A Song Of Steel (The Light of the North saga Book 1) Read online

  ‘Here, let me see.’ He smiled and reached out his hand once more. Ingrid suddenly furrowed her brow and snapped her hand back.

  ‘You’d better not be tricking me. Don’t you dare throw it away just so we can fish again!’

  Aurick chuckled. ‘Oh come on, I’m not that mean.’

  Gingerly, she leaned back over the tackle box between them and laid the rusty mess in her father’s hand, brows furrowed, eyes watching him like a hawk for a hint of betrayal.

  But there was no betrayal. Turning the mass over in his fingers, picking at the dirt and trying to free some of the metal for closer inspection, Aurick hummed to himself and wondered. Suddenly the fragile mass gave way in the middle and broke apart. The metal links in the centre, reduced to almost nothing but rust, disintegrated and scattered flakes of reddish metal and globs of brown mud all over his lap.

  ‘Hey!’ Ingrid shouted, lunging for the pieces. ‘Why did you do that? What is wrong with you?’

  The boat tipped alarmingly as she clambered over the box between them and grabbed at Aurick’s left hand with its rusty contents. There was a moment, as Ingrid shouted and grappled with her father’s arm and Aurick laughed and tried to placate her, when the boat seemed on the verge of capsizing.

  Of course, this was when the fish bit.

  Just as Aurick managed to get his daughter’s wild grabbing under control and began to explain that he didn’t mean to break her discovery, the line suddenly went tight. Unattended, with the reel lock on and the boat already leaning, the rod simply slid over the side with a splash.

  ‘Damn!’ Aurick exclaimed. He lunged for the rod, rusty links still digging into his palm. And that was when capsizing went from being a possibility, to being a reality.

  A couple of hours later, back ashore and next to a line of sodden clothes drying around a fire, peace was finally made between father and daughter. Aurick sat with his blanket around his shoulders, palms out to the fire and thinking over the afternoon’s events. Once the boat had capsized, he had been in a state of near panic until he found his daughter, safe and gasping in the cold water on the other side of the upturned hull. Bits of equipment, a beer can, the cool box and spare clothes were spread out around them on the lake like the aftermath of a shipwreck. Somehow, the rod had caught in the anchor rope of the boat, an unseen fish still futilely pulling away at it.

  He had tied the rod on securely to save it, righted the boat and started to splash about, returning all the floating detritus to the boat, daughter first. Once everything in sight was recovered, he had started to reel in the line. The fish, which had come close enough for him to see that it was a superb specimen, had slipped the hook just three metres short of the boat. It was just one of those days.

  After paddling to shore as a very soggy, cold and grumpy duo, Aurick had tallied up their equipment to see what was missing. Casualties of the capsize included the boat’s spare anchor, his box of fishing tackle, his sunglasses and one of his shoes. The shoe and sunglasses he could live without, and the anchor was cheaply replaceable, but the box of fishing tackle had been collected over twenty years, and he was irritated to have lost it. It would be hard to replace the contents.

  Setting that aside as the next day’s problem, he spent his time trying to rescue the situation with his daughter. He felt disappointed to have this weekend so utterly ruined and hoped that this would not be his last chance to bring her up here. He had always dreamed of bringing his children up here and teaching them to fish and hike in the mountains as he had done. Now it was all in jeopardy, and he felt foolish for allowing it to happen. He should have known better than to lunge for the escaping rod.

  Fortunately, Ingrid was also feeling sheepish. Wrapped in three blankets and sitting cross-legged by the fire, like a tiny tipi with just her head poking out, she feared her father’s disappointment and anger over his lost equipment and was trying to think of how to apologise. The evening sun was still bathing the firepit in its gentle glow when the human tipi finally unravelled and shuffled around the fire to sit next to her father.

  They looked at each other for a moment before the silence was broken.

  ‘Father?’

  ‘Yes, daughter?’

  ‘Fishing sucks.’

  There was a pause before they both burst out laughing, and the tension drained from the air like the water had drained from the beached and overturned boat. Aurick leaned down and lifted his daughter onto his lap to embrace her.

