The Conqueror

Due East

Perhaps once, perhaps twice in their lives, most people will find themselves undergoing a radical transformation. You could walk out onto a plain and leave that plain as someone else entirely. You have a sudden urge to start anew, with a different set of values, quite different ideals. A war can have that effect on a person. For Jonas Wergeland, who had never been to war, it was a spell in what he was inclined to call a loony bin that did it.

I am talking, in other words, about the year he spent doing his national service, with N Brigade, and more specifically about an incident which took place just after they had completed their ABC survival course at Skjold, up north in the Indre Troms region, a course geared not towards anything as innocent as mastering the alphabet but to learning how to survive under extreme circumstances: in the case, that is, that Norway were to be attacked by atomic, biological or chemical weapons. For two weeks Jonas Wergland dealt, in theory and in simulated practice, with the sort of possible scenarios which few people dare think about; he had, for example, to plot out on a sheet of paper those zones which would be affected by radioactive fallout; he learned how lethal bacteria and viruses could be spread most effectively over the widest possible area, and he tramped about in protective clothing and a mask like a spaceman, pretending to establish the presence of such fiendish inventions as sarin or mustard gas.

Maybe it was the ridiculous skills he learned on that ABC course, this illusion of being able to survive even if the world went due west, that drove Jonas to go off into the wild; as if, after all those staggering, hypothetical possibilities, he sorely needed to scrape about in a piece of concrete Norwegian reality, the soil he was in fact supposed to defend — or maybe he simply wanted to confront the foe that was forever being waved in their faces and at whom they had for so many months been haphazardly firing blanks: an adversary they never saw but who, according to high command, was out there somewhere and might at any minute start making life hell for them. No one could be surprised if a man — frustrated at being charged with an important task, but one which is never clearly defined — suddenly goes off willy-nilly, in hopes of meeting this mysterious foe. In case you have not yet guessed it, Professor, I am once more about to relate the story of the radio theatre.

Jonas had a weekend’s leave. He took advantage of an army recreation scheme and the fact that he was friendly with the officer in charge of transport to borrow a jeep on the excuse that he and another soldier were going to camp out for the night in Dividalen National Park, a little way to the southeast. His mate hopped off, however, a couple of miles down the road, outside his girlfriend’s house in Andselv, with instructions on what to say to the company commander on the Sunday evening. Jonas then headed towards a much more remote destination than Dividalen, namely Alta in the far north which, despite the long drive, he passed right through before cutting south again and arriving, after driving for a couple of hours through mountain birch and rosebay willowherb, at Kautokeino where, on a whim, he made a sharp swing to the left, onto a narrower road which he followed for about six or seven miles, until he came to Av’zi. Jonas parked the jeep, got out, shouldered his rucksack and struck off resolutely into the wild, bearing eastward, as if intent on doing the exact opposite of going due west.

He made his way up onto the bare, open plain at the foot of Muv’ravarri, skirted round Gar’gatoai’vi and eventually, after an unexpectedly tough march over rocks and moss, bogs and streams, reached the eastern side of Stuora Oaivusvarri, where he pitched camp 1,600 feet above sea level. The most incredible thing so far was that he had not encountered the notorious Finnmarksvidda mosquito. All he could hear was a vague humming; there was something there, all the time, but hidden from view.

Having dined on combat rations from his Readiness Support Package, also known as ‘dead-man-in-a-tin’, and boiled coffee, Jonas settled himself outside his tent and gazed at the sun, which was slowly sinking, but which, here in the third week of July, would still stay above the horizon all night. He felt limp. Drained. As if the radiation he had been dealing with in theory had in fact permeated his body. Although he had actually been feeling like this for some time. Ever since Viktor’s accident. That chunk of ice falling out of the blue. Jonas sat there, gazing at the landscape, struck by how remarkably desolate it was. This must be the closest one came in Norway to a desert. And how still it was. Like finding oneself in a world after a nuclear war, he thought. Was this really his country? All of a sudden it seemed so totally alien that Jonas’s interest perked up again. He knew he would encounter something of crucial importance out here, but not what form it would take. It merely lay there, latent, like a hum, behind everything else. In his heart of hearts he may have been hoping to stumble upon some inconceivably massive diamond find. Or better still: a chunk of ice with a pearl ear-stud inside it.

