The Orkney Scroll

Chapter 7

Our hardy band of travelers, now reduced to four, and pursued relentlessly by Goisvintha’s father Theodoric, fled south, the path of least resistance, I suppose, but one that led straight into the territory of the caliph of Muslim Spain. Desperate for provisions, Bjarni and Oddi attacked a merchant’s retinue in the dead of night. Taken by surprise, some fled, and some were killed by the three Vikings. One, obviously the leader, fought Bjarni for some time and would not yield. Finally Bjarni gained the upper hand, and the man fell to the ground, Bjarni raised his axe, intending to deliver the final blow. The man said nothing. He did not beg for mercy. He did not cry out in fear.

Bjarni lowered his weapon. “You are a worthy opponent,” he said to the man. “I will not take your life, and I would appreciate it if you would extend me the same courtesy. I will take only what we need from this wagon of yours, and be on my way.” With that he turned his back on the man, a gesture that some would say was foolhardy, but in a short time Bjarni, Oddi, Goisvintha, and Svein the Wiry disappeared into the darkness, unfortunately straight into a military encampment. Soon after that they were on a forced march toward Cordoba.

It would be fair to say that Bjarni, Oddi, and Svein, and even possibly Goisvintha would have been amazed by what they saw as they made their way across the countryside. By the early days of the eleventh century, Spain was surely the most sophisticated place in Europe. Aqueducts crisscrossed the country, the remarkable irrigation systems ensuring orchards and grain fields aplenty. The towns would have been simply extraordinary. Cordoba, the seat of the caliph, was certainly a most impressive place. There were fabulous mosques, gardens, fountains, hospitals, great libraries, magnificent palaces, public baths. Houses were well-kept and flowers, trees, and shrubs bloomed everywhere, most of which Bjarni would never have seen before. And wonder of wonders, the streets were not only paved, but lit and patrolled. Remember, the streets of Paris were not paved until the thirteenth century, those of London, the fourteenth. To Vikings accustomed to the stone houses of Orkney, and the muddy, dangerous roads of the territories they knew so well, Cordoba must surely have been astonishing.

Bjarni and the others were brought before someone he knew must be important, and he thought they all would die. Now Vikings were well known in Spain. They were a nuisance most of the time, and a great deal of trouble some of the time, and indeed were called madjus or “heathen wizards.” Vikings had sacked Lisbon, Cadiz, and even Seville in the ninth century, until eventually repulsed by the highly organized army and navy. Muslim Spain had never really been good hunting for the Vikings, but they would still have been considered a threat. There would be none feeling too kindly toward Bjarni and his friends.

But then a voice was heard from the back of the room. There was much consternation in the group at the words. “This captive may not be a man of the book,” the voice said, by which he meant a Muslim, a Christian or a Jew, “but he is a man of honor. He spared my life, and I would ask that his life and that of his companions be spared in turn. ” Bjarni must have looked in surprise at the man he had almost killed, now resplendent in silk.

So Bjarni and his tiny retinue were set free. But Bjarni would have to carry on alone.

Who would kill a poor sod, a harmless dreamer like Percy Bicycle Clips? Or Magnus Budge, or whoever he was? He’d always be Percy to me, an unusual little man pedaling furiously toward what he hoped would be salvation. And not just kill him, but stab him over and over again, then leave him to bleed to death, his eyes to cloud over, his breath to come in gasps, as the last of his life oozed from him, alone on a cold concrete slab.

Trevor Wylie I could almost understand. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he deserved it or anything, but he did, I suppose, make a credible murder victim if one might be permitted to put it that way. But not Percy Bicycle Clips.

I was very glad I hadn’t mentioned a name when I pounded on the door of the nearest house I could find to get help for Percy, help that even then I knew was too late. That meant that when I was interviewed by the Northern Constabulary both in their squad car and later that evening in Kirkwall, I had not had to explain the name Arthur Percival when in fact all of the corpse’s identification proclaimed him to be Magnus Budge. No doubt they would have found that a little odd. Even I found it so. As it was, I was just a tourist who had happened upon a grisly sight while hiking around the World War Two bunkers on Hoxa Head. Everyone was terribly apologetic that such a dreadful thing had happened to a visitor. They kept telling me that violent crime was very rare.

