Wrack and Rune (8 page)

“We don’t have one.”

“Yes we do. Tim and I founded it this afternoon.”

“Oh.”

Svenson didn’t need to be told any more. He went properly and sedately to pay his respects to Miss Hilda and her nephew, thus elevating them in the local social scale beyond their wildest dreams. It was a hitherto unheard-of honor for President Thorkjeld Svenson, renowned academician and holder of the Balaclava County Senior Plowmen’s Trophy since God knew when, to appear in person at an informal gathering in Lumpkin Corners.

“And I’ve brought my Uncle Sven to meet you, Miss Horsefall. He’s here from Stockholm for my daughter’s wedding. Uncle Sven was a hundred and two last November.”

“He sure as hell don’t act it,” was the consensus of the assemblage. Uncle Sven, though knowing only about forty words of English and not able to pronounce most of them, was already the life and soul of the party. His mustache now pointed almost straight up. His round little cheeks glistened like two Rome Beauty apples. His sea-blue eyes glistened as he ran a connoisseur’s eye over Miss Hilda and her amethyst brooch.

The lady herself must be wishing she’d put up her hair in kid curlers last night. She kept patting it to make sure no wisps were flying out from under her hairnet and fussing about not having had no chance to get redded up for company.

“Ay tank you look svell,” Uncle Sven was assuring her as he steered a forkful of chocolate cake past his mustache. “Ve take valk, hah?”

“Yes, why don’t you two go off by yourselves and have a nice, quiet little visit?” suggested great-niece-in-law Jolene, perhaps already seeing herself as mistress of the Horsefall homestead. “You need a breather, Aunt Hilda. I’ll be glad to hold the fort for you here.”

“Maybe you’d like to go wash some dishes, Jolene, since you put on such a performance about claiming the honor last time,” suggested Marie. “I don’t mind pouring the coffee.”

“Then quit jawin’ an’ pour me some,” said Henny with unaccustomed authority. “After that you can go bile up another pot an’ put the kettle on for tea. Here comes the minister an’ his wife. Jolene, you clean up them plates an’ cut some more cake. Step lively, both o’ you.”

Astonished by this turning of the worm, Jolene and Marie stepped. Miss Hilda blinked in amazement, greeted the minister and his wife first to show who was still queen of the castle around here, then took Sven Svenson’s arm. Shandy saw his opportunity.

“I think President Svenson and I will—er—stroll along behind our two senior citizens,” he remarked to Jolene, who happened to be nearest. “As a precautionary measure, you know.”

He didn’t say what the precaution would be against. Jolene, intent on serving cake to the minister’s wife, merely gave him an absentminded nod. The procession was off. Uncle Sven set a beeline course for the barn. Thorkjeld addressed him sternly in Swedish to the effect that Miss Hilda was no pushover and he’d better do some preliminary spadework. Sven protested that at a combined age of two hundred and seven, he and Miss Hilda had no time to waste on preliminary spadework. Thorkjeld reminded him they were here to look at a runestone and he capitulated.

“What are you two gassin’ about?” demanded Miss Hilda.

“Uncle Sven wants to see that runestone young Swope found. He knows all about runestones.”

“H’mph. I bet I could tell ’im a few things.” She squeezed Sven’s arm and he cast another wistful glance toward the barn.

“Would it be too far for you to walk to the stone?” asked Shandy, trying to keep the expedition to its avowed purpose.

“Hell no,” she replied, “though I’d sooner go in a buggy for old times’ sake.”

“I wish we could oblige you, but if the path is as bad as Swope described, I doubt whether any vehicle except a bulldozer or a tank could get through.”

“Wouldn’t o’ had no trouble if Henny’d o’ kept that loggin’ road open like I told ’im to.”

“What road is this, Miss Horsefall?”

“Cuts in from the Balaclava Road just down past the old Lumpkin place, or used to. I ain’t been that way in a month o’ Sundays, myself.”

“And the runestone would have been easier to reach by that road?”

“Easy as pie. Used to be a turnaround an’ you could drive right up to the stone.”

“We might try getting through with your nephew’s tractor.”

“Can’t have no fun on a tractor.”

Miss Hilda’s argument was unassailable. They compromised by Shandy’s driving the tractor on ahead to beat down a wider path over the route Swope had hacked out while Thorkjeld walked behind, carrying Uncle Sven under one arm and Miss Hilda under the other when the going got too rough for their century-old legs.

The distance was not great, less than half a mile from the house, but it was solid brier patch most of the way and Cronkite Swope took an honored place in Shandy’s list of unsung heroes. Cronkite had even managed to clear a tiny space in front of the stone itself. Uncle Sven had room to kneel and use Thorkjeld’s pet magnifying glass to examine the inscription.

