Who's Afraid of Beowulf Read online

  As the top of her hat emerged into the light, the surveyor put his copy of Custom Car back in his pocket and asked: ‘Are you all right, then?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ Hildy stammered. She was shaking, and sweat had turned her fringe into little black spikes, like the horns of a stag-beetle. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

  ‘You were down there an awful long time,’ said the surveyor. It had just occurred to him that more portable things than ships are sometimes found in ancient mounds.

  ‘Very interesting,’ Hildy said. ‘I wish I could be sure it was authentic.’

  The surveyor was staring at something sticking out of the pocket of her paddock jacket. She put her hand over it and hitched her lips into a smile.

  ‘So there’s nothing like - well, artefacts or anything down there?’ asked the surveyor, rather too casually. Hildy tightened her grip round the neck of the brooch.

  ‘Could be,’ she mumbled. ‘If I’d been brave enough to look. But the roof looks like it might collapse at any minute, so I came out again.’

  ‘The roof?’

  ‘Perilous, if you ask me. I think I heard it moving.’

  The surveyor’s face seemed to fall. ‘Perhaps we should try to shore it up,’ he suggested. ‘I could go in and have a look. Of course, you needn’t go in.’

  Hildy nodded vigorously. ‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘Where’s the nearest phone, by the way, in case we have to call for help?’

  As she expected, the surveyor didn’t like the sound of that. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘it’s a job for the experts.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Best leave well alone.’

  Hildy nodded.

  It had started to rain, and the survey team were making chorus noises. ‘What I’d better do,’ the surveyor said, ‘since we can’t do anything more for the present, is send the lads home and take you back to Lairg. You lot,’ he shouted to the survey team, ‘get that hole covered up.’

  The old man in the raincoat said something authentic, but they ignored him and set about replacing the tarpaulin. ‘We’d better wait till they’re on their way,’ whispered the surveyor. ‘Otherwise - well, they might be tempted to see if there was anything of value down there.’

  ‘Surely not?’

  Neither Hildy nor the surveyor had much to say on the way back to Lairg. Hildy was thinking of a passage from Beowulf which she had had to do as a prepared translation during her first year at New York State, all about a man who stole a rich treasure from a hoard he found in a burial-mound, and woke a sleeping fire-drake in the process. She could remember it vividly, almost word for word, and it had had a decidedly unhappy ending.

  The surveyor bundled her out of the car at Lairg and drove away rather quickly, which made Hildy feel somewhat suspicious. So she telephoned the police at Melvich and explained the situation to them slowly and lucidly. Once they had been made to understand that she was not mad or drunk they sounded very enthusiastic about the prospect of guarding buried treasure and promised to send the patrol car out as soon as it came back from finding Annie Erskine’s cat. Feeling easier in her mind, Hildy went into the hotel bar and ordered a double orange juice with ice. As she drank it, she drew out the brooch and looked round to see if anyone was watching. But the barman had gone back to the Australian soaps in the television room, and she was alone.

  The brooch was an exquisite example of its kind, the finest that Hildy had ever seen. The form was as simple as the decoration was complex, and it reminded her of something she had seen recently in quite another context. Slowly, the magnitude of her discovery and its attendant excitement began to return to her, and as soon as she had finished her drink she left the bar, reversed the charges to the Department of Archaeology, and demanded to speak to the Director personally.

  ‘George?’ she said calmly (he had always been Professor Wood to anyone under the rank of senior lecturer, but he had never found so much as a row-boat). ‘It’s Hildy Frederiksen here - yes, that’s right - and I’m calling from Lairg. L-A-I-R-G.’ He was being vague again, she noticed, an affectation he was much given to, especially after lunch. ‘I’m just back from a first inspection of that mound site at Rolfsness. George, you’re not going to believe this, but . . .’

  As she spoke, her hand crept of its own accord into her pocket and closed around the flying dragon. Something seemed to tell her that on no account ought she to keep this extraordinarily beautiful and dangerous thing for herself, but that nevertheless that was what she was going to do, fire-drake or no fire-drake.

