The Valhalla Prophecy (43 page)

With the guideline in place and pulled taut, the others quickly followed him. Nina, last to cross, surveyed her surroundings as she set foot on solid ground. “So if that really was Bifröst we just crossed, then technically … this is Asgard. The home of the Norse gods.”

“That is true,” said Tova, thrilled at the prospect. “If the Old Norse myths are euhemeristic, then Thor, Odin, Loki, Freyja … they all came from here. This is the land from which they ruled.”

“There’s not much
to
rule, though,” Eddie said. “Except pine trees.”

“It might not always have been forest,” Tova said, a little defensively. “There have been warmer periods in the past. It may once have been able to support farming.”

“Tova, where do we go from here?” said Nina, keen to move on.

The Swede checked her notes. “The runestone said, ‘Across, follow the stream to the falls.’ There must be a stream nearby.” She pointed ahead. “This way, I think.”

“You’ve been right about these things so far,” said Nina reassuringly.

“So what are we actually looking for?” Eddie asked as they began their trek into the forest. “Valhalla’s some sort of hall, but I doubt we’re going to find a building just standing in the middle of the woods.”

“I do not know,” admitted Tova. “It depends on how much of the
Eddas
are based on truth, and how much Snorri created himself, or took from sources that had already added their own details to the mythology. In the
Poetic Edda
, Valhalla is described as a hall with five hundred and forty rooms.”

“Big place. The heating bills must be a bugger.”

She smiled. “In the
Prose Edda
, though, the huge golden hall that King Gylfi sees when he arrives in Asgard may be an illusion created to impress him. So there is no way to know what was real.”

“Until we find it,” said Nina. “But if the runestones were describing a real place, we can’t be far from it now. Is there anything else mentioned in the
Edda
s or other sources that might be useful? Like a landmark?”

“There is a tree, or a grove of trees, called Glasir,” Tova replied. “It depends on the translation whether it is just one tree or many. But Glasir is supposed to mark the entrance to Valhalla. There has been speculation that it is connected to Yggdrasil, the world-tree, which would make it an ash.”

“So we just need to watch out for an ash tree, then,” said Eddie. “Not that I know what an ash tree looks like. Anyone else?” Nina and Kagan shrugged.

“I do,” said Tova, before adding, “I think.”

He smiled sardonically. “I’d look it up on my phone, but I don’t think I’ll get much of a signal out here.”

“I think it’ll just be a case of ‘not one of these,’ ” Nina joked, gesturing toward the conifers surrounding them.

Eddie grinned, then continued onward. After a few minutes, he spotted something ahead. “Ay up.”

“You’ve seen an ash tree?” said his wife.

“No, but that matches what Tova said, don’t you think?” A hundred yards away, the forest was split by an ice-filled streambed that had cut deeply into the ground. “What was the translation? Something about following a stream to a waterfall?” Tova nodded.

“The water is frozen, though,” said Kagan as they approached. “Which way do we follow it?”

“I’m not an expert,” Nina said with gentle sarcasm, “but I’m fairly sure that water doesn’t run uphill.” She looked up the slope toward the stream’s source. “Over there.” In the distance between the trees, the group saw the rocky line of a cliff.

They followed the icy waterway. “Oh, that is beautiful,” said Tova as they reached the cliff’s foot. There was indeed the base of a waterfall there, but like the stream it was frozen, cascading water turned to overlapping sheets of icicles.

Eddie was more interested in the surrounding rocks. The falls had cut quite deeply into the cliff, exposing step-like strata on each side. “Shouldn’t be too hard to climb up,” he said, clambering onto the lowest level. “I’ll find a good route, then you follow me.”

He began his ascent. As he had predicted, it was not a difficult task; there were a few places where he had to haul himself up to higher ledges, producing grunts of exertion and muttered obscenities, but before long he was at the top. “Okay, it’s pretty straightforward,” he announced. “Just watch out for that ledge about halfway up—there’s a lot of ice on it.”

“Got it,” said Nina, beginning her own climb. “What can you see up there?”

“Loads of future Billy bookshelves. Which way are we supposed to go?”

“The runes said to the summit,” Tova called to him. “You must be close.”

“All right. I’ll have a look around.”

“Don’t get lost,” said Nina.

