-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
DISCLAIMERS:
The characters of Janice Covington and Mel(inda) Pappas from the TV show 'Xena Warrior Princess' belong to Studio USA/Renaissance Pictures/Universal or whoever actually owns them now. No infringement on their rights is intended. All other characters are created by myself, and belong to me.
All characters depicted, names used, and incidents portrayed in this story are fictitious. No identification with actual persons is intended nor should be inferred. Any resemblance of the characters portrayed to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
The registered trademarks mentioned in this story are © of their respective owners. No infringement of their rights is intended, and no profit is gained.
This story depicts a loving relationship between consenting adult women. If such a story frightens you, you better click on the X in the top right corner of your screen right away.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
NOTES FROM THE AUTHOR:
Written: October 16th - November 12th, 2020.
This story is dedicated to the Xenaverse bard DJ Belt whose Mel & Janice-series is, in my opinion, the pinnacle of the genre - DJ, your stories are inspiring, superbly entertaining and just plain ol' magical, and I can only dream of reaching the levels you're at. And finally, a word from Janice Covington herself: "Hey, reader, do yourself a great big, fat favor and find DJ's stories. You won't regret it for a second."
As always - thank you for your help, Phineas Redux *High-five*
As usual, I'd like to say a great, big THANK YOU to my mates at AUSXIP Talking Xena, especially to the gals and guys in Subtext Central. I really appreciate your support - Thanks, everybody! :D
Description: Action! Adventure! Danger! Excitement! Janice Covington and Mel Pappas return to the page with a tale of waterlogged woes and muddy melees. To prove that the foreign warriors present at the mythical Gathering Of Kings in Jutland in the first century AD were in fact their legendary ancestors, Mel & Janice explore an ancient burial mound near the small Danish town of Yelling. They hope the site holds the key to unlocking the mystery, but even their wildest dreams cannot match what they find in… THE VALKYRIE'S TOMB!
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
*
*
PROLOGUE
June 17, 1952.
A piercing whine cut through the air as the steam whistle mounted on the locomotive let the world know the train was about to resume its steady progress north. The wheels were soon set in motion which made the six-wagon regional train roll away from the station and gradually pick up speed.
As the border between Germany and Denmark became enshrouded in swirling fog and billowing smoke from the three-axled steam locomotive, an unusually-dressed figure rolled up the window she had been peeking out of.
Dr. Janice Covington - Ph.D., archaeologist extraordinaire and one of the world's two leading experts on the legendary Ancient Greek warrior Xena of Amphipolis - zipped her leather jacket all the way up as she returned to the uncomfortable bench seat in their second class compartment.
The rustic woodwork creaked and groaned all around her like the old wagon was about to give up the ghost; it seemed to hold for the time being, but it rattled just a little too much for her liking. Zipping the jacket wasn't enough to stay warm so Janice stuffed her icy hands into the side pockets as well. Her breath wasn't visible, but she had an inkling it couldn't be far off despite the date.
Having turned thirty-six at the start of the year, Janice was at the top of her game. She had lost none of the mental attributes she had gained in the years she had spent on various digs around the world: she was still the same feisty soul she had been in her teens, and she still had the unwavering confidence in her abilities she had gained in her twenties. Her early thirties had provided her with plenty of hands-on experience as well as a sharp, analytical mind that was often able to punch through the confusion that inevitably reigned supreme at dig sites. All these attributes had joined forces to create the woman she had become.
Another thing the countless digs had provided Janice Covington with was the tall, graceful, occasionally befuddled but above all highly intelligent Southern Belle Melinda Pappas. They had initially met in Macedonia in 1940 when Mel had walked into Janice's tent as a tender, inexperienced twenty-five year old. The daughter of a renowned professor, Mel Pappas' sheltered life had made her somewhat ill-equipped to deal with the harsh realities of life on actual digs, but she was a fast learner and had soon come to terms with the peculiarities of outdoors life - not to mention the idiosyncrasies of Janice Covington.
They continued working together for Uncle Sam in the last years of World War II as historical experts who helped rebuild museums in recently liberated towns and cities in Western Europe. As the war ended and the world slowly recovered from the horrors, Mel and Janice finally had a little time for the emotional aspects of their relationship.
Over the course of a few months, they grew closer until they discovered their attraction to each other had turned into real love. They hadn't been apart for more than a week at a time since then. Now, they shared a bungalow in a suburb of San Francisco while working at one of the metropole's universities as lecturers in applied archaeology and Ancient Greek linguistics, respectively.
The Southern Belle in question had pressed herself into the corner of the bench seat opposite from where Janice sat. Her stylish overcoat was wrapped tightly around her in an attempt to remain warm though it was supposed to be summer, not winter. Tired from the age-long journey, her eyes were closed in rest.
They had flown from San Francisco to New York-Idlewild Airport, then across the Atlantic to London, then further onto Hamburg where they had needed to take the bus through half the large city to get to the central train station. There, they had waited for hours for the much-delayed regional train that had finally brought them within reasonable distance of their destination.
The black, horn-rimmed frame of Mel's spectacles had slipped a short way down her regal nose, but they were in no danger of falling off even considering how much the locomotive and the old wagons bucked along the well-worn rails.
Unlike Janice who wore brown trench boots and a khaki ensemble of high-waisted uniform pants and a men's shirt under her leather jacket, Melinda wore square-heeled shoes, Nylon stockings and a medium-brown, tailor-made dress that underscored her high class as well as accentuated her curves. Her long, dark hair that had been pulled up into a neat bun was partially covered by a chic pillbox hat that was a shade or two paler-brown than the dress.
Janice grinned at the exquisite sight opposite her as she adjusted her own dark-brown fedora. The years she had spent up to her knees in mud and potsherds had certainly given her more than plenty, she had no right to claim otherwise. Her old fedora was given another nudge; it ended up sitting crooked atop her dusty-blonde locks just like Bogart or Cagney would wear it, and just like the matinee idols, she had the Casual Cool-look down pat.
---
The train continued to rumble north. The progress was steady rather than impressive as it chugged its way closer to the port city of Vejle that was located eighty kilometers north of the border on the east coast of the Jutland peninsula.
Now and then, a fellow passenger or a train official would walk along the narrow corridor to the right of the compartment, but it hardly broke the monotony. With nothing to look at out of the window beyond gloomy rain clouds and billowing smoke from the locomotive's stack, Janice reached into her leather jacket's liner pocket to find the telegram that had set the entire trip in motion.
It read,
'6-9-1952 -- To: Professor Chester Coyne, University of San Francisco -- From: Professor Thorkild Granfeldt, Royal University of Copenhagen -- A unique runestone has been unearthed in Jelling -- STOP -- Chronicles an unusual olive-skinned warrior and two Teutonic mercenaries helping King Wermund prevent a war -- STOP -- Initial analysis suggests carvings performed 500-600 AD -- STOP -- However referencing far older events -- STOP -- Perhaps even 150-200 AD -- STOP -- Has caused heated discussion among proto-Norse scholars -- STOP -- Your presence is urgently requested for thorough translation and analysis -- STOP STOP.'
Janice continued to look at the intriguing message for a short while longer. She and Mel had only become aware of it through sheer dumb luck. At one of the university's coat-and-tie dinner fundraisers, they had chatted with Professor Chester Coyne - the leading expert in the ancient and proto-Norse eras prior to the Vikings - about this and that when he had mentioned the telegram.
Although Mel had been doubtful as to the connection with their own fields of expertise, the familiar spark had been ignited deep within Janice. Her intuition and years of experience hunting down the Xena Scrolls whispered in her ear that Xena just might be the 'unusual olive-skinned warrior' mentioned; if the Warrior Princess had been there, Janice Covington needed to follow.
There was a risk it might turn into a wasted two weeks, but the opportunity to explore another journey through the Norselands in addition to those chronicled in the Rhinegold Scrolls was too good to pass up. After the formal dinner and a glass or two of Merlot, she had suggested to professor Coyne that they could take over the assignment in exchange for a few guest lectures. The old fellow had accepted before she had even finished uttering the sentence - perhaps he had known about the state of the Danish so-called summer weather.
A muted yawn and a brief smacking of lips from across the compartment meant that Mel had come to from her slumber. As she moved her long legs back, her heels bumped into the heavy suitcases she always brought with them on every assignment. Since the luggage was far too heavy for the wooden storage racks above, she'd had to put them on the floor.
They not only contained the countless dusty tomes she needed for translating scroll fragments recovered during the digs, but a collection of transcriptions of those of Gabrielle of Potaideia's works that had survived the millennia. Mel could have used a typewriter to quicken the time-consuming task, but - true to form - she had painstakingly transcribed them by hand to be as close to the ancient bard as possible. It had earned her several cheeky comments from the peanut gallery, but she'd had the last laugh when she had presented the finished book.
