Her Viking Guardian (Bound for Training #3)

Chapter 1

Ilsa

No real archaeologist, let alone a lowly grad student like me, ever actually got to uncover a mosaic that reshapes everything she thought she knew about the past.

That, however, was exactly what had just happened to me. Maybe it didn’t change everything I had thought I knew about the past, but it changed the parts that mattered most to me. The parts about the Normans in Sicily in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

The tesserae beneath my brush told a story that no textbook had ever whispered, let alone proclaimed.

I had been working the site, outside Palermo, for three weeks already, cataloging every detail of what the rest of the dig team had dismissed as a servants’ house.

I felt certain, based on the dimensions, that it was actually the undercroft of a Norman chapel.

I had almost given up hope when the pattern had begun to emerge.

Not the interlocking geometric borders that characterized standard Sicilian-Norman work of the period, not the medallions that any first-year art history student could identify as Byzantine.

Something older. Something that had no business being here at all.

I sat back on my heels and pressed my wrist against my forehead, careful not to touch my face with the brush hand.

The late afternoon light slanted through the narrow window slits of the undercroft, catching the gold leaf tesserae at an angle that made them burn like small fires set into the earth.

My heart was doing something undignified and unscholarly in my chest.

The central design seemed unmistakable.

Not Christ. Not the Virgin. Not any of the saints whose iconography I had spent a big part of my doctoral coursework memorizing.

A tree. Specifically, a tree whose roots descended into three distinct realms rendered in lapis and obsidian glass, whose branches would clearly spread across the top of the composition in a pattern I had seen before, not in any Sicilian context, but in illuminated manuscripts from a monastery outside Bergen that I had studied during my undergraduate thesis year.

Yggdrasil.

Here. Beneath a Norman chapel. In Sicily.

I set my brush down with extreme care, because my hands had started to shake.

The academic part of my brain, the stubborn intellectual part that had gotten me through my qualifying exams and three rejection letters from major journals before my first acceptance, had already begun to construct the argument.

The Normans had come south into France, yes, but they were Norse in origin.

Eleventh century. The conversion had been relatively recent.

It was not, strictly speaking, impossible that some remnant of the old belief system had traveled with them, had found expression in a private space, an undercroft, a place below the official architecture of the new faith.

Not impossible. Extraordinary, certainly. Career-defining, possibly.

The other part of my brain, the part I didn’t discuss in academic papers or with my dissertation committee, was doing something else entirely.

It was looking at the female figure I had only just begun to uncover at the base of the tree, her form emerging from centuries of grime and careful brushwork, and feeling a recognition that had nothing whatsoever to do with scholarship.

She was tall. Angular-featured. Her hair, rendered in silvered tesserae, fell in loose waves.

My grandmother’s pendant, the small rune-carved disc I wore always at my throat, suddenly felt warm against my skin.

I told myself it was the Sicilian heat. The day’s weather, plus confirmation bias.

Then I saw the border inscription, and confirmation bias became the least of my problems, because I couldn’t have imagined those letters if I’d tried.

The text ran along the lower edge of the composition in a band I had taken, in my initial excitement over the tree, for decorative knotwork.

It wasn’t knotwork. It was language, the Latin the cosmopolitan Norman court had used alongside old French and Greek and Arabic.

The words, however, weren’t written in the Roman capitals familiar to any literate Norman cleric.

The script was Younger Futhark, the Norse runes I knew only because, well, I had been a Norse myth geek in high school. They read, Filii Mercurii. Hic Incipit Via.

Latin, written in Norse runes. Not unheard of, as the church began its inexorable march through the Scandinavian lands. Unheard of here, though, in Sicily, where the Normans had long since adopted Roman writing despite their Norse heritage.

Sons of Mercury. Here the road begins.

My Latin was adequate. My Latin was, my committee would have said with the faint approval they rationed carefully, more than adequate.

And I had used it to read Tacitus. Or anyway the one book of Tacitus that mattered to me, the Germania, with its precious witness to the tribes that would migrate to Scandinavia and become the Vikings.

Including the passage in which the Roman historian had described the Germanic tribes worshipping a god he called Mercury, a god like the Romanized version of Hermes.

A god of travelers and cunning and the dead…

a god who was obviously not Mercury or Hermes at all, but something from a different kind of supernatural world. A colder and far less civilized one.

Odin. Tacitus had clearly described the god the Norse peoples would worship as Odin.

Sons of Mercury. Sons of Odin.

Here the road begins.

The inscription continued. I had to lean so close that my nose nearly grazed the tesserae, and then pull back, as if I were looking at a concealed 3D image.

I had cleaned this section thoroughly, and the mosaic had suffered miraculously little damage.

The runes remained very hard to make out, so hard that I began to think the artist had purposely concealed them in the knotwork.

Directions, along the coast southeast of Palermo. I recognized the Norman names of tiny settlements. Some had become towns that remained to this day, while others no longer existed except on our oldest maps.

Coordinates, really, of a kind. The sort of directional language that a Norman knight who had sailed from Rouen would have understood instinctively.

Distances rendered in a unit I recognized as a Norman variation of the Roman mille passus.

