“Spence wasn’t interested at all?”
“He was polite. I think he wanted to believe it and he enjoyed the story. I can understand his point of view. We have nothing to show him except a stack of lined notebooks where children have practiced their handwriting. Perhaps if we’d been able to find this tomb of the orcs, particularly if there was still treasure in it, specifically a cauldron, that might lend some credence to the story, I suppose. But we’ve tried and failed many, many times.”
“You call this a cauldron. When I heard it, it was a chalice.”
“I’m more perplexed by the idea that someone outside the family would utter the words as they lay dying. I think, though, the correct word would be cauldron, although who knows? Cauldrons were very common in Viking times. They were used for cooking. On sea voyages, when they could spend time on shore, they would use them to cook meat and potatoes for the crew, so Bjarni would have started out with one, although that is not the point of the story.
You get the idea that Bjarni’s cauldron was different. There are many instances of magic cauldrons in mythology. The Irish have the cauldron of the god known as the Dagda, a cauldron that is never empty no matter how much food you take from it. The Northern European god Thor sought cauldrons for the feasts of his fellow deities, and the Irish Bran had one, too. It is my understanding that cauldrons were used in Iron Age rituals. They have been found in bogs and so on where they were probably thrown as part of some ceremony or sacrifice. And reading between the lines in Bjarni’s story, he does seem to have come across some ritualistic rather cult-like behavior. So I’d say cauldron. They were called graal, actually, these cauldrons.“
“What are the chances of this cauldron’s having survived all this time anyway?”
“Better than average, which is still not terribly good. Most of Scotland has very acidic soil, so artifacts don’t last long, but here we have a lot of shell sand, so chances are rather better.”
“For some reason I thought this was about furniture,” I said. “And now it’s about a pot, or a medieval manuscript, I should say. I don’t want to belittle it. It’s just not what I expected.”
“Why did you think it was about furniture?”
“I was looking for a Charles Rennie Mackintosh writing cabinet, or maybe two of them. It’s a long story and I won’t get into it. The short version is that someone showed me a photograph of an older woman standing in front of this piece of furniture, and this person later quoted the line about the tomb of the orcs as he died. I thought he and I were both looking for the same piece of furniture. I really don’t know what I’m going on about. I just can’t take all of this in right at this moment.”
“You said a photo of a woman standing in front of a writing cabinet?”
“Yes, but don’t worry about it.”
“Get me the photo album overby, will you?” he said, waving his arm in an indeterminate direction, but more or less toward the back.
“Overby?”
“My apologies. I should have said throughby. On the desk. It’s moved.”
Throughby? “I’m afraid neither overby nor throughby are expressions I know,” I said.
“On the desk in the back room,” he said irritably. I got it. The room at the back was much more comfortable, what we’d call a family room off a large kitchen. I could see past it into what might have once been a dining room, but which now held a bed, presumably for Sigurd who would have difficulty getting upstairs. Thor looked up from the cartoons long enough to smile and wave at me. I smiled and waved back. Oddi didn’t acknowledge my existence. He was sound asleep on the sofa beside Thor.
Sigurd flipped through the pages for a minute or two, and then pulled a photograph out of its sleeve. “Would this be that photograph?” he said.
It was the photo Percy had shown me, with a pleasant-looking elderly woman standing in front of a Mackintosh, or perhaps a reproduction, writing cabinet. “That’s it!” I exclaimed. “The writing cabinet.”
“You have eyes but cannot see, as the saying goes,” he said. “Look again.”
I did. The woman looked just as pleasant, the Mackintosh just as I remembered it. Then I realized what he was talking about. On the wall behind the woman and over the cabinet there was a picture in an old frame. When I took it over to the light of the window, I knew what it was. It was Willow and Kenny’s treasure map. “Got it,” I said. “This goes with Bjarni’s saga, right?”
“That is correct.”
“Is it really, really old?”
“No. It, too, is a copy, although certainly older than the notebooks in which I keep the story itself. Again, my grandfather copied something earlier. One of my less reputable uncles tried to pass it off as the original, and even one of my students set out to produce something similar, weathered it, and tried to sell it to the museum.” He stopped for a moment and chuckled. “You had to have a grudging admiration for the youngster, although one could foresee a bleak future for that one.”
“But the scroll in the photograph? It was sold? Stolen?”
“The latter, I regret to say. Do you know where it is?”
“Yes, I do. Please believe me, I didn’t steal it.”
“I didn’t think you had. You have it, though?”
“No, but I know who does.”
“That would be the person who stole it presumably?”
“No. That person is dead. It was found in his personal effects.”
“The man found in the bunker?”
“No, someone else.”
“A lot of dead people in this saga of yours. Will you see to it that it’s returned to me?”
“I’ll try. The people who have it think it is going to lead them to a great Viking treasure. They may not be keen on giving it up. They think that the swirls and squiggles along the bottom are an outline of a piece of coastline.”
He thought about that for a minute. “That’s actually an interesting idea. Amazing, isn’t it, how a stranger will look at something, and see what you haven’t in eighty-nine years? Longer than that. We’ve been looking for the treasure for hundreds of years and haven’t found it. My grandfather actually built this ridiculous house that I am now incapable of managing because it is close to the place some people believe Earl Thorfinn Skull-Splitter is buried, and the saga mentions the tomb of the orcs was near that place. We don’t actually know that Thorfinn is buried where we say he is, so that clue may be entirely useless. It hasn’t helped us, I know that. Good luck to them, I suppose. Wouldn’t a copy of the scroll do then, if the treasure is what they want?”
“I would think so. So this lovely woman in the photograph is your wife?”
“My late wife Betty. She died about a month ago. She hadn’t been well for some time. Dementia, you know. I miss her so much, but really I lost her a long time ago when that horrible disease stole her away.” There was a catch in his voice.
Then it hit me, this photograph, and the fact I’d seen it first in Percy’s hands. I felt kind of sick. “I am so sorry. I’ve been so thoughtless and stupid. Please, I didn’t know.” I was completely disconcerted.
“How could you know? You had never met us. She’d not had any sense of where she was for some time. It is tragic for me and for Thor, but not for her.”