by Alex Archer
Maybe I’m being too hard on him, she thought, watching him press the flesh.
Last night had clearly taken it out of him, but Karl Thorssen wasn’t about to be denied the spotlight by something as trivial as an assassination attempt.
That spoke volumes about the man.
Reporters jostled for position as he moved toward the podium that had been set up for the speech, their microphones pushed toward the front. Some were already calling out questions before he reached the lectern. He gave them time to settle down while he gathered himself. He really was good at this kind of thing, playing to the crowd. He wasn’t there to address the locals or the schoolchildren. He was talking to everyone on the planet—or as much of it as the news channels would reach. In a viral world that was everywhere there was a screen, a cell phone, a tablet or a laptop. News spread now like it never had before. The reach of microblogging sites was insidious, immense and instantaneous, turning everyone into an on-the-spot reporter. Nothing went unseen. Especially not something like this. Karl Thorssen was a political animal. This was his stage.
He looked up at her and seemed to smile—a smile that was for her and her alone. But of course it wasn’t; it was for the cameras.
“Ten bucks says the first words out of his mouth are about politics and have absolutely nothing to do with archaeology.”
“I’m not taking that bet,” the cameraman said. “Might as well just give you the money.”
“Ah, you take all the fun out of life.”
“So I’ve been told.”
Annja had heard enough of Thorssen’s rhetoric last night. She didn’t need to hear any more of it. Instead, she drifted off toward the archaeologists’ tents to the side of the dig site. They were more her kind of people. Of course there were plenty of archaeologists out there who didn’t think the same of her thanks to the sensationalist nature of many of the segments on Chasing History’s Monsters.
“Enjoying the circus?” Annja said, moving over to join a small huddle of archaeologists who were intent on something. The nearest looked up. There was a flicker of recognition, but he said nothing. The joys of syndication. No doubt the show was on some obscure cable channel over here.
“Just waiting for the clowns to turn up,” his friend said.
“Don’t worry, they’re here.” Annja grinned.
“Thought I heard the natives getting restless.”
“Thorssen’s just gearing up to do his thing.”
“Good,” the quiet one said. “The sooner he’s done, the sooner we can get on with our job.”
“Just consider yourself lucky you’re getting to do this at all. We’ve been trying to get permission to crack open the barrow for years, but have been blocked at every turn. I don’t know how Thorssen pulled it off, but the guy’s got friends in high places.”
“Or some very incriminating photos, more like,” the quiet one said, this time with a wicked grin. He stood up and brushed off his hands on his jeans. “You know how it is with the rich and famous—they operate in a different world to the rest of us mere mortals. Lars,” he said, holding out his hand to Annja.
“Annja,” she said, taking it. She felt the distinctive calluses of someone used to working the dirt.
“Ah, Ms. Creed. I thought I recognized you.”
“Occupational hazard.”
“Word came down from on high that you’d be doing a feature on the dig.”
“On high meaning Thorssen?”
“On high meaning our benefactor, yes. I’ve been told you’ve got the run of the place,” he said. He didn’t sound happy about it, either.
“It’s not every day we break open the tomb of a legendary king. It’d be great to get some footage of you guys at work.”
“And in return he gets more publicity for his controversial cause. I guess we know who you sold your soul to, Ms. Creed.”
Annja took the jibe in the spirit it was intended. She wasn’t about to defend her producer’s deeply ingrained commercialism, but he was right—assuming the segment was edited together in his favor, they were providing Thorssen with yet another mouthpiece to spread his message. Luckily for everyone, Annja got to do the final edits on her segments. “There’s nothing in my contract that says he gets a second of airtime,” she said. “I’m not here for the politics—after all, the show’s not called Chasing Modern Politicians, is it? Our viewers don’t care about immigration or racial segregation unless we’re talking about soldiers from the Holy Roman Empire. Give me a good old-fashioned monster hunt any day of the week. I leave the politicking to serious journalists.”
