Jess hit a key and a long list of options filled the screen. She chose one and called up a display consisting, so far as Ridley could see, entirely of incomprehensible questions. ‘So you’re trying to work backwards – read the history through the legends.’
‘Something like that. Crazy, huh?’
‘Aye,’ agreed Neville. ‘Unless you’ve just gone five rounds with a legend.’
‘You really expect it’ll tell us anything?’ Ridley asked plaintively.
‘God knows.’ Jess was only half-listening, absorbed in entering her answers to the questions on the screen. ‘But Hal thought it might.’ The green glow betrayed the momentary flicker of anguish in her face. ‘Right. That’s it.’ She leaned back in the chair, stretched, and gasped with pain. ‘Oh God, I need a chiropractor. And a masseur. Or maybe just a new body.’
‘What’s happening now?’
‘Hard to explain. Motive analysis –’ An echoing snore cut her off. Harry, dead to the world, was recovering from the fight in his own way.
Ridley chuckled. ‘Never mind him. Motive analysis.’
‘Yeah. See, when these stories were written down, they were analysed in detail and the various story elements noted – incidents, characters, backgrounds –’
‘Like Malevolent return from the dead?’ said Ridley, catching sight of the phrase as it flickered past on the screen.
‘Yeah, like that. Jesus. Anyway, I’ve got the Rayner computers checking through all those stories, sorting out common elements that turn up everywhere, picking out unusual ones that might be peculiar to this area, and seeing if there’s a pattern.’
‘What sort of a pattern?’
‘Well … if we’re lucky it might – just might – come up with the pieces of a common story. And if it does we should be able to put at least a few of them back together.’
‘Get some idea what it was about?’
‘Right. Then we could even compare it with the history books.’
‘Books?’
‘Computer files. Same difference.’
‘Not to me. How long is all this going to take?’
‘A while. Might as well relax and – damn!’
‘Trouble?’
She slumped back from the screen. ‘Uh-huh. Not enough data in good ol’ Rayner’s files. References are there okay, but we need all the details, so the programme’s hung up.’
Ridley was getting involved. ‘Well, my God, there must be some way we can get them!’
Jess hesitated. ‘There’s a new international network, UNET – kind of a long-range hook-up between university databanks. Trouble is, it’s expensive, and I’ve never used it. If I foul up, we could lose all our data.’
‘I know what Hal would say.’
She flashed him a thin smile. ‘Okay. Here goes my fellowship –’
Her fingers picked slowly and carefully over the keys, the screen filled with text – and went black. ‘Christ!’ hissed Ridley. Suddenly the word
*OXFORD
appeared in the top corner.
‘Jesus! It’s calling back to England!’ Jess was fascinated. A few lines of text flickered across the screen, too fast to read, and then the name changed to
*OREGON
Another jumble of words, then more names –’
*HEIDELBERG
*AARHUS
*CALCUTTA
*OSLO
– each contributing its own piece to the jigsaw. ‘All over the world – just for footnotes, I think. Don’t seem to be getting much more’n that. The result had better be worth it …’
Again the screen flickered and went blank. Jess sucked in her breath, then sighed audibly as the scurrying words reappeared.
‘All right?’
‘Think so. Something shaping up – what I’ve seen doesn’t make much sense, though. Black magic, defiling churches, and something about burning at the stake. Don’t expect too much.’
The scurrying stopped. Four words appeared.
*ONCE UPON A TIME …
‘Programmers,’ muttered Jess. ‘Lousy sense of humour. Ridley hardly noticed. He was riveted. Line by line, rolling up the screen like credit titles on a film, a story was beginning to unfold.
There was a King (Variant: King Raven) who came from over the Sea (R.316/55/V12a)
And conquered a Town for himself. (R.316 /55/Variant local)
He was a Pagan, and sold his soul to Satan to learn Black Magic (R.452/33,34,82/Variant local in this combination)
And so hated Christ that he defiled (destroyed) the Church (Local variant--cf hagiographical incidents?)
(He built a temple to Satan where) He and his wife and their evil followers held terrible rites (human sacrifice) (R.90/95/V20a/Extreme variant local, cf ogre and wife stories R.525/ff.)
Until Saint (Hilda/Oswald/other local saints/a brave young priest) defied him (resisted his magic) (R. 3407/ff.; A-T 303 ff.)