She pushed her spectacles up her nose so Janice would move into focus instead of being a shapeless blur. They shared a smile before Mel shuffled around on the hard bench to find a softer spot for her rear-end. It failed to come so she gave up trying. "Oh, gosh darn it… perhaps we should have paid for a first class compartment after all… why, I had never expected there wouldn't be any cushions," Mel said in a voice that continued to hold her trademark Southern accent despite living in San Francisco for the past six years.
"Yeah. This mule train sure is different from the California Zephyr… not to mention the Orient Express we traveled on last year, huh?" Janice said with a grin as she pushed her fedora back from her brow.
"I'll say. When do we cross the border into Denmark?"
"Oh, it's been and gone, Toots. We must be halfway up Jutland about now."
Mel shook her head in puzzlement. She cast a brief glance out of the window to see the landscape, but the view offered nothing but gray clouds and even grayer smoke. "Really? Goodness me, I slept right through it! But didn't they want to see my passport or anything?"
"Nah. The border control officer took a two-second glance at mine. He said it was all right, so… welcome to peaceful Denmark."
"Remarkable… we had more trouble getting onto the transatlantic flight in New York!"
"Well, you know what they say about us Noo Yawkahs… a day without arguing is a day wasted," Janice said with a chuckle before she snuggled down on the bench. "Toots, now that you're awake, I think I'll count to forty winks while I have the chance. Gimme a kick when we reach Vey… Way… however you pronounce that town we're going to. Yeah?"
"Will do, dear. Sweet dreams."
"Thanks. I know they will be 'cos you're gonna have the starring role…" Janice said with a grin before she moved her hat down to cover her eyes.
*
*
CHAPTER 1
Just shy of an hour and a half later, Mel Pappas and Janice Covington had moved the last of their heavy suitcases down onto the rain-soaked concrete platform at Vejle Station. To call everything dreary and gray would be an understatement. Though the station was located near the heart of the port city, the platform had been elevated four stories up from ground level so all that was visible to the two guests were the rain-slick roofs of the nearby houses.
The heavy clouds seemed to hover just above their heads. Although the rain that had fallen steadily all day had in fact slacked off to a mere drizzle, the puddles on the platform were still so large, deep and treacherous they required a boatman's certificate to navigate safely.
Only a few other passengers got off at that stop so it wasn't long before the station manager was able to wave a green flag to signal 'all clear' to the engineer up front. Soon, the steam whistle let out its customary piercing noise as the train resumed its long journey north.
As the locomotive, the coal tender and the six passenger wagons chugg-chugg-chugged away from Vejle Station, Mel tried to catch the attention of the uniformed station manager by waving a lavender-laced handkerchief in the air. "Ahem! My good man! Please! We need help finding a cart for our-" she cried, but it was to no avail since the fellow strode back to the control tower without even looking over his shoulder. "Well, that was rude," she said with a huff as the handkerchief ended up being stuffed back into one of the pockets of her overcoat with little regard for its creases.
"Yeah. Maybe he had to take a leak," Janice said as she looked up and down the deserted platform for any sign of life. She carried her ex-US Army duffel bag over her shoulder, but she put it down on the only semi-dry spot she could find. A square, flat-roofed brick building at the far end carried an Art Deco sign that read Bagageudlevering. "All right… bagage… that's gotta be baggage, right? Luggage? I'll look into it. Don't go anywhere until I get back," she continued as she strode off down the waterlogged platform.
"Very well… but please do it expeditiously. The next shower can't be far off," Mel said as she adjusted her spectacles and her chic hat.
Grinning, Janice turned around and put her arms out wide. "And you'd know five minutes ahead of us shorties 'cos your head's already halfway up there!"
Mel squinted hard as a response to her partner's cheeky quip, but she was unable to keep the stern facade for long. Tracking the shorter, but far more athletic, figure striding away on the important quest, she had to let out a chuckle at the truth of the statement.
---
The short journey of exploration proved successful for Janice as the brick building turned out to be a warming shelter for the luggage handlers and their pushcarts. After much gesticulating and the waving of several one-dollar bills, she returned with a porter and an old-fashioned pushcart that ran on squeaky wheels.
Mel's expressive eyebrows went up, then down at the sight. It was hard to tell which of the two had served the longest: the elderly porter or his noisy cart. In any case, they appeared equally fragile. The fellow's white whiskers were decades out of style, but at least they matched his weather-beaten face and crooked back. His outfit consisted of black, woolen clothes, heavy clogboots and a greasy, old-fashioned cap where the peak had cracked.
"Oh, my…" Mel said as she stepped aside to make room for the luggage cart. The elderly fellow displayed surprising strength as he transferred the heavy suitcases onto the cart, but he did let out a few groans now and then. "Please, Sir… you need to be careful with the suitcases. The contents are priceless," Mel continued, but Janice interrupted her before she could get too far:
"Save your breath, Toots. He doesn't speak English. I don't even know his name," Janice said as she swung her duffel bag over her shoulder. "I promised him two dollars for the bother. Can't say if he understood me. I guess we'll find out."
Mel nodded absentmindedly as she glanced around the platform. The elderly porter was already pushing his squeaky cart over to a service elevator, but the graceful Southerner preferred to stretch her legs a little after sitting down for so long. Aiming for a wooden staircase that would take them down to ground level, she soon left Janice behind. "Jan Covington, aren't you coming?" she said as she waited at the top of the flight of stairs.
"Yeah, but… we were supposed to be picked up by… whatshisname," Janice said and pushed her hat back from her brow. "One of Professor Granfeldt's assistants. If we wander off, the fella might not be able to find us."
Mel moved her left sleeve back to look at her wristwatch. It read a quarter past one in the afternoon - they had missed lunch because of the train's slow progress. "Well, he isn't here now, that's a fact. No, I'm not staying up here. It's far too chilly. I need a cup of coffee and something to eat. There must be a vendor around here somewhere. I'll try my luck down on the street, if you don't mind."
"And I'll be right behind ya, Toots. Like always," Janice said with a grin as she strode across the platform to get to the staircase.
---
At least Vejle turned out to be a picturesque city down at ground level. A multitude of colorful stores lined three sides of a square that spread out beyond the foot of the staircase. There were several greengrocers, butchers, fishmongers, bakeries and dairies that sold fresh milk, cream, butter and cheese. In addition to those kinds of stores, there were tobacco shops and newsdealers, as well as a book store, a dressmaker's workshop and a shop that sold elegant shoes for elegant ladies - just about the only thing that wasn't there was a diner or café selling coffee and sandwiches, and that fact left Mel in an impressive huff that didn't go away until Janice squeezed her hand in sympathy.
Wooden flagpoles that carried the Dannebrog - the Danish national flag - had been put up outside most, if not all, of the shops which turned the street into a sea of red-and-white. Faint strands of brass music could be heard whenever there was a lull in the traffic which offered a hint there might be a concert going on elsewhere in the city.
The square doubled as the bus terminal and thus saw plenty of activity in the shape of countless buses that serviced Vejle and various overland stops in the region. Beyond the lumbering buses that all seemed to smoke and rumble, hundreds and hundreds of bicycles zipped back and forth on the main connecting streets - at times, it seemed there were more bicycles than pedestrians at the square.
Mel furrowed her brow when she caught a glimpse of a heaving mass of people standing at one of the bus stops. It took her several seconds to figure out they weren't demonstrators but simply passengers waiting for their bus to show up. She knew from the time she and Janice had spent in Britain that lining up in orderly queues everywhere was a vital ingredient in the well-being of the average Brit, but it seemed that particular trait hadn't made it across the North Sea. It grew even worse when the bus finally showed up. Instead of the passengers climbing up into it in good order like she expected, it seemed more like a cattle stampede to get to the best seats.
She suddenly noticed the elderly porter addressed her in Danish - he had offloaded their luggage and was no doubt eager to get back to the brick building that served as the warming shelter. Turning around fully, she offered the fellow an apologetic smile and held up her hands in the age-old sign known universally as please wait until I have my phrase book ready.
The small book was soon opened and studied, but the man's local dialect made it near-impossible for Mel to recognize but a single word of what he said. "Jan… Jan, dear… Jan?" she said, looking around for her better half.
When the two women locked eyes, Mel issued a quick distress call that made Janice stroll back from the newsdealer she had been window-shopping at. "I think I need a little help over here. No, I definitely need a little help over here!" Mel said while she glanced over the rim of her glasses at the elderly porter.
Janice didn't even bother to look into the phrase book. Instead, she put down her duffel bag, dug into her jacket pocket and found another pair of one-dollar bills that she handed over to the elderly fellow. The porter looked at the strange, green money for a while before he shrugged and shuffled off with the empty cart.
"Hi de ho, bub! Nice talkin' to ya!" Janice said with a grin as the porter pushed away his squeaky tool.
"Thank you, dear," Mel said and put away the phrase book. After looking at her wristwatch again, she performed a slow turn while giving the square and the bus station a stringent inspection in case they had missed the assistant meant to swing by to pick them up. When nobody seemed to fit the bill, she let out a brief sigh and shook her head. "Oh, well. Did the papers say anything interesting?"