The next morning he wended his way further eastward, through unfamiliar terrain where the ground was covered mainly by moss and heather, dwarf birch and greenish-grey willow, with a scattering of rotting reindeer antlers. He soon mastered the technique of planting his army boots on the tangled roots of the willow trees when crossing streams. Although the landscape seemed monotonous it was not flat, but constantly rose and fell, a fact that made it hard to get his bearings. The soggy peat sapped his strength, and the walk was not made any easier by the heat, with the temperature in the mid-eighties. And yet you’re actually inside the Arctic Circle, Jonas told himself. If you were to follow this same line of longitude you’d be walking across the ice on Greenland, so help me. And that is absolutely true: anyone wanting to see how much Norway owes to the warm embrace of the Gulf Stream need only go for a hike across Finnmarksvidda.

At long last he reached the top of Lavvoai’vi and sat there surveying the view all the way across to the snow-covered peaks on the coast, feeling that he had much the same perspective on things as the rough-legged buzzard swooping over his head. But it was not an outlook he was after: it was insight. He scanned the surrounding scene, feeling that he was at the very centre of the country, that to be sitting here on this hilltop on Finnmarksvidda must be the equivalent of being on Ayer’s Rock, the red mountain in the heart of Australia, a place where it was so forcibly impressed on one that every landscape has a story to tell. Sitting there, staring out across the boundless plain, he realized that it was true what some people said: Norway was one big, protected national park. And it is not a bad idea to pause for a moment here to consider Finnmarksvidda, Professor, because what can you know about Norway unless you have visited Finnmarksvidda? Not Jotunheimen, but Finnmarksvidda is Norway’s primeval home, as well as an outer limit of the imagination, a sort of Timbuktu within the country’s borders. Not until he was sitting on the top of Lavvoai’vi, with a view that ran full-circle, did Jonas really appreciate a fact which he had come across so often in school textbooks: that an incredible ninety-six per cent of Norway was virgin territory. Only now did he see how desolate, how wild Norway actually was, how uncivilized, how fundamentally uninhabited. He surveyed the landscape, feeling for a moment that it exuded an emptiness that his imagination could never hope to fill. ‘Holy shit,’ he muttered to himself. ‘You could dump a small European country here, just on this deserted plain round about me, and all the millions of people in it.’

Jonas sat on the top of Lavvoai’vi, next to a trigonometric point, a pole, rather like a seamark in a sea of moss, lichen and stone and almost had to hang on to it, so mind-reeling were the prospects. Because there was something about this vast, untamed wilderness which also helped him to see the reason for the golden age which his country was living through: the gift granted to Norway was that of remaining untouched. Just as Europe had been thrown into chaos during the age of the great migration, while Norway was enjoying a time of plenty and prosperity when it could relax and consolidate its glorious Viking Age — so it was now, too. They had entered upon a new era of great migrations, and once more Norway had succeeded — again thanks to its strict legislation — in remaining untouched, if you didn’t count the handful of poor refugees who slipped through the needle’s eye, and a few thousand immigrant workers. It could, in fact, be on the threshold of a new golden age, while the rest of the world lay bleeding.

But — he could not rid himself of this thought — this was also his chance. The country was wide open to conquest. The whole of Norway lay spread before him like an enormous blank page.

This was also why he had, perhaps unwittingly, made for this spot. He did not want, like Nansen, to cross anything, or to reach some far frontier; he wanted to work his way inwards, into something, in towards a vital centre: the riddle that is Norway. If there was one place where he had a chance of finding an unknown — nay, unlikely — Norwegian reality, a vital source of inspiration, it had to be here. In the emptiness. He took another compass bearing, still due east, towards Urdutoai’vi, and tramped off, first down, then straight ahead, alongside lakes and over marshes dotted with reddish-orange cloudberry maps. Still no mosquitoes. He kept a sharp lookout in all directions, with the monotonous call of the golden plover in his ears. He was brimful of optimism, knew that there was a part of Norway that could not be pinned down on a map. Here, right here, at any minute, he might run into what he sought — a lion or, if nothing else, a diamond the size of a pinhead.

It was still abnormally hot. Plump white clouds, nigh-on identical to one another, glided across the sky at regular intervals, their bottom edges flattened out as if they were being pushed across a glass surface. Jonas felt an incipient tightening of his balls. Late in the afternoon the humming sound grew ominously louder, so much so that the whole plain suddenly sounded like a camouflaged generator. Jonas kept looking round about as he pitched camp on a knoll in a little hollow between Lavvoai’vi and Urdutoai’vi, right next to a stream. The sun was hovering low on the horizon, and he was on his way into the tent to unroll his sleeping bag when the ground began to shake, and at that same moment he heard the rumbling, it sounded as if a tank was driving straight for him.