  In the mound, it was dark and silent once again. For the past twelve hundred years, ever since the last turf had been laid over the trellis of oak-trunks and the horse-men had ridden away to the waiting ships, nothing had moved in the chamber, not so much as a mole or a worm. But now there was something missing that should have been there, and just as one tiny stone removed from an arch makes the whole structure unsound, so the peace of the chamber had been disturbed. Something moved in the darkness, and moved again, with the restlessness that attends on the last few moments before waking.

  ‘For crying out loud,’ said a voice, faint and drowsy in the darkness, ‘there’s some of us trying to sleep.’

  The silence had been broken, irrecoverably, like a pane of glass. ‘You what?’ said another voice.

  ‘I said there’s people trying to sleep,’ said the first voice. ‘Shut it, will you?’

  ‘You shut up,’ replied the second voice. ‘You’re the one making all the noise.’

  ‘Do you two mind?’ A third voice, deep and powerful, and the structure of beams seemed to vibrate to its resonance. ‘“Quiet as the grave,” they say. Some hope.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said the first two voices. The silence tried to return, as the retreating tide tries to claw its way back up the beach.

  ‘I told you, didn’t I?’ continued the third voice after a while. ‘I warned you not to eat that cheese, but would you listen? If you can’t sleep, then be quiet.’

  There was a sound of movement, metal scraping on metal, as if men in armour were turning in their sleep and groaning. ‘It’s no good,’ said the third voice, ‘you’ve done it now.’

  Somewhere in the gloom there was a high-pitched squeaking sound, like a bat high up in the rafters of a barn. It might conceivably have been a human voice, if a man could ever grow so incredibly old. After the sound had died away, like water draining into sand, there was absolute quiet; but an uneasy, tense quiet. The mound was awake.

  ‘The wizard says try counting sheep,’ said the second voice.

  ‘I heard him myself,’ said the third voice. ‘Bugger counting sheep. I’ve counted enough sheep since I’ve been down here to clothe the Frankish Empire. Oh, the Hel with it. Somebody open a window.’

  There was a grating sound, and a creaking of long-relaxed timber. ‘Sod it,’ said the first voice, ‘some clown’s moved the ladder.’

  The old man grinned, displaying both his yellow teeth, and cut the final cord of the tarpaulin. Two of his fellows pulled the cover free, while the other members of the survey team, who had come back in the expectation of wealth, stood by with dustbin liners. In about fifteen minutes, they were all going to be rich.

  ‘Can you see anything, Dougal?’ someone asked. The old man grunted and wormed his way into the hole. A moment later, he slid out backwards and started to run like a hare. The survey team watched him in amazement, then turned round and stared at the mouth of the hole. A helmeted head had appeared out of the darkness, with a gauntleted hand in front of its eyes to protect them from the light.

  ‘All right,’ it said irritably, ‘which one of you jokers moved our ladder?’

  Hildy waited and waited, but no one came. She tried to pass the time by rereading her favourite sagas, but even their familiar glories failed to hold her attention. For in her mind’s eye, as she read, the old images and mental pictures, which had been developed in the distant and unheroic town of Setauket, were all displaced and usurped
by new, rather more accurate visions. For example, she had always pictured the lonely hall on the fells where Gunnar of Hlidarend, the archetypal hero of saga literature, had made his last stand as being the disused shed on the vacant lot down by the tracks, so that by implication Mord Valgardsson had led the murderers out of the drugstore on the corner of Constitution Street, where presumably they had stiffened their resolve for their bloody deed with a last ice-cream soda. Sigmund and Sinfjotli had been chained to the log that was the felled apple tree in her own back yard, and there the wolf who was really the shape-changer king had come in the blue night and bitten off Sigmund’s hand. Thus was maintained the link between the Elder Days and her own childhood; but the sight of the ship and the heaped gold had broken the link. She had seen with her own eyes a real live dead Viking, who had never been anywhere near Setauket and was therefore rather more exciting and rather less safe. Long Island Vikings were different; they had stopped at the front door, and never dared go into the house. But the Caithness variety seemed rather more pervasive. They were all around her, even under the bed - in the shape of the brooch in her suitcase.