"They might have… they're all in Danish. But anyway, from glancin' at the pictures, it seemed there was an international incident over the Baltic Sea yesterday. A couple of Russki fighter interceptors opened fire on a Swedish sea plane. Damaged it pretty good, too. Didn't have time to see more. Let's hope the Cold War isn't about to turn hot."
"Oh, my goodness!" Mel said and adjusted her glasses. "That's the very last thing we need… another war."
Janice nodded somberly. "There'll always be war, Toots. Entombing Ares didn't even help… I swear mankind can't live without it."
---
Five minutes became ten; ten became fifteen; fifteen became twenty with no sign of the assistant archaeologist who was supposed to drive them the final stretch to the excavation site.
Patience had never been Janice's strongest virtue, so she paced the forecourt of the train station with a sour look on her face; Mel tried to kill time by having her nose buried in a book as always.
"Rooty-bill. Roota-bill?" Mel said, trying her best to pronounce the strange words she read in the small book of typical phrases. "Good dakk, voor errr den roota-bill? Jan, does that make any sense?"
"And how should I know, darlin'? I can't speak the local lingo," Janice said while she gave a pebble a vicious kick. The small stone rattled along the pavement until it ended up in the gutter next to several others that had already been kicked down there.
"No, but-"
"After Vei… Way… this place, we're supposed to go to Jelling, right? Or however you pronounce it…"
"That's right. Jelling. It's thirty kilometers west of… of… Vey… here," Mel said and looked at the numerous buses that were present at the terminal. "I'll bet one of the overland lines goes there… but which one?"
"It doesn't matter if they all do 'cos we only have dollars, not kroner. We can't buy a ticket on our good looks alone, ya know. Or you might… I'd just be shown the door."
Before Mel could counter the statement, they were approached by a late-twenty-something man with a pencil-thin mustache, a dark-blue pinstriped business suit and a dark-gray fedora not unlike Janice's.
The young man broke out in a smile at the sound of foreign voices in the middle of the busy bus terminal. "Good afternoon, ladies," he said in his best school English. "I couldn't help but overhear your conversation. You said you needed to go to Jelling?"
"Oh… Yelling?" Mel said and adjusted her spectacles. She cast a brief glance at Janice who grinned in return - one mystery solved, several hundred to go. "Yes, that's right! Are you Professor Granfeldt's assistant?"
"I'm afraid not," the well-dressed business man said as he turned to point at one of the bus stops. "Number fourteen drives through Jelling, but I'm not sure the Viking burial sites are open for tourists at this point. Some kind of important digging work is going on out there. It's been in the newspapers for the past several days."
"Oh, we're not tourists, Sir," Mel said with a smile. "We're scientists from the University of San Francisco. We've been invited to analyze a rare artifact that Professor Granfeldt's team has found. Please… now that we have your attention… how do you pronounce the name of this city?"
"Yes, I can see how that might cause a problem. It's Vejle," the young businessman said with a grin.
"Vie-la… Vie-la. I see. Thank you! Jan, it wasn't Vey or Way at all! It was Vie-la," Mel said as she turned toward her partner.
"So I gather, Toots. Vie-la. I guess I can write my memoirs now, huh?" Even while Janice spoke, she spotted a black, pre-war Opel Super Six sedan racing around the corner of the bus terminal. The old car soon came to a rocking stop over by the foot of the staircase that led up to the platform.
Another young man - though far more frantic and disheveled compared to the smooth businessman they had been speaking to - bolted from the vehicle and stormed up the staircase with his arms flailing wildly as he did so. "Wouldya look at that. I do believe our ride and whatshisname has finally made it here. Better late than never, huh? I'll check it out," Janice said as she put down her duffel bag and left it by Mel's feet.
While Mel thanked the businessman for his impromptu language class, Janice jogged across two of the terminal's bus lanes to get to the black car before it could drive off again. Once there, she looked inside it in the hope there would be someone she could talk to, but it was empty save for a filthy rag and a flat cap that had been left on the passenger seat.
Grunting, she folded her arms across her chest and leaned against the side of the car - she and Mel were just going to have to wait a little longer.
---
Only a few minutes went by before the frantic fellow sprinted back down the staircase and over to the black Opel. He had almost run past Janice before he came to a screeching halt to give her a wide-eyed stare.
The man was in his early-to-mid-twenties with sandy hair, youthful features and a button nose. His wide and confused eyes were protected by round spectacles that made him look like the intellectual type. His hair stuck out in all directions, and his shirt and his dark-blue, three-quarter length coat were messy like he had been running rather than driving the thirty kilometers from Jelling. The buttons on the cuff of his left shirtsleeve had gone missing, and the fabric was torn and filthy; his hands carried dark smears in several places.
"Hello… are you Miss Covington?" he said breathlessly in an English that held a strong Danish accent.
"That would be Doctor Covington," Janice said and pushed herself off the side of the car. "Yep, that's me," she continued as she put out her hand for the traditional greeting.
The young fellow put out his hand - smears and all - and winced when the pressure on his slender digits was far greater than he had anticipated. "Oh… I beg your pardon, Doctor." As he spoke on, his voice was revealed to carry all the typically flat Danish A's and R's.
"Common mistake, bub. You the fella workin' for Prof Granfeldt?"
"Ah… beg' pardon?"
"Are you the 'fessor's assistant?"
"Oh! That's right. I'm Henning Mikkelsen. I'm terribly sorry for being so late… I had a flat and then I got lost on my way here. I'm from Aarhus and it's my first time in Vejle," he said while he tried to get his sandy hair down smooth to look a little more presentable in the company of a lady - even if she did wear a leather jacket.
"Golly gee, how about that?" Janice said in a tone that proved she really didn't care either way as long as the car had made it there in one piece. She had to chuckle when she eyed Henning's slender frame that wasn't exactly bulging with strength. "My lovely associate and I got a lot of heavy luggage. I better help you drag it over here and into the car."
"Oh… thank you… thank you very much," Henning said and adjusted his round glasses. While Janice strolled back to Mel and the aforementioned luggage, the young fellow came to his second hard stop in two minutes as his wide eyes took in the sight of the pile of suitcases that had been placed on the ground.
Gulping, he turned around to unlock the rounded trunk of the Opel sedan.
-*-*-*-
The next forty minutes were spent driving through the lush, scenic Grejsdalen that held little in the way of residential property but plenty of steep slopes, babbling creeks and majestic oaks whose gnarled branches formed a canopy above the country road. White-trunked birch trees and delicate corkscrew willows were clustered in groves where the soil wouldn't allow room for the larger root spread required by the oaks, and beech trees competed with dense shrubbery for the affections of the sun - not that the sun could be bothered to show itself.
As expected, the word Grejsdalen proved unpronounceable for American tongues, but Henning Mikkelsen explained to an attentive Mel and an utterly disinterested Janice that it rhymed with 'Grice' but only if it was spoken with a hard G-sound like in 'Governor.'
Mel sat up front on the right-hand side of the sedan's bench seat because it offered better room for her long legs. The shorter Janice had been crammed onto the back seat with her own duffel bag and three heavy suitcases as her closest neighbors - the rest of the bulky luggage had barely been able to fit in the Opel's trunk. She occasionally peeked around Henning's tense shoulders to see where they were going, but the view ahead couldn't hold her interest for long.
"Good dakk. Kann mann kobah melk herrrr? Henning, is that accurate? The original is… hello, I would like to buy fresh milk. Good dakk, yai vil gerrrnah kobah frisk melk," Mel said as she read from the phrase book.
"I'll frisk ya, Toots," Janice said under her breath - it earned her a huff in return.
Henning stared wide-eyed at his front-seat passenger while he tried to parse what she had read aloud from the little book. "I'm sorry, Miss… that… that doesn't… I mean… I'm sorry," he said before he focused on the driving.
Mel adjusted her glasses a couple of times before she put the phrase book away for good. In the back, Janice let out a chuckle at the exchange.
Although the winding country road they were on had recently been paved, the pre-war Super Six only had a top speed of forty miles per hour so it couldn't take advantage of the excellent road conditions. Even beyond that, Henning was a nervous driver who gave off the impression he hadn't had his driver's license for long. Not only did he clench the wooden steering wheel hard like he was afraid it would fall off if he let go, he managed to grind the gears and flub every other application of the clutch pedal - and there were many due to the car's weakness and the road's constant undulations.
---
As the landscape slowly changed from the lush Grejsdalen to a flatter, heath-like terrain indicating they were getting closer to Jelling and the new dig site at the Viking burial mounds, Janice perked up and began to shuffle around in the back.
She and her legendary - or notorious, depending on the sources - father Harry 'The Grave Robber' Covington had visited Denmark only once before, in 1934, when they had made a whistle-stop tour of several museums hoping to sell an Old Norse artifact they had bought for next-to-nothing in a seedy dive in Bergen, Norway.