A landmark: one rock among three. A coastline: a bend toward the rising sun.

A cliff described in terms that, if I was reading them correctly, could only refer to something in the limestone escarpment on Capo Zafferano, twenty-three kilometers almost directly east of where I was currently crouching in the dirt with my heart in my throat.

I stayed very still for a long moment.

Then I took out my phone.

I photographed everything. Every centimeter of the inscription.

The full composition with the tree and the silver-haired woman at its roots and the border text running beneath like a secret the mosaic had been waiting nine centuries to tell someone.

I worked methodically, the way I always worked, overlap between frames, multiple angles, with flash and then without.

My hands had stopped shaking. That meant I had made a decision, somewhere in my body, that my mind hadn’t yet caught up to.

When I had what I needed, I put my phone away.

Then I took my trowel and, with the same care I had used to uncover it, I began to cover the mosaic back up.

Loose soil first, worked gently into the gaps between tesserae.

Then the larger aggregate. Then the surface layer, tamped down and textured to match the surrounding undisturbed earth.

I had watched enough sites get backfilled to know how it was done.

In three weeks, the supermarket’s foundation crew would arrive and pour concrete over this entire section, and the mosaic of the Filii Mercurii would sleep for another nine centuries, or forever, beneath a car park.

No one would find it.

No one except me had found it.

I told myself I had protected the mosaic.

I had shielded the site from the kind of attention that would bring in authorities and journalists and rival academics and ultimately the concrete anyway, just with more paperwork.

I told myself that as I smoothed the last of the surface soil with the flat of my palm, and I almost believed it.

The pendant at my throat still felt warm.

I reached the coast two hours later, just as the light had started to become golden over the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Sicily looked like a landscape, and a seascape, from ancient myth.

I drove the dig’s battered Fiat to the nearest point the road allowed and then walked, following a goat track down through maquis scrub that smelled of wild rosemary.

In one of my cargo pockets I had my phone and a small torch.

In the other I had the water bottle I had remembered at the last moment to bring.

The inscription had mentioned a rock among three. To my astonishment, I found a candidate almost immediately: one part of the looming precipice that jutted further than the two by its side. I stood at its base and looked at the shoreline and saw nothing but rock and sea.

Then I looked at the rock more carefully, passing back and forth, trying to make my eyes focus on different distances to keep from being fooled by the similarity of background to foreground.

The fissure was narrow enough that I walked past it twice before I registered what I was seeing.

Not a cave mouth, exactly. More like the coastline had developed an opinion about itself and decided to keep that opinion a secret.

The limestone had folded in a way that presented a solid face to anyone approaching from the water and a near-invisible vertical crack to anyone approaching from the land, and only at this specific angle, with the evening light hitting the cliff face from precisely this direction, was the darkness behind the crack visible at all.

I turned sideways and pushed through.

The passage stretched about four meters.

It smelled of salt and cold stone. There was something underneath those things, though, something organic that didn’t seem to fit the ocean setting.

My mind fastened on the scent-impression of the inside of a chest that had held important things for a very long time.

Then that chest opened.

The cavern was enormous. That was the first thing.

The limestone had opened into a space that had no business existing inside a coastal cliff, a vault thirty meters high at least, the ceiling lost in shadow, the floor descending in a series of natural terraces toward a still inner pool that caught the last of the exterior light through some crack or channel I couldn’t locate.

The air was cool and felt completely dry.

The acoustics were extraordinary. I could hear my own breathing echoing the way it might in a cathedral.

And in the center of the lowest terrace, resting on a cradle of ancient timber that had been reinforced, I could see now, with more recent work—that newer wood looked old, but not nine centuries old, some of it merely decades—was a ship.

A longship. A dragon ship.

I turned my torch on and walked toward it with a specific quality of attention that it seemed I was learning to bring to things that couldn’t possibly be real.

The hull looked intact. That was the second impossible thing.

Clinker-built, the overlapping strakes fastened with iron rivets that had oxidized to a dark red-brown, the whole surface treated with something that had preserved the wood against the salt air with a thoroughness that no natural process could account for.

Someone had maintained this at some point in the last hundred years, if perhaps not recently.

Someone had come here and cared for this ship over the centuries.

The prow had the head of a serpentine creature whose open mouth faced toward the sealed cave entrance, toward the sea it had not tasted in God knew how many years—if ever.

With a frown at the unlikeliness of it all, I realized that the thing must have been assembled, or reassembled, inside this cavern, since it could never have passed through the narrow opening I had just entered by.

I ran my torch along the hull and then up and across to the cavern walls, and that was when I stopped walking.

The walls were covered in images.

Floor to ceiling, from the tideline on the lower terrace to the point where the limestone curved inward toward the vault, the walls of the cavern had been carved in deep relief, with the patient and authoritative skill of people who had considered this work important enough to do properly.

I approached the nearest section and held my torch close.

The figures were large. Men and women, some of them dressed in Viking clothing. Most of them, though…

Heat surged into my cheeks as I started to make out the subject of the vast majority of the carvings.

Most of the figures were naked. Much worse, in most of the scenes…

Oh, God, I thought, my mind exaggerating only a little bit, they’re all fucking, aren’t they?