Spanners - The Fountain of Youth (27 page)

“A Viking castle that looks like a museum, in
the land of the Eskimos,” said Phage. “This is fucked up.”

“I studied Viking culture for a day,” said Mayfly. “They stopped building ring fortresses a thousand years ago.”

“I can see why,” said Phage. “Walls are low; this would be easy to invade.”

“Easy to burn down, too,” said Phoe, touching the wooden buttresses holding up the ceiling.

Adam looked around; the little girl had disappeared, and so had her cats.

“This fortress is creepin’ me out,” said Phage. “Adam, what kind of Vikings live here
, anyway?”

Adam tried to remember, but his mind was hazy. He knew he had been in a
ring fortress before but couldn’t recall any of the details.
My class doesn’t forget details,
thought Adam.
We remember everything.

“It’s ok
ay, Phage,” said Phoe.

“How do you know?” asked Phage.

“I sense it’s okay,” said Phoe. “Whoever’s here is on our side; I just sense it.”

“Well I guess we’re in luck
, then,” said Phage with a smile, looking at the front of the hall.

Before them was a large, blond
-bearded man, about the size of Brogg and dressed in animal pelts. Next to him was a dark-skinned woman with Indian features, and next to her was the girl; it was clear that the girl who had led them through the forest was their daughter. They had four panthers by their side, and when Adam focused on the Indian woman, her eyes glowed.

“
My name is Leif the Bold, first of my king’s Húskarlar, traveler, conqueror and warrior, and ruler of all you see before you,”
said the man in an old Viking dialect that Adam recognized. “This is my wife Yahíma and our daughter Dagmena. Welcome to our estate; we’re no threat to you, but you’re in great danger. Juan’s forces have increased, and if you stay on your path, you’ll face a quick and extraordinarily painful defeat. We’re here to help you avoid that fate, and spare you an eternity of torture under Juan’s throne.”

Adam translated and Phage smiled.

“Looks like we made the right choice,” said Phage. “Looks like we got a couple of new friends.”

/***/

They ate reindeer meat and washed it down with a cloudy, sweet ale that Dagmena poured from a barrel in the corner. Leif took a piece of bread from a basket and then passed it on; when it got to Adam he realized that it was not bread but dried fish.
The streams here are frozen eight months out of the year,
thought Adam.
They must travel far from here to gather food, and they plan well.

Dagmena gave Adam a jar of white paste and gestured that he should spread it on the fish, and he found that it tasted like butter and the dried salted fish tasted like a cracker. He nodded in approval
, and Dagmena smiled and then ran away giggling.

“
Before we tell you the truth of the danger you … the danger
we
face, allow me to tell you our tale
,” said Leif in his old Viking dialect.

“
Speak, please, speak slow
,” said Mayfly, mirroring the Viking dialect. “
I translate
.”

“Two speakers of our tongue!”
said Leif with a hearty laugh. “This is rare indeed; even many of my fellow warriors who still live have forgotten this language.”

“He learns fast,”
said Adam.

“Very well,”
said Leif, “my tale, slowly. I was a human Viking, working as the foreign Húskarlar bodyguard for Cnut the great, amongst others. I was a standard brute, drinking and fighting and whatnot, and one morning found myself conscripted on a longship headed towards what’s now called Newfoundland; this was nigh on a thousand years ago. We met the natives; they killed some of ours and we some of theirs, but we didn’t have the enormous impact that your conquistadors had five hundred years later.

“We were called back to the motherland, but I had nothing to return to,”
said Leif, “so I and two score other warriors stayed. We vowed to spend the rest of our days in exploration, and vowed to travel south until there was no more
south
beneath us. We journeyed down the continent, interacting with culture after culture, language after language, landscape after landscape. Some areas were friendly, most were dangerous, but we kept to our vows and traveled onwards.

“Five years later, and twenty of our comrades fallen, our remaining warriors reached an Arawak tribe with glowing eyes
—the tribe of immortals. I met the wife you see before you and we decided to stay to serve as their guardians. After a few fierce battles with neighboring tribes, they took us in and decided to give us their gift of life. Two centuries later, my wife and I had a child and I wanted her to grow up in a different climate, in a land to call her own. So we came up here with a family of panthers to which they had also given the gift of immortality, and here we stay, two undying parents and a perpetually youthful daughter.”

“Sounds idyllic,”
said Adam.

“It is,”
said Leif.

Leif nodded at his daughter
, and she went to another room and came back with a white bird in her hand. She handed it to her father, and he took a small note attached to the bird’s leg and handed it to Adam. It was written in an odd language neither he nor Mayfly could understand.

“We’ve largely split apart, and these doves are the immortal Arawak’s only method of communication; the only thing that connects us all,”
said Leif. “And it says that Juan has the upper hand.”

“How so?”
said Adam.

“He’s decapitated the Arawak council and unearthed the tribe’s criminals to build his army,”
said Leif. “The criminals are bad men, and I should know; I buried a few of them myself.”

Leif took a swig of the cloudy ale.

“As of right now, you’ll reach your destination,” said Leif, “but when Juan attacks with the imprisoned at his side, they’ll run you over in a matter of moments.”

“We will have Fountain on our side,”
said Mayfly, his Norse grammar now almost perfect.

“She can change the world, but she can’t fight a war by herself,”
said Leif. “You’ll need something stronger to break Juan’s soldiers; an immortal army filled only with the desire to kill is hard to stop. You’ll shoot them down and they’ll come out of the ground that night and tear you in half. These are immortals without consciences, and they can’t be broken, because they have no souls to break.”

Mayfly translated, but Phage cut him off.

