Fall Hard (14 page)

“No.” It was a sleepy rumble but not a bad-tempered one.

“Liar. So, that guitar in the living room, what kind of music do you play on it?”

Viggo raised himself on one elbow, a smile on his face. “You want to hear? I’ll play for you.” He slipped from my grasp and scrambled out of bed. I admired the view as he walked, naked, into the living room. Through the open door, I saw Loki jump out of his basket, his tail wagging, and Viggo bent to fondle his pet. He was back in the bedroom a moment later, carrying the guitar, and settled on the end of the bed, unabashed by his nudity.

“Aren’t you cold?” I asked.

“I’m a Viking. We laugh at the cold.” His expression was teasing. “You British, you don’t know what cold is.” He bent his head and strummed at the guitar, spent a few moments tuning its strings, then launched into a song. I wondered for a moment if Loki would join in, yipping and howling—then my amusement fled as the music began.

It was soft, lyrical, the tune achingly sad. Viggo sang in English much less strongly accented than his speech, his voice a little rough but still pleasant to listen to. After a moment, I realised I knew the song. It was an Irish folk ballad, “She Moved Through the Fair”, about a young man mourning his lost lover. The lyrics seemed to catch at my heart.

Was this how he’d felt when I’d left him and gone back to England? Had it been like a bereavement for him? Or was I just reading way too much into a simple song? Not to mention, in desperate need of getting over myself.

When the song ended, Viggo looked up at me, his expression almost shy. “Did you like it?”

“It was great,” I said, the inadequacy of my words like a weight on my chest. “I mean it.” I was struck by a thought. “Why an Irish song?”

Viggo shrugged. “Why not? Perhaps my ancestors came from Ireland, who knows?”

“Stolen on Viking raids?” I smiled and crawled out of my cocoon of bedcovers to join him on top of the duvet. “I don’t think so. I think your ancestors were the ones doing the raiding.”

Grinning, Viggo laid the guitar aside on the floor and grabbed hold of me. I let him push me back down on the bed and settle on top of me. His limbs were cool to the touch, and I shivered a little. “You think I’ve come to steal you away and make you my slave?” Viggo murmured in my ear.

“I think I might let you,” I breathed back.

I left Viggo’s flat around midnight. He asked me to stay, and I was tempted, but I hadn’t brought any clean clothes. And besides, there were some books I’d taken home from the institute I might need the next day. Viggo accepted my excuses, although at the time I was half wishing he wouldn’t. When I got back home, though, I felt I’d made the right decision. Things were moving very fast with Viggo—too fast for someone I really knew very little about.

As I got ready for bed, my gaze fell on the picture of Borgarnes that now hung on my wall. I stood there looking at it for a long moment. It was a timely reminder I had other things to think about than Viggo.

Chapter Thirteen

“I’m thinking of taking a trip out to Borgarnes,” I mentioned as Mags and I walked down to the cafeteria for lunch the next day.

She cocked her head on one side. “Hoping to jog that memory of yours?”

Well, yes. “It’s always possible, isn’t it?” I said cautiously. “But I thought I should probably refamiliarise myself with the place in any event. I mean, it’s where a lot of the pivotal scenes of Egil’s early life happened. It seems a bit silly to be so near and
not
go.”

“Well, you always seemed to find it inspiring before. When will you go?”

We reached the short queue and picked up our trays. Mags smiled a hello to a fair-haired man in his thirties or so, who nodded to her, then glanced at me, looking away again quickly. I suppressed a sigh. “Actually, I was thinking about this afternoon. It’s only about an hour away, isn’t it?”

“Yes, if you go through the tunnel at Akranes. A bit longer if you use the old route around Hvalfjördur—say an hour and a half? But it’s awfully pretty if you take the long way around.” She turned back to the important decision between a baguette with cheese salad and one with egg. I grabbed a ham and egg and a bottle of water.

