by Mike Sweeney
It felt like a lot less than two hours before the announcement came for the Frankfurt Flughafen. Not Flughof? There went another lovely theory murdered by facts.
The station was large and bright under a curving ribbed roof like a zeppelin hanger. The signage was in German and English and was excellent. The cool sterile safety of an airport reached out to envelope me as I strode to check-in.
I reflected I’d spent a lot of my life lately in airports and train stations. Well, this should go quickly. No bags. Almost no line.
It was when I fumbled out my passport from a buttoned pocket that it dawned on me. They hadn’t stamped me in. I hadn’t been through customs or made a declaration or filled out any forms. Was I in the country illegally? How could that even happen? How was I going to explain this?
It was while I was chewing on this that a voice spoke in my ear.
I leapt about two feet, straight up. Him again! He spoke a little louder, repeating his words. “Is it safe?”
“Safe as hofs,” my voice came out, surprising me. What?
It was the accent. So Prussian you could cut it with Kaiser Wilhelm’s mustache. Here, in the bright lights and cool air conditioning of an airport, here in a safe zone, it was ridiculous. As ridiculous as the action thriller quote.
I had light to study him now. He was tall. Nordic coloring. Good-looking, even with the high, strong forehead that left his eyes in shadow. Blond as Ivan Drago, but not nearly as muscular. I was still scared. Terrified, skin crawling with the memory of violence. But that wasn’t him. It was some other man, some other shovey man with big hands and a rough voice and far too much fondness for large rocks. Blondie, here? The first time we’d spoken, he’d been handing me money. But I still didn’t know where he fit in. Far as I was concerned he was still a threat.
“I’m getting on that plane,” I said.
He smirked. “You don’t vant to do that.”
“And you plan to stop me, how? This is an airport.”
“Ich?” He spread his hands in mock innocence. “It is not I about whom you should worry.”
“Go on.” I frowned at him. Or maybe I was frowning at that tortured syntax.
He pointed at my bag. “You tink zat will get through Customs?” He grinned deeper at my look. “Nicht in Schengen.”
Schengen again. What the hell was Schengen?
Think. The Lufthansa desk in Athens had said Schengen. The lounge had been in an isolated part of the terminal. My flight to Germany had been from a gate on that side. And nobody stamped my passport.
I got it.
Greece was an EU member. Hard not to know that, with all the news about Angela Merkel arguing with the Greeks over how to get out of their current financial woes. Free travel between states. No visa, just an EU identification card. Right? So that must be what Schengen meant. But Turkey?
Turkey wasn’t in the EU.
He saw the realization fly across my face. “You haf heard of Turkish Prison, nicht wahr?”
Oh, now that was just cruel. He wasn’t giving me time to think, however. He closed in for the kill.
“My client ofvers generous recompense. Leaf all zis behind. Return to your vacation, with much extra geld vor das shopping.”
It was a very tempting offer. Be free of all the worry, no more stolen antiquities hidden in my bag, no more crazy Germans with stupid accents chasing me. Back to what now seemed like safe ground. Athens, my nice hotel, my bags, my four pairs of shoes. Back to baklava and all those lovely museums and the warm Mediterranean sun.
But there was a voice in my memory. He’d inspired the hat and the leather jacket of the character I created back at the Media Lab, just as he’d inspired so many real archaeologists to begin their careers. I knew what he would say. What Athena Fox would say.
I didn’t know if the sherd belonged in a museum. But I knew it damn well didn’t belong in the hands of a private collector.
“No,” I said.
“Vas..?”
“No deal.” I smiled. A small, knowing smile. The dangerous smile of a cornered hero. “I’m taking the sherd back to Athens. And neither you, nor your mysterious employers, can stop me.”
The lines came naturally. I’d played this character. I knew this character.
“Hier.” He snapped his fingers, impatiently. “Schnell!”
“Stop! You try anything, anything, and I will say one single word. The word begins with ‘b’ and ends with ‘b’ and is a word you never, ever want to say inside an airport.”
“You wouldn’t!” I’d actually shocked him. “They would arrest us both,” he said. “They would take it.”
I shrugged. “So the authorities get the sherd. That’s not a bad thing in my book.”
“But…” He seemed almost affronted at the way I’d so casually promised to upset the orderly way of things. He didn’t seem to believe I’d be willing to cause so much chaos, with pointed guns and being thrown to the floor and cuffed and dragged off. “You are bluffing,” he said.
“Try me.” Dangerously. Confidently.
He didn’t.
I backed slowly, away from the freedom of flight, away from Athens. Back towards the trains. I already had a plan. It wasn’t a good plan. But it was a plan.
“If I even think I see you behind me, I will shout that word as loud as I can,” I promised.
He didn’t move. Oddly, though…it looked like he was smiling again.
I made it back to the trains. Boarded the first one I saw. I could figure out where to go — and where to sleep — later. With luck, I could even purchase tickets before I got thrown off the train. It wasn’t over. No, it was far from over. I was heading deeper into Europe, farther from anything I’d researched, any language I spoke, anything I knew. I still had a stolen antiquity in my bag and there was still an enemy on my trail. Maybe more than one.