“Listen to me, King,” said Phage. “I appreciate the warning, but I’m not gonna run from Juan or anyone else, and I don’t know if you’ve heard but I’ve taken down a lot of people,
including
a few armies.”

Mayfly translated for Leif, and the Viking spoke back to Mayfly directly.

“Tell him he hasn’t seen an army like this,” said Leif. “Tell him the imprisoned army doesn’t respond to disease.”

Mayfly translated, but Phage cut him off again.
             

“Tell
him
I don’t give a shit,” interrupted Phage. “If my bag of tricks doesn’t work, fine, then ask him what will. I’m tired of being lectured about prophecies, invincible armies and whatnot. The future’s what we make it, and
anyone
can be beaten, even Juan. Ask the Viking how to do it, and if he doesn’t know, tell him to have his little brownie give us our keys back.”

Mayfly translated, taking out Phage’s vulgarity, but the king got his tone and started to laugh.

“I have heard of this one, even from my place here in the woods,” said Leif. “They said he was a demon, and I see that in him. Demons aren’t always bad, especially when they’re on your side. The sick one will serve you well in the upcoming battle.”

Leif sighed deeply and looked at his wife, who was downcast and sad.

“But the reality is that the other side has
four hundred
demons,” said Leif. “You’ll be crushed as it stands.”

“Can you help us?”
asked Adam, also becoming impatient.

“Yes; that’s why I brought you here,”
said Leif. “I’ve already sent doves to both the remaining immortal Arawaks and my twenty immortal Viking compatriots.
This
will be your army, but it will take some time for them to reach the final battle place; my wife’s tribe is now all around the world, mostly living without any sort of modern technology.

“As far as my compatriots, some are bankers in Oslo, some live much as I do, but I’ll get word to them and they’ll come. Though many of them have not picked up their axes in over three hundred years, I assure you they’ll join this battle.”

Leif sighed again, and then smiled.

“You’re going to the Surgeon?”
asked Leif.

“Do you know how to get there?”
asked Mayfly.

“Yes,”
said Leif. “So does every Arawak and Viking. We’ll get you there and get you an army, but this might not be enough.”

“What is it that we need?”
asked Mayfly. “Tell us, because we don’t have much time.”

“I don’t know,”
said Leif. “You’ll need an
edge
, something that I’ve not yet thought of, something that none of us aside from you can provide. All I can promise is that my troops and I will be there fighting for you and giving you time to think of this
edge
. We can’t win the war for you; all we can do is provide protection until you figure out how to do it yourself.”

/***/

They spent the night in the fortress; it was too dark and too cold outside to return to their RV.

“And there are some dangerous creatures about,” said Leif’s Indian wife Yahíma in heavily accented English. “Even up here there are dangerous things out at night.”

Adam noticed that Mayfly couldn’t sleep and was pacing the grounds endlessly, even venturing out into the bitter cold.
His time is short here, and is growing shorter still
, thought Adam.
I don’t understand mortality like he does, but we’re not on his time now, nor mine. We‘re on the time that fate has laid out for us, and we have no option but to follow it.

Adam couldn’t sleep either because of his nightmares; they were more intense than they had ever been. Now, as soon as he closed his eyes he was under the earth again, trapped and unable to move, and he would immediately wake up in a panic. If he did manage to sleep, the nightmare would get worse, with the dirt crushing him until he woke. The fourth time he screamed
, he opened his eyes to see Yahíma’s dark figure in the shadows.

“You are not right,” she said. “Come with me if you want be right.”

/***/

Her English was passable, but they found a better common language in French; she had spent some time with fur trappers in the 1600s and spoke an old, rough dialect, but they could communicate. She took him to another room and served him one more glass of the cloudy ale from a barrel that looked like it hadn’t been touched in a century. Like all the rooms in the ring fortress, it was square, dark, and lit by a small fire in the corner.

“I feel something dark and heavy within you,”
said Yahíma.
“I sense you went through a traumatic experience?”

“Of sorts,”
said Adam.

“I know of your burial, Adam
; your mayfly told me of it.”

Adam looked down.

“What’s dark within you goes beyond that experience,” said Yahíma. “Your recent burial only served to bring it out.”

Adam nodded, but couldn’t reply.

“Would you like to explore it further?”

“There’s no time,”
said Adam.

“There’s always time, even now,”
said Yahíma. “And broken men don’t fare well in battle.”

Adam didn’t want to pursue the course she was laying before him but couldn’t turn away from her. There was something about this woman that he couldn’t quite grasp, and that was rare for him.
Perhaps she has some strange spanner power of hypnosis that I don’t understand,
thought Adam.
Perhaps I’m broken and don’t understand anything anymore.

“Okay,”
said Adam. “I’d like you to help me.”

Yahíma nodded and then went to the barrel of ale and brought out a wooden flask from behind it. She poured out thick, dark green liquid from the flask into a pot and bid that Adam sit on a chair in the center of the room. She then put the pot beneath Adam’s chair and went to
the fire in the corner and brought out some embers using tongs. She put the embers into the pot below Adam’s feet, and the green liquid started to smoke. Yahíma then went to a far wall, picked up a leather flask and poured its liquid into two cups. The liquid was odorless and solid white, like milk.

“This is a technique I developed, half borne of the ancient Greek oracles, half of my people,”
said Yahíma. “Instead of divining the future, you divine your past. I’m about to send you to a dreamscape, and though none of it is real I warn you that it will feel real, as true as you are sitting in front of me now. It won’t be pleasant; you’ll feel pain and fear, perhaps more than anything you’ve ever felt, because we’ll be traveling into the farthest depths of your being and you might not like what you find there. Do you wish to continue?”