation when she came to visit.
Elliott loved it; loved having this fearsome friend clucking over her well-being and seemingly ready to box Nik’s ears when Elliott was unhappy. Inga had been livid after Elliott’s abandonment by the Estonians and had to be physically restrained from sailing her own yacht straight to Talinn to murder the traitorous crew. To think of her spending the day baking dainty confectionary made Elliott’s heart swell.
They arrived at the bed and breakfast and Elliott stepped out of the vehicle to take a deep breath of the seaside. Truthfully, she loved the crisp, cold air. She felt clean and lightweight, as though leaving the compound behind had released her from a tiresome burden.
She greeted Inga with her usual cheer and was surprised when the towering woman returned her hug with uncharacteristic warmth. Before she could even say anything, Inga pressed a warm mug of mulled wine and a fresh ginger biscuit into her hands.
“Come and sit by the fire, meet our friends,” she said, leading Elliott into a spacious den. It was Elliott’s favorite room at the converted farmhouse, all wood and leather and wool, but dominated by a wall of thick glass facing the ocean on one side, and a mighty hearth on the other. Elliott couldn’t resist inspecting her favorite element of the room, appreciating again the simplicity of the design that belied its perfection.
The stone hearth was the central backbone of the two-story building— a terrible fire risk, but Elliott knew that Tom and Inga were both diligent in their inspections and cleaning, and only used seasoned wood, cut by Tom’s own hands the previous year and stored in a breezy outbuilding to dry. The entire structure was covered in elegant whitewash but Elliott’s expert eye could still make out the shapes of the solid shale stones beneath. It must have taken months to construct, and it was beautiful.
Elliott’s usual appreciation was cut short on this visit, however, as she beheld a familiar face seated around the fire. Anouk Barathi was the only other staff member who had arrived over the last few weeks. She’d been hired months before Elliott but had been delayed trying to secure a Swedish work visa. Her two children, who each had EU passports thanks to their absent Dutch father, would arrive in the new year to attend school on the mainland. Anouk was serious and practical, exactly the temperament needed to fill the position of the field school’s hospitality director.
To Elliott’s relief, she had already taken over organization of a number of critical procurement, hiring, and maintenance issues that Nik had overlooked. Elliott was very glad to see her and entirely unsurprised that Inga had already befriended her.
Anouk was engaged in conversation with Anders, which seemed to be proceeding haltingly. This was also no surprise. Anouk and Anders were united in many of their views on organization of Nik’s project and worked well together, but, like everyone else, Elliott knew that Anders’ manner grated on Anouk. As did his sniffing. There were another dozen or so guests milling around the large den, and she could even hear Nik’s voice coming from the kitchen where he was likely trying to charm Inga into something or other.
The mood in the whole farmhouse was cheerful and warm, and Elliott happily settled in for an evening of good food, spiced wines, games, stories, laughter, and new friends.