  ‘I’m sorry I lost your chain mail. I do think that is what it was.’

  ‘It’s okay. It was more exciting than catching a fish.’

  ‘Well, tomorrow I need to go out diving to see if I can find my tackle box, so you’ll be glad to know there will be no fishing, at least for the morning.’

  She smiled and leaned her head into his chest as they watched the sun slowly dropping behind the mountains in front of them.

  The next morning, the sun was blazing once again, and the lake was calm and beautiful. Aurick was standing in the shallows on the shore, wet suited from neck to toe, wearing a hood and face mask and with his mask and snorkel snugly fitted to his head. The boat was too small to get in and out of easily without risking it tipping over again, so it was easier to wade and swim a hundred metres out into the shallow lake to the area of the capsize to look for the box. It should be easy to see in the crystal-clear waters, as they didn’t get more than three metres deep in the centre of the lake.

  Aurick pulled his mask down over his face and worked the rim of his hood over the seal. He turned briefly to wave at his daughter, perched on the step of the cabin with instructions to watch for trouble and to stay out of it herself.

  As the water came up to his waist, he gently slipped into the water. He could walk all or most of the way out, but walking along the bottom would kick up dirt, making the water too cloudy.

  After a couple of minutes of swimming along the surface, Aurick stopped and rotated upright in the water. Gently turning himself round, he decided he was roughly in the right place and started swimming around in a lazy circle, looking for the green box on the weed-covered bottom.

  For a while, he didn’t see anything other than a single, startled fish that bolted from the weeds when he swam over it. Just as Aurick was starting to get cold and annoyed, an irregular shape caught his eye in the weeds. He took a deep breath and duck-dived down to look. To his disappointment, it clearly wasn’t the box, just a rock, slightly protruding from the mud of the lake bed. Just as he was about to return to the surface, he noticed the rock looked odd and weeds appeared to be growing in it. Going up for air, he puzzled over the find and dived down again for a closer look. He dropped right down to the lake bed next to the lump and put his hands on it. He couldn’t see much at all. Mud from his landing had exploded in the water like smoke.

  Aurick searched through the weed with his hands. Underneath a thin layer of mud, there was the flat, uneven surface of something harder than the mud, but not the solid surface of a rock. In places, it moved or cracked a bit. It seemed to be about a metre square. It definitely wasn’t his box, but his interest was piqued.

  Having found the edges of the mass, and running out of breath, Aurick tried to lift it from the bottom of the lake. It shifted and moved, but the weight of it and the clinging mud stopped him from lifting it further. As he tugged, the left edge broke off in his hand. He kicked for the surface in annoyance, and once he got there and drew in a deep sputtering breath, he brought the mass to his face and held it up to his mask.

  Chain mail.

  He knew it the second he saw it. This was the same stuff his daughter had brought up on the hook. He felt excitement grip him and, forgetting the encroaching cold, dived back down into the murky water, clinging to the mass in one hand. Now completely blind, he probed through the mud, trying to find the big mass again, but the water clouded up into the colour of tea and Aurick lost track of where he had and had not searched. His scrabbling hand found another lump, a large ring
of some sort. He grabbed it and flew back up to the surface. He examined his new muddy prize with bubbling excitement – it was a dull black metal ring, some sort of jewellery. He took a moment to calm himself and get his breathing under control. For a moment, he considered swimming back to shore; he was cold and tired and one of his hands was full. But he worried about finding the spot again and decided to make one more dive.

  His searching hand found another metal object under the thin layer of mud, some sort of bar. He wrapped his fingers around it and gently pulled it free of the cloying mud. It was long, and he had grabbed it at one end. He pushed again for the surface and, spitting his snorkel out, swirled the bar around to clear the clumps of mud off it. He let out a childish cry of excitement.

  It was a sword.

