ONE

Someone had written ‘godforsaken’ between ‘Welcome to’ and ‘Caithness’ on the road sign. When he saw the emendation, the surveyor almost smiled.

“Tourists, I expect,” said the archaeologist disapprovingly. She had decided that the Highlands were authentic and good; therefore, any malice towards them must have proceeded from uncomprehending outsiders.

“I hope not,” yawned the surveyor, lighting a cigarette and changing gear. “I was taking it as evidence that there’s one native of these parts who can read and write.” He paused, waiting for a laugh or an ‘I know what you mean.’ Neither was forthcoming. “Though there’s no reason why any of them should. After all, you don’t need to be able to read if you make your living robbing and killing passing travellers, which has always been the staple industry around here.”

The archaeologist looked away. He was off again. An irritating man, she felt.

“Which explains the ingrained poverty of the region,” the surveyor went on remorselessly, “because only a few bloody fools ever used to come travelling up here. Until recently, of course. Recently, you’ve had your coach loads of tourists. Theme holidays for heavy sleepers. Anyway, these days the locals don’t even bother killing the travellers; they just sell them tartan key-fobs. And they all take the FT, to keep track of currency fluctuations.”

The archaeologist had had enough of her companion’s diatribe, which had started before the car had got clear of Lairg. Rather ostentatiously she fanned away the cigarette smoke and expressed the opinion that it was all lovely. “I think it’s got a sort of—”

The surveyor made a peculiar noise. “Listen,” he said, “I was born and bred in bonnie bloody Caithness, and the only thing it’s produced in a thousand years is starving people.” He’d read that in a Scottish Nationalist manifesto, but it sounded clever. “Five years ago, the inhabitants of Rolfsness pleaded with the Water Authority to turn the wretched place into a reservoir so that they could be compensated and move to Glasgow. But it’s too remote even for that. The Army won’t have it for a firing range, and the CEGB got lost trying to find it.”

He was getting nicely into his stride now, despite the lukewarm response. The archaeologist managed to interrupt him just in time.

“That reminds me,” she said, tearing her eyes away from a breathtakingly lovely prospect of cloud-topped mountains, “I wanted to ask you, since you were born here. Are there any old traditions or folk-tales about Rolfsness?”

“Folk-tales.” The surveyor frowned, as if deep in thought. “Well, there’s an old superstition among the shepherds and crofters—but you know what they’re like.”

“Go on.” The archaeologist felt a tremor of excitement.

“Well, they say that every year on the anniversary of the battle of Culloden—you know about the battle of Culloden?”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

“They say that every year, at about noon, the bus from Wick to Melvich stops here for three minutes where the old gibbet used to be. But nobody’s ever claimed to have seen it for themselves.”

Dead silence. The surveyor shook his head sadly. Americans, he reflected, have no sense of humour.

“Otherwise, apart from Bonnie Prince Charlie hiding from Butcher Cumberland’s men in what is now the bus shelter, where Montrose had been betrayed to the Covenanters, no. Totally unremarkable place. Now, if there was a story that Montrose wasn’t betrayed to the Covenanters here, that would be a bit out of the ordinary.”

“I see.” The archaeologist sniffed. She should have known better than to ask. “So nothing about giants or fairies or the Wee Folk?”

“Round here,” said the surveyor grimly, “the Wee Folk means Japanese businessmen looking for sites for computer factories. Not that they ever build any, of course. Have you ever tasted Japanese whisky? All the hotels up here sell it now. Personally, I prefer it to the local stuff.”

The archaeologist gave up in despair, and they drove on in silence for a while. Then, as they turned a sharp corner on the side of a towering hill, the archaeologist suddenly asked the surveyor to stop the car.

“What is it?” said the surveyor, glancing anxiously in his rear-view mirror, but the archaeologist said nothing. She had no words to spare for such an insensitive person at the moment when she caught her first glimpse of the sea that washes the flat top of the British mainland, and, grey and soft-edged as any dream-kingdom should be, the faint outline of Orkney. On an impulse, she opened the car door and scrambled up to the top of a rocky outcrop.

