Sword & Mythos

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  Greenland archaeologists and multinational corporations looking for minerals must be the only people who are blessing Global Warming. The only question was whether we could finish excavating before the company whose explorer had noticed the ancient timbers sticking out of the mud bank moved in.

  Susan swore as she stepped in a puddle. “The last dig I was on was in New Mexico. Hot, dry, full of scorpions … never thought I’d miss them. This is interesting,” she went on, “but my specialty is the Anasazi.”

  Another people, I thought, who like the Greenland colony, had mysteriously disappeared.

  “If I weren’t up for tenure next fall,” she went on, “I would have stayed home.”

  “Whereas, here it’s cold and wet and full of mosquitoes.” Josh slapped at his neck. “But a good place to chase legends.”

  Why was I here? I wondered as I picked up the bucket. Why did a black girl dream about Norse gods? I dumped out the earth and dipped up a handful of icy water. It tasted clean, stony, with a slight hint of sulphates. How many years ago, I wondered, had this water fallen from the sky? From here, I could see up the channel the water had carved beneath the ice. Water dripped from the sparkling lacework of ice at its rim. Some said that the entire base of the ice cap was melting, and one day, the whole thing would collapse and come sliding down to the sea.

  Josh joined me, staring down at the sparkling stream where sunlight struck sparks from the surface and set the rock beneath aglow. He scooped up a pebble, flushed when he saw me watching him, and dropped it again.

  “I know perfectly well that the Greenlanders were poor.” He bent to drink. “No one digging here has ever found any hoards. The last colonists took all their goodies away.”

  “So, why did you expect an artifact?“ I asked, as he stood up again.

  “Well, there’s this manuscript in the Princeton library by a professor of Anthropology called Webb who toured Iceland and Greenland in 1877. He wrote that the natives showed him a strange image and said it was from the Tornasuk cult.”

  “Which no anthropologist since then has heard of,” I observed.

  “Well, no … but the name has to have come from somewhere.“

  “Has anyone ever told you that you read too many fantasy novels?“

  “Speak for yourself, Sir Svarthild.” Josh accompanied my SCA name with an ironic bow.

  I made a face at him. I was one of the rare women to earn knighthood, and he was only a squire, after all.

  I began to pick my way upstream. The sun had dipped low enough to shine into the cavern the river had carved, giving it an eerie glow. Eons of ice had carved the black granite into spires like the pillars of some abandoned temple. What strange rocks, unseen since the early Pliocene, would be revealed if the ice cap disappeared? My boots crunched on wet stone as I picked my way around the boulders. Then I heard a footstep that was not my own. It was the old man.

  Suddenly, he looked taller. Now that ill-tempered frown seemed thoughtful, like a picture of Einstein I had seen.

  “Ymir’s bones are close to the surface here. Other places, they are covered by growing things, but this land has never really belonged to Midgard.” His gaze travelled over the stones. Oddly enough, his speech, however strange, was now that of an educated man.

  “Whose is it, then?”

  “The Old Ones. The jotnar — the ones your folk call the giants …”

  “The Frost Giants?” A chill drop fell on my neck as we passed under the arch of icicles. Surely, that was why I shivered and not because I suddenly felt as if I had crossed a threshold.

  “And others …” he replied. “Many things sleep beneath the ice. It is my task to learn if the sun, or your digging, has released them.”

  “Oh, I don’t think you need to worry,” I said quickly. “All we’ve found are some timbers and a line of stones. We think it might have been a chapel.”

  “A church?” He made an odd sound that could have been laughter. “But of what faith?”

  “By the time the Greenlanders settled up here, they were all Christian … unless, at the end, some went back to the old ways. That’s what the Danish missionaries were afraid of when they came back in the 18th century, but all they found were Inuit, so they baptized them, instead.”

  He gave that snort of not-quite-laughter once more. From outside, I could hear a rumble that might be Stamford’s bass voice and Susan’s laugh. Then another sound brought my head up, heart pounding. It came again, an echoing groan like a god in pain. Or a giant, I thought, remembering his words.