The National Museum in Copenhagen had been their last-gasp attempt, but when the museum's lead curator had declined to buy the artifact from the adventurer because of its dubious origins, the two Covingtons had gone into the port-side red light district of Nyhavn to drown their sorrows. There, they had leaned from the first mate of a packet coaster that the questions were far fewer and the money far easier to come by down south in Germany - and that Old Norse artifacts were all the rage among certain people.
Harry Covington didn't need a written invitation, so he and Janice soon boarded a cargo freighter bound for Rostock. Although the artifact had been sold to a shady individual for good money, it had been the first time the young, impressionable Janice had seen the brown-clad soldiers that patrolled or paraded the streets in perfect, jackbooted goose-step. She wouldn't return to Germany for another eleven years; the winter and early spring months of 1944-1945 had been a very different experience for all involved.
"Janice Covington!" Mel suddenly said in a sharp tone of voice. The graceful woman up front had turned around in the passenger seat so she could shoot blue fire at the woman in back. "Have you heard anything of what I've been saying to you?"
Janice returned to the present to flash a broad grin at her partner. She pushed her fedora back from her brow to stall a little while she gathered her thoughts; then she said: "Sure I have, Toots! You've been talking about how excited you are to-"
"No!"
"No?"
"No. I was trying to convey the utter confusion I felt after attempting to read the bus timetable back at the terminal. Your mind is clearly too preoccupied to pay any attention to me, so I shall save my vocal cords," Mel continued and turned back around.
"Awww… I'm sorry, Toots," Janice said and leaned forward on the back seat intending to put a hand on Mel's shoulder. The movement meant the top suitcase began to slide down toward her, so she had to press her hand against it to stem the tide. Once she had accomplished that, the moment had gone so she leaned back to look out of the side window.
---
Janice's patience had been worn down to its final two threads by the inexperienced driver and the resulting interminably slow ride, but she was rewarded when Henning Mikkelsen finally drove the pre-war Opel Super Six off the country road and onto a narrower stretch. They soon drove past a sign announcing that the village of Jelling was a mere two kilometers away.
"Yelling? Isn't that right?" Mel said to Henning as they drove past the sign.
"Jelling, yes indeed," Henning said and broke out in an enthusiastic bout of nodding. "My orders are to drive you ladies over to the famous inn at once so you can get settled in. We have booked two rooms for you and they should be fine. And warm!"
On the back seat, Janice put a hand on the pile of suitcases before she leaned forward to catch Mel's eyes in the rear-view mirror. The non-verbal messages that were sent between them all said they would accept the two rooms for the sake of appearances, but would continue to share the same room and bed like they had for more than seven years.
There wasn't any point to stirring up a hornet's nest or causing hostilities as the first thing they did after arriving, so they would be quiet about the nature of their relationship until the locals had grown more accustomed to the unusual foreigners - then the truth could be disclosed.
Janice had never been too pleased about keeping her affections under wraps. However, she understood matters were different for Mel who was far more sensitive. Melinda Pappas' peace of mind had always been, and would always be, number one on Janice's prioritized list of concerns - whenever Mel was miserable, Janice would move mountains to get her significant other back on the sunny side of life.
---
The historical Jelling Inn turned out to be only a stone's throw from the two Viking burial mounds that had put the village on the world map. The two-story building from the mid-1800s had been painted in a fetching shade of bright-yellow that made it stand out among the other houses in the village, and all the window frames were held in stark white to create even more of a contrast to the lush, green surroundings.
Just as Henning made a clumsy U-turn to pull up in front of the inn's double-door entrance, the heavens opened up once more. Fat drops began to fall from the sky at an increasing rate until they had turned into yet another steady drizzle.
Mel let out a deep sigh as she sent a despondent glance at the rain on the windshield. "How foolish I was… how could I possibly think that June would be a summer month here in the northern hemisphere?" she mumbled as she tugged her stylish overcoat even closer around her dress.
"Oh, this is summer, Miss Pappas. The winters are even wetter," Henning said before he stepped out of the sedan and hurried around to the back to get the luggage.
Janice chuckled as she leaned forward once more. "At least we're here. C'mon, Toots, let's get ourselves settled in. I'm itchin' to get my fingers on those lovely mounds over there!"
"Why, Janice Covington! I swear, you are incorrigible!" Mel said in a clear huff before she opened the passenger door - Janice just let out a husky chuckle.
-*-*-*-
The interior of the inn was as winning as the exterior. The entrance led to a cozy lobby where an old-fashioned wooden reception desk stood ready to greet the guests. The woodwork appeared old and frail, but a closer look revealed the shabby look was in fact deliberate, and that it was in first-class condition.
Although the walls were painted pale tan rather than the same shade of yellow as the exterior, it was quality craftsmanship and bode well for the rest of the historical inn. The tiles on the lobby's floor were slate-gray and appeared more modern than most of the other items there; they had a coarse texture so they wouldn't be slippery. Several original oil paintings graced the walls in ten-by-six-inch wooden frames, and there were a few hunting trophies on display as well.
Mel was suitably impressed by the old inn as she put down the suitcase she had been carrying. She smiled at the sight of several colorful flowers that someone had arranged in a large ceramic jar not too far from the reception desk. She and Janice had a few moments on their own since nobody was there to greet them, so she strolled over to the flowers to pay closer attention to the splendors.
Predictably, Janice couldn't give two bent dimes about the flowers. Though the double-doors at the entrance opened up wide, she still needed to crab sideways through them to avoid scraping the woodwork with the three suitcases she had stuffed under her arms. The heavy things were soon thumped onto the tiled floor - which earned her a crooked eyebrow and a brief "Oh, Jan!" from Mel - before she shuffled back outside to get her duffel bag and help the asparagus-armed weakling Henning Mikkelsen get the final pieces of luggage out of the sedan's trunk before it became waterlogged by the most recent deluge.
There were several doors leading away from the central area. All were closed at present, but they carried brass pictograms that offered a clear picture - literally - of what was hiding behind them.
It wasn't long before the door to the private quarters at the back opened to reveal the current owner of the historical inn. Svend-Aage Lindholm was a wispy-haired, white-bearded fellow in his late sixties who presented a somewhat portly figure as he slipped in place behind the reception desk. After taking a final puff on a pipe, he put it in an ashtray.
His bulk, his doughy face and his simple clothing - coarse, dark-brown pants, a white, collar-less shirt like those favored by farm hands, and a pale-brown, knitted vest - hinted at him being a simple man, but it was clear from the sharp look in his pale-blue eyes that he was anything but a yokel.
The aforementioned eyes seemed to look past the tall guest before he reached into his shirt pocket to fetch a pair of reading glasses. Unfolding them, he pushed them up his nose until the lady was finally in focus - then he broke out in a smile. "Goddaw og velkommen til Jelling Kro, kære frue. Jeg er Svend-Aage-"
"Please, Sir…" Mel said and hurriedly held up her hands before the innkeeper could get too far into his introduction. "In English if at all possible!"
"Aw… my English not so good but I try," Svend-Aage said with a smile. He licked his meaty lips a couple of times like he needed to collect his thoughts; then he continued: "Hello and welcome to Jelling Inn, my dear lady. I am Svend-Aage Lindholm. I own the inn. How nice to see you. You must be the one the two rooms was booked to?"
"I am, Mr. Lindholm. Or to be precise, we are. Jan? Jan, dear! You're needed in here!" Mel said loudly to catch her partner's attention.
Grunting and groaning, Janice crabbed sideways through the entrance for a second time carrying the final three suitcases. Behind her, a red-faced Henning had wrapped his thin arms around Janice's duffel bag. The various pieces of luggage quickly followed the first batch onto the tiled floor before Janice shuffled over to the man at the reception desk. "Hi de ho, Mista! Nice place but shitty weather you got here," she said and pushed her fedora back from her brow.
"Janice Covington, will you please curb your crude language? Goodness me, I can't take you anywhere!" Mel squeaked before she turned back to Svend-Aage with an apologetic smile on her lips. When it seemed the innkeeper was far too occupied staring at the unusually-dressed Janice rather than trying to translate her comments, the potentially delicate situation was quickly forgotten about. "Sir, do you need to see our passports before we sign in?" Mel continued while she dug into one of her coat's outer pockets to find her travel document.
"No, but I need your… your underwrite- uh… name… your signatures? Yes, your signatures here on the dotted lines," Svend-Aage said and held out a piece of paper. After finding a fountain pen, he pointed a chubby finger at the line where Mel needed to sign her name.
She did so with a smile before she pushed the paper over to Janice so she could jot down her own John Hancock as well. Once the signatures had been placed on the lines, a pair of old-fashioned brass keys exchanged hands.
"When does the pub open, Mista?" Janice said after she had stuffed the brass key into her rear pants pocket.
"The bar is open already. The kitchen is open from four o'clock. Hot food is served after that time, Miss."
"That's Doctor, actually. Doctor of Philosophy. Okay, we're going to be real busy while we're here, so would it be possible to have at least some of our meals brought up to our rooms?"