The stone itself was nothing to get excited about as far as Shandy could see. It was merely a slab of granite perhaps four feet high and two feet wide at the base, such as the Great Glacier had strewn so lavishly over the area, to the dismay of early colonists who had to drag the stones off the fields they’d cut and burned clear and were trying to turn into farmland. Plenty of stones like this one had been piled into stone walls to keep out wandering pigs and shoot at Redcoats from behind.

Shandy didn’t think much of the runes, either. To him they were only half-obliterated gouges in the granite. Uncle Sven, however, got so rapt in study that he forgot to retain his firm grasp on Miss Hilda, who flounced off in a fit of pique and seated herself on the tractor. He also lost his feeble grip on the English language, so that Thorkjeld had to act as translator as soon as there was anything to translate.

“Well, what’s it say?” demanded Miss Hilda, considerably out of sorts at having been ditched for a slab of granite.

“Give him time,” grunted President Svenson. “The inscription is badly defaced.”

“H’mph. He ain’t in none too great shape hisself.”

This was pure spite. Thorkjeld didn’t bother to relay the remark to his uncle, being wise in the ways of women and knowing Miss Hilda didn’t really mean it anyway.

Sven Svenson went on peering and muttering, often using his sensitive scholar’s fingers to trace a mark that was too dim to make out by eye. At last he began to chuckle. He rocked back on his heels and read off the inscription to Thorkjeld, who laughed a good deal louder, then translated for the others.

“‘Orm Tokesson found no good drink and only ill-tempered women. This place is cursed.’”

“Must o’ been before my time,” said Miss Hilda blandly.

“You mean it’s real?” Shandy gasped. “Good Lord! Now what do we do?”

“Damned if I know. Get a bunch of archaeologists out here from Harvard or somewhere, I suppose. Let ’em do whatever the hell they do.”

“I must say I find this hard to credit. Why should a Viking expend all that time and effort hacking a complaint about booze and women into solid granite?”

“You don’t understand the soul of the Norsemen, Shandy. They were great poets.”

“This is great poetry?”

“Well, Orm might have spread himself more if the stone hadn’t been so damned hard. Yesus, what if you’d been cooped up in a longship for weeks, maybe months on end, with the ale running out and the meat going bad and not a goddamn thing to do but row or get seasick. Finally you reach land and go ashore all set for a rip-roaring drunk in sympathetic company and there isn’t any. Can’t you feel the agony behind those simple, poignant words? The dryness in the mouth, the—” Thorkjeld Svenson’s eye happened to light on Miss Hilda’s prim lilac print and he broke off what for him had been a long oration.

“Poor Orm,” he finished sadly, with head bowed in tribute to one he clearly regarded as a fallen comrade.

“M’yes,” Shandy conceded. “I hadn’t thought of the matter in that light. Besides, I daresay if your—er—profession involved a lot of hewing and slashing anyway, you wouldn’t regard a few hours’ worth of granite chipping as more than quiet recreation. Has your uncle any idea when this might have been done?”

“The runes are in the later Danish period. Maybe around the time of Sven Forkbeard or Canute the Great.”

Shandy felt sweaty up his spine. “Canute?”

“Sure. Even a clod like you must have heard about King Canute.”

“I thought he was king of England.”

“He was. Also Norway and Denmark. Damn good king, too. Conquered England and married Ethelred the Unready’s widow, Emma. Emma didn’t find old Canute unready, I’ll bet.”

“When did he live?”

“End of the tenth, beginning of the eleventh century. Why Canute?”

“Canute happens to have been a popular name among the Lumpkin family, which, as you know, settled this area. Spurge Lumpkin, the Horsefalls’ hired hand who was killed this afternoon, had a cousin named Canute who’s now the only surviving direct descendant. Canute was also the name of their grandfather, or whatever he was. That Canute left the Lumpkin family estate in such a muddle that in effect it became a tontine.”

“Last one alive gets the loot, eh?”

“Precisely. A time-honored Viking custom, I believe.”

“Arr!”

Thorkjeld looked rather pleased and proceeded to explain the situation to his great-uncle, who nodded. Apparently they both liked to think old Norse customs were still being observed in Balaclava County. Shandy failed to share their gratification.

“I don’t see what’s so great about shoving a man’s face in quicklime.”

“Right. Degenerate. Not in tradition. Brain ’em with a battle-ax. Chop ’em up with a broadsword. Slit ’em down the front while they’re still alive and spread open the ribs so you can watch the lung flap.”