And he and his wife were burned at the stake (hanged and burned/lynched and refused Christian burial/stoned and buried as pagans by their own followers (Historical Witchcraft refs., esp. 17th and 18th centuries)
Neville whistled softly. ‘Could put the porno writers out o’ business, that. Frederick Forsyth, an’ all. Just like a bedtime story, eh?’
Jess was staring, open-mouthed. ‘But – it shouldn’t be like that! It can’t be! Folktales just don’t fit together that way!’
‘Unless they happen to be true?’ suggested Ridley. ‘How about checking the history books?’
‘Files,’ said Jess, with an unsteady smile. ‘I still don’t believe it, but here goes nothing.’ Nervously she keyed another set of commands into the terminal, then sat back in the big chair, biting absent-mindedly at her finger.
‘Now what?’
‘I’ve got a sweep going for anything which might match that story – anywhere in Europe. Could be an import, you see –’ The screen flickered, and the words
*TRINITY DUBLIN
*KOBENHAVN
*TRONDHEIM
appeared and vanished in quick succession. ‘Jesus, we’re still on the net! I forgot!’
‘Let it go,’ said Ridley.
‘More the merrier,’ said Neville, as
*MOSKVA
appeared. ‘Gawd, not the bloody KGB, is it?’
‘The Russian colleges have some good specialists,’ muttered Jess. ‘Especially – wait a minute.’
*REFERENCE: Monastic Archives, Kiev (now in the Hermitage, Leningrad): Monastic chronicle, Spanish, 11th century--MSS fragmentary; marginal note added to account of 11th-century English kings; corrupted Latin (derived from unknown Anglo-Saxon original?).
Modern English rendering follows:
In this year, when the pagan Hericus was finally driven from Eboracum, that vassal of his named Herafenius, also called Rimaconerius, likewise met his end, and his wife Aodana, who had made their rule abhorrent in the North by defiling the church of Christ with pagan obscenities, claiming thereby to rule the fertility of the land and the fortunes of seafarers. But their cruelties so stank in the nostrils of the Lord that when Hericus could no longer aid them the oppressed arose against them, and slew them, and all those of their followers who did not repent. And they were given no Christian burial, but by the will of their repentant followers, being in great fear of their evil souls, disposed of like carrion.
NOMENCLATURE
Hericus = Eirik (id. Eirik Bloodaxe, king of York AD 948-954)
Eboracum = York (Jorvik)
Herafenius = prob. Hrafn (Raven)
Rimaconerius = meaning uncertain; compound?; –conerius confect. konungr, a king or princes;
Rima– meaning uncertain
Aodana = prob. Aud
*POSSIBLE SOURCE REFERENCE--Irish Chronicle: War of Goidhill and Gael: Chieftain Turgein (?Thorgeir) and wife Ota (?Aud) try to reestablish paganism: defile church and hold obscene rites on altar; defeated and drowned. All major authorities agree account wholly legendary
*REFERENCE ENDS
Ridley took a deep breath. ‘Do they now?’
Without a word Jess leaned forward over the keyboard and tapped a series of controls. The screen image split in half and shrank, and the folklore analysis reappeared on the left-hand side to lie parallel with the chronicle account. Neville whistled. ‘Reckon you just struck gold, love!’
But Ridley frowned. ‘Gold? Look, it’s all fascinating, this, but we haven’t found anything to help us! I mean this – this Raven character got the chop in – in –’
‘In the tenth century,’ said Jess. ‘Yes! And then he was burned, or buried, or something. What the hell’s he got to do with what’s happening here now? So there might be a connection – how do we find out what it is?’
‘ ’Ey, what’s all the racket?’ demanded a sleepy voice behind them. ‘Can’t a bloke get a decent night’s kip … ey-oop, where’d you dig up this lot?’ Harry was staring at the computer display with a slightly sheepish expression. ‘Could’ve told you this meself. Heard it from me grandda’ –’
Neville snapped his fingers. ‘Right! That’s the bloody story you’ve been using to shock all those naive little tourist bits!’
‘Just like that,’ agreed Harry cheerfully. ‘Right up t’end – buried like pagans. ’Appen that meant they just choocked ’em in the sea –’
He stopped, appalled, as Jess grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. ‘No!’ she yelled. ‘Christ, I’m a turkey, Hal’d kill me. Pagan burial! Balder’s funeral! Scyld, in Beowulf! That Arab traveller’s account! The Vikings didn’t always bury their upper classes, the rich men and the kings. When they could, they gave them a classier funeral – they burnt them! In a ship!’