I believed them, not that it helped much. Somehow, de spite the fact he’d lied about his name, and had not been very forthcoming on any subject of interest to me, I’d come to regard him as, if not a friend exactly, someone I was fond of in a rather peculiar way. It’s not everybody who can make a tour of the Neolithic interesting, even for somebody like me, who is inclined to like just about anything about the ancient past. When I’d seen the old house with the man in the wheelchair, I’d really hoped I would find Percy before I left so I could tell him about it. I wasn’t sure what he meant by The Wasteland, the maze, the wounded king, but if he thought salvation lay there, then I wanted to make sure he’d seen what I had.

Everyone was, of course, exceptionally nice to me. My jacket had been splattered with blood, and carried the bloody imprint of Percy’s fingers on the sleeve. The soles of my shoes were caked in both mud and blood. I kept telling everyone I was fine, but I couldn’t stop shivering. I could not understand why they kept the station so cold. They plied me with enough sweet tea to float an ocean liner, but it didn’t help much. They even sent a squad car to Mrs. Brown’s guest house to pick up some clean clothes to replace the ones they had to take as evidence. I have no idea what Mrs. Brown thought of this at the time, but she was more than solicitous later. The police told me I might get my clothes back but it wouldn’t be for a while. I said I never wanted to see them again.

I was asked to tell my story of how I’d found him over and over again. I did the best I could. I told them he’d been alive when I got there, and that when I’d gone over to try to help him, he’d grabbed my arm. They asked me if he’d said anything, and I said he had, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember what it was. They asked me if I thought he’d named his killer. I said I didn’t think so, that while I couldn’t recall what he’d said, I did remember that I’d thought it was gibberish at the time. They told me to take my time, that it might come back to me, and if and when it did, I was to call.

Various people came and went while I sat there, sipping tea. The couple who had answered their door came in to give and sign a statement. Other than this strange woman splattered with blood yelling and pounding on their door, they had seen and heard nothing. Nobody, when it came right down to it, had seen or heard anything.

They asked me if I knew the victim. I had told them I’d given him a lift a couple of days before when we’d both been visiting Historic Scotland sites, when he’d fallen off his bike and damaged it. I tried to be as honest as possible. I am, after all, virtually living with a policeman. I told them that while we’d spent some time together, I hadn’t known his name. The last part, clearly, was true. I somewhat reluctantly told them that he’d said his nickname was Percy, a little editorializing there on my part, as the word nickname had never come into it, and they solemnly wrote that down. When they asked me why I’d stopped to offer him a lift, I said he looked familiar to me, like someone I knew from home. He wasn’t from home, however. He lived with his mother in an old house in Kirkwall, I was to learn soon enough. They told me they would have to keep my rental car.

While I waited, a never-empty mug of tea in hand, a rather plain woman, sixtyish, in a drab and rather worn brown coat and matching hat, came in. She looked just like Percy, only about twenty-five years older. She had to be his mother. She had a handkerchief balled up in one hand and kept dabbing her eyes with it. She had a runny nose and didn’t seem to notice. For a while we sat in the same room, under the watchful eye of a rather stern policewoman.

“My boy has had an accident,” she said after a few minutes of rummaging about in her handbag for another handkerchief.

“I’m so sorry,” I replied.

“He must have fallen off his bicycle and hit his head. I’m sure he’ll be feeling better in the morning.” I believe I winced slightly because the policewoman coughed and then almost imperceptibly shook her head.

“The police have some other idea entirely about what happened to him, but they can’t be right. There has been some mistake. He was always off riding his bicycle. He quit his job, you know. I don’t know why. He was a dreamer, my boy was. Some woman found him.”

I said nothing for a moment. Was it a good idea to tell her I was the one who found him?

“I hope he didn’t suffer,” she said, sniffing. “I hate to think he was in pain.”

I took a deep breath. “I am the person who found him. He didn’t suffer at all.” She got out of her chair and rushed over to grab my arm. Her grip reminded me all too well of Percy’s dying grasp. “Promise me he wasn’t in pain,” she said. “Please.”

