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Show 60 trench, and scatter dead leaves over the freshly-turned earth, and probably no one would pay too much attention to the way the ground looked even if they did come by. He lay on his stomach, his arms dangling into the hole and his chin resting on the edge, and tried to make out the scratches on the top plate. He wouldn't be able to read them without the stones, which he guessed were the two translucent eggs lying half-buried in the leather next to the breastplate, but he thought he might be able at least to tell if he were looking at them upside down. Unfortunately they were too faint, at least at that distance and in that reduced light, for him even to be certain whether they were organized in lines or in columns, or whether the fine webwork of reticulations he thought he could see across the surface of the metal were merely a crust formed by natural oxidation. Meanings lay hidden under those marks, in any case, and when he was older he was going to decipher them. It would take time, months probably, and he would be withdrawn and preoccupied, and more than likely a little short-tempered while it was in progress, and he would have less time to give Melanie, but she was being a little independent herself lately and it wouldn't hurt to straighten her out. He started to get up, intending to push the boulder back onto the hole and tidy up where he had dug around it, when he was grabbed from behind and his face was pushed into the loose dirt piled next to his trench. He had a confused sense of a pale spidery light moving across the clods of earth and then a knee dug into his back, forcing the breath out of him. His wrist was seized in a grip like a steel claw and pulled up sharply behind him. The sudden pain made him draw in his breath, which he could not do very far because of the pressure on his back, which was just as well, since the small quantity of loose soil he aspirated would have choked him if it had |