Lars seemed to like that answer.
She tried to remember his surname. She had it written on a card in her pocket, but could hardly take it out and check.
Lars...
Lars...
Mortensen.
That was it: Lars Mortensen.
“So, what’s your deal with Thorssen? He just letting you in on the action out of the kindness of his heart?” she asked.
“Hardly.” Lars grunted. “He wants first look at everything we uncover, and any broadcast or press release has to have his name slapped right across it.”
“It’s all about the glory for him,” one of Lars’s companions explained, joining them. “The more press he gets, the more he gets to play the benevolent champion of Middle Sweden, the more people will lap up his stupid politics and buy into his send-them-back-home promises. Makes me sick just thinking about it.”
He was right; Thorssen’s rhetoric was the sort that resonated with certain segments of society whenever there were open borders and high unemployment; the flow of people toward a better life was always one-sided, and with any one-sided narrative it was easy to spin it negatively.
“Well, how about we get one over on him by having you give me a call before anything comes out of the ground, then technically you’re not breaking your promise to Thorssen. Saves him getting his hands dirty, too.”
“Oh, I’m sure he’s quite happy to get his hands dirty,” Lars said, though the kind of dirt he meant had nothing to do with the rich soil of the dig site.
Annja glanced across at Karl Thorssen, who was on the podium now, hands braced on either side of the lectern as he leaned forward. His hair fell across his face. He didn’t brush it aside for the longest time, then made a show of biting back the pain when he did. It was quite the theatrical performance. He spoke slowly, enunciating each syllable so no one would miss a word.
“Today is a landmark day for this proud nation of ours. Today is a day we embrace the past. Today, as we drive the shovel into the ground to turn the earth, we are forging a connection with the land of our forefathers. Think about it. As we open the barrow we are digging through the same ground they strode upon. The same earth. We are tapping into the magic still latent within that soil. Heroes walked upon this land, the greatest of which lies buried beneath it. The past and the present are separated by a few feet of dirt. Think about it.” His voice carried across the quiet crowd. They were obviously doing what they were told. There was an intensity to his voice that demanded it.
Listening to him, she realized Karl Thorssen was a believer; every word that came out of his mouth, he meant. Yes, it was theater, but weirdly that didn’t make it any less real.
Believers were always the most dangerous men in her experience. It didn’t matter who did the actual dirty work, just so long as it got done. She’d already seen that Thorssen had an army dedicated to his cause.
“Ah, my minute in the sun,” Lars said, picking up a pristine shovel that had been leaning against a couple of crates of equipment. “Time to put on a smile for the cameras.”
Annja studied his face as Thorssen drove the shovel into the yielding dirt, rested his foot upon it, then pushed down. Not once did he wince or show any sign of physical discomfort. Putting on a brave show for the world? she wondered. Or letting the mask slip to show who you really are?
It was impossible to know one way or the other.
<
br /> Thorssen turned over the soil to cheers and applause from the small crowd. The cameras had their sound bite and their visual leader for their news segments; his job here was done. He bowed his head, raised a hand in thank you and farewell and allowed himself to be helped back to his car.
A short while later he was driven away, and people were left milling around asking what, if anything, would happen next. It didn’t take long for the children to grow restless, several of them deciding that rolling like logs down the hill was a good idea. Their teachers had trouble corralling them, but eventually they were herded onto the waiting coach and whisked away.
The reporters, who only a few moments before had been pressing their microphones forward trying to catch every word Thorssen said, had their backs to the barrow and were doing their final pieces to camera, telling their viewers what they’d just seen and why it was so significant. Fifteen minutes later it was a ghost town. The TV crews had packed away their equipment and driven off in a convoy. Now that Thorssen was gone the barrow was back to being a grassy hill. They’d return if and when evidence was unearthed that Skalunda Barrow truly was the last resting place of Beowulf. Until then, story filed, they’d forget all about it as soon as the next piece of news broke.