  It was black with corrosion, pitted and rough, and it was covered in smears of sticky mud, but Aurick felt himself utterly captivated by the sight of it. Waving at his confused daughter and awkwardly paddling back to shore with his hands full, he managed to breathe in half a mouthful of water and arrive, still spluttering and coughing, at the shore where Ingrid was waiting.

  ‘It’s a sword! I found a sword!’ he said with glee, entirely unnecessarily, as his daughter was staring at the soggy, wheezing, mud-smeared spectre than had crawled out of the lake with an ancient sword in hand. ‘I found it with some chain mail – must be the one that got stuck on your hook.’

  ‘So, we found a sword,’ said Ingrid with a pointed glare.

  Aurick looked taken aback for a moment but then nodded fervently. ‘Yes, quite right, a team effort.’

  ‘Good,’ said Ingrid with a smug smile. ‘So, uh… what do we do with it?’

  Aurick looked at her in surprise. He hadn’t thought about that in his excitement.

  ‘Uh, I know who we can start with. In Røros – the museum there. The owner will know what to do.’

  ‘Røros Museum of Norse History and Mythology’ was written on the gable end of the pitched roof of Halfar’s little museum in block wooden letters. He could see it from near the bottom of the main street as he was walking up the steep incline. It always brought a smile to his face to see it there: his own little slice of history. It wasn’t a grand building, and it wasn’t even built for the purpose. It had been his neighbour’s house, which Halfar had bought and converted. But that didn’t matter to him. It was his, and he loved it.

  Halfar Asleson was a diminutive seventy-three-year-old who was visually unremarkable from other men of his age. But to those who met him or saw him in his beloved museum, there was fire in his eyes and a spring in his step. Something of an eccentric local celebrity in this quaint old mining town in the mountains, the ex-history professor had got bored three days into his retirement thirteen years ago. He had, within a few weeks, decided to make his lifelong passion of learning about and collecting Norse history into a small museum in his home town.

  The small collection, initially in his own front room, had expanded to take up the entire ground floor, and then the second floor, of the converted house next door. His rather lofty goal was to educate and reinvigorate the locals about Norse history and help them regain a pride in their roots. This goal was met, as Halfar frequently and cheerfully put it, with a ‘surprising lack of success’. That small downside was not the sort of thing to dissuade the ever-positive Halfar, however, who would also often say that history is fast in the making and slow in the learning.

  Røros was an early industrial-period mining town, but it was known that there had been ancient Norse settlements in this area, some of the last Norse settlements in existence in Scandinavia. Despite officially being part of the dominion that became Nordland in the late 1100s, in practice, the locals were isolated and ignored at the time, and Christianity had not firmly taken root in this area until the High Middle Ages. It is possible that the last people to worship the old Norse gods had lived in the valleys surrounding this broad plain, hidden deep in the mountains.

  The simple fact was that most of the country regarded its Norse history and the events that ended it as a footnote to its more recent Christian Germanic past.

  He had hoped, of course, that the government would support his efforts, and those of revival historians around the country, to really bring the knowledge of Norse life back into the national awareness, but the government was disinterested, even hostile, and the population at large still cared much more for their country’s Germanic, rather than Norse, roots.

  However, some serious academics, archaeologists and researchers did make the pilgrimage to his little museum. He was well known in that small community for his excellent collection and his rather unique displays on Norse legends and mythology, and he often had conversations with them long into the night on this or that aspect or interpretation of a certain legend, which was something he enjoyed above all things.

  Halfar reached the door of the museum and went in, flipping the sign in the window to read ‘open’ as he closed it behind him. As he sat down at the counter by the front door, he set about the tedious task of replying to a TV producer who had asked a long series of questions about the use of Viking axes, making it clear he had no idea what Vikings or their war axes were like at all. As he was tapping his fingers in frustration on the side of his keyboard, the door clanked open, and a man and a young girl hurried in with much more bustle and excitement that people usually entered his museum. The man was carrying a long package of wrapped newspaper, and both were breathless and wearing nervous smiles.

  ‘Hello, can I help you?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, we found something we want you to look at. We called, but there was no answer, so we decided to come anyway. It’s important.’ The man placed the long package gingerly on the front desk and started peeling the layers of newspaper away.