“Shut up, will you, President?”

“Called it the blood eagle,” Thorkjeld went on unheeding. “Crude sense of humor. Almost as bad as the stuff you see on kids’ television programs. Interesting thing about Canute. After he married Emma he integrated. Sent his Danish wives home. Some of his Danish troops, too. What were they going to do back in Denmark? Sit around twiddling their battle-axes? Go a-viking to keep their hands in, more likely. Why the hell not?”

“Vy te hell not?” agreed Uncle Sven, who appeared to have followed Thorkjeld’s train of thought with no difficulty. “Hah, tootsie?”

“I’d o’ went a-viking after that dern Canute if I was ’is lawful wedded Danish wife an’ he tried to banish me for some female named Emma, queen or no queen,” Miss Hilda replied.

“Hah. You good Norsk voman.”

“As a matter of fact, that may not be too far off the mark,” said Shandy. “Her nephew’s name is Hengist, as in Hengist and Horsa. They were Saxons, of course, but weren’t they also sea rovers, and wasn’t Hengist also a king in England back around the fifth century
A.D.
? His progeny would have been absorbed into the local culture by the time Canute came along, but they’d all be-—er—brothers under the battle-ax, as it were. Would it be unreasonable to suppose there might be a Hengist in Orm’s crew?”

“Hell no,” said Thorkjeld. “Lot of conquering back and forth. Lot of other stuff, too. Integrated all over the place. Still at it,” he added with a warning glance at Uncle Sven, who was edging up to Miss Hilda again. “What do you say, Uncle Sven? Had enough for tonight?”

“Don’t answer that!” cried Shandy. “Come on, President, we’d better get Miss Horsefall back to the house. Her company will be wondering what’s become of her. I suppose it’s all right to leave the runestone as it is?”

“Been standin’ there already for the Lord knows how long an’ nobody ain’t done nothin’ to it yet,” said Miss Hilda. “Just don’t say nothin’ about it back at the house or them kids of Eddie’s an’ Ralph’s will be down here rippin’ their clothes off their backs like that young feller from the paper done. Clothes is too derned expensive these days. So’s everythin’ else.”

“Te bast tings in life bane free,” Uncle Sven reminded her. “Ve valk alone next time. Hah, tootsie?”

T
HEY PRIED UNCLE SVEN
away from Miss Hilda at last, and got him back to Valhalla. Shandy delivered Tim to Laurie and Roy, refused to arbitrate a dispute over wallpaper samples, and sought the more soothing company of his own beloved spouse.

“Well, what did I miss?” was Helen’s greeting.

“A gaggle of the Horsefalls’ relatives, a saunter through six miles of squirrel briers, and a lecture from Thorkjeld on Viking customs.”

“Sounds too jolly for words. Peter, you’re at it again, aren’t you?”

“Peace, woman. Why don’t you just go get me my pipe and slippers like a good little lady librarian?”

“Why not your violin and hypodermic? You don’t smoke and Jane Austen is sleeping on your slippers.”

Jane Austen was a tiger kitten the Shandys had recently wheedled out of their neighbors the Enderbles. Peter had wanted to call the infant feline Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd, but the name had proved biologically unviable, so Helen had got her own way and Jane was now busy rearranging the household to suit herself, as even the youngest of cats knows so well how to do.

“Why isn’t Jane Austen sleeping in the cat’s pajamas?” the alleged head of the house demanded.

“You’re overwrought, poor dear,” said his wife. “How about some hot tea or a nip of bourbon and branch or something?”

“Nothing, thanks. I had cake and coffee thrust upon me at the Horsefalls’ by a great-niece-in-law named Jolene who has a jaw like a Norwegian icebreaker. Aren’t you going to ask me about the runes?”

“Certainly, dear. What about the runes? Peter, you don’t mean to tell me they actually are? I can’t bear it! What do they say?”

“I don’t believe it myself, but Thorkjeld’s Uncle Sven translated them anyway.” He repeated what Sven had said, and added Thorkjeld’s footnotes.

Regrettably, Helen giggled. “Poor Orm indeed! But, Peter, if Dr. Svenson is right, this will rock the socks off every archaeologist from here to Helsinki. What’s going to happen now?”

“Thorkjeld’s attending to the sock-rocking department, Harry Goulson’s handling the obsequies, and God only knows what young Cronkite Swope is up to but I fear the worst. We can only be thankful the
Fane and Pennon
doesn’t come out till day after tomorrow. That gives us tomorrow to batten down the hatches and man the battlements, anyway.”