He smiled, then disappeared from view. She kept climbing. It took her longer than Eddie to reach the top—she took care negotiating the ledge he had warned her about—but she pulled herself up onto level ground with nothing more than a slight shortness of breath.

She glanced down to see how Tova and Kagan were doing. The Russian was following the archaeologist, his injured leg only slowing him slightly. Beyond them, the stream had carved a path through the forest—providing another view back along the frozen river. If anything, the sight was even more captivating than it had been from the rock bridge.

Nina finally turned away, finding with mild surprise that her husband was out of sight. “Eddie? Where are you?” The dappled light through the trees made his tracks in the snow surprisingly hard to follow.

“Over here” came the reply from a dip about fifty yards away. She headed for it. Eddie came into view below as she approached its edge. “Have a gander at this.”

“At what?” she asked. There was nothing immediately unusual in sight; a large bowl-shaped depression had a long hump at its center, snow-laden trees atop it. But his expectant half smirk told her she had missed something. She followed his path down the slope, looking in all directions. Was there an opening in the ground, or a group of stones that might once have been part of a structure? Nothing presented itself—

The answer suddenly appeared with such obviousness that she couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it immediately. “You got it now?” Eddie asked.

“Yeah, I got it,” she said, laughing. “Talk about not seeing the wood for the trees.”

The forest surrounding them was made up entirely of evergreens—but the trees on top of the mound were devoid of leaves beneath their coatings of snow and ice.
Wiry branches spread out to form roughly spherical shapes, in contrast with the distinctive cones of the conifers. “So you think that’s an ash tree?” said Eddie.

“I think that’s an ash tree,” gasped Tova, hurrying up behind Nina.

“An ash grove,” Nina corrected. She counted at least a dozen of the interlopers. A few small evergreens had managed to take root among the group, but otherwise the ashes seemed to have been in possession of the hillock for a long time. “Is this it? Have we found Valhalla?”

“I do not know. Come on, we must search!” Tova rushed past Nina down the slope.

“If there were any buildings here, they’re long gone,” Eddie said as Nina followed the Swede.

“I don’t think we’re looking for an actual building,” she replied. “I think we’re looking for
that
.” She pointed at the hump.

He was less than impressed. “You think
that’s
Valhalla?”

“No, but Valhalla is under it!” said Tova. “The Vikings often put their dead in burial mounds—the largest in Sweden is called Anundshög, in Västmanland. It is big, over nine meters high.” She led the way around the little hill. “Perhaps that is even where the name came from; Valhalla means ‘the hall of the slain,’ but if whatever was built here was buried to hide or protect it, then it would have looked just like a burial mound.”

“It’d match the runes,” Nina noted. “They said Odin’s hall was
now
of the slain.”

“You mean Valhalla might just be a nickname?” Eddie asked dubiously.

Nina smiled. “You’ve heard of Emperor Caligula?”

“The mad, pervy one? ’Course I have.”

“Caligula was a nickname—it was a type of soldier’s boot. His real name was Gaius Germanicus.”

“No wonder he changed it. But if this place was so important to the Vikings, why would they bury it? What were they trying to protect?”

“The eitr,” said Kagan as he caught up. “They were
afraid of it, because they knew how deadly it was—but they also knew some people would still be crazy enough to look for it.”

“That might be where the myth of Loki comes from,” Nina said thoughtfully. “He was a Norse god like Thor and Odin, but he betrayed them and sided with the serpent and the wolf at Ragnarök. Maybe he was like Hoyt—he wanted to use the eitr as a weapon.”

“So they hid the map to the eitr pits so that only Vikings they trusted would know how to find it?” said Eddie.

Tova nodded. “The only time they would need it would be when Ragnarök was upon them.”

“Kind of an open-in-event-of-doomsday thing?”

“It’d explain why they went to such lengths to hide it,” said Nina. “You don’t want your people deciding to go out there on a macho whim. If you think the Midgard Serpent’s about to surface, though,
that’s
when you gather the troops and follow the secret path to Valhalla. It’s a mobilization point. Once you’re here, the next stop is the serpent’s pit—the source of the eitr.”

“Novaya Zemlya,” Kagan said. “Or … the other place. We have to find it—before Hoyt and Berkeley do.”