Ridley gave a sudden growl of understanding, and Neville’s jaw dropped. ‘You mean – pushed ’em out to sea with the ship on fire? Then the chests –’
‘Right! That’s why they were covered in pitch!’
‘So they’d burn!’ said Ridley. ‘But they bungled the job.’
‘We almost found ’em!’ breathed Neville, aghast. ‘Bloody ’ell, almost. An hour or two earlier and we’d have been opening the first chest on the spot –’
Ridley shook his head. ‘Pity you didn’t! Him in the first chest tucked away in the lab tank, her in the second – free to escape, flatten the guard, and come release him. It fits, but –’
‘He – Jay,’ Jess swallowed. ‘He said something about finding the ship because of him. Because of what he’d done. The ceremony, he must have meant. And he said – he said that the King and Queen came to the clearing that night.’
‘Meaning our friend Raven and –’
‘Aud.’
‘Right.’ Ridley scowled. ‘So it is them. Aud I’ve met. Can’t say I care for the lady. He didn’t say anything else that might help us?’
‘Nothing good. Something about Fimbulwinter, I think, whatever in hell that is. Could be I had other things on my mind at the time.’
‘Could be. Why not check it out now?’
‘Huh? Jesus, we’re still on-line!’
‘So pay by instalments. Or I will. Right now I could use some answers.’
Again the keys clattered and rattled under Jess’s fingers. Harry started humming ‘Them bones, them bones, them dry-y bones!’
‘Fimbulwinter. Hope I’m spelling it aright. Hang on, I’m getting something …’
*FIMBULWINTER?
FIMBULWINTER (Old Norse fimbul-vetr: found in Voluspa (c.9th-10th century AD) and cognate sources). The ‘winter of the world’, an infinite tine of cold and darkness before the RAGNAROK (q.v.)
‘Ragnarok?’
‘That one I don’t have to look up. It’s the last battle between the Norse gods and their enemies – the end of the world. Kind of a Viking Armageddon.’
Ridley stood up stiffly and walked over to the window. He pulled back, the curtains; orange light flooded the room, from the street lamp outside reflected in the thick snow. ‘Still snowing,’ he said quietly. ‘You know, in this modern age all this – these creatures – shouldn’t be half the terror they are. Not when burning scares them off. Not in summer, with hours of daylight. It’s winter gives them their real power – when we can’t cope, can’t go whizzing around in cars or planes or any of our modern marvels. It takes us back to being savages in huts, squatting around the fire.’ He turned away, as if there was something he did not want to see.
‘Hey, Inspector!’ Jess’s voice was puzzled. ‘There’s something else on your pad here. I can’t make it out – there! That anything?’
‘Aye – that’s what Hal was calling these things. Dunno if I spelt it right – drow-gar, he pronounced it.’
‘Draug-gar? Doesn’t mean much to me. Hal’s the Old Norse freak, I always have to look these things up. Hang on, I’ll input alternative spellings, just in case. If I don’t get it wrong, ten to one the bloody programmers have.’
‘God,’ said Ridley, ‘I hate it when that screen goes blank.’
‘Yeah. Big databases, though. Takes time to find something I can’t spell … Jesus, if I don’t move I’m gonna lock up.’ She eased out of her chair and went, as Ridley had, to the window, rubbing her eyes. But she stood there silently, staring out into the darkness lurking just beyond the streetlamp, and did not go back.
‘It’s through,’ said Ridley. ‘Jess?’
‘Oh, read it out,’ she said, in a curiously flat voice.
Ridley peered at the screen. ‘Draug – d-r-a-u-g; something or other …’
‘Etymology. Origins of the word.’
‘Whatever you say. A – God above! A malignant ghost, or living corpse, of Icelandic folklore; similar to superstitions in many other countries, notably Vampire (q.v.) though without feeding on blood. Descriptions occur in many Old Norse sagas, notably Grettir’s Saga; Viga-Glum’s Saga. Draugar appear as dark, bloated, creatures (resembling corpses buried on marshy ground) who haunt their own families and the places where they are buried. At first they kill domestic animals, and frighten the household by shaking the roof, or battering doors and shutters. Later they attack and kill human beings; such victims may become draugar (possibly subservient) themselves. In saga accounts draugar are almost invulnerable, but are wrestled to death by a strong hero and destroyed by burning. Most likely to return as draugar are those who have been evil in life, especially those who practise the dark arts of – what’s this? Sey-ther?’
