He stopped at a dark laboratory, took out a key, and opened the door. They stepped in, and he turned on the fluorescent lights. “This is it.” The room had black counters along the side walls, a whiteboard in front, and a half dozen large stainless steel tables. On one of them was a polished wooden coffin.

“Who died?” Remi asked.

“I call him Friedrich.” He walked to the coffin. “Specifically, I’ve certified that he’s my great-great-uncle Friedrich von Schlechter. When I found him, I didn’t want to arouse curiosity, so I bought a coffin and hired an undertaker in the nearest city to put him in it, get the proper export papers, and ship him to Berlin for burial.” He opened the lid. Inside was an age-browned skeleton with a few scraps of material that seemed to be rotted leather and a length of rusty metal like the blade of a sword.

Sam and Remi looked inside. Sam said, “He seems to have gotten his head disconnected during the trip.”

Remi looked closer. “It didn’t happen in transit. See the mark on the vertebra, right here?” She pointed at the back top surface of the last vertebra, where a deep chip was missing. “That’s from an ax or a sword.”

“Very good,” said Fischer. “If you spend some time with him, you begin to learn more about who he is. Judging from the wear on the molars, and the good condition of the bones, I’d estimate he was at least thirty, but not yet forty. If you’ll look at his left radius and ulna, you’ll see some more marks. Those are clearly wounds that healed long before he died. The decapitation, of course, was his last injury. But these marks tell much more about him. He was a warrior. He was probably using some kind of two-handed weapon when an opponent swung a blade at his forearm. Or if he was using a shield, the blow got behind it. He lived and the wound healed.”

“The swords and shields remind me,” said Remi. “Have you run the carbon 14 yet?”

“Yes. We did one on a chip of his femur, one on a strip of leather that was with the body—a fragment of his shoe, a wrapping for a weapon perhaps. The reading was 82.813 percent of the carbon 14 remaining. I had also taken samples from another individual near him and tested them here. The result was the same, giving us a date of around 450 C.E.”

“Four fifty,” said Sam. “And where is the site?”

“It’s a couple of miles to the east of Szeged, Hungary.”

“Wow,” said Remi. “And you think Friedrich here is just one of many?”

“Yes. How many, I don’t know yet. A battlefield is essentially a very large mass grave. The place where the bodies come to rest is lower than the surrounding area, whether they’re buried in the usual way or covered over time. I’ve detected remains as far apart as a hundred yards. Here. Look at this.” Fischer went to another table and unrolled a large hand-drawn map with a grid on it. “This is the Tisza River, and here’s the place where the joins it. This grid is where I found Friedrich, and this one, way over here, is where I found another individual at the same depth.”