So much for Istanbul.
Once again I collapsed against a sheet-metal wall, me and the oversized luggage. The song was still playing in my head, mocking me. “You can’t go…” I sang softly, my voice breaking.
When I’d collected myself, I went looking for my proper seat. The train was at least heading in the right general direction. München was the next big stop. Major city, it looked like. I should be able to find a room there and sleep for whatever remained of the night.
And do laundry. I really, really needed laundry. Between crawling through the woods and running for my life, my clothes stunk.
The plan had come to me in a rush. If they were watching the air…go by sea. I’d seen there were passenger ferries going to and from Athens. And I’d learned from Océane about how well Europe was connected by rail. So just get to the nearest coast and sail back to Greece.
Which would be the Italian coast. Where Giulio had his shop. Yes, a look at the map confirmed. Padua was en route. Giulio knew about the calyx. He’d been friendly to me at the Atlantis reception. Maybe he’d have an idea what I was supposed to do about the thing in my bag.
The next minutes were an education in the complexities of the German train system. I eventually figured out which carriage I was supposed to be in. Wasted more time trying to interpret the cryptic messages on the back-of-seat displays, things like “ggf. Reserviert” and “bahn.comfort.”
Eventually I gave up and crawled into a compartment near the front of the train with a mostly dark display and nobody else inside. I didn’t dare sleep, but I turned off the light, turned up the heat, and curled up on the well-padded seat.
Time to do some research.
First search term was Professor Edward E. Sharpe. He didn’t seem to have gotten a lot of academic interest in his theories. I didn’t see links showing up for any journals or universities or even general-interest science and history sites. Closest I saw were some technical discussions on Haploid groups (whatever those were). And then there was something about “Protochronism.” I itched to read more about that, especially as I saw some of the other terms on that site. Dacomania? Turbo-Sla
vs? Ancient Bulgarian Jedi?
Welcome to the rabbit hole. This was like the Roman Empire all over again. Sure, it looked fun to read up on at first, but then you realized you were looking at hundreds of years and as many Emperors, a sprawling multinational and later multi-part empire of constantly shifting borders, and oh yeah the books you were supposed to have read were long and dry and properly read in the original Latin.
So, Wikipedia. Always a good first stop for research. Never a good last stop. It said Sharpe had been a proper academic, knew his Latin and his Classics well enough to teach at a graduate level. Had a bit of money, did a bit of traveling, had friends up in the “go to opera openings, sit on local charity boards” level. Including a few in Greece and Germany.
And…the page was locked. There were a lot of recent edits. I popped over to one of my lesser-used tools and did a search frequency check. Sharpe was a popular guy this week.
The most informative thing, I quickly decided, had been on the bottom of that first results page. Google kindly informed me that under direction of the NetzDG — apparently, short for Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz and you gotta love those Germans — some of the results were blocked in my current country.
And it didn’t take a lot to see why. Whatever the academic merits or lack thereof for Sharpe’s theories, there was a significant interest by white supremacists. Sure, the pages that were getting through the local filters were cloaking themselves in “rational discourse on immigration” and “race realism” and similar. None of them were going to have velvet paintings of the world’s worst Chaplin impersonator on their landing page. But it was still very, very obvious what they were.
What in Hela’s Realm did this have to do with my mystery Greek pot?
The train rumbled on through the night. I was cold and alone and fighting off sleep and huddled over the glow of a smart phone reading up on white supremacists and I was extremely aware of what a strange place this was to be.
Nothing was visible through the window. Dark enough to already be the Black Forest. ICE was nice; fast enough to give the Japanese super-train pause. Four hours to München. Enough time to maybe learn something.
So that was the Sharpe end. Who were these Dorians?
The Dorian Invasion. It had, from first glance, a long pedigree. And it was far from uncontroversial. I stopped off at the first actual academic I found, a historian who snarked in her blog about how even their cloak pins had been taken from them by recent archaeology, leaving the Dorians as not just phantoms, but naked ones. Okay, that sounded promising. I could always use some archaeology. But later. I was still trying to figure out who had been up on the Rotenfels and why I’d been attacked.
Vash. He’d been on cameras. Normally I stayed away from the kinds of corners he hung out in. Dark corners like Something Awful. The chans, especially 8chan. Gamergaters, MGTOWs, any of that Cloaca Maxima of the Internet. But Vash had a footprint, and a big one. Maybe I could find out what was going on by looking for that.
“We meet in Munich for the celebratory beer and kajira, oh great Priest-King.” one tidbit said. He was still in Germany? Well, he had gone shopping at that middle-ages market. So maybe he was going to do a little more sight-seeing while he was making up racist lies at a low-rent archaeological dig.
And, oh. This was not good.
I was seeing a meme pop up in more and more of the places I looked. Soil and water. The Dorians, personified as some sort of horned Viking character, showing Mainstream Archaeology where to find soil and water.
Mainstream Archaeology was a girl. And she was wearing my hat.
And now I knew what that phrase meant. It came from the Spartans. I should have remembered. The Persians had a rote formula for what they asked of nations that would otherwise be allowed to continue having their own local government. They’d been quite forward-thinking about that.