“We’ve got to get inside first,” Eddie pointed out. He looked up at the mound. “And we might have to do a lot of digging—this thing’s big, it must be at least forty feet high. We’ll need to find a door.”

Tova stopped. “A compass! Does anyone have a compass?” Phones were produced in unison. “Ah, of course. But we should go to the west side of the mound. Which way is it?”

Eddie checked his compass app. “Keep going this way around it. Shouldn’t be far.”

“Why the west side?” Nina asked.

The Swede set off again, her pace quicker than before. “The entrance to Valhalla is supposed to be on the western side, guarded by a wolf.”

“A wolf, eh?” said Eddie, suddenly on alert and checking the surrounding forest. “Good job I brought the Wildey.”

“I don’t think it’ll still be on guard after a thousand years,” said Nina. She now almost had to jog to keep up with Tova, who had picked up a stick and was scampering along the edge of the barrow, poking at the snow. “What are you looking for?”

“They may have left a marker, even a runestone, just as they did in the Arctic,” Tova replied. “Are we at the west side yet?”

“Pretty much,” Eddie answered.

“Then there could be something that would show the way in. Help me look for it, please.”

The others joined in her search. Nina soon found something under the snow that seemed promising, but a tap with her boot revealed nothing more than a lump of broken wood. Disappointed, she continued around the mound. If Valhalla really was buried beneath it, it could be a very large structure: She guessed the barrow’s total length at close to three hundred feet. If there was no marker, then Eddie would be right—it would require a lot of digging to open it up …

She approached a tree, a small conifer rather than an ash. Its trunk was tilted at an angle, and as she drew closer she saw why: The ground dropped away on its far side, almost as if a trench had been cut into the earthen slope. She reached its edge and looked down into it. The overhanging tree, some of its roots exposed where the unstable soil had slid away, had shielded it from most of the snow.

Even though it was thickly carpeted with ice-crusted dead leaves and partially hidden by scrubby bushes, she could tell that the cutting, with its level floor and steep sides, was not natural.

A dark opening, about five feet high and framed by gnarled ash roots, lurked at its end. Her heart raced. “Tova! Over here—I think I’ve found it!”

The group hurried to her. “This must be it!” Tova cried, hopping down onto the frozen detritus. She peered into the opening. “There is something back there—it may be a gate!”

“Whoa, whoa!” Eddie shouted as she moved to enter. “Hold on a minute!”

Tova stopped with a questioning look. “What is wrong?”

“Don’t you remember? It had different names depending on what translation you read. One of them was a gate … and the other was a
death-barrier
! Don’t just run in there.”

“I really wouldn’t,” Nina added. “We’ve learned that the hard way. Eddie, you’ve got a flashlight, haven’t you?”

He climbed down into the trench and took a powerful torch from his backpack, then shone it into the hole. The beam revealed dirty, dull gray metal. “Looks like lead,” he said, sweeping the light across its surface. More details appeared. The obstruction was one of a pair of double doors. A rough image of a wolf, head lowered aggressively, had been pounded into the lead. Lines of small holes ran across the barrier at head, stomach, and knee height.

“What are those?” Kagan asked.

“I dunno, but I’m not going to poke a finger inside to find out.” He fixed the torch on a larger vertical slot in one of the doors, then raised it to illuminate its interior. “I think they’re made of wood—the lead’s just armor. I can’t see anything on the other side, though. It’s blocked off.”

Nina moved alongside him. “You know what would fit into that? The sun compass that was set into the runestone, if you turned it sideways-on.”

“ ‘The two parts together brought, shall alone open the death-gate of Valhalla,’ ” said Tova quietly.

“The compass must be some sort of key. No idea how, but it can’t be a coincidence that it’s the right size. Eddie, let me have the flashlight.”

“Careful,” he warned as she took the torch and stepped closer to shine it into the slot. “You might set something off.”

“I’m not going to touch it,” she assured him, leaning as close as she dared to peer into the opening. As Eddie
had said, the barrier was made of fire-hardened logs behind the lead sheathing. But there was more lead inside, plates of the dull metal on each side of the slot. The temptation was strong to prod one to see if it moved, but she resisted. “I think there’s a mechanism, but I don’t—”