“You mean a ring like Stonehenge?” I said peering off into the distance in the direction of the guide’s pointing finger. Percy gave me a “Don’t you know anything?” look.
“Not identical, but yes, a henge ring of standing stones,” she said.
“Why didn’t I know about this?” I said to Percy. “I love this kind of thing.”
“Shush,” he said, so I did. I soon found myself bent over and entering a long passageway, the walls of which were made out of the most amazingly large stone slabs, and thence standing in a large, somewhat beehive-shaped stone chamber. It was extraordinary, very sophisticated in design and construction, and dating apparently to almost five thousand years ago! It must have been one of the greatest architectural achievements of those times. First Vikings and now this! Who knew?
Maeshowe might date to Neolithic times, the most important but not the only chamber tomb to dot these islands, but apparently it had been reused by Vikings, possibly as the tomb of some important person in the ninth century, then looted three centuries later. There were inscriptions on the walls, Viking runes that had been translated, and if you judged the Vikings by these runes, they were a lusty lot. There seemed to be several claims to sexual exploits. There was also a reference to well-hidden treasure, but apparently none had been found there.
“You mean to tell me that Orkney is just covered with Neolithic tombs?” I said to Percy when we’d finished our tour.
“There are lots of them,” he said. “They’re still finding them on a reasonably regular basis. They just look like hills or mounds of earth, and they’re often found by accident. Mine Howe in Tankerness, for example, was found because a cow fell through the roof of it. Others are found when somebody’s sitting out admiring the scenery and the leg of the stool breaks through or something like that. There are lots here as yet undiscovered, I’m convinced of it.”
“And you want to find one?”
“Yes, I wouldn’t mind that at all.”
“I got the impression you knew how to read those runic inscriptions.”
“Sort of. I can’t do it without a textbook in front of me, but yes, with some effort I can.”
“That’s amazing. Can we go see these standing stones, seeing as we’re in the neighborhood?”
“I guess,” Percy said. He sounded a bit resigned, but when we got there he proved to be an able and enthusiastic tour guide.
The Ring of Brodgar is simply astonishing, a perfect circle of megaliths or stone slabs that measures something over three hundred feet in diameter, the slabs themselves up to about fourteen feet high. It is surrounded by a ditch, and has as its backdrop the lovely water of a loch. Purple heather blooms in and around it. There are thirty-six stones now, but apparently there were sixty, and this monument, too, dates back to the Neolithic Age. The Stones of Stenness, part of another stone circle that was in use beginning about five thousand years ago, are very tall stone slabs, a little under twenty feet. Sheep graze amongst the stones, the circle empty except for them and Percy and me. I was absolutely enchanted. What ancient ceremonies would have taken place there? What deities did these people believe in? When had the Vikings arrived? I wanted to know.
Percy insisted we drive farther north to a place on the coast called Skara Brae, site of a Neolithic village. It was an extraordinary place. You could actually see how people lived thousands of years ago, with their built-in box beds and their hearths. There were several layers of homes built over time, covering many, many centuries of habitation. I had thought, I suppose, that Stone Age peoples lived in ghastly huts, and was surprised by how sophisticated these houses were. Skara Brae was another of those serendipitous finds, having been revealed in 1850 when a terrible storm stripped the surface away.
Percy eventually tired of my endless questions and exclamations of delight, and he was limping more obviously the farther afield we went. “Kirkwall,” I said, taking pity on him. “I’ll come back and see these again later. Thank you for showing them to me.”
“That’s okay,” he said.
“I don’t suppose you would tell me why you were in Glasgow,” I said.
“Same reason you were, I expect,” he said.
“And what would you say that was?”
“I don’t know. The startling revelation, perhaps. The easy solution.”
“I didn’t find either of those.”
“Nor I. Wishful thinking, then,” he said. “For both of us.”
“We could join forces. To find the source of the second writing cabinet.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Fundamentally we’re looking for different things,” he said. “Yes, we are both looking for a piece of furniture on one level, but you are really seeking vindication.”
“When you put it like that, I suppose you’re right, but I am also looking for justice, and I remain unconvinced that justice is being served in the arrest and trial of Blair Baldwin.”
“Okay, justice, too,” he said. “I suppose.”
“Thank you for that concession.” He almost smiled. “And what is it you are looking for?”
He paused for a moment. “I’m not sure. Salvation, maybe?”
“And what form will this salvation take?”
“The Wasteland,” he said. “Since you won’t stop asking until I tell you.”
“I see. Are we talking a wasteland, or The Wasteland with capital T, capital W?”
“So many questions. The Wasteland,” he said, with the emphasis on ‘the’. “The Wasteland, the maze, the wounded king.” He laughed then, but it was a humorless sound, more bark than anything else.
“The Wasteland,” I repeated. “As in T S. Eliot. It doesn’t look very wastelandish here. In fact, it’s one of the greenest places I’ve ever been.”
“I’ll find it,” he said. “I hope we will both find what we’re looking for.”
“But we can’t do this together?”
“No, I don’t think so. It is a solitary quest, after all. We have to choose our own paths. It is simply a matter of asking the right question, and each of us in our own way will have to do that.”
Great, I thought. It’s possible I’m in a car on a relatively untraveled road with a delusional and possibly seriously disturbed person. I wanted to ask more, to tell him to stop being so obscure, but in the end I didn’t press him. Perhaps the native niceness was wearing off on me, or maybe I wasn’t in the mood for riddles. I could tell his injuries were really starting to hurt him now, and he looked very discouraged. I parked on the edge of town where he directed me, and I watched him limp away, his bent and twisted bicycle in his arms. As he reached the first corner he turned back for a moment, and I had the impression he was coming back, that there was something more he wanted to say. But he only inclined his head toward me. At the time I took that to be a silent thank-you, but since I’ve wondered if it was an acknowledgement that we were two of kind, kindred spirits, both of us unable to rest until our questions, both temporal and spiritual in the broadest sense of the word, had been answered. It is a picture of him that will stay with me a very long time.
Chapter 6
Bjarni and Oddi would endure tremendous hardship before they would reach landfall again. Buffeted by waves in the Channel and then fierce storms in the Bay of Biscay, they finally ran aground in Galicia in what is northern Spain. At the turn of the last millennium, Galicia was something of an anomaly, a rather isolated place, surrounded by sea to the north and west, cut off from the rest of Europe by mountains to the east and the armies of Muslim Spain to the south. The cape that juts out into the sea in Galicia is not called Finisterre, the end of the world, for nothing.