Svend-Aage Lindholm opened his mouth to let out a surprised grunt but closed it before he could produce the utterance. The number of Danish women who wore men's hats and leather jackets and who could write Ph.D. on their calling cards could be counted on one hand - and there would be at least four fingers to spare. "I, uh… yes. It would be possible, Doctor," he said, furrowing his brow as he continued to gawk at the fedora-wearing foreigner. A moment later, his face lit up once more. "Perhaps you could come into the krostue… uh… eating room later on and look at what food we make so you can bestil- uh… order your evening dinner. My wife is the cook and she is very good."
"We'd be delighted to, Mr. Lindholm," Mel interjected in an attempt to avoid creating a bad first impression. By the mixed look on Svend-Aage Lindholm's meaty face as he looked at his newest guests, it appeared that she was safe and that Janice had perhaps put herself on the questionable list. "Come, Jan… let's get the suitcases upstairs. Where's Henning?"
Janice let out a long groan when she realized Henning had made a swift escape. Looking at the piles of luggage she had to schlep up to their rooms on her own, the groan turned to a sigh. "The scrawny fella split. I'm your gal, Toots." She took off her hat to wipe her brow pre-emptively before she reached for the first suitcase.
---
The eleven guest rooms upstairs were neat and tidy but not overly large or luxurious - at least not to American eyes. The wooden furniture was of a high quality and everything smelled fresh, clean and inviting, but there were neither refrigerators, telephones, television sets nor air conditioning units present in any of the rooms.
Each room had a maroon curtain hanging down from a rail in the ceiling to create a divider between the sleeping section and the living area. The beds were queen-sized - known locally as 'one-and-a-half width beds' - and were thus a good foot narrower than the one Melinda and Janice shared back home in San Francisco.
The thick, white duvets that adorned the beds were voluminous and appeared suffocatingly heavy at first glance, but they were surprisingly light to move around - they had to be as they were of vital importance. Not only would the inn's central heating system be turned down after ten PM to save a few drops of heating oil, the nightly temperatures rarely went above twelve degrees centigrade even during the warmest months of July and August.
The rest of the room's furniture consisted of a medium-sized dining table with seating for four, a writing desk, a five-drawer bureau and four chairs that could be placed wherever they were needed. Oil paintings that portrayed the nearby landscape and various historical scenes adorned three of the four walls; the fourth saw a double-width window that overlooked the street below. What appeared to be old-fashioned kerosene lamps were suspended over the dining table and the desk, but they had been converted to electricity so there was no need to refill them at regular intervals like in the old days.
They had chosen to use Mel's room since it had a clear view of the two burial mounds across the street - Janice's only having a view of the trees' crowns. Mel had immediately commandeered the dining table for all her priceless books, and that particular half of the guest room looked like a well-stocked bookstore during spring sale.
Janice needed to rest her back and catch her breath after the groan-inducing ordeal featuring her duffel bag and all the cumbersome suitcases, so she stood by the window casting a gloomy gaze at the street below. The feisty archaeologist and her perpetual go-get-'em attitude had received a hard knock at the sight of the pelting rain that made rivers run down the window panes - it seemed the miserable weather would never end.
She let out a deep sigh; not because of a sudden anxiety of being exposed to the rain, but because she knew the dig site might resemble a swimming pool by now. It wouldn't be the first time important archaeological discoveries ran a risk of being devastated or even destroyed by inclement weather - nor would it be the last - but she hoped Professor Granfeldt and his team had enough experience with the conditions to have made sure precautionary measures were in place to keep everything dry and secure.
There was nothing she could do about any of that now, so she unzipped her leather jacket and strolled over to the coat rack to find a hanger she could use. Once the warm jacket was off her shoulders, she went straight over to the cast-iron radiator to warm her fingers.
It wasn't long before Mel returned from downstairs carrying a wooden tray that held mugs, napkins, cake forks, plates with faintly yellow slices of sponge cake and finally a pale-blue metal pot filled to the brim with steaming hot coffee. "Aw, you're such a swell dame, Mel Pappas! There's plenty o' room to put it down over here," Janice said as she guided her partner over to the writing desk.
Once the tray was down and safe, Janice picked up the coffee pot and poured plenty of the dark-brown liquid into the mug meant for her. She took a slight sniff before sampling it. The coffee smelled stronger than how it was usually made in the US, but it was the right thing at the right time so it didn't matter - besides, she had tasted everything ranging from brown water to liquid rocket fuel in her many years exploring the world so she was used to it. The slice of cake was another story, however, and she cast a suspicious squint at it instead of trying it. "What the hell do they call that thing?" she said before she took another sip.
"Why, it's a lemon-flavored sponge cake," Mel said and adjusted her glasses like she didn't quite understand Janice's question.
"Can ya really eat that thing?"
"Well, of course you can. Mrs. Lindholm offered me a small sample and it's quite delicious, Jan. Tart like you'd expect, but certainly tasty."
"Eh. Me and sponge cake don't match. I'll pass."
"Suit yourself," Mel said as she pulled one of the plates closer; then she poured herself a mugful of coffee to go with the sponge cake. "I ordered our dinner while I was down there. We're going to have slices of roast pork and white potatoes in parsley gravy. It taxed my phrase book to the limit, but it seemed to be popular with the other guests so I doubt it'll kill us."
Janice let out a dark chuckle as she eyed the rain streaming down the window pane. "But that stinkin' rain might. Jebediah Criminy, won't it ever stop? I don't particularly feel like wading through three feet of mud on our first day here! And we haven't even spoken to Professor Granfeldt yet…"
"I met one of his assistants downstairs. Or another of his assistants, to be precise," Mel said as she dug her cake fork into the lemon-flavored cake. The bite balanced on the fork while she spoke on: "I couldn't understand all he said, but I do believe that Professor Granfeldt has uncovered another artifact that he's studying near the excavation site. It's smaller than the important one and doesn't seem connected to it."
"And we're up here doing nothing. Dammit." Shaking her head, Janice continued to grumble into her coffee but the words were lost as she took a mouthful of the steaming hot liquid.
-*-*-*-
Janice's mood had improved by leaps and bounds by the time they went down for dinner at a quarter past six. Mel's sweet lips had played an important part in bringing the archaeologist around, as had the lengthy session of doing nothing but sitting close and basking in each other's presence next to the glowing-hot cast-iron radiator.
The inn's restaurant downstairs had deliberately been held in an old-fashioned design that probably hadn't changed much, visually speaking, since it had opened for business in the mid-1800s: it was an open room equipped with seventeen square tables and dining chairs that were held in a matching design. Wood panels graced the walls rather than paintings like in the guest rooms, and several electrical lamps that resembled gas-powered lanterns had been added to the paneling to create a cozy atmosphere. Apart from a few details like the burgundy carpet and the red-and-white tablecloths, everything in the restaurant was made of wood to give it a homey, old-world feel.
The kitchen itself was of the highest standards and stretched into the center of the building behind a counter made of polished tiles. Out there, a steady stream of orders were being processed by Mrs. Lindholm and her three staffers. Whenever a lid was lifted or a pot was stirred, a delicious scent of the various dishes filled the air, and the appetite-inducing fragrances were accompanied by happy muttering and the clicking of cutlery out among the guests.
Unlike many other restaurants found in the larger cities, nary a barked command or heated word was heard among the kitchen staff. Though life behind the pots and pans could be hectic during peek hours, Mrs. Lindholm ran a tight ship - there was simply no need for her to raise her voice at any of her employees.
Roast pork and white potatoes in parsley gravy proved to be a somewhat hefty but certainly exquisite dish. Mel had nabbed her fair share of the white potatoes and the cream-based gravy while Janice had been bowled over by the tastiness of the slices of pork that were fried on a large pan while nearly submerged in melted butter. After a brief attempt to control the hot and greasy half-inch thick slices with her cutlery, she had gone back to basics and had eaten them like she would eat spare ribs: with her fingers. The inevitable result was that she had grease up to her elbows and over most of her face.
Returning from the restroom at the back of the inn in a freshly scrubbed state, she noticed that the portly Svend-Aage Lindholm had joined Mel at the table. The innkeeper presented a bottle that didn't appear to be wine or beer. Always interested in sampling local spirits, Janice upped the pace so the chance wouldn't pass her by.
"Hi de ho, there, Mista," she said as she slipped down onto her chair. A closer look at the bottle revealed the liquid was clear and that it had two bunches of an unidentified herb soaking in it. "That looks neat. Any chance of a shot?"
"Jan, dear…" Mel tried in a low voice, but her concerns were waved off.
Svend-Aage smiled at the unusual woman's interest. Moving over to the counter, he took three shot glasses that he put on the table. "This is called bjesk. It's a Jutlandic specialty. I made it myself and it's a good blend. It's strong but not… not… ah… sprittet… spirited? No, I'm sorry. I don't know the word. You understand?"
"Can't say for sure 'til I've tried it, Mista," Janice said with a grin. She pulled one of the shot glasses closer to her at once, but when she repeated the gesture and put the next one in front of Mel, she was met by a gentle shaking of the head.
