Wrack and Rune (7 page)

“I found it,” he was yelling. “I found the runestone!”

Miss Horsefall sniffed. “You look more like as if you’d lost a fight with a barrel o’ bobcats. O’ course you found it. I told you where ’twas, didn’t I? Couldn’t you o’ got there without ruinin’ your Sunday britches into the bargain?”

“The briers down there are fierce.” Cronkite dabbed at a welling scratch on his chin with the sleeve of what had started out to be a natty pink-and-green-striped shirt. “I’ve probably got myself a beautiful case of poison ivy, too, but what the heck? Look, Professor Shandy, I made a rubbing.”

“By George, so you did.” Shandy bent over the scribbled sheets of copy paper that Cronkite was piecing together on the porch floor. “I’m afraid I don’t know the first thing about runes, but those marks are certainly—er—interesting.” He did not in fact find them so, but it did seem heartless not to give the young fellow some sort of kudos for his enterprise.

“And I found this!” Cronkite thrust a fragment of discolored metal under his nose.

Shandy backed off and fumbled for his reading glasses. “What is it?”

“Might be off a Willys-Knight we used to have back around 1927,” Henny ventured.

“It looks a bit ancient for that. Would you mind if I scrape it with my jackknife, Mr. Swope? I’ll be careful, I assure you.”

“Sure, Professor, go ahead. I tried to wipe it on my shirttail, but the metal’s so corroded I couldn’t get anything off but some of the surface mud. The thing was sort of half buried next to the stone, see, as though it might have been thrown up by a frost heave when the ground started to thaw. If you hold it up to eye level and squint across the surface you can see a pattern, as if it might have been engraved or decorated somehow.”

“M’yes, I believe I can,” said Shandy, obediently performing the scrutiny. “The convex side is irregular in a—er—regular sort of way, at any rate.”

Intrigued now, he scratched gingerly at the pitted, greenish patina. “Wouldn’t you say that might be bronze, Tim?”

“Could be,” Professor Ames replied after doing a good deal of prodding with a thick, heavily ridged fingernail. “What do you think, Henny.”

“Copper, mebbe? Kind o’ hard for copper. Yep, could be bronze. Or brass. More likely brass, if it’s off’n a car. Did we have acetylene lamps on that old Pope-Toledo, Aunt Hilda?”

“Doesn’t look like anything off a car to me,” said Shandy. “It’s more like a—it reminds me of something, but I can’t think what.”

“Well, if you want to know what I think”—it was clear they were going to hear what Cronkite Swope thought whether they wanted to or not, so nobody tried to stop him—“I think it’s a piece broken off one of those old Viking helmets. See how it curves around and comes up to a sort of dome shape. And this crescent-shaped hole in the edge could be where the horn came out. You know how they’d have cow horns and antlers and stuff sticking out of their helmets to make them look fiercer.”

“So we’ve been led to believe, at any rate.” Shandy hefted the fragment with more respect. Was it possible Cronkite could be right? “I tell you what, young man. The best person for you to show these things to is President Svenson at the college. He’s something of an authority on ancient Norse culture.”

“I thought he was an authority on plowin’,” said Henny Horsefall.

“He is. That and a—er—great many other things.”

“A real Renaissance man, would you say?” cried young Swope, his bright green eyes snapping with the thrill of it all.

“I’d place him—er—a good deal further back in history than that.”

Shandy could easily picture Thorkjeld Svenson in a horned helmet, slashing away at the Jutes and the Saxons for the sheer hell of it. Authentic or not, Cronkite’s find might serve a useful purpose by taking Svenson’s mind off his daughter Birgit’s marriage to Hjalmar Olafssen. The presidential mansion was going to be awfully quiet without Birgit.

“When can I see President Svenson?” demanded Cronkite.

“Almost anytime, I expect. He’s at home, I know. Ride back with Professor Ames and myself if you like. My wife will give you dinner and we’ll—er—strike while the bronze is hot, as it were. Then if the president wants to come over here and look at the runestone, as I suspect he will, it will still be light enough to see by. If the Horsefalls don’t mind our coming, that is.”

“Glad to have you,” grunted Henny.

“Be somethin’ to break up the evenin’ anyway,” Miss Hilda agreed grudgingly. “Lord a’ mercy, how many times have I gone to get supper an’ set a place at the table forgettin’ the one I meant it for wasn’t never comin’ no more. Time I went myself, maybe.”

