Chapter 5
Henrik
I didn’t much like duty in Huginn’s Eye—none of us did, even Aksel, our self-proclaimed tech wizard.
Despite its venerable nickname, with the flavor of Odin’s watchful raven, our time in the control room certainly didn’t feel like the most Viking-like activity we practiced as Sons of Odin.
The monitoring station carved into the limestone under Rouen lay far from the older, ceremonial spaces, with their inspiring carvings and their even more inspiring furniture: the Rouen longship itself, descended from Rollo’s own, and the bride saddles in the chambers we called our houses.
Huginn’s Eye had only existed for three generations, and someone in one of those previous generations seemed to me to have possessed a sense of irony: all that Norse ritual grandeur a few hundred meters away and here the fluorescent lights, server racks, and ergonomic chairs that no self-respecting Son of Odin would ever admit to finding comfortable.
I found them extremely comfortable. I supposed I thought of that as my private shame.
The sensor array woke up during the second hour of my three-hour shift.
The alert came in the same way alerts always appeared, from the older systems, with a sound like an ancient, metallic statue clearing its throat, a brittle kind of buzz that I had never actually heard with my own ears in the two years I had rotated through control room duty, but recognized immediately from Sven’s description of the noise.
Even he, the chief of the Sons of Odin, had only heard it once, he had told me.
I set down my coffee and leaned forward, my eyes moving over the six different candidates for the sound’s provenance, each of them a dusty box with a pair of lights on the front. Five boxes showed only their green light, while one showed both green and red.
The Sicily array. I had to look twice at the designation, because I had assumed, as we all had, that the Sicily array was essentially decorative at this point—a legacy system installed by an earlier generation of Viking brothers and maintained through distant hands, thanks to inertia and the organization’s deep institutional unwillingness to decommission anything.
The sanctuary at Capo Zafferano had been dormant for decades.
The array monitored a pair of sensors buried in the floor of the cavern; one just inside the entrance, the other in the passage leading to the bridal chambers.
It had not registered anything more significant than a stray seabird since before I was born.
Now it had registered a human being, if I read the scant series of digits under the lights correctly; a moving weight on the order of sixty kilograms, corresponding fairly exactly to the step of a small person.
The sensors transmitted only once every three hours, so whoever it was could still be there or could have come and gone.
I moved to the main monitor and looked for the interface Sven had shown me a single time, when I had started taking my shift in the control room, the one innovation to the old monitoring systems made since their installation in the 1970s.
The clever application took the bare bones provided by the sensors’ data and extrapolated it into a rudimentary telemetry, based on the relationship between timing and force detected.
At 18:47 local time, someone weighing about sixty kilos had found the fissure in the rock and entered the ship sanctuary. They had stayed there for thirty-two minutes before they had entered the passage to the bridal chambers.
Someone had gone all the way in. They had stayed in that vicinity for a further forty-six minutes, then triggered the two sensors in reverse order, moving very fast… almost as if they were fleeing something.
I picked up my phone and called Sven.
* * *
Ilsa
The next morning, a Saturday, I told myself, when I woke up from a dreamless sleep, that I had definitely calmed down.
Also that I had obviously had some sort of minor psychosexual freakout, but that I just needed to figure out what I would do about what I had found.
I knew the mosaic and the cavern had been real, but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure about the ship, the carvings, and… and…
I blushed down at my espresso as I sat in the morning sun at my favorite café.
The other thing. The thing in the chamber. And what I had—or hopefully hadn’t—done on top of it.
The espresso, as always, tasted very good, just on the far edge of bitter, exactly where I liked it.
I concentrated on that. The espresso was perfect and the morning light on the Palermo streets was beautiful.
I, a doctoral candidate in archaeology, had made an extraordinary discovery, and I was not going to think about the bride saddle, or especially what I had (or hadn’t?) done on its warm leather surface.
I wrapped both hands around the small cup and looked at the pigeons investigating the cobblestones near my feet.
I told myself, very firmly, that the rational explanation represented the only possible correct one.
I had been alone and overstimulated and the combination of physical exhaustion and academic excitement had produced a kind of waking dream.
The warmth of the wood had been the warmth of my own body’s heat, reflected back. The voice had been my own subconscious, stocked with Old Norse vocabulary from my coursework and apparently harboring opinions about Viking masculinity that I had not previously been aware of.
The young woman’s eyes, in the vision of the Worldtree, were harder to explain. I did not explain them. I drank my espresso instead.
“Excuse me.”
The voice was Italian-accented English, low and musical, and it came from beside my left shoulder. I looked up.
The woman standing next to my café table was the most beautiful person I had ever seen outside of a fashion magazine.
Even inside a fashion magazine I thought she might have given most of the rest of the contents a serious challenge.
Olive skin, dark hair arranged in a way that looked effortless but had certainly taken considerable effort.
