Alex Archer - Serpent's Kiss

“Dude,” Jason whispered, “you should really keep your mouth shut about now. She could kick your butt.”

“Okay,” Annja said as evenly as she could, which she knew wasn’t very even at all, “you guys take this end. I’ll take that one.” She pulled the straps on her backpack and headed the other way.

“You just really made her mad,” Jason told his companion.

“Me? You’re the one that started the argument over the D&D rules.”

Annja tried to block them from her hearing, but she was doomed to failure because sound carried more clearly and farther over water than it did over land. There were times when she preferred working alone on a dig. This was one of them.

Doing a field study with Professor Rai was a treat. The woman had traveled extensively around the Indian subcontinent and been part of every major dig the Archaeological Survey of India had done in the past twenty years. Annja knew she could learn a lot. She also knew that the professor had played up Annja’s involvement to the local papers to get more press due to the Chasing History’s Monsters connection.

The Shakti-sacrificial-victims dig hadn’t been set up to ferret out any new information. It was fieldwork designed to season the professor’s class and to provide more substantiation to the book Lochata was writing on Shakti.

The gold naga statue was a totally unexpected find. Annja just hoped there would be more. She didn’t see how there couldn’t be.

Jason and Sansar kept up their argument, though at a lower volume. They obviously weren’t paying attention to what might be in the shallows.

Annja sighed unhappily. She was wet, hungry, tired and pushed to the breaking point of her patience. She wondered how the two students could be so completely useless. She wanted to find another artifact to show them what could happen if they actually applied themselves to the task at hand.

“Hey!” Jason yelled with sudden enthusiasm. “Look what I found!”

“S O HOW OLD IS IT ?” Jason wanted to know.

Standing in the shallows where the artifact had been found, Annja upended the fired clay pot and studied the bottom. “49 B.C. ,” she said

“Wow,” Sansar said. “That thing’s over 2050 years old.”

Jason slapped him on the back of the head. “She’s goofing you. How would a potter know that he made a pot forty-nine years before Christ was born?”

“Oh.” Sansar rubbed his head. “I knew that. I was just so excited over finding it that I wasn’t thinking.”

“You didn’t find it. I did,” Jason said.

“We were walking together. That means we both found it.”

“I seem to recall bending down to pick it up from the water,” Jason replied.

“Both of you can shut up,” Annja suggested.

They looked at her, clearly offended but silent nonetheless.

“I think you have found something,” Annja said a short time later. “It even ties in with the dig Professor Rai has initiated.” She pointed to the figure of a six-armed woman riding a tiger.

“Shakti, right?” Jason asked.

“Right.”

“I thought I recognized her.”

“This lays out some of her story.” Annja slowly turned the pot to display the collection of images around the base.

The images were sculpted to lead one into the other. The image next to the one of Shakti on the tiger showed her at court with several ladies-in-waiting fanning her. Still another showed her in battle with Shiva, her lover. The final image showed her sacrificing herself on a funeral pyre to Shiva.

“Makes you wonder how long the Shakti cult was here,” Jason said.

“It does,” Annja admitted. “But it also makes you wonder how wide the belief in her was spread.”

“What do you mean?”

“Did this come from the dig site? Or was it brought in from the sea?”

“You think someone threw it away?”

“No.” Annja struggled for patience. “I think the naga and the pot could have been part of a ship’s cargo.”

“Cool,” Sansar said. “You mean you think there’s a sunken treasure ship loaded with gold out there?”

“No,” Annja said. “I don’t.”

B UT THE OTHER MEMBERS of the dig site were quickly convinced by Sansar and Jason that the ocean shallows were burgeoning with gold just waiting to be scooped up. They’d taken a break to go get bottles of water and quickly spread the news of their find. When they’d returned, most of the dig site members had returned with them.

The students split into groups and prowled the water like children on an Easter-egg hunt. Jason and Sansar had stopped arguing long enough to locate a fishing net that had washed up. They weighted the bottom with stones and were dragging the ocean bed.

Annja reluctantly admitted to herself that the two were definitely inventive.

“Not exactly the most organized effort, is it?” Lochata asked.

“Not even,” Annja agreed. Her headache had gotten worse. Despite the pain and the frustration she felt, she worked in the journal she was keeping for the Shakti dig.

She sketched the bay area’s general geographical characteristics and marked the site where the clay pot had been found. The spot where the naga statue had been found had already been marked.

“I’m surprised the pot survived the tsunami,” Lochata said.

“Not to mention hundreds or thousands of years at the bottom of the ocean,” Annja said.

“It wasn’t there thousands.” Lochata turned the pot carefully in her hands. “This was kiln-fired.”

“So it came from a city or a town,” Annja said.

Lochata nodded.

Annja flipped back through the notes she’d made prior to boarding the plane in New York. “The closest city I know of that was on the coast within that time frame was Kaveripattinam.”

“There were a few others. Smaller, but still viable. But it was Kaveripattinam that the world came to see and trade with. Until a tsunami destroyed much of it twenty-five hundred years ago,” Lochata said.

“We’re a long way from Poompuhar,” Annja pointed out. Kaveripattinam had been rebuilt over time, though so much of the ancient architecture had been lost, and it had been renamed Poompuhar.

“The pot could have come from a merchant ship, then,” Lochata said. “I’ve worked with a lot of the pottery that was found offshore there. This piece looks like other pieces that were recovered there.”

“Even the bas-relief?”

“No. I was talking about the composition of the materials and the technique used to fire it.” Lochata ran her fingers over the raised images of Shakti. “These mark the pot as something other than an everyday pot. This was probably intended for a religious service. Or as a cherished gift for a lover or a family member.”

Annja showed the professor her drawing. “The pot and the statue were found in a relatively straight line.”

Lochata nodded. “I’d noticed that.”

“It would probably help if some of the students searched deeper into the jungle. Anything that was light would have washed farther up the shore.”

“When I can get them to stop looking for gold,” Lochata said, “I intend to have them search there.” She sighed. “Provided they’re interested in continuing the dig.”

Annja glanced out at the students walking through the shallows and smiled. “I think they’re interested. We just need to find a few more things to keep them that way.”

W HEN A NNJA STRIPPED DOWN to her bikini she claimed the instant attention of every male in the dig crew. She felt a little self-conscious as she walked toward the water.

She had a good body. She knew that. Hours of work on the weight machines and StairMaster, hours spent in the boxing gym she frequented and an active lifestyle guaranteed that.