Alex was already occupying a table near the window. Alone. I wondered a bit meanly if none of his fellow summer students liked him. After we’d paid for our meals, Mags led the way over there, and he looked up with a smile. “Hey, Mags, Paul. Pull up a chair.” I’d been about to do so in any case, but he forestalled me, twisting around to grab an empty chair from the table behind for me.

“Thanks.” I said it grudgingly but forbore commenting I wasn’t a complete invalid. After I’d done my usual awkward fumble with tray and stick, we sat, exchanged greetings and commented on the weather (it was drizzling again). Then Mags startled me.

“Paul’s planning a trip to Egil’s old neighbourhood this afternoon,” she said conversationally.

Alex beamed like he’d just won the lottery. “Yeah? Mind if I tag along?”

I had half a mind to say,
Yes, actually
just to wipe the self-satisfied look off his face. Instead, I threw Mags a reproachful glance—she missed it entirely, having bent her head to pull the cucumber slices out of her baguette—and just asked, “Don’t you have classes to go to?”

He shrugged. “Yeah, but this is a field trip. I’m here to learn, right? So what does it matter which way I do it?”

“I hope my students won’t take such a casual view of their studies. It could get a bit depressing, lecturing to empty theatres.” I bit into my baguette, which was disappointingly bland. I half thought of asking Mags for her spurned slices of cucumber, but I doubted they’d improve the flavour much. A shame it hadn’t been the tomato she’d objected to.

“Oh, Paul.” Mags was looking up again. “Alex isn’t doing a degree or anything. He’s here for a holiday.”

And apparently I’d been designated tour guide. Maybe I should get a large umbrella and issue Alex with a bright red woollen hat. “Well, it’s your choice,” I said a bit shortly, not much liking the way I’d been backed into a corner.

“Great! Are you heading off straight after you’ve eaten?”

I nodded. “Pretty much. Will you be ready?”

“You know me. I’m always ready.” He smirked.

Mags was looking a bit pink again. “Well, you two have fun.”

“Why don’t you come too?” I suggested without much hope.

“Oh no. I’ve got lots to do. But thanks for offering.”

Conversation dropped for a while as we ate. If it had just been me and Mags, it would have been a companionable silence, but with Alex there, it felt awkward, strained, particularly as he’d finished eating some time before us and was just playing with what I was sure must be a stone-cold cup of coffee. He took the occasional sip to keep us company, I noticed with quiet schadenfreude. I was relieved, though, when I’d finished my meal and could push back my chair.

“Right. Okay, Alex, I’ll see you in the car park in ten minutes, if that’s okay with you?”

“See you soon,” he confirmed with a smile that showed no signs of tension.

“I’ll see you later, Mags.” She smiled, and I limped off in resignation.

“These places always seem farther away than they look on the map,” Alex said as we drove along the ring road north of Reykjavik. “Not that I’m complaining. I kinda like it out this way—not so much black to look at.”

True enough, there were no lava beaches here, with their thick, black sand—the volcanic ash that had so disrupted air travel a few years previously. I rather missed them. “Actually, I quite like that sort of thing. We could be anywhere here. You know where you are with a lava beach.”

“Yeah, and it’s way too near an active volcano for my liking.”

He’d said it dryly, and I matched his tone. “Worried the place is about to turn into a modern Pompeii? I think we’ll probably be okay. But don’t you find it exciting, being in such a young land? Things are still happening here, geologically speaking.”

“Thanks, but I’d rather geology went on and happened without me. And come on, you can’t tell me you think all that black is scenic.” He waved a hand at the view out the windscreen. “This is kinda pretty.”

He wasn’t wrong, but… “There’s nothing distinctive about it, though. Nothing unique or exciting. In fact, I was just thinking we could be in northern Britain.”

“Makes you homesick, does it?”

“Me?” I was startled. “No. I’m a southerner. Born and bred in the Home Counties.”

“Uh, and those would be…?”

“Sorry. The ones around London. Commuter belt.”

Alex nodded. “Right. You still have family in the area?”

“Only Gretchen. My sister.” Did I owe her a phone call? My conscience twinged automatically before I remembered it had only been a couple of days since my last call.

