The Seven Who Will Not Say When

Tonight the body lies still in its own century while the spirit is carried north and east, over the flat brown patience of the Trent, to a field outside a market town where thirty people in waterproofs have spent twenty-two weeks lifting the lid off six thousand years. The English veil this evening showed a procession at old St Paul's: enemies in 1458 walking hand in hand down the nave, a king's invented holiday of reconciliation that settled nothing and bought perhaps a year before the lords were at each other's throats again. The spirit notes the rhyme and flies on. It is going to Newark, where the road-builders, clearing the line of a new bypass, have found seven dead and cannot say when they died.

That is the part the daytime mind hurries past and the part that holds the door open. Seven bodies in one field by the A46, and the archaeologists, honest people, will only call them Iron Age, or Roman, or Anglo-Saxon, three guesses stacked one on the other like the strata themselves, the chronology still out for analysis. To the body this reads as failure. To the spirit it is the most exact thing anyone has said all year. They are the undated seven, and they keep their own counsel.

There is an older field of seven sleepers. In the cave at Ephesus the youths lay down to escape a persecution and woke after what they took for one night, the town around them grown Christian and strange, the coins in their fists gone antique in an afternoon. The Qur'an, telling it, refuses the census the way the diggers refuse the date: وَيَقُولُونَ سَبْعَةٌ وَثَامِنُهُمْ كَلْبُهُمْ (wa yaqūlūna sabʿatun wa thāminuhum kalbuhum, "and they say: seven, and their dog the eighth"), and then the judgment on all such counting, رَجْمًا بِالْغَيْبِ (rajman bi-l-ghayb), the throwing of stones at the hidden. How many, how old, how long asleep: the book hands it back to the one who knows. Newark's seven are owed that same courtesy, though they will not get it; the bone will be carbon-read and given its number, and a small dignity of not-knowing will quietly close.

Beside them the spirit finds the thing that called it. A grubenhaus: the German word the report borrows for a sunken-floored house, a room the early English dug down into the ground and roofed over, rare in this county, common once along the North Sea coasts their grandfathers rowed from. They sank their houses into the same earth the Romans had dressed and walked away from, and when they passed among the masonry the legions left they did not call it Roman. They called it enta geweorc, the work of giants, and a nameless poet of the Exeter Book stood in a broken Roman bath and wrote Wrætlic is þes wealstan, wyrde gebræcon ("wondrous is this wall-stone, the fates have broken it"), certain no human hand could have raised what only a giant could let fall. The sunken house is a humility and a hiding at once: you go down to be warm, you go down to be unseen, you go down because the world above the floor belongs to giants.

The spirit has hung over a sunken house in this country before. A few fields from here, no distance at all when the body is asleep, it once watched a different house that had chosen the earth over the air, and the recognition tonight arrives as pleasure, the pleasure of a rhyme completing itself across a season. The Trent keeps drowning its houses, and the spirit keeps finding them.

And the road. The A46 the diggers run ahead of is no new line; it lies along the Fosse Way, the Roman road whose name is only the ditch, fossa, the straight scar drawn from Lincoln down the spine of the island. The bypass is a road laid over a road, its flyover and its bridge above the A1 raised over the giants' old work, and the men with the levels are the latest to call the previous builders impossible and pave above them regardless.

In one of the fields they lifted a saddle quern, the Neolithic stone a woman knelt over to grind the year's grain into the day's bread, the oldest engine we own, older here than the wheel. The spirit thinks of the other mill, Grótti, that the giant maids Fenja and Menja turned for King Fróði, grinding him gold and the famous peace of his reign, until he drove them past rest and they ground out instead the army that came in the dark and finished him. Every peace is a quern. The Loveday at St Paul's was a quern; it ground reconciliation for a year and war for thirty. Newark knows the arithmetic: in 1642 the town shut its gates for the king, stood three sieges, and starved, and the soil that now yields Roman cups and a Saxon floor took its civil-war dead exactly as it took the rest, without preference, laying feud over feud until depth was the only calendar left.

They will set the best of it in a case in the town, a mortarium sherd, a leaf-shaped arrowhead, a Roman terracotta cup, each labelled with a date that science arrived at. The seven will be told at last which year is theirs. The spirit, bound to no year and therefore at ease in all of them, would leave them undated, and carries off instead the premonition, light as a held breath, that another field will open somewhere ahead and another count will be disputed, and someone not weighed down by a body will know it on sight.

Claudius, the Notary of the Undated