Chap. 100 The Rusted Tang

Chap. 100 The rusted tang

B'rost resisted leaving. He was still poking around the enormous skeleton.

"Look, K'ndar, even with it missing the skull, this thing must be 10 meters long!"

"Come on, B'rost, even Rath is getting nervous. Do you want to get stuck in a squall?"

"Just a few more minutes, K'ndar…or you can leave and I'll be right behind you."

The leader in K'ndar rebelled at that. You don't leave a teammate behind. But what if the teammate is being stubborn? He looked nervously at the sky. He guessed they had about twenty more minutes.

Enough time, Scientist, his mind said, to sketch that skeleton. 

Oh, yeah. He got out his notebook and began to sketch. 

I need a camera, he thought, or else try and pry D'nis away from his myriad other projects to come back out here.

"You said, how long?" he called to B'rost.

"Ten, maybe twelve meters," B'rost called back. "Remember, that's WITHOUT the head."

Lindea was standing near the now headless end of the skeleton. She was getting nervous, too. Her sailor bred weather sense was beginning to complain. But she could feel something, saying, stay. Look around. 

"Look," B'rost said, "here's leg bones. Part of a hip?"

"Pelvis" K'ndar said, in a tone that said he was getting tired of this. The wind was beginning to pick up.

"Pelvis"

Lindea felt drawn to the pelvis.

Shaking her head, wondering at what it was, she was still awed by the size of it. Even being deteriorated by the weather, it was huge. It was…

It had something.

She looked closer. There was a dark red spot in amongst the bleached white of the bone.

"K'ndar. Do you have a knife? Something to pry with?"

K'ndar, shaken out of his mood, handed her his knife. She began to dig at the spot.

It came out fairly easily. The three were dumbstruck in amazement.

Lindea recognized it. "It's the head and tang of a harpoon."

"OK. Now we leave," K'ndar said, and taking Lindea by the hand, turned for his dragon.

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Of course, they had to go to Landing.

"WHERE did you get this?" Raylan said, turning it over and over in his hand.

"From the same skeleton we found on the southern edge of the continent. Did you get a chance to examine the skull?"

Raylan shook his head. "Sorry to say, but no. Your artifact find, K'ndar, seems to have to have inspired others to go poking about and suddenly we're being inundated with "things" that people have found. Everyone insists they've found an artifact when it's just…stuff…that someone else lost in the jungle or just had sitting at the bottom of a pile of other 'stuff'-but we're checking them out, just the same. But this thing looks legitimate, although I've no idea what it is."

"It's a harpoon head," Lindea said, "sailors used to fish with them but that was a long time ago, long before people remembered what dolphins could do for us, like telling us where the fish are. But why they'd harpoon that big animal on the beach, I don't know."

"Ah," Raylan said, and typed "harpoon" into his computer. He read the results and said, "Got it. Now I understand." 

"I'm a landsman, after all," he explained, "About the only thing I know about fishing is that I admire you fisherfolk for all the hard work you do to keep me fed."

She smiled and nodded her head.

"I'll kick the skull identification up in priority, now that you've brought this in," Raylan said. 

"I'd never used one, a harpoon, I mean, but my grandfather had one in their home, once they'd retired from fishing. I think he kept it because HIS grampa had had it. It was more as a memory thing than ever using it, and it had the name of his grampa's first ever ship on the tang. But I don't see a name on this," Lindea said.

"Well, considering it's been protected by bone since who knows when, maybe this thing has some sort of etching. We'll look at it and if there's anything that can…hello, here it is."

Raylan pointed to the inside of the tang. K'ndar could see nothing that looked like etching. 

But, Raylan was the expert.

"Let me take this to the back, my scanner here won't pick this up. This will take a minute, are you in a hurry?"

"Not now, I guess," K'ndar said. He was lying.

B'rost had kept quiet about having the neck bone from the skeleton. Lindea looked at him.

"Are you going to leave that bone with Raylan?"

"Not just yet. I want to take it home and have our dolphins look at it. I want to KNOW," he insisted.

"OK."

Raylan came out with a smile on his face.

"We found a number. It's inside the handle, so while it's rusted, it's not been degraded too badly."

The three perked up. 

"What's the number?"

"213". 

"That's..that's it?"

"Yes, but-craftsmen put numbers in things like this harpoon head for a reason. Why?" 

"Why?"

"Yes, why. I'm trying to joggle your brains into thinking like archivists. Why would someone go to all the trouble of putting a number on the INSIDE of a harpoon head? A thing they might never see again?"

"Um…….." 

"Come on, think."

They thunked.

"To…to keep track?"

Raylan grinned. "Why keep track?"

Lindea said, "Um…to keep track of who made it. Or to designate ownership."

"Why would you want to designate ownership?"

B'rost said, "It's like cheeses-we used to stamp a date on the cheeses we made, to keep track of when it was put up to age."

Raylan encouraged him, smiling. "Did your cheesecraft hall have a specific number or symbol?"

"Yes, of course, we had a special symbol, how else would you know where the cheese came from..OH! The number in the head must be from a specific forge?"

"Ah, there you are. One puts numbers into or onto things, to keep track of the number they made, or to designate the person who forged it, or where it was forged, or even a date.

 And if that's so, and if we're lucky, we have records from long, long ago, thanks to Aivas being able to read skins. Now we have a lot of history recorded that was lost over the years. Hides are horrible record keeping things."

He looked at Lindea.

"If I may keep this, ma'am, until I get a chance to do the research?"

"Of course."