“I promise,” I said.

“Did he say anything?”

“I’m sorry I can’t remember.”

“He was a good boy. Odd, but good.”

“That’s exactly the way I think of him,” I said, as the policewoman gently pulled her away from me, and actually gave me a wan smile. She was much nicer looking when she smiled. I found myself thinking of Percy after this exchange with his mother, how he’d tripped over the merchandise in Trevor’s store, the way he always seemed to use bicycle clips whether he needed them or not, and his glasses askew. I thought about how enthused he was about the ancient sites we were visiting together, actually showing some personality as he pointed everything out, despite looking rather rumpled and dirty from his bike accident. Most of all I thought of his salute as he left me in Kirkwall, broken bicycle in his arms, his sleeve torn, his glasses, now held with one of my safety pins, even more crooked than before.

“Glasses,” I said aloud. “We have to find his glasses.” The policewoman now came over to sit with me, obviously thinking I was in as bad shape as Percy’s mother, which in retrospect maybe I was. Not as bad as a mother perhaps, but certainly right up there in the out-of-it category. “He’d lost his glasses.”

“Glasses?” she said.

“Spectacles,” I said. “Whatever you call them here. He wasn’t wearing his glasses when I found him. I lent him a safety pin to hold them together.”

“I’m sure he appreciated it,” she said, patting my hand.

I thought about that, slowly and carefully through the fog in my brain, and realized finally that she thought when I found him dying I’d fixed his glasses. “I mean when he fell off his bike the other day. He broke the arm of his glasses. He couldn’t see without them. I gave him a safety pin to hold them together until he got home.”

She looked at me for a minute, then went into the other room. I hoped it was to tell them about the glasses, because I had this idea that when I was feeling better, I would think this was significant, the fact they weren’t there, that is. A couple of minutes later, she came out, sat down with Percy’s mum and asked her if her son wore glasses.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I hope he hasn’t lost those. He’s always breaking them. I think we have a spare pair at home, though, that he can wear until his good ones turn up.” The policewoman patted her hand, gave me a significant look, a nod, really, as if to acknowledge she now understood what I was saying, and went back to standing at her post. At this point a clergyman arrived, and immediately went to sit with Percy’s mum. She seemed to alternate between knowing her son was dead, and thinking he’d be fine soon, but I think reality was starting to sink in. She cried and cried, and the clergyman patted her arm and murmured comforting thoughts, I’m sure, although I couldn’t hear them. A few minutes later he came over to talk to me. He took my hand in his. “Your hands are like ice,” he said.

“Yes, I don’t know why they don’t put the heat on here,” I said. “At the guest house I’m staying in, it’s always nice and warm.”

“You are very pale,” he added. Of course I’m pale. I’m always pale. That’s the way I was born. I know that when I’m not feeling well, which would be now, and when I don’t have any makeup on, which was also probably now, given the rather rudimentary dusting I’d given myself that morning, I scare people. I have always considered that to be their problem, not mine. However, I was sure if they turned on some heat, I’d look and feel better. Instead they called a doctor. He recommended more hot tea with lots of sugar. No alcohol. That was too bad, because I was looking forward to some of Mrs. Brown’s scotch.

The policewoman came over to ask me to go back to talk to the policeman in charge of the investigation. I believe she said his name was Cusiter, although she made it sound as if it had an extra r in it, after the u. I was having trouble concentrating. As I left I heard the clergyman ask Percy’s mum if there was someone who could come and stay with her that night. “I’ll be all right,” she replied. “My boy will be home soon.”

“Perhaps someone else,” the man said patiently.

“Perhaps my neighbors in St. Margaret’s Hope,” she said. “The Millers.”

“You remember now, Emily, that you moved to Kirkwall when your husband died ten years ago.”

There was a pause. “Yes,” she said. “That’s right. Magnus and I moved to Kirkwall. Magnus will come and get me.” I thought if I could feel anything at all, other than cold, I would find this very sad.

