Joe Broadmeadow
Artifact IMG_1360, Providence Cache. Provenance disputed.
Being an excerpt from Proceedings of the Institute for Pre-Collapse Studies,
Vol. 412, Spring 2525
The image recovered from the Providence Cache is catalogued as IMG_1360, and it is, without exaggeration, the most consequential visual artifact of the Late Coastal Period.
It shows three males, advanced in age, standing on a bed of graded stone at the margin of a body of brackish water. They are dressed identically from the waist down in seamless waterproof garments of a synthetic hide. Two hold a long implement of iron tines. Between them and slightly forward sits a vessel of alarming red, and off to the right, a second vessel in submissive gray.
For four hundred years we have called them the Triumvirate. It is time to say plainly what they were doing.
I. The Garments
Dr. Halvard Pinn of the Reykjavik School was the first to note that the leg coverings extend upward across the torso and are held aloft by tension straps at the shoulder. He classified them as ceremonial immersion armor.
The classification has held. No civilian of the period is known to have worn such a thing casually. The garment is impractical for movement, unbearable in warmth, and offers no protection from weapon or weather. It served one function only: it permitted the wearer to stand in water without becoming of the water.
This is the essential theological insight of the period. The Triumvirate did not swim. They did not sail. They stood at the threshold, dry inside the sea, and this liminality was the entire point.
II. The Implement
The long-handled iron rake has been the subject of nine monographs and one duel.
Early scholarship, following Pinn, identified it as an instrument of harvest. This reading collapsed in 2489 when metallurgical analysis of a comparable artifact from the Bristol dig demonstrated that the tines are far too widely spaced to retain any known grain, fruit, or root.
The current consensus, which I endorse, is that the implement is a reading device. The tines were dragged across the seabed not to gather but to interpret: to feel for the presence of hard objects buried in soft ground, and to derive from that contact a judgment about the world below.
The Triumvirate, in short, were diviners. They read the floor of the bay the way earlier peoples read entrails, and later peoples read markets.
III. Rank and Hierarchy
Each man wears a soft cap bearing insignia.
The bearded elder at left displays a lettered device and rests the shaft against his shoulder in the posture of one who has carried it a long time and intends to keep carrying it. He is the Rakebearer.
The central figure wears blue, stands upright, and grips the implement with both hands at the balance point. His cap is pale, his bearing forward. He is unmistakably the Speaker, the one who addresses the water on behalf of the others.
The figure at right wears dark lenses over his eyes and has laid his arm across the Speaker’s shoulders. Lens-wearing in this culture denotes either seniority or a refusal to be photographed accurately. His shirt bears an inscription only partly legible, of which the surviving fragment appears to read I’VE BEEN…, a testimonial formula common to the veterans of ritual undertakings. He is the Witness. He no longer performs the rite. He confirms that it occurred.
Note that none of the three is smiling in the manner of a man at labor. All three are smiling in the manner of men who have gotten away with something.
IV. The Vessels
The red vessel is marked with warning glyphs: a circle, a bar, a small figure in distress. Pre-Collapse peoples did not affix such glyphs to trivial containers. Whatever was carried in the red vessel was understood to be dangerous.
We can see, at its rim, dark shapes and a flash of amber-gold.
Dr. Ilse Kravitz argued in 2503 that these were the proceeds of the divination: objects extracted from beneath the water, rendered sacred and therefore hazardous by their removal from the world below. Her paper was well received.
The gray vessel, set apart and containing only a folded dark cloth, is almost certainly for the disposal of failed offerings. Every rite requires a place for the things that did not work.
V. The Dissent
I would be derelict not to address the Marchetti Hypothesis.
In 2511, a junior fellow named Renaldo Marchetti published a four-page note arguing that the men in IMG_1360 were not priests, diviners, or a triumvirate of any kind. He proposed that they were three friends of retirement age who had walked into shallow water, dragged a rake through the mud until it struck the shells of an edible bivalve, put the bivalves in a bucket, and gone home to eat them. He suggested the red vessel was simply the container they had on hand, that the warning glyphs referred to the vessel’s original industrial contents and nothing more, and that the third man wore dark lenses because the sun was out.
Marchetti further argued that the smiles are entirely accounted for by the fact that it was a nice day, they were together, and someone had offered to take the picture.
The note was withdrawn. Marchetti now teaches secondary school in the Berkshire Protectorate and does not answer correspondence.
I mention the hypothesis only to dismiss it. It is unserious. It asks us to believe that a civilization capable of orbital manufacture and continental data storage produced an image of three armored elders holding a sacred iron implement beside a warning-marked reliquary, and that this image means nothing more than what it shows.
We are historians. We know better than that.
VI. Concluding Note
And yet.
I confess that I have kept a printed copy of IMG_1360 above my desk for eleven years, and that on certain afternoons, when the funding reports are due and the Institute is quiet, I look at the three of them standing in the stones with the water behind them and the bay stretching flat and bright toward a far shore of small houses, and I find I do not much care what the rake was for.
They came out at low tide. They stood in the cold. They found something under the mud that only their hands could tell them was there.
Then somebody said get together, and they did, and the old ones put their arms around each other the way men of that period apparently only did when a camera was pointed at them.
Whatever they were doing, they had done it before, and they had done it together, and there was every intention of doing it again.
Marchetti, if you are reading this: your mailing address is on file. I would like to buy you a drink.
Dr. E. Sowerby-Nunes is Chair of Littoral Antiquities at the Institute for Pre-Collapse Studies. Her forthcoming monograph is titled Dry Inside the Sea
Great piece, Joe!