A pale linen suit that fit her in a way that told me it had been made for her body specifically.
She was perhaps thirty, perhaps thirty-five.
She had arranged her face in an expression of polite inquiry that managed also somehow to be an expression of complete certainty that her inquiry would be answered in the affirmative.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said, not sounding sorry at all, but in a pleasant way. “May I sit for a moment?”
I said yes, because the alternative was saying no to a woman who looked like that.
She sat, crossing her ankles, and looked at me with a gaze of direct appraisal.
I had the strong sense, in fact, that this woman made a professional study of looking at people…
young women, in particular, though I couldn’t have said why.
I felt her eyes travel from my face down to my shoulders and back up.
“Have you ever considered modeling?” she asked.
I blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“Modeling.” Her mouth curved. “You have extraordinary bone structure. The coloring is unusual—very striking, especially here in Sicily, of course. I work with an agency here in Palermo and I occasionally approach women I think would be of interest.”
I was twenty-four years old, five feet ten inches, and had spent the last three weeks in cargo pants with soil under my fingernails.
I had also, I remembered, washed my hair this morning and I had put on the one good shirt I had brought to Sicily, because I had needed to feel like a normal human being after the previous afternoon’s events.
I was trying to decide whether this represented coincidence or the universe’s poor taste in timing when I noticed it.
The collar around the woman’s neck.
It was so subtle that I had almost missed it entirely—a thin band of dark leather, fitted close to her throat, with a small fastening at the back that her upswept hair nearly concealed.
Not really a fashion accessory, I thought, since not a choker in the style that had been recurring on runways for the past several years.
It seemed like something deliberate and specific, worn against the skin with the familiarity of an accoutrement she never removed.
My mouth went slightly dry. To my distress, I found myself thinking about the carvings on the cavern wall. I thought about the phrase bed thrall. I thought about the expression on the faces of the women in those carvings, the settled, undone quality of it, and I thought: stop it, Ilsa.
“Do you have a card?” I asked. My voice came out steadier than I felt.
She tilted her head slightly. “I could give you a card,” she said. “Or you could simply come with me. The agency is five minutes from here. You could see it, meet some of the staff, have a sense of whether it might interest you.” A small pause. “I think it would interest you.”
I should have asked for the card. I knew, in the part of my brain that had navigated three years of graduate school, two field seasons, and the particular social minefield of academic conferences, that I should have taken the woman’s card and put it in my pocket…
and then of course done nothing with it.
At the very least, even if I did find the situation rather intriguing, I should have done some appropriate due diligence before going anywhere with a stranger who had approached me at a café.
But she had a collar on. And I had spent the previous evening in a limestone cavern having an experience that had rearranged something fundamental in my understanding of my own body.
Sitting here in the morning sun pretending to be a normal person was not, it turned out, something I could do for more than about forty-five minutes.
“All right,” I said.
She stood. I blinked up at her for one crucial moment. I let the moment pass; I stood. I left money on the table and followed the beautiful woman in the collar down the street.
Agenzia Ostia—the Ostia Agency—occupied the ground floor of a building on a quiet side street, behind a facade of pale stone that gave nothing away.
Inside, though, the reception area had the kind of atmosphere that communicated money without displaying it: clean lines, good art, a marble floor that had been there for a hundred years and polished until it reflected the light from the tall windows like still water.
The air had a floral scent that reminded me of a five-star hotel, from the very few times I’d ever entered one.
The woman behind the reception desk looked up when we entered.
She smiled at my companion with the ease of long familiarity, and then she looked at me with the same professional appraisal I had already received on the street.
I noticed, because I was already looking for it, that she too wore a collar.
The receptionist’s appeared slightly wider than my companion’s, and made of a different shade of leather, but unmistakably the same category of thing.
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“This is Ilsa,” said the woman who had brought me here. I realized I didn’t know her name. “We’ll use room three.”
“Of course, Giovanna,” said the receptionist, and her eyes moved back to me with an expression I couldn’t quite read.
Room three lay down a short hallway, past two closed doors.
It was small and very clean with white walls.
It held a low-backed chair upholstered in black leather, a black leather-covered coffee table, and nothing else of note.
Giovanna—I had her name now—came in behind me and closed the door.
The click of the latch seemed louder than it should have.
“So,” I said, turning to face her. “How does this work? Do I fill out a form, or—”
“Take your clothes off, please,” Giovanna said.
The pleasantness of her tone seemed at first like the most alarming thing about it. She said it the way you say, please take a seat… the way you say, can I get you something to drink? As though the request were entirely ordinary. As though the only reasonable response was compliance.
“I’m sorry?” My voice had gone very flat.
“Your clothes.” She gestured, a small and unhurried movement. “All of them, please. I need to assess your figure properly before we proceed.”