The police may have been very courteous, but they weren’t for letting me take the flight out of Orkney I was booked on. I was asked to remain there until the forensics team arrived from Aberdeen, headquarters of the Northern Constabulary, and had had a chance to do whatever they do. Such expertise, it was explained to me, would have to come outwith Orkney. “Outwith” was not a word I was familiar with, but it sounded rather nice. I told them about Rob, which softened them up considerably, and that I knew that staying as long as necessary was the right thing to do.

Percy’s mum was leaving just about the time I was told someone would drive me to Stromness. A neighbor from Kirkwall had come to take her home. I didn’t ask her about Percy’s granny and her furniture, because I didn’t think of it, and even if I had her grip on reality still seemed a little tenuous, and furthermore it would hardly have been the appropriate time. I’ve wondered since, though, whether it would have made a difference. I suppose had Percy been alive he would have told me it was one of the questions I was supposed to ask.

Detective Cusiter, if that was what his name was, had been good enough to have someone phone the car rental company to explain my situation, and they in turn were nice enough to deliver another car to Mrs. Brown’s place in Stromness shortly after I got there. The man who delivered the car apologized profusely for my inconvenience, which was an unusual word under the circumstances. “Please be assured that you will not be charged for the second car. We are terribly sorry for your loss.” My loss? Loss of the car? Loss of a friend? Loss of my seat on the plane? I told him that was exceptionally decent of the rental agency, and really it was. Everybody was so nice here.

The other residents of the BB were equally aghast and sympathetic. “Travelers,” one man opined. “No one from Orkney would do such a thing. In the good weather, they come in on the ferry, do their nefarious business, and then take off on the next boat. They’ll never find them.”

“Travelers?” I said.

“You know, gypsies, other criminal elements.”

I thought that was rather unfair, but what did I know? I needed a scotch, and I didn’t care what that doctor said. What I also wanted was for everyone to stop being so nice. I wanted them to take to the streets to protest what had happened to Percy. I wanted them to unleash that Viking blood they kept telling me flowed in their veins, to hunt down the killer, take justice into their own hands, and tear this terrible person to pieces. That’s what I wanted them to do, because I myself was too tired and too cold to do it. I had a large scotch, despite doctor’s orders, left a voice mail for Rob telling him I wouldn’t be home immediately and why, then went straight to bed, and enjoyed a dreamless sleep that left me even more tired than I’d been when I lay down. I still couldn’t remember what Percy had said to me.

The next day, after Mrs. Brown plied me with bacon and eggs and some rather lovely brown bread in the notion that it would help, which indeed it did, I undertook a self-guided tour of the Neolithic in Percy’s honor. I really just wanted to stay in bed, but I had a feeling that if I did so, I’d never get up again. I crawled on all fours or slithered into every chamber cairn I could find. I climbed up Wideford Hill, and down into Wideford Cairn, then Unstan, Cuween, Grain, Mine Howe; any tomb or earth house or whatever I came across, I entered. They were all rather interesting, from the outside just grassy mounds, but with stone entrances, and inside stone chambers, often more than one. I could almost hear Percy telling me about them. I hoped I’d done him proud. I went to a place called the Brough of Birsay which held the remains of a Viking church and homes. It wasn’t old enough for Percy to have recommended it, but the sun was shining as I walked across the causeway usable only at low tide to see the place, and from the vantage point of lighthouse high atop the hill, I looked down a coast of spectacular cliffs disappearing into the mist, and across water that would have stretched without interruption back to my home country. I decided Orkney might have the biggest sky I had seen in a very long time, bigger perhaps than the prairies of home. It was very, very beautiful, breathtakingly so.

Then I went back to the Stones of Stenness and walked around the Ring of Brodgar. The pastoral view was truly lovely, and I wished Percy were there to share it. After that I just drove around the island, I don’t know why, maybe searching for someone who looked as if he’d killed my strange friend, Percy. Occasionally I stopped to eat. Stuffing food down my throat seemed to be the only thing that kept me from doing something else, although what that something else was I didn’t know. I did know I didn’t feel like crying.

It was thus that I found Willow in the Quoyburray Inn in Tankerness a couple of days later, but by then I didn’t care. She was sitting alone at a table in the corner of the bar with a plate offish and chips in front of her, and, in a choice of questionable taste given the recent demise of her boyfriend and the means of his dispatch, a bottle of Skull-splitter beer. With Percy’s death, my interest in Blair and Trevor, the furniture, and therefore Willow had evaporated.

