A historical mystery novel

Bucaresdava The City Underneath

There is a great deal more under Bucharest than pipes and old cellars.

The city has burned, drowned, been shelled and rebuilt so many times that no builder in Bucharest is surprised by what comes out of the ground. Coins, bones, a horse's bit, the occasional cannonball. But once in every century or so, always within a hundred paces of the Dâmbovița, a spade turns up a bronze disc the size of a man's palm, cold in weather that has no business making anything cold. It cannot tell you what is coming, and it will not undo one thing that has been done. What it does is remember, faithfully and at somebody else's expense.

Enter the city

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First the land, alder and marsh and nothing else. Then the Dâmbovița, cutting the line the city would follow. Under both, already buried, the thing that outlasts them.

The story

A city with more than one past

Bucaresdava is a historical mystery told through the lives of people separated by centuries and joined by the same city.

From a Dacian settlement on the Dâmbovița before Bucharest had a name, through princely courts, fire, plague and the widening capital, each generation encounters fragments of something the city has never completely forgotten.

  1. Before the name A settlement on the river, and the ground it chose.
  2. The princely city Courts, ash and plague years, rebuilt on their own rubble.
  3. The capital Boulevards cut straight across older, quieter ground.
  4. Now The latest visible layer, and not the last.
A small dark metal disk, worn smooth at the rim, engraved with a wolf-like creature whose body curves into a serpent's tail.
Approx. 5 cm across, dark metal, engraved.

The object

Found, and found again

A disc of dark metal, five centimetres across, heavier than a thing that size ought to be. Nobody has placed the alloy, the marks cut into one face are not Latin, Greek, or Cyrillic, and no one who has bent over them with a lamp has got further than that. It has been under this city since before there was a city, and it has forgotten nothing. The memory is longer than the city itself.

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