“I’ve never been outside of the US before, so it’s all very interesting to me, as I’m sure you can imagine.”
He was looking for a way to offer her advice, she could tell. She had to follow it up with something quickly.
“And I hope you’ll forgive me, but, like you said, I’m not much of a morning person. And I’m so tired. Do you mind if I just take a nap while we drive to the airfield?”
That did it. Her asking for permission in that slightly self-effacing way was a request he couldn’t refuse.
Finally, some peace.
They were going to a private plane, she knew. Before today she’d only been on commercial planes twice, and now, she was going to be making the jump to a private plane.
It felt like an extravagance, much like the hotel had seemed. But it wasn’t up to Lucie to tell the Al-Brehoni Research Assistance Fund how to spend their money. If they wanted to treat visiting students to a taste of the high life, well, that was hardly something she was going to complain about.
She had expected security checks when they got to the airfield, but when she opened her eyes, she was surprised to find their car had parked right there on the tarmac.
“Your chariot awaits,” Zach was saying, with the obligatory cheesy grin.
She smiled in spite of herself. Sometimes, when Zach forgot who he was for a second, he could almost be charming.
Almost.
If they were running late because of Lucie’s mix-up no one said anything. Everyone was polite. An attendant ushered her up the stairs and into the cushy private plane.
It was awkward for her, having everyone try and help her with things. She felt like she should stop them. She felt like an imposition. But the heat of the day, already ramping up, made her glad that someone was ready and waiting to take her bags for her.
Zach, for his part, was comfortable in this role. And it showed. Ordering people around in exotic locales was more or less his natural habitat, and he seemed to have no squeamishness about the way everyone was scrambling to assist him.
Inside the plane, Lucie was glad to see that there was plenty of room for her and Zach to have their own personal space. And yet, as she should have predicted, that was not to be. When she sat down at one of the tables in the back and began to dig out her books, she found that Zach had no qualms about coming right up and sitting at her table.
“Nice plane,” he said. “A bit small. But I suppose it’s only a one-hour flight.”
She noticed how he raised his voice just slightly, so that he could be heard above the noise of the crew speaking to each other in Arabic, preparing the systems for takeoff and running their final checks.
“Yes…” Lucie said, and then shifted her eyes down.
In front of her lay a reference guide for idiomatic Arabic in the Persian Gulf region. It was a good resource, and one that she intended to peruse for the duration of their plane ride to the site.
She’d spent years working on her Arabic. It was a requirement for her degree—for entrance into her degree program, even. But when she’d started studying Arabic, she’d learned the variety spoken in North Africa, her justification being that she thought she would end up studying there.
It wasn’t until later that she’d learned of the burgeoning archeological renaissance happening in Al-Brehoni, now that the crowned prince had begun opening up sites for excavation that had previously been off limits. Though she never expected she’d actually get to be involved in a dig here, she had jumped at the chance to shift her dissertation subject.
So Lucie found herself here, with most of her expertise in the wrong variety of Arabic. She’d been retraining herself for months, but the differences were sometimes large, and she was grateful for this chance to review a few things before she could embarrass herself in front of their hosts at the dig site.
But no sooner had she opened the book, then she saw Zach’s hand reach out across it, pulling it away from her.
“Arabic?” he shouted, above the whirr of the engines warming up. “But your Arabic is great!”
She couldn’t help herself.
“Did you just accidentally give me an actual, normal compliment?” she said incredulously.
She immediately regretted it. She was playing into his game. The back and forth. It was exactly what he wanted.
Luckily, they were interrupted by a besuited man insisting that they fasten their seatbelts and listen to a brief security demonstration.
And then they were climbing into the sky. Zach seemed almost bored with it all, but Lucie didn’t let that bring her down. She peered excitedly out the window, looking at the city fall away as a seemingly endless expanse of desert opened up beneath them.
She wasn’t going to let Zach ruin this trip for her. She wasn’t going to let anyone ruin this trip for her. This was what she’d been working towards her entire life, and, come hell or high water, she was going to make the most of it.
TWO
Lucie knew the duration of the flight was an hour, but as they prepared for landing, it felt as though it had been far shorter. She’d managed to get Zach to leave her alone so that she could revise the Arabic she so desperately needed, despite Zach’s insistence that everyone would speak English anyway.
When the plane came in to land, Lucie felt her pent-up excitement come bubbling to the surface. She’d been trying to hold it down for the last few weeks, ever since she had received confirmation that she was going to be coming here. She’d been trying not to get ahead of herself, and to keep her expectations low.
But now that she was here, she realized she needn’t have worried. It was incredible. It felt as though she had been transported through time. Yes, they were standing on an airfield, but it was dusty and remote, and basically just a flattened patch of earth. The nearest ramshackle building looked like it could have been built hundreds of years ago.