  Hildy tried her best not to unpack it from under the shirts and sweatshirts and hold it up to the light, but she was only flesh and blood. It seemed to glow in her hands, to move not with the beatings of her pounding heart but with a movement of its own, as if it were some thing of power. She made an attempt to study it professionally, to see if that would dispel its glamour; undoubted Swedish influences, garnets probably from India but cut in Denmark, yet the main work was in the classical Norwegian style and the runes were those of the futharc of Orkney. She stopped, and frowned. She had not noticed the runes before; but the keen light of the reading-lamp seemed to flow into them, like water into a channel when a dam is opened, so that they stood out tiny but unmistakable on the main curve of the central spiral of the decoration.

  Runes. For some reason her heart had stopped beating. Perhaps it was some magic in those extraordinary letters, first created at a time when any writing was by definition magical, a secret mark on silent metal that could communicate without speech to the eyes of a wise lore-master. Runes cannot help being magical, even if what they spell out is commonplace; a rune cut on the lintel will keep the sleepless ghosts from riding on the roof, or put a curse on the house that curdles milk and makes all the fires suddenly go out. Runes were also spells of attraction; to learn the runes, the god Odin had made himself a human sacrifice at his own altar, and ever since they had had a power to command. For all she knew, it was their command that had drawn her, by way of New York State and Cambridge, across the grey sea all the way from Setauket to be the improbable heroine of some last quest.

  The strange wonder of the thing did not altogether fade or wither as it lay in her hands: the runes were still runes, and the brooch was still incredible. A Viking brooch in a museum or under the fluorescent tubes of the laboratory of the Department of Archaeology was resentfully tame, like a caged lion, and its voice was silent. Outside on the cold hill the wild lion roared, fascinating and dangerous, while in the incongruous setting of a hotel bedroom it was like - well, like a wild lion in a hotel bedroom, where no pets or animals of any description are in any circumstances permitted.

  Rationalised, what that meant was that she was feeling guilty about having stolen it, which was effectively what she had done, something which no archaeologist, however debased, would ever conceive of doing. So why, she asked her suitcase, had she done it?

  ‘I must put it back,’ she said aloud.

  The only vehicle for hire in Lairg was a large minibus, by all appearances coeval with the longship Naglfar and about as practical for winding Scottish roads. But Hildy was in no position to be choosy, and she set off with an Ordnance Survey map open on the seat beside her, to drive to Rolfsness and put the brooch back in the mound before the team from St Andrews got there. As the deliberately obstructive road meandered its way through the grey hills, she could feel her resolve crumbling like an ancient parchment; the wild animal commanded her to return it to its natural habitat, not to put it back where middle-aged men with careers would come to find it and make it turn the treadmill of some thesis or scholarly paper.

  She stopped the van and took it out once more. The dragon’s expression had not changed; his garnet eyes were still red and hot as iron on the anvil; his lips still curved, in accordance with the demands of symmetry and form, in the same half-smile of intolerant mockery. She was suddenly aware that blood had been spilt over the possession of this extraordinary thing, and convinced that blood might well be shed for it again.

  A loud hooting behind her, and plainly audible oaths, not in Old High Norse but modern Scots, woke her from her self-induced hypnosis. She rammed the van into first gear and drove on to the verge, letting the council lorry pass. Now she felt extremely foolish, and the voice in the runes fell silent, leaving her to her embarrassment. Listening to dragon brooches, said another, rather more familiar voice in her head, is only one step away from talking to dragons, for which they take you to a place where people are very kind and understanding, and where eventually the dragons start talking back. She bundled the brooch back into her pocket and took off the handbrake.

