A work of art our mother said brushing it for her while Bella sat in

"A work of art," our mother said, brushing it for her while Bella sat in a chair. When the soldiers arrived they examined the perfectly preserved clay bowls; they held the glass beads, the bronze and amber bracelets, before smashing them on the floor. With delighted strides, they roamed the magnificent timber city, once home to a hundred families. Then the soldiers buried Biskupin in sand.MY SISTER had long outgrown the hiding place. Wooden streets, crowded twenty- five centuries before with traders and craftsmen, were being raised from the swampy lake bottom. Dripping with the prune- coloured juices of the peat-sweating bog. Afterbirth of earth.I saw a man kneeling in the acid-steeped ground He was digging My sudden appearance unnerved him.

For a moment he thought I was one of Biskupin's lost souls, or perhaps the boy in the story, who digs a hole so deep he emerges on the other side of the world.BISKUPIN had been carefully excavated for almost a decade. Archaeologists gently continued to remove Stone and Iron Age relics from soft brown pockets of peat. The pure oak causeway that once connected Biskupin to the mainland had been reconstructed, as well as the ingenious nail-less wooden houses, ramparts, and the high-towered city gates. If you're lucky, you'll emerge again in someone's arms; or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of your skull.I squirmed from the marshy ground like Tollund Man, Grauballe Man, like the boy they uprooted in the middle of Franz Josef Street while they were repairing the road, six hundred cockleshell beads around his neck, a helmet of mud. For over a thousand years, only fish wandered Biskupin's wooden sidewalks. Houses, built to face the sun, were flooded by the silty gloom of the Gasawka River. Gardens grew luxurious in subaqueous silence; lilies, rushes, stinkweed.No one is born just once.

Fugitive Pieces is her first novel.FUGITIVE PIECESTIME is a blind guide.Bog-boy, I surfaced into the miry streets of the drowned city. Copies are available to `IoS' readers for the special price of pounds 13.99 (including p&p); call the TBS credit-card line on 01621 819596, citing this offer.ANNE MICHAELSAnne Michaels, who lives in Toronto, is the author of two collections of poetry, The Weight of Oranges, which won the Commonwealth Prize for the Americas, and Miner's Pond, which won the Canadian Authors Association Award. At the base of the balloon was a basket in which there was a boy, and by the basket, clinging to a rope, was a man in need of help.! `Enduring Love' (Jonathan Cape, pounds 15.99) is out now. Not the nominal space that encloses a cartoon character's speech or thought, or, by analogy, the kind that's driven by mere hot air. It was an enormous balloon filled with helium, that elemental gas forged from hydrogen in the nuclear furnace of the stars, first step along the way in the generation of multiplicity and variety of matter in the universe, including our selves and all our thoughts.We were running towards a catastrophe, which itself was a kind of furnace in whose heat identities and fates would buckle into new shapes.

I think that while we were still converging, before we made contact, we were in a state of mathematical grace. I linger on our dispositions, the relative distances and the compass point - because as far as these occurrences were concerned, this was the last time I understood anything clearly at all.What were we running towards? I don't think any of us would ever know fully But superficially the answer was, a balloon. The initial conditions, the force and the direction of the force, define all the consequent pathways, all the angles of collision and return, and the glow of the overhead light bathes the field, the baize and all its moving bodies, in reassuring clarity. I'm lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible; the convergence of six figures in a flat green space has a comforting geometry from the buzzard's perspective, the knowable, limited plane of the snooker table. The aftermath, the second crop, the growth promoted by that first cut in May.I'm holding back, delaying the information. What I describe is shaped by what Clarissa saw too, by what we told each other in the time of obsessive re-examination that followed: the aftermath, an appropriate term for what happened in a field waiting for its early summer mowing.