“Not at all,” I said. “I appreciate your company very much, and I hope we’ll be friends. I think we are already.”
“You are so nice. If you don’t mind, I might just have a nap before dinner. I haven’t been sleeping that well.”
“A nap sounds good to me, too.”
“Good. We’re leaving at seven-thirty. We have two other guests, Lester whom you know, and there’s someone else as well, Simon Spence, a museum consultant. He’s a friend of both Lester’s and Robert’s.”
“I look forward to it.”
“I meant what I said about staying on longer. Robert can fly his plane back, and I’ll take a regular flight whenever it works for you.”
“Robert has his own plane?”
“He does. He loves to fly, mybe even more than golf. If the weather’s good, he might even take you up in it. Or out in his boat. He does love his toys. See you about six-thirty downstairs for a cocktails.”
I suppose Maya really did have a nap. I, however, borrowed some binoculars—she had, after all, told me to help myself to anything I needed—and turned them on the house across the way. I watched for some time but saw no one, just the wind blowing dried brush around the yard. It was a very dismal spot, all the more so because Orkney seems such an orderly and tidy place. Then for something to do, I turned the binoculars on Robert, who was hitting golf balls, and Drever, who kept working way out of Robert’s range. I decided that Maya was right, and that Drever spent most of his time making sure every blade of grass on the green was perfect. At some point both Robert and Drever walked over the hill toward the sea together, maybe looking for golf balls.
Dinner that evening, in the dining room of the Foveran Hotel in St. Ola was very pleasant. The food was spectacular, the conversation stimulating, although I was not exactly sparkling myself. Lester was amusing, Robert and Maya both generous hosts. Simon Spence, the museum consultant was from Edinburgh, in Orkney on a contract of some kind with Historic Scotland.
I finally managed to work in the question I needed to have answered, which is to say, what is an “orc”? Spence launched into an explanation immediately. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed that “orc” was essentially part of the place name where I found myself, the “orc” in Orkney.
“The Norse called these islands Orkneyjar,” he said. He pronounced it more or less orc-nee-yahr. “That was their interpretation of a much older name for the islands. The Celts referred to the islands in Old Gaelic, as Insi Orc, or ‘Island of the Orcs,” which is to say young pigs or wild boar. Not that we think Gaelic was ever spoken in Orkney, although it’s possible the Picts, who were here a very long time ago, spoke a type of Celtic language. It was not Gaelic, though. When the Norse, or Vikings, arrived in the ninth century, they assumed the name meant Seal Islands, because their word for seal was orkn. Eyjar means ’islands,“ hence Seal Islands. But the name predates the arrival of the Vikings by hundreds and hundreds of years. The Romans knew the islands as the Orcades, for example, and the Romans were long gone by the time the Vikings showed up here. Some believe that the Picts, who were here before the Vikings, took the boar as their symbol, which would explain the name.”
I told him how interesting I thought all this was, and I meant it. Bjarni the Wanderer had hidden the cauldron in the tomb of the pigs or the boar, or maybe the seals. Not that I was any further ahead in actually nailing this down, mind you, but at least I knew what the word meant, and that it was not so far-fetched in this place given the long history. Would Bjarni have thought the tomb held the bones of seals? I suppose it depended when and by whom the line had been written.
“I don’t suppose you could explain why this island is called the Mainland,” Maya said. “Given that it is an island, and what I would call the Mainland would be Scotland proper, the Highlands and such.”
“Corruption of the Norse name for it, Meginland,” Spence said. “Just to make it more confusing, what is now the Mainland may once have been called Hrossey, or Horse Island.” That, too, was interesting, in that it showed that Kenny the Adorable knew what he was talking about, even if that animal on his treasure map was really a camel. “You do all know that you call these islands Orkney and not the Orkneys unless you want to sound like an ignorant tourist.”
“That much we figured out,” Robert said. “And we know it’s the Mainland, not just Mainland, as in we are touring around the Mainland.”
“That is correct,” Spence said. “Always good to call a place by the name preferred by those who live there.”
“So the names are essentially Scandinavian, not Gaelic or whatever?” Lester asked.
“True. Norn, a Norse language was spoken here for almost a thousand years. It was supplanted by English, not Gaelic. The last official Norn document dates to the middle of the fifteenth century. Scottish earls replaced the Norse jarls, and Orkney became more Scottish than Scandinavian, although I can tell you people here are proud of their Norse heritage, and most place names here are of Norse origin. I understand that there were elderly people who still spoke Norn in the early nineteenth century, but the language died with them. Nobody speaks it now, and even then nobody read it. It essentially had gone out of common usage in the seventeenth century.” That information, too, was interesting, and would later prove, although I didn’t realize it at the time, to be very useful.
“What about Viking runes?” I asked. “I saw some in Maeshowe.”
“Yes, there are several examples of runic inscriptions here. It’s an early Germanic writing system, once used for magical purposes, but it was in use as a general communication for some time.”
“So people here could once write something in runes.”
“Certainly. That’s why we get all those runic inscriptions in Maeshowe and other places here. They are not magical inscriptions though. Instead they are about rather lusty encounters of the secular kind.”
“Didn’t the runes say there was treasure there?” Maya asked.
“Yes, indeed. And there may have been. Unfortunately it was long gone by the time archaeologists arrived. There are some runic inscriptions right in the tomb that say the treasure was removed over three days by Hakon. The runes make it clear that the tomb was definitely well-known to the Vikings. In the Orkneyinga Saga there is a story about Harald Maddadarson of Atholl who tried a surprise attack on Orkney while Orkney Earl Rognvald was on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Maddadarson got caught in a bad storm and took shelter in Maeshowe, only to have two of his men go crazy while there.”
“Seriously?” I said.
“Who knows? It was a tomb after all. Maybe this was the Viking equivalent of staying in a cemetery overnight for us, and they scared themselves right over the edge. It’s a good story in any event.”
“I have another question, Simon,” Maya said. “I’m sure I should know the answer, but what exactly did St. Margaret hope for?”
Simon laughed. “Hope is a word for a cove or bay. There are two possibilities for St. Margaret, one being Margaret, the saint and queen of Scotland, the other the very young daughter of the king of Norway who died in the late thirteenth century when she was on her way to be wed to the English Prince Edward. She was only seven or something, unpleasant thought. I opt for the former.”