“Weird kind of a name for a Brit, isn’t it?”

“She’s named for my grandmother.” I paused but couldn’t think of a reason not to tell him. “She came out from Austria on the Kindertransport in 1939. The rest of her family all died in the camps.”

“Damn.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “You—I mean I, I guess—kinda forget all the shit that happened back then still affects people today.”

I shrugged awkwardly. “Not Oma. She died when I was little. I don’t really remember her, to be honest, except for a vague impression of a grand old lady in a grand old house. It was a retirement home, of course, but I didn’t know that at the time. I always thought the whole house was hers and she lived there in state, like a less batty Miss Havisham.”

I waited for him to ask about her too, but apparently he’d read his Dickens. Or seen the film, more likely. Then I gave myself a mental slap on the wrist for being such a bloody intellectual snob. Why wouldn’t Alex have read Dickens? He was a history professor, for God’s sake.

He just didn’t always seem like one.

As we skirted Hvalfjördur, we came across another reminder of World War II, an abandoned US naval base. “They used the fjord here as a safe haven for supply ships, back in the Second World War,” I commented, apparently back into lecture mode.

“Hvalfjördur.” Alex stumbled over the Icelandic name. “That means whale fjord, right?”

“Your Icelandic’s coming on, then,” I said mildly.

Alex rubbed his chin. “No, I uh, to be honest I picked up a flyer about whale-watching trips and saw the word. So are there whales in that there fjord?”

“Not anymore, although they’ve found some bones.” I smiled. “There’s a particular whale associated with this place. Raudhofdi—it means redhead.” I glanced at Alex’s copper hair.

His eyebrows shot up. “A whale with red hair?”

“Hey, I didn’t write the legends. Some say he was a red-headed man first and was cursed by one of the hidden folk—elves, by another name—because he was an unfaithful lover. At any rate, he’s reputed to have sunk countless ships here in the fjord.”

“What did the US Navy have to say about it?”

“Nothing. He’d gone by the time they got here. He made the mistake of killing the son—or possibly sons, I can’t remember—of a local priest, and although the man was old, blind and walked with a stick, he got Raudhofdi to follow him up a waterfall. Which apparently caused an earthquake somehow and then killed him. The whale, that is, not the priest.” I suppressed a shiver. Dangerous places, waterfalls.

There was a pause before Alex spoke. “So how did the priest get up the waterfall?”

“Climbed the path up by the side, I think.”

“Oh. Okay. See, if you’d told me he’d swum, I’d have said the whole story was crazy. But that makes sense.” He laughed, and after a moment, I laughed with him.

He wasn’t so bad, I told myself grudgingly. At least, not when he wasn’t being so bloody pushy.

When we got to the edge of Borgarfjördur, I slowed the car. A long road bridge led across the fjord in front of us to the town of Borgarnes. The sun was, for the moment, bravely visible in a rare patch of blue sky, and the low white buildings of the town shone brightly. Higher than all the rest, the church spire stood out like a beacon. Behind the town glowered the mountains, their peaks hidden in the ever-present clouds.

It was the view from the framed photograph on my wall. A deep sense of rightness overtook me, and I pulled over to the side of the road.

“Problem?” Alex asked, turning towards me with a concerned look on his face.

“No.” I shrugged, the gesture seeming artificial to me, at least. “Just wanted to appreciate the view for a bit.” We sat in silence for a moment.

Alex was the first to speak. “So this Egil, was he born here, or did he come over from Norway or somewhere?”

“Born here. He’s a true Icelander. It was his father Skallagrim who sailed over—and his grandfather, Kveldulfr, although he died en route. Still got to choose the landing spot, though,” I added.

Alex snorted. “What, did he come back as a ghost and haunt the crap out of them until they set down where he said?”

“No, just asked them before he died to throw his coffin overboard and see where it pitched up.” I smiled, lost in the images of men, harried from their land by a king who had killed their kinsman, tired from a long sea journey, yearning for solid ground and fresh food and water. Now grieving as well the loss of their leader, still they were determined to follow his last wishes.