  “The ice is unstable,“ I quavered. “We should get out of here.”

  “Not yet,” he murmured, sweeping the mottled curves of ice with that disconcerting single gaze. “It is not quite ready to fall.” For a moment, I thought a shadow extended from his walking stick, as if he were holding a spear. But there could be no shadows in this place where a diffuse illumination filtered through the ice from above. Slowly, he turned, pointing it at each wall.

  “Now!”

  As we lurched through the entrance, I heard the ice shriek, then a resounding crash that shook the stone. I leaped for the bank as a wave of muddy water churned down the channel behind us. Josh looked up, eyes widening, and scrambled up the slope. The Danish boy was not so lucky. The waters swallowed his flailing form and carried him away.

  I took a deep breath and began to count. No one else had been lost.

  The ice had collapsed inward. Our cavern was now a wide bay supported by glistening planes of sheared ice and ribs of dark stone. The ice that had covered the edge of our excavation had gone, as well. The line of stones we were uncovering extended straight into the hill.

  Dinner that evening was a somber affair. Dr. DuBois had radioed for a seaplane to collect the body that now lay packed in ice behind the supply shed, but the connection had been garbled and it was not clear when the authorities would arrive. On the western horizon, clouds were looming up in gray towers, bringing a twilight that, by rights, was a month away. The sea heaved uneasily, its surface an oily pewter beneath the fading sun. I understood now why today’s Greenlanders painted their houses such bright colors. As the light dimmed, the orange nylon expedition tents that had glowed so cheerfully in the morning sun seemed forlorn.

  We cooked on a solar-powered stove, but someone had managed to gather enough trash for a little fire. The bright flicker warmed our souls.

  Josh sipped his hot chocolate and set it down. “You know, when I came here, I liked the theory that the colony might have simply died out because all the young people gave up on it and moved away, but I’m beginning to wonder.”

  I suppressed a grin, recognizing the one topic that was guaranteed to get arctic archaeologists talking.

  “You can’t rule out disease,“ I put in. “An isolated population like this would be vulnerable to any bug a visiting ship brought in.”

  “Then why are there no mass graves?” asked the man from Cambridge. “They didn’t have the wood to burn bodies, even if it was plague.”

  “I think Basque slavers carried them away,” said someone else and the debate was on.

  “You can’t rule out attack by the Inuit, when the Norse gave up on farming and began to compete with them for game —“

  “But tribal traditions say that their ancestors came and found the settlement almost deserted.” Dr. DuBois pushed back the strand of silver-streaked hair that was always falling over his eyes. “They ate the remaining livestock, and took the few women and children into their tribe.”

  “And what do you think, Harbard?” asked Stamford. I looked up. When had the old man joined us at the fire?

  “I think … there are worse things than humans in the world. You should get under cover.” He pointed at the western sky, now a mass of curdled clouds. “Soon comes the storm.”

  Of course Harbard had meant the weather, not the old powers he was talking about yesterday, I thought as I began a careful probe along the line of the string that outlined the sector
we were to excavate today. Last night, we had huddled in our tents for hours while sleet lashed the hillside, but as the sun pushed higher, the storm had ceased, leaving a flat gray sky.

  Far from stopping work because of the accident, Dr. DuBois was urging us on. I could understand his fear the authorities might forbid us to continue. With the terrain changing so swiftly, there was a real danger that anything we did not record now would be swept away. The director stood by the ice wall, hair tossing as he gestured toward the hill. Stamford faced him, seeming more solid than ever as he shook his head.

  “You can’t do it!” His voice rose suddenly. “You’ll ruin your reputation and the data —“ The rest was lost as Stamford turned, but I could see the desperation in Dr. DuBois’ eyes.

  There was a shout from the opposite corner. I looked up to see Josh struggling to his feet, a chunk of rock in his hand.