"Not for me, Jan. Thank you," Mel said and adjusted her glasses. Instead of trying the spirits that she expected to be outrageously potent, she went back to her delightful white potatoes and cream-based parsley gravy.
Jan grinned and pretended to breathe on the shot glass and then wipe it off on her sleeve. "All the more for me, darlin'," she said as she watched Svend-Aage pour the clear liquid into the small glass. "Thanks, Mista. Skoal, right?"
"That's right. Skål!" Svend-Aage said and downed the bjesk in one go.
Not to be outdone by their host, Janice followed suit and let the home-made spirits rush into her mouth and down her gullet. She smacked her lips a couple of times as the aftertaste of dill and a few other herbs and spices came to the fore. "Hey, that's not bad! It's got a little kick but it won't knock your socks off. It's very much like ouzo. Mel, I think you should try. You'd like it."
"Not tonight, thank you. I'm already quite tired after the long journey here," Mel said before she dabbed her lips on the napkin. Pushing the empty plate away, she settled for taking a sip of her water.
Janice gave Svend-Aage a big thumbs-up that the innkeeper clearly didn't understand the meaning of. Trying again, she reached over to thump his arm. "Tastes great, Svend-Aage. Whatcha say it was called?"
"Bjesk."
"Bee-esque. I'll remember that," Janice said with a grin. Svend-Aage grinned as well before his portly shape lumbered back to the counter. When another pair of guests entered the inn's restaurant, Janice's attention was grabbed by the fact their overcoats were dry. "Oh… things may be looking up, darlin'. Their clothes ain't wet."
"A very astute observation, Janice," Mel deadpanned.
"Yep. And that means the rain has stopped. Wanna go over to the dig site and have a look-see?"
"Now?" Mel said before she looked at her wristwatch. "It's half past seven!"
"So? We've both worked on digs way, way, way past midnight. Hell, we've worked on digs until the sun came up. I think we should," Janice said and got up at once. It didn't take her two seconds to don her leather jacket and her beloved fedora. Once she was dressed, she furrowed her brow as she glanced down at the empty plates. "Uh… how the hell do we pay for the food? We don't have any of the local currency…"
"Professor Granfeldt's team has a running tab or an expense account at the inn. That'll cover everything, Jan. I believe that was the essence of what Mrs. Lindholm tried to tell me when I ordered dinner," Mel said and followed her partner away from the table.
"Now ain't that something. I s'pose we coulda done the dishes, but…"
Mel let out a chuckle at the suggestion. "Quite. You can go ahead if you wish. I need to change into my work clothes before I go anywhere potentially filthy."
"Change your clothes, huh? Weeeellll, I could wait a couple of minutes. You need a hand gettin' out of your duds there, darlin'?" Janice said and flashed Mel a sly grin. She pushed her fedora back from her brow while she waited for an answer.
When none came - beyond a crooked eyebrow - Janice put a tender hand on Mel's elbow and guided the tall, graceful woman out of the restaurant and back up the staircase.
-*-*-*-
The evening air was heavy with the characteristic scent of wet soil and soaked foliage. So much water dripped off the branches of the trees it appeared it was still raining, and the drops created a disharmonic concert of splashing as they fell onto the ground to join their brethren. A few swallows had ventured out of their shelters and whooshed around in the hope of finding some insects; nearby, a blackbird warbled its melodious song from atop a hedge.
Lake-sized puddles had formed everywhere on the short stretch of the road between the historical inn and the main dig sites, and although Mel and Janice both wore sturdy boots, they were forced to plot a zig-zag course to avoid any disasters of the watery kind.
Although it wasn't too windy down on the ground, the vast, ragged cloud formations raced past at great speed high above the world. The early evening sky continued to be draped in gray, but there were scattered sections that held the typical pale-blue tone of a Danish summer night. With the Summer Solstice only a week away, the sun wouldn't set until well after ten thirty PM; it would rise once more at half past three the next morning to provide plenty of light for the early birds of the two-winged and two-legged kind.
Mel had swapped her delicate travel dress for a pair of heavy-duty, dark-brown overalls that featured large pockets and reinforced leather patches on the knees. Although most of her work at the various digs consisted of having her nose buried in dusty books to identify or translate fragments of words written on snippets of brittle parchment, it was often necessary for her to be right down in the pit next to Janice assisting the expert archaeologist in rescuing a priceless artifact from its earthy grave - and Nylon stockings simply didn't last long in such an environment.
Further up Mel's long torso, she wore a double-breasted, long-sleeved shirt that could withstand a great deal of the inevitable mud, dirt, tearing and scraping that happened at any dig. On top of all that, she wore an officer's combat coat that she had bought in a US Army surplus store. Though washed-out olive-green definitely wasn't her color, she appreciated the garment's ability to keep her warm on even the coldest nights - as proven by the archaeological expedition she and Janice had undertaken in the Canadian winter of 1949-1950 while searching for Native artifacts for an exhibition at the University of San Francisco.
Even though Janice had teased her about it, she had thrown the coat into the suitcase on the base of a nagging suspicion that the Scandinavian summer wasn't quite in the same league as back home in San Francisco, and now she was glad she had. A pair of gloves that had been stuffed into one of the coat's pockets completed the ensemble.
A large leather bag containing a strong magnifying glass, a flashlight, a storm lighter, a notepad, a collection of pencils of varying hardness and finally a small compendium - that she had written herself - listing the most common letters and symbols in Ancient Greek would ordinarily be slung over her shoulder, but it had remained in their room at the inn since the objective of their evening walk was simply to visit the dig site.
Walking next to the elegant lady, Janice just wore her regular outfit. In fact, she traveled lightly on this particular adventure since she had left her trusty Webley Six revolver and her bullwhip at home. She knew from past experience that getting firearms across the European borders was rarely less than a hassle, and she hoped they would be able to avoid the kind of near-fatal drama that had blighted their quest for Cecrops' treasure the year before. Even a year on from the closing fight in the legendary Orient Express, there were times when her nose would register a whiff of the cordite from the gun that had gone off at point blank range between herself and the evil mastermind's worst henchman. One of them had walked away, the other hadn't.
The cobbled footpath they followed came to an abrupt end at a three-feet tall cast-iron gate that ran across the path to prevent pedestrians from going further. Hawthorn hedges meant to stop anyone but the stupidest from vaulting them took over where the iron gate ended.
Two of the five items that had put Jelling on the world map could be seen on the far side of the thorny hedges: the pair of dome-shaped Viking burial mounds that had been created in the mid-900s AD as the final resting place for King Gorm the Old and his family. At ninety feet across and twenty-four feet tall, the northern-most of the two mounds was certainly befitting the status of its erstwhile resident.
Adhering to the Viking traditions of the time, the king was buried with his armor and a great deal of weaponry, valuables and everyday items like his favorite bone comb - after all, he would need to look presentable in the grand dining hall in Valhalla. As history recorded, Gorm had ultimately been the only one of the ruling family to be laid to rest in the two mounds; the reason why the southern mound hadn't been used after all had been lost in the murky mists of time.
Beyond the mounds, a white church stood proudly reminding the visitors that Denmark had been Christianized only a few decades on from when the Old Norse mounds had been erected. Though the stone structure Mel and Janice were looking at was built in the mid-1100s, it wasn't the first church at that location - there had been at least three previous wooden churches at that very spot going back to the late 900s.
The final two items that had rocked the historians' world upon their discovery were the two huge boulders that had been placed on the other side of the church. They each carried lengthy messages written in runes: the first had been commissioned by King Gorm the Old to act as a mourning monument for his wife, Queen Thyra. The second had been erected fifteen years later, in 965 AD, under the auspices of Gorm's son Harald Bluetooth, and listed what would later be known as Denmark's 'birth certificate' - the carvings on the runestone would mark the first time the name Denmark was used.
"Oh my," Mel said as she adjusted her horn-rimmed glasses to take in the spectacle of the two burial mounds. "A thousand years ago, honest-to-goodness Vikings stood where we stand tonight. You can certainly sense the history here, can't you?"
"Yep. And close to two thousand years ago, Xena and Gabrielle may have stood right here, too. Perhaps we should look for an X carved into a rock somewhere… like 'Xena was here!' " Janice said with a grin; it only earned her a crooked eyebrow in return.
Moving away from the cobbled footpath, they walked along the hawthorn hedges for a dozen yards or so before they came to another stop. Janice soon let out a grunt and scratched her neck. "There's something funny here, though… where's the professor's new excavation? I mean… it's gotta be around here somewhere, but…" she said, making a sweeping gesture at the mounds' green surroundings that didn't appear to have been touched by human hand for centuries.
"You're right, Jan. There aren't any work lights here. Or tents… or scaffolding for that matter. I can't imagine they would-"
"Hvem dér?" a gruff, female voice suddenly barked in Danish a short distance away.
