Right of Way

The road comes up the valley in two lines of orange flags and runs into the mound, where Khulan is dragging a machine over the stones.

The road belongs to a copper mine that does not exist yet. The mine has paid Khulan's consultancy for three weeks of her, and when the three weeks run out, the mound has to stop being in the way. The antenna box rides on a cart with two bicycle wheels. The box is the size of a carry-on suitcase and the color of a traffic cone, and it sends a pulse down into the stones and listens for what comes back. Behind the cart the survey wheel runs up the distance like a taxi meter, tik, tik, tik.

Philipp walks the baseline with the tape and calls the line numbers. Solongo moves the string. Dorj sits on the bumper of the mine's Land Cruiser in a hi-vis vest buttoned over his deel, and the vest says DRIVER across the back with a number under it. He eats sunflower seeds and spits the shells into a paper cup, because the mine has a policy about litter on a heritage site.

The flags are orange plastic on steel pins, and they stand a road's width apart. They pass either side of the mound and run east to the stream, where this site code ends and the next one starts. Every flag has a stake number on it in marker. The surveyor came in the autumn, set them, and left. The regulation says a registered mound keeps a buffer that no road may cross. This mound is on no register. The mine's map calls it KH-12. The valley has more of these mounds than it has families, and the map has a code for every one. Two other consultancies bid on KH-12. Khulan bid under both of them by a margin her partners in Ulaanbaatar still ask her about.

Whoever raised the mound fenced it with standing stones, and east of that fence the small stone rings begin. Each one is a low heap the size of a kitchen table, and there are more of them than a person would want to open. They stretch toward the stream and stop short of the bank. The scope of work calls them satellite features and pays for two of them.

The tablet clamped to the cart handle draws what the box hears as a grey slice down through the ground she has just rolled over. The mound comes up as a mess of small bright returns where stone sits on stone, and on the second pass a clean rectangle sits under the mess. The slice looks like the printout a clinic hands a woman in her second month.

Philipp has come up the mound with the tape still in his hand. He is from Bremen, and he has run radar over Roman roads and Bavarian bog bodies and a car park in Leeds and a golf course in Dubai where the fourth green kept sinking and the client wanted it to stop. This is his first time in Mongolia, and he has photographed every sheep since the airport. Before the flight he signed the consultancy's subcontract, which gives the mine every line his machine records, and he read it as far as the day rate.

"There's your chamber. Those are slabs on top, look at the flat return. It's small. It's a youth, or a woman." He bends closer to the screen. "Oh, that's lovely."

Khulan looks at the rectangle.

She has another window open on the tablet behind the radar software. It is the report. It has the mine's logo in the header and the site code and the date, and it has a sentence she wrote at a coal project in the Gobi three years ago and has taken to every site since, the way a man with one good suit wears it to every funeral.

No features of archaeological significance remain within the right-of-way.

At the consultancy's day rate the sentence is worth more than her father ever held in his hand at one time. She has typed it under site codes from the desert to the Russian border. It has been true every time, and every time a mine has paid the invoice on the day she sent it.

Things stay where you put them. That is the whole of her trade and the reason a mine will pay for it. A thing in the ground stays in the ground at the depth you left it, in the year you left it, and the box finds it there or finds nothing, and either way the ground has kept its side.

Past the last flag the ground drops to the stream. Past the stream there is a flat where the grass grows short and dark in a circle the size of a ger floor, and the circle is there because a ger stood on it every winter for longer than the mine has had a name. Khulan was born on that floor. The mine's map calls the flat Sector 4. She read the surveyor's plan in Ulaanbaatar before she bid, and she laid a business card on the paper where the road crosses the stream. On the far bank the drawn road bends north toward the highway, and the flat sits clear of the bend by the width of her card.

Solongo pulls the string to line nine and waves. Philipp goes down the mound to the tape. Khulan takes the cart handle and walks the roof of the chamber.

At noon the mine's caterer sends lunch in foam boxes with the Land Cruiser's driver, and the Land Cruiser's driver is Dorj, so Dorj drives to the camp and back with mutton and rice and a thermos and bills the mine for the diesel. The boxes carry the name of a company in Ulaanbaatar that also feeds the airport. Khulan eats standing. Solongo eats on the tailgate with the finds register open on her knee.

Philipp points his fork at Dorj. "Ask him for the local story. There's always a local story. In Bavaria the bog bodies were witches, every one of them."

Khulan asks him. There is a grammar for a stranger and a grammar for an elder and a grammar for your own, and she uses the third, because she has never once used another with him. Philipp hears none of it. To Philipp it is all Mongolian.

Dorj answers with his mouth full. It takes him one sentence, and Khulan hands most of it to Philipp.

"He says the bodies went with the riders."

"Where did the riders take them?"

"They went with them. That's the saying. The heads stay at the mound, and the bodies went with the riders."