  We gathered around. In the pallid sunlight, the grooves in the dark surface were clear. Runes? I did not think so. There was something oddly disquieting about the way these marks twisted across the stone.

  “Is it Inuit work?” asked someone. “Maybe it’s that Tornasuk cult you’re always going on about —“

  Dr. DuBois went down on his knees where Josh had been working, scraping away with the trowel. “Give me light!” he muttered and Stamford, who was the kind of man who always seemed to have a screwdriver in one of his many pockets when you needed one, pulled out his flashlight and directed the beam along the trench.

  “It’s part of a design…” breathed the director, “that leads toward the ice.” He looked up at Stamford. “Now do you see why we have to uncover the surface of the stone?” He jumped up and started shouting orders. In a few moments, the USC boys came running up, pickaxes in their hands.

  “What is he thinking of?” Josh turned the fragment back and forth in his hands. “This is not how you do archaeology.“

  “Not when you have time,” Susan replied. “But I’ve heard some stories about cutting corners in rescue digs that would curl your hair.”

  “I hope they know what they’re doing.” The USC men were attacking the ice with enthusiasm. I jumped as a large chunk crashed to the ground.

  “That ice has been there a long time,” Josh began, but his voice failed as we heard once more that anguished groan. Halfway up the slope, a spray of snow puffed into the air and then, with a roar, a whole section of white hillside detached and came thundering down.

  “Once is an accident. Three feel like enemy action,” said Susan. We had managed to dig out the boys who had been using the pickaxes. Their bodies lay now with that of the first man to die.

  “Yes, but who is the enemy?”

  Josh looked up the hill. Above the debris from the avalanche, we could now see a rim of bare stone. The stream was already beginning to wash the snow away.

  “That…” he whispered. From his pocket he took the bit of carven stone. “I don’t know what this is, but it’s not what I came here for.” He lifted his hand as if he would fling it into the stream.

  Susan grabbed his arm. “What are you doing? This is the only artifact we’ve actually found! You can’t throw it away.”

  “Put it in the box, then. I don’t want to look at it anymore.”

  Susan’s brow wrinkled in distaste as he set it in her hand, but when I went back to camp for a break, I saw her going into the prefab shed where we kept the expedition records. The scientific part of my mind was relieved, but the other part, that had grown up with a grandmother who used ghost stories from the bayou to keep me in line, wished that Susan had not stopped him.

  When she came out, she was frowning.

  “What is it?”

  “The computer’s not working. I was going to check some of our records, and all that showed on the screen were wavy lines and fizz. I tried rebooting, but nothing changed. It’s like the poor thing’s brains are fried.”

  “What about the radio?”

  “I don’t know. Could it have been struck by lightning? Nobody noticed a strike, but we were all huddled in our own tents during the storm. Still, Dr. DuBois radioed the police commissioner in Nuuk yesterday. They‘ll send someone,” Susan added brightly.

  “If they can,“ I responded. The gray sky was fragmenting into heavy clouds. The white bergs in the sea bobbed uneasily, lashed by whitecaps raised by the rising wind. The sun was still high, but the light seemed to have thickened and there was an odd, electric tingle in the air.

  “We’d better tell him,” said Susan. I nodded and followed her up the hill.

  Ice from the avalanche still covered much of the grid laid out for excavation, but that no longer mattered. The stream was now rushing from a gap that led straight into the hill. Emerging from the tumble of ice we could see stone blocks like the ones we had been trying to dig out of the ground, several courses if them, forming a seamless join with the stone of the hill.

  Dr. DuBois’ eyes were blazing. “In there,“ he breathed. “Answers …” He shuddered and looked around as Stamford grasped his arm.

  “Yes, but we should not go in now,” murmured the younger man. “We’re all tired. In the morning, we’ll see more clearly.”

  The director blinked, but he nodded and let Stamford lead him down the hill.

  That night was a bad one. I was not the only one who was having evil dreams. Somewhere in the middle, I woke from visions of amorphous horrors and crawled out of my tent, gasping for air. The wind off the sea smelled as if half the fish in the Arctic Ocean had died there, and banners of sickly-green light danced across what should have been a peaceful twilit sky.