Cronkite was a young man of tact and feeling. He put his lacerated right arm around Miss Horsefall’s bony shoulders and gave her a little squeeze.

“Hey, cut that out. You’ve got to stick around till after your birthday party anyway. We’re planning to run your picture on the front page.”

“Then I s’pose that means I’ll have to put my hair up in kid curlers the night before. Pesky things. I hate sleepin’ on ’em.”

Yet Miss Horsefall was looking less woebegone as she went to prepare the evening meal for herself and the one old man she had left to feed.

“WELL, WHAT DOES IT
say?” Shandy prodded. “Harald Bluetooth was here?”

“Shut up,” replied Thorkjeld Svenson with that suave courtesy for which he was ever noted. He jabbed a forefinger the size of a bedpost at one of the more carefully worked out patches in Cronkite’s scribbling. “Looks like Orm.”

“Orm what? Is Orm a word?”

“Name. Damn good name. What’s wrong with Orm?”

“Something must have gone wrong with him if that’s Orm’s tombstone,” Cronkite pointed out reasonably.

“Might not be a grave. Might be any damn thing. Wish Uncle Sven were here.”

“Where is he, President?”

“How the hell do I know? Am I my uncle’s keeper? Down at the Senior Citizens’ Drop-in Center pinching some widow’s backside, most likely.”

“Thorkjeld, you may not speak with disrespect of your learned great-uncle.”

Sieglinde Svenson had entered the room, queenly in a thin summer dress of some soft blue material, though slightly wan about the eyelids from the strain of marrying off the fifth of her seven daughters and coping with relatives who had thronged from all parts of the northern hemisphere to make sure Birgit and Hjalmar got well and duly hitched.

“What’s disrespectful about pinching widows? How many men his age would be up to it? Proud of the old letch.”

“Uncle Sven is not a letch.” Sieglinde had high moral standards and did not care to have such words bandied about in her presence. “He lived in happy monogamy with your Great-aunt Ylva until her untimely passing at the age of eighty-nine. Naturally he is lonely without her and seeks other feminine companionship. You would do the same.”

“Hell, you’ll outlive me by forty years,” cried Thorkjeld in panic.

His wife shook her noble blond head. “I shall not. Life without you would be unendurably serene. What is this paper you have here, and who is this attractive but bedraggled young man? I trust he does not want to marry our lovely Gudrun or our sweet little Frideswiede.”

“He damn well better hadn’t,” growled the bereft father. “Look at him. Doesn’t even have a whole shirt to his back.”

“This is Cronkite Swope, a reporter from the
Weekly Fane and Pennon,”
said Shandy.

“And I have lots of shirts,” Cronkite protested, stung to the quick. “I tore this one slashing through the brambles to get at the runestone and haven’t had time to go home and change. And I don’t even know Gudrun or Frideswiede. Though I’d sure like to if they take after their mother,” he added gallantly.

Cronkite did have a way with words. Sieglinde awarded him a smile, Thorkjeld a menacing snarl.

“Urrgh! Where’s this runestone?”

“In Mr. Hengist Horsefall’s oak grove over in Lumpkin Corners. I never knew it was there until Miss Hilda Horsefall, his aunt, told me about it while I was interviewing her this afternoon. I’m sorry this is such a poor rubbing. All I had with me were a pencil and some copy paper.”

“Why did you not go better prepared?” Sieglinde asked him.

“Well, gee, Mrs. Svenson, I didn’t know I was going till I went. They sent me over to write a little story about Miss Hilda’s hundred and fifth birthday party but then the hired man fell into the quicklime so I thought I’d better go find that runestone quick and I ought to be down at the paper only I wanted to make sure it really is a runestone first.”

“I see. Your explanation makes more sense to me than anything else I have heard during the past month. Then, Thorkjeld, this is a genuine runestone?”

“Got runes on it anyway. Have to see for myself. Show Uncle Sven.”

President Svenson was still knitting his craglike brows over Cronkite’s scribblings. “This doodad here. Might be curse.”

“Curse?” Cronkite almost fell down the front steps in his joy. “You mean like ‘curst be he that moves my bones’?”

“Arrgh.”

“And what about the helmet?” Cronkite proffered his fragment of bronze. “Don’t you think this could be part of a helmet? See the hole where the horn came out?”

“Urrgh!” Svenson replied with more enthusiasm. He clapped the metal against his massive skull. One turbulent lock of iron-gray hair stuck out through the hole like an eagle’s wing. “How do I look?”