  It was nearly dark when she reached Rolfsness, but the new, sensible Hildy Frederiksen defied nightfall as she defied all the other works of sorcery. She parked the bus under a lonely rowan tree and trotted swiftly over to the mound. There was no tarpaulin over the hole and no sign of the police, and her archaeologist’s instinct returned, all the stronger for having been challenged. A terrible fear that the mound had been plundered while her attention was distracted struck her, and she started to blame herself. Why, for a start, had she left the mound in the first place, like a lamb among wolves, unguarded against the return of those unsavoury contractors’ men? She fumbled for her flashlight and dropped it; the back came off and all the batteries were spilt into the short wiry grass. Her fingers were unruly as she tried to reassemble it, for clearly everything she tried to do today was fated to come to no good. When the wretched thing was mended, she advanced like an apprentice lion-tamer on the hole in the side of the mound, afraid now not of what she might see but of what she might not.With a deep breath that seemed to fill not only her lungs but also her pockets and the very lining of her jacket she poked one toe into the mouth of the hole, as if it were a hot bath she was testing. Something seemed to move inside.

  ‘Now what is it?’ demanded a voice from under the earth.

  So she had disturbed the plunderers at their work! Suddenly her small familiar body was filled with cold and unreasonable courage, for here was a chance to redeem herself in the eyes of Archaeology by falling in battle with tomb-robbers and unlicensed dealers in antiquities.

  ‘OK,’ she said between clenched teeth, ‘you’d better come out now. We have this whole area surrounded.’

  There was a clanking noise, as of something very heavy moving, and somebody said: ‘Why don’t you look where you’re putting your great feet?’ Then a ray of the setting sun fell suddenly on red gold and blue steel, and a man stood silhouetted against the sky on the edge of the mound.

  He was a little over six feet tall, clad in gilded chain-mail armour. His face was half-covered by the grotesque mask that formed the visor of his shining helmet, while around his bear-like shoulders was a thick grey fur cloak, fastened at the neck by a brooch in the shape of two gripping beasts. In his right hand was a hand-and-a-half sword whose pommel blazed with garnets, like the lights of distant watch-fires.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ said the man from the mound.

  Hildy did not answer, for she could not remember. The man clapped his gauntleted hands, whereupon a procession of twelve men emerged from the mound. Nine of them were similarly armed and masked, and on their arms they carried kite-shaped shields that seemed to burn in the setting sun. Of the other three, one was small and stooping, dressed in a long white robe that blurred the outlines of his body like low cloud ove
r a hillside, but his face was covered by a hood of cat skins and he leant on a staff cut from a single walrus tusk, carved into the shape of a serpent. The second of the three was a huge man, bigger than any human being Hildy had ever seen before, and he was dressed in the pelt of a long-haired bear. On his shoulder he carried a great halberd, whose blade was as long as its tree-like shaft. The third was shorter than the rest of the armed men but still tall, slim and quick-moving like a dancer. He wore no armour, but only a doublet of purple and dark blue hose. Tucked under his arm was a gilded harp, while over his right shoulder was a longbow of ash-wood and a quiver of green-flighted arrows.

  They looked around them, shading their eyes even against the red warmth of the setting sun, as if any light was unbearable to them. One of the armed men, who was carrying a spear with a banner of cloth bound to its shaft, turned to the others and pushed his helmet back, revealing a face at once young and old, with soft brown eyes under stern brows.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Here we are again. So how long do you reckon we’ve been down there?’

  ‘No idea,’ said the man next to him, who carried a silver horn on a woven baldrick. ‘Ask the wizard. He’ll know.’

  The standard-bearer repeated his question, slowly and loudly, to the small stooping man, who made a noise through the cat skins like a rusty hinge.

  ‘He says twelve hundred years, give or take,’ said the standard-bearer. No one seemed in the least surprised (except Hildy, of course, and she was not as surprised as she would have expected to be). The horn-bearer cast his eyes slowly round the encircling hills, inexpressibly majestic in the light glow of the sunset.

  ‘Twelve hundred years,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Well, if that’s true, it hasn’t changed a bit, not in the slightest.’ He looked round again. ‘Pity, really,’ he added. ‘Miserable place, Caithness.’