The Bog Read Online Free PDF

of the person who had actually done those things.
    He turned to Brad. “She’s magnificent,” he said in a hush.
    “Isn’t she,” the younger man said knowingly and in a tone of voice that revealed he shared David’s reverence.
    David looked at the young man, still shaking his head in disbelief. “You’ve really outdone yourself, Brad. This is more than I could have ever hoped for. I’m speechless.”
    Brad blushed uneasily. “You deserve the credit. It was you who found the site.”
    “But you’ve done the initial toil. At the very least you’ll share credit for the discovery.”
    Brad grew even more modest and uncomfortable and David looked at him, marveling at his reaction. It was true that picking the site gave him claim to the discovery, but doing the initial excavations and finding the body were no small achievement either. It was not that David thought he was taking advantage of the younger man. Meting out the more arduous tasks to one’s assistant was typical procedure in the archaeological field. What amazed him was that Brad could be so humble about it all. He remembered being in the same circumstances himself so many times before and gazing at his superior with gracious but only slightly concealed envy as he longed for the day when he would be the one in charge of the expedition.
    His thoughts were soon interrupted. “There’s something else you should see,” Brad said.
    “What’s that?”
    “Her face,” Brad finished simply.
    David continued to stare at him for a moment and then looked back down at the body. From his current vantage only the side of her head was visible, and he realized he was going to have to get down into the hole itself. Trying as best he could not to muddy himself, he lowered himself into the pit. He knelt down, craning his neck as he carefully leaned between the muddy wall of the pit and the body and for the first time caught a glimpse of her face.
    “My God,” he murmured.
    When viewed from above, the deceptively tranquil posture of the body had not prepared him for what he now confronted, for frozen in the young girl’s visage, as perfectly preserved as her skin and her nails, was a look of unspeakable terror. Her eyes were open, the white of them still preserved as it was in many of the bog bodies that had been discovered, and even the blue of her irises. And they were wide from the sight of some long-forgotten horror. Her mouth too was still agape in the rictus of a terrible death. Whatever had killed her had scared the soul out of her before it had done it.
    “Have you determined how she died?” David asked, bewildered and shaken by the sight of the awful countenance.
    Brad shook his head. “Not yet. Could be a knife wound or something on some part of her that’s still concealed by the peat.”
    David continued to stare at the reclining figure. “Where’s the comb you mentioned?”
    “In the tent.”
    David climbed out of the hole, wiped the mud from his hands, and followed Brad to the campsite. The younger man vanished through the flap of the tent and reappeared several moments later carrying a large hair comb in his hand.
    As Brad had said over the phone, the comb was carved out of horn. What he had failed to mention was that it was also inlaid with ivory and gold, an exquisite object to behold. Aside from that, David did not immediately see what identified the comb as Roman. He turned it over in his hands, examining it. He knew of only one other comb that had ever been found buried along with a bog body, and from his memory of that comb he perceived that this one did not precisely follow that Celtic design. However, he still did not know what was Roman about it. He looked closer, trying to find any distinguishing feature. And then he saw. Scratched lightly into the horn and so darkened by the bog water that it was almost invisible was a phrase scrawled in Latin: Ul tibi postremum donarem munus moriturae, accipe multum manantia fletu. He translated the