Here, then, was the earldom of her mind, her true habitation. She felt as Orestes must have done when, coming secretly out of exile, he looked for the first time upon Argos, the land he had been born to rule. That was the sea of her Cambridge dreams, those were the islands she had first pictured for herself sitting on the front porch in Setauket, Long Island, with her treasured copy of the Orkney-men’s Saga open on her knee. As a promised land it had been to her as she trod the weary road of professional scholarship, laying down her harp beside the waters of Cam, marching more than seven times round the book-shops of St Andrews. As she gazed out over the sea, called ‘whale-road’ and ‘world-serpent’, she could almost see the blue sails of the Orkney Vikings, the dragon-prows of Ragnar Lothbrok and Erik Bloodaxe, sweeping across their great grey highway to give battle to Bothvar Bjarki or Arvarodd in the vik at Tongue.

“On a clear day,” said the surveyor behind her, “you can just make Out the Old Man of Hoy from here. Why you should want to is beyond me entirely.”

“I think it’s wonderful,” said the archaeologist softly.

“I think it’s perishing cold. Can we get on now?”

They got back into the van.

“Tell me again what it is you’ve found,” said the archaeologist briskly.

“Well,” said the surveyor, leaning back with one hand on the bottom of the steering-wheel, “we were taking readings, and I’d just sent the Land-Rover up ahead when it fell clean through this small mound. Right up to its axles, useless bloody thing, we had to use the Transit to pull it out again. Anyway, we got it out and when we looked down the hole it had made we saw this chamber underground, all shored up with pit props. I thought it was an Anderson shelter or something left over from the war, but the lads all said no, ten to one it was a Viking ship-burial.”

“They said that?”

“They all work for the Tourist Board over the summer. So we put a tarpaulin over it and sent for your mob.”

“Didn’t you want to look for yourselves?”

The surveyor laughed. “You must be kidding. Roof might collapse or something. Besides, you aren’t supposed to touch anything, are you, until the experts arrive. Or is that murders?”

The archaeologist smiled. “You did right,” she said.

“The lads get paid by the hour,” said the surveyor, “and I’m on bonus for being in this wilderness. Besides, if it does turn out to be an ancient monument, the project will be cancelled, and we can all go home with money in lieu. Look, there it is.”

He pulled over on to the verge, and they picked their way over the uneven ground to the site. The archaeologist found that she was faced with a long leaf-shaped mound about fifty to sixty yards long, pointing due north. Under her woolly hat her hairs were beginning to rise, and she broke into a trot, her moon-boots squelching in the saturated peat. The sheer size of it made her heart beat faster. If there really was a ship down there, and if anything at all was left of it, this was going to make the Mary Rose look like a pedalo.

The survey team were staring at her over their cans of lager, but she took no notice. As she struggled with the obdurate ropes that held the tarpaulin in place, an old man in a raincoat apparently moulded on to his body got up hurriedly and started to wave his arms at her. To her joy, the archaeologist realised that he was a Highlander, and that the gist of his broken English was that she was on no account to open up the mound. She beamed at him (for surely this was some survival of the ancestral terror of waking up the sleepers under the howe) and said, “Pardon me?” Her pleasure was somewhat diminished when the surveyor explained to her that what the old fool meant was that he’d spent half the morning nailing the tarpaulin down in the teeth of a gale, and that if she insisted on taking it off she could bloody well put it back herself.

