Page 18 of The Last Viking

“I share your bafflement, my lady,” Rolf said, turning a page. “Look, look at these.” He pointed to the silver armlets taken from the site and held out his arms to show the similarity of the etched motifs to his own adornments.

On and on Rolf went, examining the pages of the book, his frown growing deeper, his growls more pronounced.

And Meredith felt a ripple of fear sweep her. What was going on?

Rolf finally turned on her. “What is this book? Who wrote it? And why?”

“The Vestfold Dig: Death of a Viking Prince, is its title, as I said before. It’s about an archaeological dig that took place about five years ago in a grave field in Norway. Vestfold was a region of southwestern Norway.”

“I know where Vestfold is,” he said impatiently. “I live there.”

“You do?”

“And why are men digging up sacred burial sites?”

Meredith shrugged. “Archaeologists do it all the time. Thousands of Norse graves have given us the only insight we have into the way people lived a thousand years ago, since no written documents survive.” She flinched when she saw the look of revulsion on Rolf’s face.

“If they were Christian graves, the holy priests’ hue and cry of sacrilege would reach the high heavens. Are Norse graves fair game because we are ‘heathens’?”

“No, when it comes to greed…or, more often, the search for historical knowledge, graves become a sort of public domain.”

He hugged his arms around his chest as if suddenly cold and mumbled, “Thousands of graves opened…who could have predicted such? ’Twould have been better if all Vikings followed the tradition of death burning.” Then he seemed to remember something else. “What did you mean about this death of a Viking prince?”

This whole conversation was getting ridiculous. “I already told you,” she said with exasperation. “The objects depicted in that book were taken from an ancient Viking burial site. A ship burial mound.”

“Burial? Whose burial?” he asked, almost fearfully. Then added, “Ancient?”

“Well, it’s believed that some powerful Viking leader had a son who died and that he erected this burial mound in his memory. There were no skeletal remains. So, it’s presumed that the son died in a battle out of the country, or at sea, maybe even…” Her words trailed off at the absolute horror on Rolf’s ashen face. “Rolf, why are you so upset?”

“He was not a prince. He was a karl…a high chieftain.”

“Wh-what?” She shook her head to clear it. She was talking to him as if she bought all his playacting. However, the teacher in her rose stubbornly to the surface, and she explained, “Rolf, the Viking buried there died more than a thousand years ago. Ancient history.”

“A thousand years?” he repeated dumbly. “Do you persist in saying this is the year 1997?”

“Of course.”

“Guð minn góður!” he whispered, then repeated the expletive, “My God!” Holding her eyes, he spat out, “Not only did my ship run off course in the great waters, but it traveled through time, as well.”

“That’s impossible,” she declared.

“What other explanation is there? Yesterday my ship wrecked and the year was 997. Today, you tell me that it is 1997.”

“And you think that time travel is possible?” she scoffed.

He rolled his shoulders uncertainly. “The saga legends tell of such, but usually those adventures involved gods and the afterlife. But, yea, to answer your question, I do believe, like all good Norsemen, that anything is possible in this life.”

She curled her upper lip with skepticism.

A soft moan escaped Rolf’s mouth as he gazed once more at the book clenched in his fists. “Faðir minn,” he groaned. “My father—” he raised anguished, tear-filled eyes to hers, pleading—“my father must have prepared this burial site for me. Do you realize what this means?”

She shook her head numbly.

“I am dauður…dead.”

Meredith nodded, though she didn’t really think Rolf was dead, or that the man standing before her was a time traveler. No, she couldn’t accept that.

Could she?