The Boudicca Parchments

Chapter 45

“Professor Hynds! Professor Hynds! You’ve got to come and see this!”

The young man was breathless from his sprint. He had been on the other side of the dig site — almost diagonally opposite the professor’s makeshift office — and he had been forced to run two sides of a square to reach the professor.

Emeritus Professor Edward Hynds looked up and swept a strand of grey hair from his eyes.

“What is it?”

“You’ve got to see this, professor,” said the gangly youth. “We found clay jar… intact.”

The professor scratched his silver beard, contemplatively.

“Okay, well follow procedure. Hand it to your coordinator and have him bag it up and marked… carefully.”

The breathless youth stood there immobile, looking at the professor, expectantly.

“No you don’t understand.” The voice was still panting from his recent exertions. “He’s the one who sent me to tell you.”

“Why would he…”

Hynds trailed off, sensing that something was missing from this explanation.

“He opened it, professor.”

“What?”

“He opened the jar. It had a cork lid. And he took it off and there was a jute bag inside. And inside that was a piece of leather and rolled up inside that was piece of parchment!”

Hynds put a hand on the table and stood up to his full six foot height. Although only a year and bit shy of his proverbial three score and ten, he was in pretty good nick. He tipped the scales at sixteen stone, but most of it was muscle. This was not some deskbound professor who had gone to fat. This was a man of the outdoors who kept himself fit by hill-walking and gardening. When he did find himself deskbound for any significant period — such as when he had to fulfil the academic’s perennial obligation to generate a scholarly paper for publication, so as to stay on the cutting edge of academia — he took advantage of the various local gyms to counterbalance the desk time with a muscle-building and cardiovascular work out.

“When you say parchment, do you mean papyrus?”

It sounded patronizing, but Hynds knew that some of these students were wet behind the ears and didn’t know the difference.

“He said parchment. In fact he said it looked like Jewish style parchment — whatever that means.”

By this stage, the Hynds was moving round the desk. He knew that Jews had very particular ways of preparing parchment, that differed significantly from the iron age Romans and Romano-Britons.

“Did he say what was on it?”

“He said it was a map… a map of Europe actually. But he also said something about writing on it.”

Hynds realized that the reason he hadn’t brought the map back to the office was in case the professor wanted to check out the spot where it was found. After a find like that, they would almost certainly want to prioritize the digging in that area. But Hynds also wanted to check out the stratum that the find had come from. And the area coordinator had probably realized this.

“I think I’d better go and take a look.”

And without further ado, Hynds was out of the door, leaving behind the tall, bearded man who had come to the office volunteering to participate in the dig.