“How about I make myself useful?” Annja asked as Lars and his team started to unpack rolls of plastic sheeting from their van. He doled out instructions to others, surprisingly in English rather than his native Swedish, which led her to think that it was for her benefit. He had everything under control, but Annja never was one for being a spectator.
“It’s fine, we’ve got it covered. Unless you fancy a shift with the shovel?”
Annja laughed, assuming it was a joke. Dig sites used mechanical diggers these days to scrape the surface back and mark out the trenches for excavation, not teams of slave labor with shovels. She looked around for the digger, but there was no sign of one anywhere.
“So when is the digger arriving?”
“Digger? You’re looking at him.”
“Are you serious?”
“Sadly. Yes.”
“What? Why?”
“Red tape. We could only get approval to excavate if everything was done by hand—minimal impact on the environment, every single sod replaced as close to its current position as is humanly possible.”
“Wow. Better grab a shovel, then. We’re going to be at this for a while.”
“Tell me about it,” Lars said. “It’ll take us a day to clear out what a backhoe could do in half an hour. But in this as in the rest of life beggars can’t be choosers. Lucky for you I’ve enlisted half of the horticultural department from the university to do the grunt work. Let the big strong farm boys do the backbreaking stuff.”
“Nothing wrong with a little extra muscle.” She held out her hand. “Pass the shovel.”
Lars handed her the shiny new shovel Thorssen had used to break the ground.
“Where do you want me?”
“Over there, we’ve marked out a trench where, according to geophys results, we believe the entrance to the barrow lies. Have fun.”
Annja hefted the shovel onto her shoulder, but before she walked off to lose herself in some good old-fashioned manual labor, she asked, “Do you really believe he’s down there?”
“It’s been a long time, and there’s no way of knowing for sure, but yes. I wouldn’t be getting involved in this unless I thought that there was the realistic chance of finding something.”
“That’s not the same as saying you think we’ll turn up Beowulf’s bones. We’re talking fourteen hundred years for grave robbers, looters, despoilers, defilers, never mind treasure hunters, and heaven knows what else to come along and plunder the barrow.”
“That’s always a risk,” the archaeologist agreed. “We won’t know until we’re inside. Just as we won’t know if this is the tomb of Böðvar Bjarki—the Norse warrior king from the Saga of Hrólf Kraki, for instance, whose story mirrors the legend of Beowulf in many significant areas. We know it was from Geatland that Böðvar arrived in Denmark, and moreover, that upon his arrival at the court there, he killed a monstrous beast that had been terrorizing the court at Yule for two years, not unlike Grendel. Of course, there’s no evidence as to whether Beowulf was real or not, but his character from the poem does fit seamlessly into the context of his society and Germanic family tree.”
“Seamlessly? It doesn’t exactly fit the poem, does it?”
“In terms of what we actually know, it’s difficult to say anything with certainty. The poem may have been composed as an elegy for a seventh century king like Böðvar, corrupting his name over time, but there’s little surviving evidence to indicate who it was actually written about, much like King Arthur. It’s a legend. And with all poems of the time, it has evolved with the telling and retelling. We have no idea who the original author was. Indeed, there’s as much as three hundred years between its composition and the oldest surviving manuscript, which remains unnamed. The poem itself wasn’t called Beowulf until the nineteenth century. Indeed, from the 1700s it was known as Cotton Vitellius A.XV, after Robert Bruce Cotton, the manuscript’s owner, and there was no transcription of it until 1818.”
She had heard much of this before, but Lars’s passion when he started in upon the subject close to his heart made every word fascinating.
“The burial rites described in Thorkelin’s Latin transcription bear a strong resemblance to evidence found at the Anglo-Saxon burial site at Sutton Hoo. Likewise Grundtvig’s Danish translation and Kemble’s subsequent modern English version echo the same funereal rites.”