Willow, and I’ve thought about this a lot since, seemed very surprised to see me. I didn’t care about that either. In fact, I didn’t give a fig about anything, although a small part of my brain was trying to tell me I should. Willow dropped her fork, put her hand to her mouth, and said “Lara!” in a rather strange tone of voice. There was a pause, and then she said, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

Sure you have, I thought. You have been roaring around Orkney on the back of a motorcycle piloted by a rather well-built young man in red and blue leather just hoping to see me standing by the side of the road.

“What I mean is, I thought I’d missed you, that you would have gone home by now. I’m so glad you’re here.”

“I don’t believe I knew you were coming to Orkney, Willow,” I said, through clenched teeth. “Had I known, I would of course have told you where I was staying.”

“I know that,” she said. “I trust you.” If I hadn’t felt so awful, I probably would have laughed. She gestured to me to sit down and then leaned forward conspiratorially. “I found it,” she whispered. “As soon as I found it, I called your shop, and a nice man told me you were taking a bit of a holiday in Britain. I knew that meant you’d headed for Orkney, so I flew out the very next day. I figured I’d just find you here somewhere. After all, it’s not a very big island.”

A nice man? Surely she didn’t mean Clive. “You found what?” I asked in a normal speaking voice. “The money?”

“Shush,” she said. “Not the money, but the closest thing to it.”

“And what might that be?”

She leaned forward again. “The treasure map,” she mouthed.

Oh, spare me, I thought. “I see,” I said. “That’s exciting. I knew you were here, actually, Willow. I saw you get off the ferry and then again on South Ronaldsay, but I couldn’t catch you because you were on a motorcycle with a rather fetching young man.”

“That’s Kenny. Isn’t he cute as anything? All that leather! I met him on the ferry, and he’s helping me find the you-know-what.”

“That’s nice,” I said, but my tone betrayed me.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” she said. “You think I’d cut you out of the deal. But I’m going to show you what I found, and when Kenny gets here, he’ll confirm that I made it very clear to him that you are to be a part of this, that we’d split it three ways, and that our number one priority, well, maybe number two, has been to find you. We asked for you at all the hotels in Kirkwall and Stromness, believe me. Oh, there he is. Kenny, we’re over here!”

Kenny was there all right, all six-foot-something of him, with dark curly hair and lovely deep blue eyes, and a physique that was indeed rather impressive in all that leather. He was, as Willow had already pointed out, cute as anything.

“Hello,” he said to me, before leaning over to peck Willow on the cheek.

“This is Lara,” Willow said, before he could say anything else.

“Lara!” he exclaimed. “Wow! Brilliant! Nice to meet you. I’m Kenny. How did you find each other?”

“She found me,” Willow said, going on to explain in some detail that I’d seen them both and where. Alarms bells were ringing here. It might be that she really wanted Kenny to know all about it, or that she was trying to make sure he knew so he wouldn’t say anything she didn’t want me to hear.

“Brilliant!” he repeated. “Willow thought, she was afraid you know, you’d be headed back home by now.”

Oh, please, I thought again.

“Actually, why aren’t you heading back by now?” Willow said. I pointed to the newspaper sitting in front of her, tapping the article about Percy’s demise.

She scanned it for a moment. “Lara! How awful!” She leapt up and threw her arms around me as Kenny grabbed the paper to see what we were talking about. “Omigod,” she kept saying over and over. “I didn’t even see your name until right this minute. This is just too horrible. First Trevor, and now this complete stranger. How unlucky can you get?”

That was a good question, even if Percy had hardly been a complete stranger, a fact I decided I was not going to mention. She would hardly put the name Magnus Budge and Percy together. Even I was having trouble with that.

“I guess that’s why you didn’t e-mail me that you were staying over,” she said. I bit my tongue, and, instead of clawing her eyes out, just gave her a baleful glance. “Did you not get mine?” she said.

“Strangely enough I didn’t, no.”

“No wonder you’re looking at me like that. Did you check your e-mails?”