‘Seithr,’ said Jess. ‘Sound familiar?’
‘Not to me.’
‘Nor me,’ said Neville. ‘Feels like we’ve got all the bloody pieces, but ’ow the ’ell do we put ’em together?’
‘Try this one,’ said Jess. ‘An evil black magician, so evil that even when he’s killed by his Christian enemies his own late followers are afraid he’ll come back from the dead; they try to stop him – and screw up. So evil that hundreds of years after he’s gone there are stories of plagues, dead fish, dead birds, endless winters. Then one poor goddam lunatic called Jay Colby tries to bring back the past, and gets him instead – as a living corpse, so he can finish what he started a thousand years ago.’
‘I don’t get it,’ said Ridley.
‘I didn’t, not at first. But look outside.’ She pointed. Beyond the gap in the curtains, beyond the thin glass pane, they could all see the rush and swirl of the snowflakes in the wind. The miniature mountain range along the bottom of the window was growing almost as they watched, climbing upward, and a film of pale ice was forming on the inside of the glass. ‘We know his name – Hrafn, Raven. And what else he was called; Rimaconerius – Rimkonungr. Rime-king. Rim, rime, it’s the same word. In English and in Old Norse. It means ice.’
‘Raven,’ said Ridley slowly. ‘Raven the Ice King. You’re saying – An infinite time …’
‘Why not? Ever known a winter like this, this early, this bad? You said it yourself – it’s the winter that makes him so terrible. And there’s no better place to start it than here – Saitheby.’
‘I’m not with y
ou,’ said Neville.
‘I already told you!’ said Jess darkly. ‘They’ve been wrong all along about the name of this place. This is Saitheby – goddam it, don’t you see? Seithr-by. The Town of Black Magic.’
CHAPTER NINE
THEY WERE hunting him – hunting, with the blizzard baying on his heels. Twice now he’d glimpsed them, undisturbed by the snow and the scything wind. It bit through clothes and skin in great chill slashes that left him gasping for breath, breath that sucked the warmth out of him. The snow it drove at him crusted like lead armour in his clothes, flayed his cheeks and caked solid in his beard. Icy trickles, melted by his breath, ran stinging over his cracked lips and down his neck, soaking his pullover till it rubbed his throat raw. His feet were numb weights he lifted, dragged and let fall with only the remotest tingle of pain. And all the while he had to wrestle with the howling air as though it were a living enemy, clawing and buffeting him. Exhaustion embraced him with dreamy promises of warmth, tempting him to slow down, lie down, forget, so easily –
Hal bit down savagely on his cracked lip. That was one way of staying awake, anyway. Not because he had any real hopes of help, not with night fallen, the roads closed – the only people abroad would be strays like himself or … or others he did not want to meet. This was their storm, their sending: give in to it, fall down and sleep out his life in a dream of comfort, and he gave in to them, now and forever. They were not the only menace the snow hid; he had been stumbling around for so long he might easily have gone right past church and houses and be wandering around the edge of the Oddsness cliffs. But that hardly frightened him: if nothing else, it would at least be a cleaner death …
He bit his lip again, hard, and tasted warm blood. People were relying on him. He had no business thinking about dying, not yet – not while he could still stay up or awake, that way or any way. He had to.
Suddenly something icy clutched painfully at his half-numbed legs. He stumbled and floundered into a slope of snow that rose in front of him – a drift-wall his feet had sunk into. He took a deep breath, feeling the icy air dance like glass fragments in his lungs, and began to scramble up it with desperate haste, wading, kicking, shovelling the snow aside. If it was only high enough to give him a little shelter on the lee side! Even a minute free of the blast might help, maybe even let him get his bearings, though his eyes were snow-stung and half-blind. By the time he reached the crest he was almost on all fours, hands and arms as dead as his legs. He stood for a moment to get his breath – and in that moment the wind swirled sharply round, as it had against the car. It lashed hard at him from one side, whipping powdery snow off the drift and across his eyes. He staggered, fighting furiously to keep on his feet, afraid to fall in case he couldn’t get up again; then, freed from wind pressure, the slope under his feet cracked, crumbled and spilled out, sending a small avalanche pattering down into shadow. He slid with it, arms flailing wildly for balance or a handhold, and finding neither he toppled …
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