“But wasn’t Beowulf’s body burned in a funeral pyre on a boat?” Annja recalled having read several retellings of the story as a child long before she’d ever encountered a direct scholarly translation. The image of the burning boat was always one that had stuck with her. If she closed her eyes she could see the flames and feel their heat on her skin. Fire.
“You are correct. The image of the Viking funeral boat sailing out ablaze does provide for a much more dramatic conclusion to the tale. Though I truly believe there has to be a reason why the site of Skalunda has become so intrinsically linked with everything we believe to be true about our hero. Stories don’t endure without a grain of truth to them, do they?”
It was a question she couldn’t answer, but she wasn’t entirely convinced by his reasoning. Yes, it made sense that the poem would have been changed over time. The only extant copy of the original showed at least two authors, and the story itself was riddled with dichotomies of paganism versus Christianity, which supported the notion that each subsequent teller of the epic tale had added their own beliefs to the core story, but was burial really a part of Nordic culture of the time?
“Well,” she said wryly, “the answer’s only a backbreaking dig away.”
3
They had been at it until well into the night, working in shifts and stopping occasionally for food, but now that the sun had finally set and everyone had been sent home, Lars could savor the scene. It was real. It was happening. After all of the paperwork, all of the begging, all of the disappointments, they were finally here, digging down to what could well be the biggest discovery of his lifetime.
He allowed himself a small smile.
Putting the dig together had been a herculean task, and while they were still a long way from finding anything, the sense of satisfaction he felt surveying the site couldn’t be denied. They could make do without the backhoes and all of the other machinery. It was all about what was down in the ground now. The team had spent most of the first day clearing the ground, cutting and rolling away a strip of turf a few inches deep to reveal the undisturbed soil beneath, then marking it so the sod could be relaid exactly where it had been. It had taken hours of painstaking work, but the students had put in a full shift, cutting out a trench almost six feet deep, three wide and fifteen long.
It had been a good day, and they’d ended it with a ritual wetting of the site,
sharing a beer while they cleared the equipment. It had been one of the students who’d come up with the idea to have that beer out of an old horn, each taking a sip and passing the horn around the circle until it was empty. It was a nice ritual, and very in keeping with the nature of the dig. Then they’d taken a few shots to immortalize their handiwork for posterity, each of them standing beside the deep trench, beer horn in hand. They were all part of this great work, and for him there was no real difference between the workers and the queen. They were all in it together.
Bellis had taken a handful of the team who were bunked up in one of the caravans and headed into town in search of a bar, joking, “Tonight we drink, for tomorrow we dig!” It wasn’t exactly a war cry, but then, they weren’t going to war so it didn’t need to be.
The trailers were still in darkness.
A series of solar-powered garden lights lit up the trench.
Lars sat on the pile of turf that had been carefully set aside in numbered rolls and lit a cigarette. He breathed deeply, savoring the smoke before blowing it out in rings. He’d spent most of the day watching other people work. He was still full of energy and itching to play his part in the excavation. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to rest until he had at least got a little dirt under the fingernails. That would make it all seem real. That was just the kind of man he was.
He stubbed out his cigarette and went over to the main tent. The plans were laid out on the central table along with the geophys readings. He’d studied the information diligently and knew it like the back of his hand. The geophys readings were a little more complicated than the ones he was used to looking at; normally they would cover a flat stretch of a field while these ones were trying to plot the three-dimensional shape of the mound itself. He never tired of looking at those images. He’d watched the technicians with their equipment, taking carefully measured steps as the made their readings, one pace after another until they built up a picture of the shape beneath the ground. It was inspiring.
There was every chance that the body—if it had ever been there—would have been placed in a cavity, and sooner or later that would have collapsed in on itself, which meant they would have to deconstruct the entire barrow in the hopes of finding the remains. This wasn’t a quick two-week job. They could be here for the best part of a year or more painstakingly going over the ground before they found anything exciting.
