Chapter 33 #2
The next part of the journey blurred into a sequence of managed discomforts.
Standing. Walking. The humiliating delicacy with which I had to arrange my body to sit again, in the shuttle van.
Henrik’s hand at my elbow, efficient and possessive, and his quiet instructions to the small staff who never once seemed surprised by the state of me.
Customs, if there was any, passed invisibly around us.
Wealth and secrecy formed their own corridor through the world.
By the time we had left the airport in the dark van, I had begun to feel less like a person moving through events than an artifact being transported under controlled conditions.
I sat beside Henrik in the back while the city and outskirts and then less legible industrial spaces passed beyond the tinted windows.
Rouen, in the thin northern light, looked entirely ordinary; even the cathedral seemed just a cathedral.
That offended me somehow, as if having been to Yggdrasil I had the right to a more interesting world, rather than finding that after traveling the boughs of the Worldtree everything in reality seemed even more mundane.
I kept wanting to ask questions. About Mary.
About Sven. About Aksel, apparently another Son of Odin.
About the Sons of Odin’s archives and whether anyone anywhere had ever described a Chinese tree.
Each question pressed at my lips and then stopped.
The prohibition on speaking the vision seemed to spread to the whole territory around it.
At last the van descended a ramp into an underground garage so nondescript that at first I thought there had been some mistake.
Concrete, white-painted columns, numbered spaces, fluorescent strips overhead.
The place had the aggressively characterless quality of urban utility everywhere on earth.
I frowned as Henrik guided me out. The soreness in my body made my steps short and careful.
Giovanna emerged behind us, immaculate as ever, her heels clicking against the cement.
“This,” I said before I could stop myself, “is Rouen’s ancient, sacred, hidden Viking center?”
Henrik’s mouth twitched.
“Patience.”
He led us not toward an elevator bank or a visible door of consequence, but toward a section of wall beside what looked like a locked maintenance cage.
For a moment I wondered whether the whole thing had become laughably ordinary, if centuries of esoteric masculine authority in fact culminated in utility access.
Then Henrik put his hand to a point in the wall I would never have noticed, and some disguised mechanism answered. A seam appeared where I had seen only poured concrete. A panel released with a soft hydraulic sound and swung inward.
Cold air breathed out from darkness beyond.
I stopped dead.
The hidden door in an underground garage would have been enough to reverse the feeling of mundanity.
The quality of the space beyond, though, lit up my imagination the same way the cavern in Sicily had; stone, old and uneven and lit with a restrained amber glow that at once erased the garage as thoroughly as a dream.
I had the immediate, irrational feeling of a world behind the world, one not metaphorical at all now but built—more, built a very long time ago.
Henrik glanced at me.
“Come, lille en.”
I went.
As we crossed the threshold the stale practical air of the garage vanished behind us.
The passage beyond descended only a little, but it was enough to make me feel the city lifting away.
Stone closed around us. I saw carvings in places, obviously older than the ones in the sanctuary under Capo Zafferano, worn smooth by time and passing hands.
Lamps recessed into niches cast gold over rough walls.
I heard no traffic. No ventilation hum. Only our footsteps and, somewhere deeper in, the suggestion of a chamber large enough to gather echoes.
Then the passage opened.
I saw Sven first, tall and pale and composed in the amber light, and beside him…
Mary.
Her red hair. Her pale, exhausted face. Her nakedness, mirroring mine.
The unmistakable fragility in the way she held herself, as if every part of her below the waist still remembered, just as those parts of my body did.
For one heartbeat I saw her in two forms at once: here in a worldly body, and there on the branch, bright with impossible recognition.
Then she saw me, and her expression became radiant and somehow sad at the same time.
We moved at the same time, toward each other, without any permission from our masters but willing, I felt, to endure any whipping we might get as long as we could get it side by side.
One moment we stood on opposite sides of the threshold between passage and chamber, and the next we were in each other’s arms with a force that made me gasp because of my sore body.
She clung to me. I clung to her. We both trembled.
“It was you,” she whispered against my shoulder.
“Yes,” I said, already crying. “Yes, you, too.”
Her laugh turned into a sob. Mine did too. The relief was so intense it felt almost animal. She was real, and the tree was real.
“So,” said Sven, “you girls have given our scientific approach to the visions of the v?lur quite a difficult challenge. And that’s before we even consider the Chinese problem.”