As Mel and Janice spun around to look in the direction of the shoutee, a figure clad in dark stepped out of a sentry box that had been perfectly camouflaged.
The security guard wore a slate-gray rain cape over her shoulders, but she pushed it off at once to have her arms free. Swinging an old-fashioned Madsen M1887 bolt rifle around, she worked the action as she approached the two people she believed to be intruders. She was dressed in a pale-brown uniform identical to the one used by the Danish infantry during the war. Her feet were well-protected by a pair of brown military-issue boots, and her short hair was kept in check by a dark-green beret that sat crooked atop her locks - a brass ensign depicting a laurel wreath and pair of bayonets had been pinned onto the front of the martial-style headwear.
"De damer har ingen ret til at være-"
"In- in English, please!" Mel squeaked while she rummaged through all her pockets for her phrase book - then she realized she had left it at the inn.
The mid-thirty-something security guard narrowed her eyes but eventually broke out in a nod. "Very well. You ladies have no business here. You need to turn around at once and head back to the inn or wherever you came from," she said as she eyed the two women cautiously.
Mel could only stare at the lethal bolt-action rifle, but Janice had been there and done it all before. Pushing her fedora back, she broke out in a grin and stepped forward. "Hi de ho, General. We're Doctor Janice Covington and Melinda Pappas. Professor Granfeldt has sent for us to help him with a little o' this and a little o' that. Well, here we are."
The uniformed guard lowered the Madsen rifle but kept it ready in case it was a trick to make her ease off. She glared at the two supposed trespassers for a while longer to gauge their intentions. When nothing seemed untoward, she swung her weapon back onto her shoulder.
Mel let out an audible sigh of relief at the peaceful conclusion to the unexpected drama; it prompted Janice to run a hand up and down one of her partner's long arms while she said: "Thanks, General! Havin' a gun pointed atcha tends to make ya nervous, yeah?"
The guard let out a short grunt. "I wasn't told there would be foreign staff here. I'll need to have it verified before I can let you in. Besides, the professor has already left for the evening. He won't be back until early tomorrow morning."
"Aw, hell!" Janice said under her breath before she punched a fist into an open palm. Rubbing her brow, she looked back at the armed security guard. "Where'd he go? Ain't he staying at the inn?"
"He drove to Vejle to meet some of his colleagues."
"Dammit… we were told the professor had found something very important… we've traveled halfway across the globe to have a look at it! Do you know anything about that?"
"No."
A few swallows had time to whoosh by before Janice eased off on her mumbled grumblings - the earlier arm-rubbing was repeated, only in reverse, with Mel performing the calming motions on the tense Janice. Another sigh escaped the feisty archaeologist before she broke out in a shrug. "Well… all right, but there must be something we can begin to work on in the meantime. Hasn't that 'fessor fella clued you in on anything they've found here?"
"I'm a sentry and not a scientist, Doctor. The professor has told me nothing. I can't leave my post and I can't allow you to wander around freely."
Mel put a hand in the air and wiggled her fingers to catch the guard's attention. "Ah, if I may. Good evening. I'm Melinda Pappas, translator of Latin, Ancient Greek and several other languages. Mel for short. Where is the dig site, exactly?"
The guard nodded in the direction of the white church. "On the far side of the southern mound. That's the empty one behind the church."
"I see…"
"I don't," Janice said in a grumble.
Silence fell among the three women. The slight confrontation turned more than a little awkward before the stern guard relented and seemed to ease up toward the visitors - there was even a hint of a smile on her face. "I don't have all the details, but gossip insists that Professor Granfeldt's team has found what appears to be a third mound. Much smaller than the other two, and apparently much older."
"Much older?" Mel echoed; she looked at Janice whose eyes began to narrow as a few dots were connected in her mind. "Oh my, Jan… that must be where the runestone that mentioned the olive-skinned warrior was found… goodness me, might it be about Xena after all?"
Janice chewed on her cheek as she tried to look at the white church in the hope of seeing through it and onto the third, smaller mound. When her attempt failed, she turned back to her partner. "That's what my gut's been tellin' me all along, Toots. That's why I wanted us to come over here. It's gotta be Xena and Gabrielle. We know from the scrolls that Xena spent some time at King Hrothgar's palace while Gabrielle was under the fire spell. What if the royal palace was right here in Yelling as well? Nine hundred years or so before the other things we see here."
"Mmmm…" Mel said and glanced around. High above them, heavy clouds rolled in to end the brief spell of good weather. Scattered drops of rain had already begun to fall, and the wind had picked up as well. "Unless I made a terrible mistake in translating the scrolls, neither the general location nor the local terrain seems quite right. So much of the narrative took place in a terrible bog, and there was mention of a system of caves as well. Neither can be found here. Granted, a lot can change in two thousand years… give or take. And, of course, Gabrielle wrote those scrolls after the fact. Indeed, quite a long time after the fact… and off Xena's recollections, too," she continued as she pulled the ex-army coat closer around herself to keep warm.
Janice only had time to nod before the guard spoke again: "Say, do any of you ladies have a cigarette I could borrow? Maybe a Lucky Strike or something? My own cigs got soaked before…" - She held up a sorry-looking pack of Green Cecil that had become so wet it had practically turned to mush.
"No wonder in this crap weather," Janice said with a grin that preceded a shrug. "I'm really sorry, General, but neither of us smoke… I used to smoke cheroots, but… ah, my associate here threatened to remove a vital privilege if I didn't quit, so…" she continued as she winked at Mel.
"Ulrikke."
"Whassat?"
"Ulrikke Jensen. 's my name."
"Olrickah?" Mel said; the tongue-twister name forced her graceful mouth into appearing somewhat less so.
"Perhaps you can just call me Rikki like my brother does," Ulrikke said with a tired grin.
The next rain cloud had made its way into the stretch of sky above the three women, and it chose that moment to empty out its contents onto the world below. Three distinct groans were heard as heavy drops began to plummet from the gray mass. While Ulrikke Jensen spun around on her heel, picked up the discarded rain cape and strode back to the sentry box, Mel and Janice hurried back to the inn so they wouldn't get soaked to the core - like Ulrikke's mushy cigarettes.
*
*
CHAPTER 2
The night had been chilly but brief. The first indications of the new day were merry birdsong and a narrow streak of pale light that illuminated parts of the ceiling above the curtains. Early birds may get the worm, but other birds - like Mel and Janice - preferred to spend the morning hours snuggled up close under the winter duvet that proved to be cozier and more comfortable than it had appeared.
Janice used her big toe to sample the morning air at a quarter past six, and she decided on the spot that getting up would have to wait a while longer. Ten past seven, the metallic scent that spread from the radiator in the guest room told the two adventurers that the central heating had once again been brought to life. The ambient temperature slowly rose to a point where it would be safe to venture outside the duvet - not that Janice felt any need to do so while she and Mel shared the same space in the soft bed.
---
Their regular morning routines were made more difficult by the fact there was only one bathroom on the entire upper floor of the historical inn, but Janice took care of business by standing guard while Mel washed her hair and all the other vital tasks. Though the other guests staying at the inn let out a few grumbles at the length of time it took and the amount of hot water that was used, they were told that perfection just couldn't be rushed.
---
By the time they made it down into the restaurant for breakfast, Janice's eagerness to at least clap her eyes on the runestone and the rest of the discovered artifacts was nearing its boiling point. It didn't help that Mel asked Mrs. Lindholm if it was possible to get genuine American pancakes. Since the lady in charge of the pots and pans had never heard of anyone eating pancakes for breakfast, it took a while before the details had come across. Ultimately, Mel gave up and settled for toast, jam and coffee.
While Mel allowed herself enough time to enjoy the breakfast, Janice poured down her coffee at world record pace. Getting up from the chair, she donned her leather jacket and plonked her fedora crooked onto her blond mane. "Mel, I'm way too damn antsy to sit still for a moment longer. I gotta do something! The professor musta returned by now… I'll be over at the dig site. Just come over when you feel like it."
Mel started to nod, but a new guest entering the inn's restaurant made her look past Janice and over to the door. "I'm afraid the ants in your pants need to settle down, Jan…"
"Haw, that ain't possible, Sweetheart! Why?"
"Well, I'll bet you two dollars that distinguished gentleman over there is Professor Granfeldt," Mel continued before she dabbed her lips on a napkin. Pushing back the plate with the half-eaten toast so the orange jam wouldn't end up all over her slacks, she got to her feet to greet the elderly fellow.
Janice grumbled as she took off her fedora and her jacket once more. After putting the items across the back of one of the chairs so they would be within easy reach, she turned to look at the fellow Mel referred to.
The man who had just entered the restaurant was in his early seventies, white-haired, somewhat gaunt and with a pale complexion. His cheeks and chin were bare, but his upper lip was graced by an impressively swooping mustache that had recently been waxed. He wore brown ankle boots, off-white pants, a tan blazer over a white shirt, and a black tie featuring a large, suave knot. His white hair was covered by an old-fashioned, flat-brimmed straw hat that he took off when he noticed the two women looking at him.