The tarpaulin was thrown back, and the archaeologist nerved herself to look inside and seek her destiny. She had always felt that one day she would make a great discovery, something which would join her with Carnavon, Carter, Evans and Schliemann in the gallery of immortals. On the rare occasions when archaeology had lost its grip on her imagination—seemingly endless afternoons spent up to her knees in mud in some miserable Dartmoor hut-circle—she had consoled herself by trying to compose a deathless line, something which would be remembered beside ‘I have looked upon the face of Agamemnon’. Although so far in her career she had found, apart from enough potsherds to line the bottom of every flowerpot in the world, nothing more prestigious than a Tudor belt-buckle, she knew that one day she, Hildy Frederiksen, would join that select band of immortals who have been fortunate enough to be the first men and women of the modern age to set eyes upon the heirlooms of the human race. She knelt down and with trembling fingers checked the contents of her organiser bag: camera (with film in it), notebook, pencil, small brush, flashlight (free with ten Esso tokens) and small plastic bags for samples.

In the event, what she actually said when the beam of her flashlight licked over the contents of the mound was ‘Jesus!’ but in the circumstances nobody could have blamed her for that. What she saw was the prow of a ship—a long clinker-built ship of a unique and unmistakable kind. The timbers were coal-black and glistening with moisture, but the thing actually seemed to be intact. As the blood pounded in her ears she thanked God for the preservative powers of peat-bog tannin, took a deep breath, and plunged into the hole like a small, learned terrier.

The chamber was intact; so much so, in fact, that the possibility of its collapsing never entered into her mind. The sides were propped with massive beams—oak, at a guess—which vaulted high overhead, while the chamber had been dug a considerable depth into the ground. Under her feet the earth was hard, as if it had been stamped flat into a floor. The ship itself reclined at ease on a stout trestle, as if it was already taking its rightful place in a purpose-built gallery at the maritime museum at Greenwich. It was an indescribably beautiful thing, with the perfection of line and form that only something designed to be functional can have, lean and graceful and infinitely menacing, like a man-eating swan. Every feature she could have hoped to find in an archetypal Viking long-ship was present—this in itself was remarkable, since none of the ships so far discovered looked anything like the authoritative reconstructions in the Journal of Scandinavian Studies—from the painted shields beside each of the thirty oar-holes on either side of the ship to the great dragon figurehead, carved with a deep confident design of gripping beasts and interwoven snakes. Although it was strictly against the rules, she could not help reaching out, almost but not quite like Adam in the painting, and tracing with the tip of her left forefinger the line of the surrealistic pattern.

Like a child who has woken to find itself inexplicably inside a confectioner’s warehouse, she walked slowly round the great ship, noting the various features of it as if with an inventory. Suddenly the light of her flashlight was thrown back by a sparkle of gold: inlaid runes running back from the prow, glowing bright as neon. She spelt them out, like a child learning its alphabet; Naglfar, the ship of nails, the ferry of the dead. It was so utterly perfect that for a moment she could not bear to look, in case her light fell on an outboard motor bolted to the stern, or a slogan draped across the mast advertising Carlsberg lager.

She touched it again, and the damp sticky feel of the tannin reassured her. Turn the Circus Maximus into a car park, she said to herself, and wrap fish in the First Folio; preserve only this. As if in a dream, she put her foot on the first rung of a richly carved ladder that rested against the side of the ship.

At the top of the ladder was a small platform, with steps leading down into the hold. She stood for a moment unable to move, for the belly of the ship was piled high with the most extraordinary things, jumbled up together as if History was holding a garage sale. Gold and silver, fabrics, armour and weapons, like the aftermath of an earthquake at a museum. She rubbed her eyes and stared. Under the truncated mast, she could see twelve full sets of armour lying wrapped in fur cloaks, perfectly preserved. No, she was wrong. They were human bodies.

Then the flashlight went out.