He spun round. He had known, and yet not known. It was a dragon. At first he was disappointed. The next instant, delighted. Delighted because it confirmed that all his ingrained ideas about the world, everything he had learned in his twelve years of schooling, was wrong, or at any rate not the whole story. He also had time to think that Daniel ought to have been there, to see that Jonas was right: the Norwegian lion was not a lion. The creature in the national coat of arms, the creature that lived at the heart of Norway, was a dragon.

How did this dragon look? It was transparent. By which I mean, the dragon was made up of mosquitoes, millions of mosquitoes. It was formed, quite simply, out of the most common of all things. That was the secret: at the heart of Norway lived a dragon, a monster composed of small fry. And it emitted a shimmering glow, like the Northern Lights, or like something electrified. And here — at last — Jonas found the answer to the question of what sound a dragon makes. It hums. Like a transformer. He should have known it, because the dragon is a creature that has mastered the art of transformation.

For this reason he only saw the dragon clearly, in all its unnerving gruesomeness, at the second when he turned around — the next moment it was transparent, a dense swarm of glistening mosquitoes. Only when he had had his back to it had the dragon assumed its real form. Consequently there is only one way to slay a dragon, and Jonas instinctively knew how, had learned this skill long before, was not even surprised to find hidden strands in his life suddenly revealing themselves in this way, a little like the secret writing they used to do as children, which only became visible when you held the paper over the cooker ring. A dragon could only be killed by a discus throw, a swift, surprising pivotal action. Jonas stood with his back to it, picked up a flat, almost circular stone, a good two pounds in weight, stood with his back to it and gathered himself, hefted the stone disc in his hand, made a couple of swings, heard the hum turn into a roar, whirled round and threw the stone with all his might, like a discus, so that it struck the dragon right between the eyes, with a noise like that of a vase smashing, before it had time to become transparent. The dragon fell down dead, lay revealed as a true dragon in all its banality, as seen in countless pictures. It reminds me of something I’ve seen before, Jonas thought to himself, only it’s bigger.

And what did he do then? This too he knew by instinct. He took out his knife and cut the brain out of the dragon’s head. As he did so, the body crumbled into dust, leaving only the horns behind; they looked exactly like any old set of reindeer antlers. Jonas stood with the brain in his hand, surprised by how small it was, like a black-lacquer puck with a silvery pattern shining through when he turned it to the light. It smelled sweetish, like fruit. It should come as no shock to anyone that a dragon brain is prepared in the same way as one of Norway’s national dishes. Jonas boiled up water in a pan and gently laid the brain into it, just as one would do with slices of cod, and let it steep for a little while. The sight he beheld did not really surprise him: the black-lacquer appearance of the clump gradually changed, as if the dragon’s ability to metamorphose did not stop even when it was dead. Within a few minutes its dark aspect gave way to a dull white hue, like that of a lichee inside its shell or — why not? — a pearl. Jonas lifted out the brain and placed it on a pot-lid. He saw how it gave off a faint white glow, a glow that came from within.

He sliced off a piece and ate it, just as hunters eat a piece of the lion’s heart in order to steal the animal’s strength or, in Jonas’s case: its way of thinking. How did it taste? Warm. Like when you popped a torch into your mouth as a child. He took several bites, realizing as he did so what lay stored within the dragon’s brain, what that silvery pattern denoted: light. I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned out to be as valuable as any diamond, he thought.

Jonas sat there, somewhere between the two ridges on the vast expanse of Finnmarksvidda and suddenly he saw it all so clearly: all his life he had wanted to be a conqueror. Not so that he could lord it over other people, but to find someone who could lord it over him. As he consumed the last piece, he felt himself being lit up from within. He knew that light was bound to play some part in his future and when, after his national service, he began his studies at the Institute of Astrophysics and turned all his attention to the stars, this represented his first attempt to pursue that presentiment. From a certain point of view, it still involved hunting dragons.

The trek back to Av’zi went surprisingly smoothly, he seemed to be filled with a new kind of energy or enthusiasm. It should be added that, safe back at camp, Jonas Wergeland was given a dressing-down that is still talked about today, in front of the whole company. When he did not show up on the Sunday evening, only his mate’s story prevented the launching of a wide-scale search, complete with missing person announcements on the police wavebands. No civil charges were brought against Jonas, but he was given the maximum disciplinary penalty: twenty days’ detention under guard, or in the glasshouse, as it was called. As far as Jonas was concerned it was a small price to pay. He had not merely seen the light; he had swallowed the light.