The crew of the plane, their job now done, were already making moves to get going again. They tossed Lucie and Zach’s bags unceremoniously on the ground and were on their way. The engines had barely shut down before they were starting up again, and the plane was taxiing off towards the makeshift runway.
Not that Lucie was sorry to see the shiny private plane go. It felt out of place here, where she could see more goats than vehicles.
In fact, scanning the world around her carefully, she only saw one car.
It was in the distance, and just looked like a dust-trail so far. She slipped on her sunglasses to protect her eyes against the harsh glare of the sun, but still had to squint to make it out.
“Are they really just going to leave us here?” Zach asked, and Lucie sensed just a hint of uncertainty in his voice.
“Oh, I’m sure we’ll be fine,” she said, the hint of a knowing grin on her lips. “Everyone speaks English, right?”
The car heading towards them turned out to be a jeep, loaded down with three archeologists who pulled up to the airfield and greeted them. Much to Lucie’s annoyance—and Zach’s barely contained joy—they did in fact speak perfect English.
“Did you have to leave the site to come get us?” Lucie asked, as she and Zach piled into the car. She was slightly dismayed at having interrupted their work.
The head archeologist, Professor Hasseb, was a kind-looking older Arab man with a silver mustache. He shook his head as he started up the jeep.
“We were just on our way back from town. There’s a possibility of storms later, and we wanted to make sure we’ve got everything we need at camp, in case the roads get blown out.”
At the mention of storms, Lucie saw Zach scan the horizon, as though he expected to see a great billowing dust cloud coming right at them. It was just like him, she thought, to get concerned about the weather.
All her life, Lucie had dreamed of being an archeologist. Her parents had been supportive, at first. Then, when she’d started devoting all her time to study, to the extent that she never got around to finding the man they expected her to marry or the grandchildr
en they expected her to produce, they’d gotten a little less supportive.
Everyone had always talked down to her, as though they thought she’d just watched Indiana Jones a few too many times as a kid and gotten a little obsessed.
She’d thought things would get better in academia, but they only marginally had. At Harvard, among those who spent their time writing papers on new interpretations of things already found in museums, her enthusiasm to get out into the field had largely been met with derision. She would learn, they’d told her. She would go out, and find that it wasn’t nearly so rosy as she had assumed. Not without a mountain of funding and a well-established team to make life easier, the implication always seemed to be.
But now, as she listened to the three researchers talk about the day-to-day running of the camp they’d built, and plans for how they would go about gridding out the north-eastern quadrant of the site, Lucie knew: she’d been right.
The archeologists were two Al-Brehonian men and one French woman, but they felt immediately like family to her. They talked excitedly about their work in a way Lucie had never heard anyone else do—other than herself. They talked about the people who had lived in the town that they were excavating as though they might have been their neighbors, or friends.
Lucie belonged. Finally, she found, she belonged.
But she didn’t get to bask in the warm feeling of having found her people for long. No sooner had they arrived at camp, and Professor Hasseb began introducing them to the other researchers working at the site, then an officious-looking little man in spectacles came up to Professor Hasseb and started speaking to him in quick, sharp Arabic.
“What’s he saying?” Zach asked quietly.
“Uh, he’s saying the storm is moving faster than they expected, and the weather report says it’s…”
She tried to focus. He was hard to understand.
“Something about categories. The sandstorm is a different category. Or something. He says the site’s going to be impossible to work with, and…”
Again, she lost the thread of the conversation and wished that she’d manage to get in a bit more study of Gulf States Arabic.
“Something about the city?”
“Town,” said the French woman, whose name had been crowded out of Lucie’s brain by the flurry of introductions she’d just made. Was it Christine? Christina?
“He said we’re all going to have to get out of here. The storm’s been picking up speed and it’s worse than we thought. We can’t wait it out here.”
Lucie felt like the wind had been knocked out of her. There was mounting rush of activity occurring around them, as Professor Hasseb was directing everyone to pack up, but it felt to Lucie like the world was standing still.
She only had a week here, and now it was being taken from her. She’d heard reports of storms shutting down sites for days, and rendering everything they left in their wake so hard to put back together that progress on site essentially stopped for weeks.
This was the only shot she was going to get at getting the information she needed for her dissertation. She’d extrapolated, based on the location of fragments, that this place was a previously unknown center for pottery production. But without access to the whole site, and the ability to help in excavating further fragments, how would she be able to prove it?
Zach was talking, but she tuned him out. She didn’t need to hear him right now.
Professor Hasseb mentioned that he was going to wait out the storm in a hotel in the nearest town, and offered to take them with him. Zach accepted immediately, but Lucie hesitated. It would be giving up.
Zach answered that Lucie would be coming, too, and the older man moved on. He was too busy to worry about a couple of students losing everything they’d been working towards.
“Why did you do that?” Lucie heard the words creak out of her. They sounded guttural. Angry.