The human heart is a volatile thing. A second or so before, Hildy I-Have-Looked-Upon-The-Face-Of Frederiksen had been thanking Providence that she alone had been granted the privilege of being the first living person in twelve hundred years to set foot on the planks of the longship Naglfar. Now, however, it occurred to her as she stood motionless in the complete silence and utter darkness that it would have been quite nice to have had someone there to share the moment with her, preferably someone with a reliable flashlight. She reminded herself sternly that archaeology is a science, that scientists are creatures of logic and reason, that she was a scientist, therefore she was not in the least afraid of the dark. However, being afraid seemed at that particular moment the most logical thing in the world, the reason why fear circuits had been planted in the human brain in the first place. So deathly was the silence that for a moment she took the sound of her own breathing for the snoring of the twelve dead Vikings lying just a few yards away from her under the mast. She tried to move, but could not; her muscles received the command from her brain and replied that they had never heard anything so absurd in their lives. She reflected that burglars must feel like this all the time, but the thought was little consolation.

As suddenly as it had gone out, the flashlight came back on again—the ways of petrol-station flashlights pass all understanding—and Hildy decided that, although it was really nice inside the chamber, it was probably even nicer outside it. As she turned away towards the ladder, she felt something under her foot and without thinking stooped and picked it up. It felt very cold in her hand, and was heavy, like a pistol. She stopped for a moment and looked at it. In her hand was a golden brooch inlaid with enamel and garnets, in the shape of a flying dragon. She half-expected it to move suddenly, like an injured bird picked up in the garden. The beam of the flashlight danced on interlocking patterns and spirals, and she felt dizzy. She knew perfectly well that she ought not to touch this thing, let alone thrust it deep into her pocket, and equally well that no power on earth could stop her doing it. Then she imagined another noise in the chamber and, with the brooch in her pocket, she scurried down the ladder and out of the mound like a rabbit with a ferret the size of a Tube train after it.

As the top of her hat emerged into the light, the surveyor put his copy of Custom Car back in his pocket and asked: “Are you all right, then?”

“Of course I am,” Hildy stammered. She was shaking, and sweat had turned her fringe into little black spikes, like the horns of a stag-beetle. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

“You were down there an awful long time,” said the surveyor. It had just occurred to him that more portable things than ships are sometimes found in ancient mounds.

“Very interesting,” Hildy said. “I wish I could be sure it was authentic.”

The surveyor was staring at something sticking out of the pocket of her paddock jacket. She put her hand over it and hitched her lips into a smile.

“So there’s nothing like—well, artefacts or anything down there?” asked the surveyor, rather too casually. Hildy tightened her grip round the neck of the brooch.

“Could be,” she mumbled. “If I’d been brave enough to look. But the roof looks like it might collapse at any minute, so I came out again.”

“The roof?”

“Perilous, if you ask me. I think I heard it moving.” The surveyor’s face seemed to fall. “Perhaps we should try to shore it up,” he suggested. “I could go in and have a look. Of course, you needn’t go in.”

Hildy nodded vigorously. “Go ahead,” she said. “Where’s the nearest phone, by the way, in case we have to call for help?”

As she expected, the surveyor didn’t like the sound of that. “On the other hand,” he said, “it’s a job for the experts.”

“True.”

“Best leave well alone.”

Hildy nodded.

It had started to rain, and the survey team were making chorus noises. “What I’d better do,” the surveyor said, “since we can’t do anything more for the present, is send the lads home and take you back to Lairg. You lot,” he shouted to the survey team, “get that hole covered up.”

The old man in the raincoat said something authentic, but they ignored him and set about replacing the tarpaulin. “We’d better wait till they’re on their way,” whispered the surveyor. “Otherwise—well, they might be tempted to see if there was anything of value down there.”

“Surely not?”

Neither Hildy nor the surveyor had much to say on the way back to Lairg. Hildy was thinking of a passage from Beowulf which she had had to do as a prepared translation during her first year at New York State, all about a man who stole a rich treasure from a hoard he found in a burial-mound, and woke a sleeping fire-drake in the process. She could remember it vividly, almost word for word, and it had had a decidedly unhappy ending.