“God,” cried Timothy Ames, who hadn’t uttered a word until now. “It couldn’t be anything else.”

“Yesus, wait till Uncle Sven sees this! Swope, maybe in ten years I let you meet Gudrun.”

“Thank you,” said Cronkite. “I’ll be looking forward to it. Right now, though, I’ve got to write my story. Keep the helmet to show your uncle if you want to. I’ll be around to get his opinion first thing tomorrow morning. Nice to have met you, Mrs. Svenson. Thank your wife again for the wonderful dinner, Professor Shandy.”

Before Swope had quite finished his polite adieux, he was gunning the motorbike he’d ridden over from Lumpkin Corners.

“I have a feeling we’ve unleashed a monster,” Shandy mused.

Nobody paid any attention to him. Tim didn’t hear and Thorkjeld was busy kissing Sieglinde in the old Norse manner, which is to say
molto con brio,
as a prelude to rounding up Uncle Sven and going to see the runestone.

They found the aged relative heading for the college barns with a purposeful expression on his face and a buxom widow trotting eagerly beside him. The widow was much the taller, but Sven had the longer mustache. Though his chin was bare of beard, the hair sprouting from his upper lip trailed a good six inches below his mouth, or would have were it not at the moment blowing out beyond his ears to mingle with the silver locks that flowed down to his debonair blue and white polka-dotted collar.

It seemed too bad, Shandy thought, to spoil his plans for the evening, but Uncle Sven didn’t appear to mind. He was as excited as Thorkjeld over the fragment of helmet and pronounced it without hesitation as having come from Uppsala circa
A.D.
900. He also said, in Swedish so as not to hurt her feelings, that one could always find a willing woman but a runestone in this benighted wilderness was a treat he hadn’t expected and what were they waiting for?

Thorkjeld, fired with enthusiasm, clamored to drive the party over to the Horsefalls’. Shandy said him a loud and final nay. He’d do the driving himself. He was simply not up to riding with a berserker tonight.

On the way over, Uncle Sven studied the rubbing, which Cronkite and Helen had patched together at dinnertime with cellophane tape. He agreed with Thorkjeld about Orm and thought the next word was “Tokesson,” which would mean, obviously, “Orm, son of Toke.” He granted the curse but reserved judgment on the rest of the inscription. At least they were now sure this was not one of those geological freaks that had aroused false hopes in the area before.

Helen had predicted Peter wouldn’t find the Horsefalls mourning alone on his return trip, and as usual she proved right. A fair number of relatives and neighbors had gathered, bringing cakes, cookies, condolences, and curiosity. Miss Hilda had changed into what had no doubt been her best summer dress for the past thirty years or more: a lilac print, set off by a handsome amethyst brooch that must date from an earlier, more prosperous era. At sight of her, Uncle Sven’s mustache ends began to curl upward.

She shoved forward two fiftyish men who might have been twins. “This here’s Eddie, Professor, and this is Ralph. They’re the great-nephews we was tellin’ you about.”

Both were tallish and spare, with the stooped shoulders, the weather-beaten faces, and the resigned but resolute “What’s Ma Nature and the government going to soak us with next?” expressions that betoken small farmers everywhere. Shandy felt favorably disposed toward both by instinct, though he knew he shouldn’t. Both had large families, iron-jawed wives, and a general aura of not being quite able to make ends meet. Already he could detect murmurs about which of them would get to move in with the old folks and run the farm, and he recognized one of Ralph’s sons as having been a prime troublemaker at the college’s Grand Illumination two years ago, before he himself had taken over that disreputable role.

Ralph Junior was fifteen or so, big for his age, and, it would seem, already angry enough with an unfair world to do the sorts of damage Henny Horsefall had been plagued with. He probably owned a bike and didn’t live far away. He must know his folks were in the running to get the farm; perhaps he’d decided to hurry matters along by scaring old Henny into feeling the need of protection. Or perhaps somebody else, such as that grim-looking aunt of his, knew the boy’s record as a public nuisance and was operating on the principle of “Give a dog a bad name and hang him.” Shandy began to feel overburdened with likely suspects.

“Sorry, President,” he muttered. “I might have known there’d be a mob here as soon as word about the hired man got around. We’d better not mention the runestone for the moment. It might start a stampede.”

“Then what in hell did you lug us over here for?” Svenson growled back.

“Don’t worry, we’ll get to it one way or another. Would you mind pretending for the moment that you’re here as emissary from the college’s Agricultural Laborers’ Assistance Fund?”