“I did.” I had, too, every day in Glasgow, at the airport before I left, and in the only Internet cafe I could find, in Kirkwall, when I took Percy back with his ruined bicycle. There had been no e-mail from Willow.

“Technology,” she said. “Great when it works, and a real pain when it doesn’t.” I said nothing.

“This is a terrible tragedy,” Kenny said solemnly, pointing to the newspaper. “But we’ve got something to take your mind off it. Now that you’re here, we can turn all of our attention to our, um, project.”

“He means finding the you-know-what,” Willow said. She and Kenny exchanged glances.

“Exactly,” he said.

“You two had better order something to eat, to keep up your strength,” she said. “The fish and chips are excellent.” She was right about that. I enjoyed my meal very much despite their tiresome attempts to persuade me that they’d spent their every waking moment looking for me. Soon I was driving down the highway behind the motorcycle, this time traveling at a pace I could match. I had no idea what Willow wanted to show me, but what else did I have to do until the expertise that normally resided outwith Orkney did its thing?

Willow and Kenny were staying at a pleasant bed-and-breakfast place in Deerness. They had separate rooms, they assured me, as if I cared, but it seemed rather a technicality given they shared a bathroom in one of those arrangements where there is a door from each room into the bathroom. We gathered in Willow’s room.

“Ready?” she exclaimed, placing in front of me a rather odd object. It was a long piece of cloth, rather scroll-like in appearance with a primitive but unusual drawing on it. There was a central panel on which was depicted, from the top, an animal, probably a camel, then a castle, a zigzag design, a head with mouth and eyes open, an image that made me feel a bit queasy, and, at the bottom, a bowl-shaped object of some kind. Down the sides were twiglike figures, and along the bottom some wavy lines in an irregular pattern.

“I found it hidden in the suitcase that Trevor had packed for his getaway,” she said. “It was under the lining. I almost gave the bag and its contents all away to a charity, but there was this long thread that didn’t look right in the lining, and I opened it up and there it was. Trevor couldn’t sew to save his life.” I thought that was maybe an unfortunate choice of phrase, but I suppose if she could drink Skullsplitter beer without a qualm, she was well over Trevor. I’m sure the delectable Kenny was helping with this transition a lot.

“I wasn’t sure what I had, other than it looked like a map, but Trevor’s ticket, the around-the-world ticket that I believe I have mentioned I paid for, had a first stop in Orkney. I am just guessing, of course, but I’m willing to bet he found this in that writing thing that you are so keen on finding. You did tell me that you thought the desk came from either Glasgow or Orkney, did you not? So I figure there is no money, but there is a treasure somewhere, and Trevor was heading off to find it. Or maybe, I suppose, it’s possible he already did, but then where is it? I flew to Edinburgh, took the bus to Scrabster and then the ferry, hoping, assuming, I’d be able to find you here. Fortuitously, I met Kenny on the boat. He knows all about this kind of thing, don’t you, Kenny?”

“A little,” he said. “I’m studying Scottish history in Edinburgh. My thesis is on Viking Scotland with particular reference to Orkney. That’s why I could decipher the runes around the side here. Stop me if you know all this, Lara, but Orkney was an important part of the Viking world. It was settled by the Norwegians, Norse in other words, probably some time in the ninth century. The Vikings jarls or ”earls“ were very powerful men, some of whom extended their territories into northern Scotland, Caithness, and Sutherland, and even beyond. We know about this period from archaeology, but also from something called the Orkneyinga Saga which is the story of the earls of Orkney. It is probably part history, part myth, but useful just the same. I think we’re really on to something, that there is a real Viking treasure to be found. I don’t know if you’ve been to Maeshowe, Lara, but if so you’ll know there are many Viking runes there, which we can actually read. The alphabet is called futhark for its first six letters, th counting as one.”

“Isn’t the word futhark cute?” Willow said. “The things you learn.”

“Some of the runes found in Maeshowe refer to well-hidden treasure in the tomb,” Kenny said. Thanks to Percy, I already knew that. “Treasure for the Vikings, I have to tell you, almost invariably means gold and silver. But Viking treasure wasn’t found in Maeshowe. Maybe it’s somewhere else. I’m thinking that these swirls along the bottom are actually a map of the shoreline where the treasure was buried.”