The surveyor bundled her out of the car at Lairg and drove away rather quickly, which made Hildy feel somewhat suspicious. So she telephoned the police at Melvich and explained the situation to them slowly and lucidly. Once they had been made to understand that she was not mad or drunk they sounded very enthusiastic about the prospect of guarding buried treasure and promised to send the patrol car out as soon as it came back from finding Annie Erskine’s cat. Feeling easier in her mind, Hildy went into the hotel bar and ordered a double orange juice with ice. As she drank it, she drew out the brooch and looked round to see if anyone was watching. But the barman had gone back to the Australian soaps in the television room, and she was alone.

The brooch was an exquisite example of its kind, the finest that Hildy had ever seen. The form was as simple as the decoration was complex, and it reminded her of something she had seen recently in quite another context. Slowly, the magnitude of her discovery and its attendant excitement began to return to her, and as soon as she had finished her drink she left the bar, reversed the charges to the Department of Archaeology, and demanded to speak to the Director personally.

“George?” she said calmly (he had always been Professor Wood to anyone under the rank of senior lecturer, but he had never found so much as a row-boat). “It’s Hildy Frederiksen here—yes, that’s right—and I’m calling from Lairg. L-A-I-R-G.” He was being vague again, she noticed, an affectation he was much given to, especially after lunch. “I’m just back from a first inspection of that mound site at Rolfsness. George, you’re not going to believe this, but…”

As she spoke, her hand crept of its own accord into her pocket and closed around the flying dragon. Something seemed to tell her that on no account ought she to keep this extraordinarily beautiful and dangerous thing for herself, but that nevertheless that was what she was going to do, fire-drake or no fire-drake.

In the mound, it was dark and silent once again. For the past twelve hundred years, ever since the last turf had been laid over the trellis of oak-trunks and the horsemen had ridden away to the waiting ships, nothing had moved in the chamber, not so much as a mole or a worm. But now there was something missing that should have been there, and just as one tiny stone removed from an arch makes the whole structure unsound, so the peace of the chamber had been disturbed. Something moved in the darkness, and moved again, with the restlessness that attends on the last few moments before waking.

“For crying out loud,” said a voice, faint and drowsy in the darkness, “there’s some of us trying to sleep.”

The silence had been broken, irrecoverably, like a pane of glass. “You what?” said another voice.

“I said there’s people trying to sleep,” said the first voice. “Shut it, will you?”

“You shut up,” replied the second voice. “You’re the one making all the noise.”

“Do you two mind?” A third voice, deep and powerful, and the structure of beams seemed to vibrate to its resonance. “ ‘Quiet as the grave,’ they say. Some hope.”

“Sorry,” said the first two voices. The silence tried to return, as the retreating tide tries to claw its way back up the beach.

“I told you, didn’t I?” continued the third voice after a while. “I warned you not to eat that cheese, but would you listen? If you can’t sleep, then be quiet.”

There was a sound of movement, metal scraping on metal, as if men in armour were turning in their sleep and groaning. “It’s no good,” said the third voice, “you’ve done it now.”

Somewhere in the gloom there was a high-pitched squeaking sound, like a bat high up in the rafters of a barn. It might conceivably have been a human voice, if a man could ever grow so incredibly old. After the sound had died away, like water draining into sand, there was absolute quiet; but an uneasy, tense quiet. The mound was awake.

“The wizard says try counting sheep,” said the second voice.

“I heard him myself,” said the third voice. “Bugger counting sheep. I’ve counted enough sheep since I’ve been down here to clothe the Frankish Empire. Oh, the Hel with it. Somebody open a window.”

There was a grating sound, and a creaking of long-relaxed timber. “Sod it,” said the first voice, “some clown’s moved the ladder.”

The old man grinned, displaying both his yellow teeth, and cut the final cord of the tarpaulin. Two of his fellows pulled the cover free, while the other members of the survey team, who had come back in the expectation of wealth, stood by with dustbin liners. In about fifteen minutes, they were all going to be rich.

“Can you see anything, Dougal?” someone asked. The old man grunted and wormed his way into the hole. A moment later, he slid Out backwards and started to run like a hare. The survey team watched him in amazement, then turned round and stared at the mouth of the hole. A helmeted head had appeared out of the darkness, with a gauntleted hand in front of its eyes to protect them from the light.