  The old man stood in front of the prefab, gazing upward. As I started toward him, I heard the scrape of a zipper and Stamford emerged from his tent, his blunt features creasing in a scowl.

  “This isn’t right, is it?” he asked. “Surely, the northern lights shouldn’t be visible at this time of year.“

  Harbard sighed. “It can happen … when the veils are thin …”

  The atmosphere? I wondered. Or did he mean something else?

  “An electromagnetic anomaly would explain why the computers are wonky,” muttered Stamford, but the old man did not reply. Presently, Stamford crawled back into his tent. After a little while, I returned to my own.

  In the morning, Susan was gone.

  “Dr. DuBois, are you sure this is wise?” Stamford was trying again to be the voice of reason, or perhaps Cassandra. But if the director had ever been willing to listen to him, he would not do so now, when footsteps in the mud showed that Susan had already entered the passageway. I knew why she had gone. She was desperate to win tenure. To be the first to see what might be a historic discovery would make her famous in our field.

  The air was heavy. Flickers like heat lightning veined the sky. In that light, even the most familiar things looked strange, and the jagged summits of the mountains wavered as if about to shake free of their dappling of snow and come lurching down to the sea.

  DuBois stared at that opening in the hill. “I have to go in there,” he said softly. “You must understand.”

  And we did. The summons from that shadowed gateway beat in our blood. Come to me and I will show you wonderful things, it called to us. Come to me….

  DuBois picked his way across the mud, at his side Stamford, the perfect lieutenant, who would advise his leader against any folly — and then follow him into it. The man from Cambridge was next and then the other two Canadians. In a moment, Josh and I were alone. When they came out, disappointed or triumphant depending on what they found, would I be remembered as the one was too wise, or perhaps too fearful, to go in?

  “What about you?” I asked Josh. “What if this is a lost temple of the Tornasuk cult? Don’t you want to make your reputation as one of the first to see what’s inside?”

  “Some things are more appealing on paper than in reality.” He gestured toward the entry. “That gaping mouth gives me the willies.”

  “You are wise.“ a new voice made
us turn. Harbard. Not the scruffy old man but the nobler figure I had spoken with before.

  “Do you know what’s in there?”

  “An old enemy,” he replied.

  “A jotun?” I asked, remembering our conversation.

  Harbard sighed. “The jotnar who dwell in Midgard have their place, if the balance is maintained. It is tipping now — you have tipped it. The stars shift their alignment and the veils grow thin. Many of the oldest Powers were destroyed when we dismembered Ymir and used his flesh to build this world. But not all of them. Their true home lies beyond the circles of the world, but there are still places in Midgard where a portal can open to the dimension in which they dwell.”

  “Is that what Dr. DuBois is going to do?” squeaked Josh.

  “If they are not stopped, this gate will open to Ragnarok.”

  I shook my head in denial. “I haven’t heard the Gjallarhorn!” I dredged up details from the Norse Lit course I’d taken so long ago. “Where are the Sons of Surtr? Where’s the ship made of nails? Where are the rest of the gods?”

  “This is a Ragnarok before its time, unheralded, with no hope of a new world. It is a doom released by men and so, I must work through men to fight it.” Facing me, he seemed to grow taller. “Dark battle maid, will you follow me?”

  Instead of worn clothing, I saw a gleam of armor. Instead of the old hat, a helm. And in the place of a walking stick, a spear. The reference I had been seeking came to me.

  “You are not Harbard but Odin the Old!”

  His lips twitched beneath the beard. “And you are not a völva but a valkyrie!”

  I forced myself to stand straight beneath his gaze. “Why me?”

  “What is your name?”

  “Tonya” I began, but was that name, and the surname inherited from some man who had owned my great-great-grandfather, truly my own? “‘Svarthild,’” I said aloud. It was the name I had made for myself and in the East Kingdom it had earned some renown.