Arable land and available irrigation. Soil and water. Which some literal-minded Laconian pointed out to some hapless ambassadors could be found at the bottom of a well. Cue a bit in a recent movie and years of internet memes of “Spartan kick!”
It had proved irresistible to the chans. They didn’t seem to know who, they didn’t seem to know why, and they didn’t seem to know the difference between a well and a cistern, but over and over, they had the Dorian Invasion proved while some girl went into a well. There was even a gif animation. Pretty well done, at that.
And, yeah, the White Power types loved them some Spartans, too. The great sprawling Venn Diagram of the internet made for some strange bedfellows.
But who had reported that detail? The only people who even knew I’d been attacked were Xander, and the would-be murderer. Unless…could Vash been a witness? I needed to talk to him.
The compartment door opened suddenly. A tall, tired-looking German with lots of bags and, on his head, a narrow-brimmed hat with a sharply peaked crown.
“München.” I stared at the hat. A shoe was dropping, and the leg above it was clad in lederhosen.
“I promise you I came by it honestly,” the man said, putting down his other bags and pulling a guitar case off his back.
“You what…wait. How did you know I spoke English?”
He made an apologetic smile. “I knew you weren’t German,” he said. “Neither am I,” he offered. He pointed at his hat. “Tyrolean,” he said. “I’m Austrian.” He chuckled. “A German would never make small talk like this. Talk politics or philosophy, or don’t talk at all. Well, maybe a Bavarian. They’re more Austrian than German anyhow.”
I was rethinking my midnight plan. What is Spain when it is at home? España. Japan? Nihon. And München?
“…is also known as Munich.” The Austrian nodded, taking my non sequitur in stride. “Thank the gods it isn’t October,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows at me. “You don’t know,” he said. “And here I thought you were mistaking my perfectly good Alpine Society hat for the cheap felt things they hand out at the train station. It started,” he said kindly, “This weekend.”
“I’m not going to be able to find a hotel, am I.”
“Maybe not. You should brush your hair.”
“I…what?!”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean it like ‘you should smile.’ I mean, that’s why nobody is going to confuse you for a German. Germans are hardworking, punctual, obsessed with rules, and neat.”
I looked rueful. “Well, these clothes have been at the bottom of a well. I mean cistern. So, really…those aren’t all stereotypes?”
“Of course they are. People are people. But be less than five minutes early to an appointment and you’ll discover how many of our German-speaking neighbors are eager to live up to those stereotypes.”
Five minutes early. Was that what the frowns had been, at the Bad Münster Bahnhof? That only an idiot or a tourist would have to make a mad dash to make her train?
“They don’t hesitate to let you know when you do something wrong.” I gave it a longer thought. “I think I find it refreshing.”
“Say that after a nice little old lady has yelled, ‘Bei Rot stehn, bei Grün gehn!’ at you after you’ve dared cross against the light. Usually followed with a, ‘Seien Sie ein Vorbild für die Kinder!”
“Think of the children,” my tired brain threw out. It might even be right.
“So I assume this is your first time.”
“Oktoberfest.” It hadn’t been in my plans. But now that I knew, it wasn’t as if I could ignore it. This was Germany. Home to so much history I couldn’t even list it. And I was just going to let it all pass by, merely glimpsed through a train window? The castles, the Roman ruins, the battle sites, the relics of the more recent war. Oh, no. I had to get out of the train at least once.
And Vash. Oktoberfest. That’s what he had meant. Had to be. I needed to find him. Beat the truth out of him if I had to.
Besides, Drea would never forgive me if I didn’t. The biggest beer party in any hemisphere? “Would you believe me if I said I didn’
t even know I was going until just now?”
“If you didn’t, you are a pretty good actor.” He thought for a long moment. “I have an idea,” he said.
“Okay.” I uncurled my legs, leaned forward. I don’t know why, but for some reason I trusted this gangling Austrian musician.
“My partner bailed. She decided she’d rather work on her Master’s thesis. Since I did everything in my name, it would be easy enough to let you take over her reservation. It is close, too; walking distance from the Theresienwiese. And there’s more.”
“More?”
“She reserved a dirndl at one of the few decent rental places in the area. That’s the only way you are going to get one that isn’t tourist trash. Well, that or drop a few hundred euros in Marienplatz and hope they still have your size in stock.”
“Wow.” I didn’t know what to say. “Does everyone come in costume?”
“Don’t let a Bavarian hear you call it that. It’s tracht and it is traditional dress.”
“Point taken. But how can I ever repay you?”
“Well…” Long pause. Then, hopefully, “You aren’t a musician, by any chance?”
Long years of painful practice on the violin flashed through my mind. “No,” I said. “Not really.” Be brutally honest. “I did Musical Theater in High School.” Grinned. “You want to hear ‘Climb Ev'ry Mountain?’”
A pained look. “I’d prefer not.”
He had a certain amount of puttering around to do. Wiping down his instrument. Repacking his bags. I was going to guess he’d boarded directly following a gig. And would be performing again in Munich.
He broke the silence. “You read?”
I nodded.
“I can work with that,” he said. He reached forward to shake. I was in. I could do Oktoberfest. I could find Vash.