“All right,” it said irritably, “which one of you jokers moved our ladder?”

Hildy waited and waited, but no one came. She tried to pass the time by rereading her favourite sagas, but even their familiar glories failed to hold her attention. For in her mind’s eye, as she read, the old images and mental pictures, which had been developed in the distant and unheroic town of Setauket, were all displaced and usurped by new, rather more accurate visions. For example, she had always pictured the lonely hall on the fells where Gunnar of Hlidarend, the archetypal hero of saga literature, had made his last stand as being the disused shed on the vacant lot down by the tracks, so that by implication Mord Valgardsson had led the murderers out of the drugstore on the corner of Constitution Street, where presumably they had stiffened their resolve for their bloody deed with a last ice-cream soda. Sigmund and Sinfjotli had been chained to the log that was the felled apple tree in her own back yard, and there the wolf who was really the shape-changer king had come in the blue night and bitten off Sigmund’s hand. Thus was maintained the link between the Elder Days and her own childhood; but the sight of the ship and the heaped gold had broken the link. She had seen with her own eyes a real live dead Viking, who had never been anywhere near Setauket and was therefore rather more exciting and rather less safe. Long Island Vikings were different; they had stopped at the front door, and never dared go into the house. But the Caithness variety seemed rather more pervasive. They were all around her, even under the bed—in the shape of the brooch in her suitcase.

Hildy tried her best not to unpack it from under the shirts and sweatshirts and hold it up to the light, but she was only flesh and blood. It seemed to glow in her hands, to move not with the beatings of her pounding heart but with a movement of its own, as if it were some thing of power. She made an attempt to study it professionally, to see if that would dispel its glamour; undoubted Swedish influences, garnets probably from India but cut in Denmark, yet the main work was in the classical Norwegian style and the runes were those of the futharc of Orkney. She stopped, and frowned. She had not noticed the runes before; but the keen light of the reading-lamp seemed to flow into them, like water into a channel when a dam is opened, so that they stood out tiny but unmistakable on the main curve of the central spiral of the decoration.

Runes. For some reason her heart had stopped beating. Perhaps it was some magic in those extraordinary letters, first created at a time when any writing was by definition magical, a secret mark on silent metal that could communicate without speech to the eyes of a wise lore-master. Runes cannot help being magical, even if what they spell out is commonplace; a rune cut on the lintel will keep the sleepless ghosts from riding on the roof, or put a curse on the house that curdles milk and makes all the fires suddenly go out. Runes were also spells of attraction; to learn the runes, the god Odin had made himself a human sacrifice at his own altar, and ever since they had had a power to command. For all she knew, it was their command that had drawn her, by way of New York State and Cambridge, across the grey sea all the way from Setauket to be the improbable heroine of some last quest.

The strange wonder of the thing did not altogether fade or wither as it lay in her hands: the runes were still runes, and the brooch was still incredible. A Viking brooch in a museum or under the fluorescent tubes of the laboratory of the Department of Archaeology was resentfully tame, like a caged lion, and its voice was silent. Outside on the cold hill the wild lion roared, fascinating and dangerous, while in the incongruous setting of a hotel bedroom it was like—well, like a wild lion in a hotel bedroom, where no pets or animals of any description are in any circumstances permitted.

Rationalised, what that meant was that she was feeling guilty about having stolen it, which was effectively what she had done, something which no archaeologist, however debased, would ever conceive of doing. So why, she asked her suitcase, had she done it?

“I must put it back,” she said aloud.

The only vehicle for hire in Lairg was a large minibus, by all appearances coeval with the longship Naglfar and about as practical for winding Scottish roads. But Hildy was in no position to be choosy, and she set off with an Ordnance Survey map open on the seat beside her, to drive to Rolfsness and put the brooch back in the mound before the team from St Andrews got there. As the deliberately obstructive road meandered its way through the grey hills, she could feel her resolve crumbling like an ancient parchment; the wild animal commanded her to return it to its natural habitat, not to put it back where middle-aged men with careers would come to find it and make it turn the treadmill of some thesis or scholarly paper.