I was suddenly very depressed. A treasure map, of all things, a map to buried Viking jewelry or something. I mean, how tiresome! Should I point out the obvious to them? I decided I would, even if it felt like too much of an effort. “What would a camel be doing in Orkney in Viking times?” I asked. “Or any other time for that matter?” If Orkney had a zoo I hadn’t seen it yet.

“We were wondering about that, too,” Willow said. “I don’t think it’s a camel, though. The artist wasn’t exactly Rembrandt or anything. Unfortunately the rather poor talent for perspective here is not going to help us at all. It’s probably a horse. They had horses, right, Kenny?”

“Right. Some have claimed the islands were once named for the horses, Hrossey, that is, and there is still a festival of the horse held on South Ronaldsay every summer. So yes, this is most likely a horse.”

“It has a hump,” I said. I was feeling disagreeable and it showed.

“I’m sure that was just a mistake,” Willow replied. “It’s a horse.” She was obviously determined that there was treasure to be found. She hadn’t managed to find the cash of Trevor’s that she so desperately believed in. Now she’d transferred this desire to a treasure map. She saw what she wanted to, but I suffered under no such illusion, and it was very plainly a camel.

My friend Moira says I can be a spoilsport from time to time. A poop is what she calls me. Maybe she’s right. “If these swirls are the coastline, would that have not perhaps changed over the intervening, say, one thousand years. You did say the Vikings came here in the ninth century and stayed for how long?”

“The era of the Viking earls ended in the thirteenth century,” Kenny said. “I suppose it might have changed a bit since.”

Good grief again. I posed my next disagreeable question. “How old would this scroll have to be?” Personally I made it nineteenth century at best, the day before yesterday at worst, and while I was no expert on the Vikings in any shape or form, and I would certainly get something like this tested, I could tell just looking at it that it wasn’t a thousand years old.

“I know what you’re thinking, that this isn’t that old,” Willow said, smart young woman that she is.

“It could be based on something much older though,” Kenny said. “There is something about it.” Could that something be called wishful thinking, do you suppose? “This hill might be a chamber tomb, like Maeshowe or the Tomb of the Eagles, perhaps one as yet uncovered. That would be amazing in and of itself. It would be even more so if it turned out to be a place where Vikings stashed their treasure.”

Tomb of the Eagles, I thought. Was that the name? It didn’t sound quite right to me, but why? But yes, it was called that. I’d been there. It was nice. Anyway, surely Kenny who was not only cute but obviously intelligent knew what the tomb thing was called, even if he wanted to believe this scroll was several centuries old. More to the point, why was this conversation upsetting me, other than the obvious, which is to say, the total futility of it? I could feel my heart pounding a little, my palms sweating, and I felt a little shaky, almost like a panic attack, or maybe as if I’d just gulped four quick espressos in a row. I just couldn’t think of any reason to feel like this at this particular moment.

“I think this is a map, of sorts. See there’s water, and a shoreline, a bay really, with a very distinctive shape. I think we need to find that piece of shoreline. There is a tower, too, a broch. So we’re looking for a distinctive piece of shoreline where there was once a tower, with a hill, or rather an undiscovered tomb nearby. There are some other really interesting symbols here as well, that make me think that it’s old. The disembodied head that speaks, for example, was a very important image in pagan times, as is the castle and the maze.” Kenny gestured to the symbols down the side. The word “maze,” of course, took me back to Percy, bleeding to death: The Wasteland, the maze, the wounded king. Even with that, though, I was not prepared for what was coming.

“Tell her what the runes say, Kenny,” Willow said.

“Yes, don’t keep me in suspense,” I said, trying to keep profound cynicism out of my voice. There was a slight throbbing at my temples that indicated a headache was on its way, due perhaps to the strain of keeping myself from snapping at them.

“It says,” Kenny replied, pointing at the sticklike figures down one side, “ ‘Before he went mad, Bjarni the Wanderer hid the cauldron in the tomb of the orcs’.” At the sound of these words, I dashed into the bathroom and threw up.