  ‘What is this?’ Halfar said, as the layers, some damp, came away. The shape of the bundle was starting to kindle his excitement.

  ‘You’ll see, then you can tell us.’

  The last layers came away, and a sword was revealed. Halfar made a quiet exclamation and straightened up. The sword was glistening with moisture, and wet mud and bits of green weed were still clinging to it. Halfar could see straight away that it was ancient, and with a squeak of excitement, he saw that the cross guard was bronze and decorated with runes under the embedded mud. A Norse sword!

  ‘I would say it’s a tenth- or eleventh-century Norse sword. Wow, this is a spectacular artefact, incredibly rare! Where did you find it?’

  ‘At the bottom of Bjørsjøen lake, but there’s more – here.’ With a dramatic flourish, the man put another small parcel on the table, this one clearly oozing muddy water, and then one more.

  Halfar unwrapped each parcel in turn. The first was heavily congealed and covered in dirt but unmistakably chain mail. Then, a near-perfectly intact, albeit deeply tarnished, silver arm ring.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Halfar exclaimed, turning the arm ring in his hands. ‘Is this everything? This is an incredible find!’

  ‘No, these are just a few items I scraped off the surface! I found all this stuff together, and the chain mail came off a lump that was on the bottom. There is a huge mass of it and…’

  ‘You broke it off?’ Halfar exploded. He stood up straight and took a step forward. Suddenly, Aurick felt like a rabbit facing down a bull.

  ‘You found some ancient chain mail and you broke some off to show me? Do you have the mind of an infant?’

  ‘No, it’s not like that,’ Aurick said, hands out in front of him, placating the tiny and suddenly terrifying museum custodian. ‘I didn’t know what it was. I was trying to free it. I stopped when I realised what it was.’

  Halfar took a deep breath and contained his outrage, noting the shock and amusement on the young girl’s face and inwardly rebuking himself for losing his temper in front of her.

  ‘Hmm, well don’t touch it again, any of it. You shouldn’t have even taken it out of the water.’ He gestured wildly with his arms in consternation, as if it sho
uld have been obvious. ‘Fortunately I have been processing some bog finds this week, and I have a tank next door for preserving them. Let’s get these in there straight away.’ He paused, the normal courtesies slipping his mind in the excitement. ‘I am Halfar, by the way. Thank you for bringing this to me. What is your name?’ he asked, smiling disarmingly at the girl as he spoke.

  ‘I am Ingrid, and the infant is my father, Aurick.’ The girl gave a broad smile as her father rolled his eyes. ‘And I am the one who discovered the chain mail.’

  ‘Did you now?’ said Halfar, flicking his eyes up to Aurick.

  ‘Yes, my father just went out to collect it.’

  Aurick did not protest, but he gave the curator a raised eyebrow and got a knowing wink in response.

  ‘I see. Well, this is a very significant discovery. Congratulations! Come, let’s get this into the preserving solution. I’ll show you how it works.’

  A few minutes later, with the father and daughter gaping in amazement at the wonders hidden in Halfar’s back room – his ‘work in progress/personal’ collection – Halfar turned to them again.

  ‘Okay, so tell me everything from the start, and then we need to record the finds with the authorities and find someone to do an excavation. Oh, and don’t tell anyone, not until this find has been properly explored. You understand me?’ The diminutive professor spoke with a firm smile and a tone honed over four decades of dealing with students.

  ‘Yes,’ said Aurick, nodding meekly. The two described their find as Halfar carefully unwrapped and cleaned the artefacts. He occasionally interrupted to ask a question or shake his head at the cascade of mishandling that had happened.

  Finally, after washing most of the half-dissolved newspaper, weed and mud from the sword, and biting his lip in concentration, he gently swirled the sword in the distilled water and then, when most of the detritus was gone, transferred it to the preserving tank. As he lowered the blade into the tank, the light rippling through the solution reflected on some lines on the surface of the sword.