She stopped the van and took it out once more. The dragon’s expression had not changed; his garnet eyes were still red and hot as iron on the anvil; his lips still curved, in accordance with the demands of symmetry and form, in the same half-smile of intolerant mockery. She was suddenly aware that blood had been spilt over the possession of this extraordinary thing, and convinced that blood might well be shed for it again.

A loud hooting behind her, and plainly audible oaths, not in Old High Norse but modern Scots, woke her from her self-induced hypnosis. She rammed the van into first gear and drove on to the verge, letting the council lorry pass. Now she felt extremely foolish, and the voice in the runes fell silent, leaving her to her embarrassment. Listening to dragon brooches, said another, rather more familiar voice in her head, is only one step away from talking to dragons, for which they take you to a place where people are very kind and understanding, and where eventually the dragons start talking back. She bundled the brooch back into her pocket and took off the handbrake.

It was nearly dark when she reached Rolfsness, but the new, sensible Hildy Frederiksen defied nightfall as she defied all the other works of sorcery. She parked the bus under a lonely rowan tree and trotted swiftly over to the mound. There was no tarpaulin over the hole and no sign of the police, and her archaeologist’s instinct returned, all the stronger for having been challenged. A terrible fear that the mound had been plundered while her attention was distracted struck her, and she started to blame herself. Why, for a start, had she left the mound in the first place, like a lamb among wolves, unguarded against the return of those unsavoury contractors’ men? She fumbled for her flashlight and dropped it; the back came off and all the batteries were spilt into the short wiry grass. Her fingers were unruly as she tried to reassemble it, for clearly everything she tried to do today was fated to come to no good. When the wretched thing was mended, she advanced like an apprentice lion-tamer on the hole in the side of the mound, afraid now not of what she might see but of what she might not. With a deep breath that seemed to fill not only her lungs but also her pockets and the very lining of her jacket she poked one toe into the mouth of the hole, as if it were a hot bath she was testing. Something seemed to move inside.

“Now what is it?” demanded a voice from under the earth.

So she had disturbed the plunderers at their work! Suddenly her small familiar body was filled with cold and unreasonable courage, for here was a chance to redeem herself in the eyes of Archaeology by falling in battle with tomb-robbers and unlicensed dealers in antiquities.

“OK,” she said between clenched teeth, “you’d better come out now. We have this whole area surrounded.”

There was a clanking noise, as of something very heavy moving, and somebody said: “Why don’t you look where you’re putting your great feet?” Then a ray of the setting sun fell suddenly on red gold and blue steel, and a man stood silhouetted against the sky on the edge of the mound.

He was a little over six feet tall, clad in gilded chain-mail armour. His face was half-covered by the grotesque mask that formed the visor of his shining helmet, while around his bear-like shoulders was a thick grey fur cloak, fastened at the neck by a brooch in the shape of two gripping beasts. In his right hand was a hand-and-a-half sword whose pommel blazed with garnets, like the lights of distant watch-fires.

“Who the hell are you?” said the man from the mound.

Hildy did not answer, for she could not remember. The man clapped his gauntleted hands, whereupon a procession of twelve men emerged from the mound. Nine of them were similarly armed and masked, and on their arms they carried kite-shaped shields that seemed to burn in the setting sun. Of the other three, one was small and stooping, dressed in a long white robe that blurred the outlines of his body like low cloud over a hillside, but his face was covered by a hood of cat skins and he leant on a staff cut from a single walrus tusk, carved into the shape of a serpent. The second of the three was a huge man, bigger than any human being Hildy had ever seen before, and he was dressed in the pelt of a long-haired bear. On his shoulder he carried a great halberd, whose blade was as long as its tree-like shaft. The third was shorter than the rest of the armed men but still tall, slim and quick-moving like a dancer. He wore no armour, but only a doublet of purple and dark blue hose. Tucked under his arm was a gilded harp, while over his right shoulder was a longbow of ash-wood and a quiver of green-flighted arrows.

They looked around them, shading their eyes even against the red warmth of the setting sun, as if any light was unbearable to them. One of the armed men, who was carrying a spear with a banner of cloth bound to its shaft, turned to the others and pushed his helmet back, revealing a face at once young and old, with soft brown eyes under stern brows.

“Well,” he said. “Here we are again. So how long do you reckon we’ve been down there?”

“No idea,” said the man next to him, who carried a silver horn on a woven baldric. “Ask the wizard. He’ll know.”

The standard-bearer repeated his question, slowly and loudly, to the small stooping man, who made a noise through the cat skins like a rusty hinge.

“He says twelve hundred years, give or take,” said the standard-bearer. No one seemed in the least surprised (except Hildy, of course, and she was not as surprised as she would have expected to be). The horn-bearer cast his eyes slowly round the encircling hills, inexpressibly majestic in the light glow of the sunset.

“Twelve hundred years,” he said thoughtfully. “Well, if that’s true, it hasn’t changed a bit, not in the slightest.” He looked round again. “Pity, really,” he added. “Miserable place, Caithness.”

Hildy suddenly remembered that she had to breathe sooner or later or else she would die, and it would be a shame to die before she had found out whether the unbelievable explanation for this spectacle, which was nevertheless the only possible explanation, was correct.

“Excuse me,” she said in a tiny voice, “but are you people for real?” The words seemed to flop Out of her mouth, like exhausted salmon who have finally given up on a waterfall.

“Good question,” replied the leader of the men. “What about you?”

Hildy wanted to say “I’m not sure”, but she realised that the man was being sarcastic, which was the last thing she expected. “I’m Hildy Frederiksen,” she mumbled, aware that in all this vastness and mystery that one small fact could have little significance. Still, she wanted it put on record before it was wiped out of her mind.

“Well, now,” said the leader, still sarcastic but with a hint of sympathy in his voice, “you shouldn’t have told me that, should you? After all, when strangers meet by night on the fells, they should not disclose their names, nor the names of their fathers, until they have tested each other’s heart with shrewd enquiry.” Then his face seemed to relax a little behind the fixed scowl of his visor. “Don’t ask me why, mind. It’s just the rule.”

But Hildy said nothing. The other men from the mound were staring at her, and for the first time she felt afraid.

“Damned silly rule if you ask me,” said the leader, as if he sensed her fear. “The hours I’ve wasted asking gnomic questions when I could have been doing something else. Is this place still called Rolfsness?”

Hildy nodded.

“Then, allow me to introduce myself. I am Rolf. My name is King Hrolf Ketilsson, called the Earthstar, the son of Ketil Trout, the son of Eyjolf Kjartan’s Bane, the son of Killer-Hrapp of Hedeby, the son of the god Odin. I have been asleep in the howe for—how long have I been asleep in the howe, somebody?”

“Twelve hundred years,” said the horn-bearer.

“Thank you. Twelve hundred years, waiting for the day when I must return to save my kingdom of Caithness from danger, from the greatest danger that has ever or will ever threaten it or its people, according to the vow that I made before the great battle of Melvich, when I slew the host of Geirrodsgarth and cast down the power of Nithspél. These are my thanes and housecarls.”

With a sweeping movement of his hand, he lifted his helmet over his head, revealing a magnificent mane of jet-black hair and two startlingly blue eyes. Hildy felt her knees give way, as if someone had kicked them from behind, and she knelt before him, bowing her head to the ground. When she dared to look up, she saw the last ray of the setting sun sparkling triumphantly on the hilt of the King’s great sword as, apparently from nowhere, a fully grown golden eagle swooped down out of the sky and perched on his gloved fist, flapping its enormous wings.