The professor's hat instantly made Mel think of the many times she had visited the nickel and dime movie theaters in the 1920s to watch a Harold Lloyd one-reeler.
The elderly man's posture was decidedly old-school in that he looked as if he had an ironing board stuck down the back of his blazer. As he stepped forward with his hand extended for the traditional greeting, his no-nonsense voice proved to match the rest of his appearance perfectly. "How do you do! Good morning! I take it you're the people from the university in San Francisco that my dear colleague Professor Coyne suggested should come over. I'm Professor Thorkild Granfeldt. And you are?"
"Doctor Janice Covington, Professor. Nice to finally meet you," Janice said and shook the older man's hand. If she had worried about needing to go light on the handshake because of his paleness, it was forgotten about in a hurry by the hard grip she experienced.
"Ha, much like the Americans who were here after the war. Always impatient!" the professor said with a gleam in his eyes that made Janice chuckle; then he turned his attention to the taller of the two women.
Mel stepped forward and soon shook hands with the old fellow as well. "I'm Melinda Pappas, Professor Granfeldt. Professor Coyne has told us so much about you and your accomplishments. We're looking forward to assisting you with the artifacts you've found."
"Thank you," Thorkild Granfeldt said and cocked his head. "Your name is Greek and yet you speak with an accent found in the Southern United States?"
"Indeed, Sir. Though my family tree has its roots in Thessaloniki, one of the branches made its way across the Atlantic," Mel said with a smile. "My father was the Dean of the University of South Carolina for a number of years."
"I see. And yet you didn't choose a life in academe?"
"Oh, but I did, Professor," Mel said and adjusted her glasses. "I hold a Doctorate in Linguistics. I've simply chosen not to go by my title. My field of expertise is Ancient Greek syntax and meter, however I'm also fluent in Latin."
"Ah! In that case…"
The two scholars shared a joke in Latin that went clear over Janice's head - it didn't bother her a bit since she knew her own special talents were just as appreciated. Instead, she grinned along with the others while she donned her leather jacket and fedora once more. "Yup, Mel here's a swell dame all-round, all right. She also makes a mean spicy beef moussaka. My own field of expertise is being on my knees with my fingers, hands and forearms buried in dirt and everything else found at the bottom of a dig pit. Now… speaking of which… how about we went over there at once to get started?"
"I haven't had breakfast yet, Doctor Covington," Professor Granfeldt said in a voice that proved he couldn't care less if the Earth stopped turning if he hadn't had his breakfast yet at the time it happened. "The mound's not going anywhere. It's been there for centuries. It can wait for another half an hour."
"Half an-!"
As the professor excused himself and moved over to one of the vacant tables, Mel sensed an explosion of severe grumbling would soon reach her ear drums - to quell it before it could rear its ugly head, she patted Janice's hand several times. "Jan, dear, perhaps you could go over there on your own? Like you planned on doing before Professor Granfeldt got here?" she said for her partner's ears only.
"Yeah… yeah, I think I'll do just that. Good thinking, darlin'," Janice said and gave Mel's hand a little squeeze. "While I do that, feel free to hob-nob a little with Mista Latin Lover over there." The only reply she got was a crooked eyebrow and a dramatic sigh.
-*-*-*-
The first thing Janice did when she reached the same spot that she and Mel had come to the evening before was to reach into one of her jacket's pockets and retrieve a pack of Green Cecil cigarettes. They had been quite expensive compared to what she had typically given for smoking tobacco back home in San Francisco, but she had persuaded Mrs. Lindholm to put it on their tab after a little debating.
The sentry box where Ulrikke Jensen had surprised them on their evening walk was empty, but Janice didn't have to wait long for the security guard to return from patrolling the perimeter. The woman, who looked even tougher in daylight, still wore the beret, the uniform and the raincape, and she still carried the bolt-action rifle across her shoulder.
"Hi de ho, there, General Rikki!" Janice said while she saluted the approaching guard. "Doctor Janice Covington, archaeologist extraordinaire, reporting for duty, Ma'am. Have you had time to talk to the old 'fessor fella about our credentials?"
"I have, yes," Ulrikke Jensen said as she came to a halt by the sentry box.
"And?"
"Professor Granfeldt has vouched for you. I must apologize for turning you away-"
Janice interrupted at once by shaking her head and putting her hands in the air. "Oh, hell no, Rikki! You followed the orders you'd been given. That's worth a helluva lot in my book. I'm just glad to see there's such professional security here… ya never know when Joe Schmuck 's gonna show up. So it's okay if I proceed to the dig now?"
"Yes, Doctor."
"Thanks. Oh… look what Santa Claus put in my Christmas stocking earlier today," Janice said with a grin as she produced the pack of Green Cecils. She lobbed it to Ulrikke who caught it smartly with her left hand. "Have fun with 'em. And think of old Janice when you light up. Yeah?"
Ulrikke grinned and put the new pack into her uniform jacket's breast pocket. "Will do, Doctor. Thank you. If you ever need any help, just call my name. I'm here pretty much from dawn to dusk… and longer than that when it gets hectic."
"Deal," Janice said and saluted the guard once more.
---
The round gravel on the footpath crunched under her boots as the digging camp finally entered her field of view. She had already walked the entire length of the white church - as well as gone past the spot where the two massive rune stones were on display - when several tents came into view.
The makeshift camp had been put up two hundred yards from the entrance in a natural blind spot that rendered it fully out of sight from the road that ran beyond the burial site. The perfect position left no opportunities for prying eyes to spy on them in case anyone would be interested in doing that.
Janice had seen hundreds of camps during her years in the field so it wasn't new to her, but it always fascinated her to see how the various dig managers had chosen to set up their infrastructure - even if the set-up at Jelling was in effect too small to be called a proper camp.
With the historical inn and Mrs. Lindholm's pots and pans so close by, a mess tent wasn't needed so that particular item was absent. Similarly, there was no need for a waste pit. A pair of closed tents that framed an open-sided one seemed far too small to be the sleeping quarters, so Janice surmised the people who had done the actual excavation work had already moved onto other projects elsewhere instead of roughing it out on bunks - and, of course, the professor's four assistants all stayed at the inn.
Off to the right, a pile of discarded dirt reached nearly a foot in the air underneath a strange-looking contraption that was used to sift through the freshly excavated soil: after pouring a bucketful into the contraption and giving the whole thing a solid shaking, whatever was left in the filter might be of interest or even importance. Janice had once found a priceless, miniature Thracian icon in such a large-scale sieve, so she knew how valuable they were.
She walked on and soon spotted the third mound that Ulrikke Jensen had mentioned the night before. Like the tough guard had said, the top of the third mound's dome was far lower than the other two. As a result, grass, wildflowers and the occasional weed had spread over it to a degree that it simply resembled a natural hill. Flying insects buzzed between the colorful wildflowers, and it sounded like a family of crickets had found a nice, cozy home somewhere among a patch of tall grass.
In fact, the third mound was so well-camouflaged that a person would walk right across it without noticing anything. It was impossible to say if it had been designed to appear that way, or if the natural erosion that always took place over time had flattened it down to what it was at present. Everything about it seemed insignificant compared to the splendors of the large mounds, the church and the runestones, but Janice Covington knew all too well that size or presentation mattered little - it was all about what it had on the inside.
Coming to a halt, she pulled up her pants and crouched down to get a literal grassroots perspective on the object of the archaeological excavation. Her experienced eyes roamed across the mound and then up at the landscape surrounding it. The man-made, Viking-era items behind her - the church, the other mounds and the runestones - wouldn't have been there when the smallest mound had been made, so she needed to clear her mind of how the site in general looked at present to get an impression of how it might have looked upon its creation.
A slow-moving propeller airplane crept across the heavens high above her. It was impossible to avoid hearing the characteristic sound of the piston-driven engine as it echoed across the landscape, but she was so focused on the mound in front of her she didn't even glance up at it.
She got up once more and circumvented the burial mound by walking around its left-hand side. The leading edge of an oak forest lay a mere two hundred yards further south of the perimeter; the wooded area would most likely have been closer fourteen centuries earlier - a plowed firebreak in front of the closest oaks proved that mankind had interfered with it.
Janice walked around the entire mound and came to a halt at the section that had been excavated. At four by seven feet, it wasn't the largest she had ever seen, but it had been done carefully and professionally. The Professor's digging team had removed more than four feet of the top soil which had made a wooden door - an underground entrance to the actual burial chamber located at the base of the mound - come into view. A further foot of soil had been excavated at the base of the door to allow it to open. Sheet piling had been rammed several inches into the ground all around the outer edge to keep the pit's new floor safe from the inevitable slides.
A stepladder provided the access to the floor of the excavation pit, and she quickly went down to literally get her hands dirty. A few scrape marks in the freshly created dirt floor in front of the wooden entrance proved that Professor Granfeldt and his team had already set foot inside the burial chamber; the runestone that the entire adventure revolved around had obviously been found inside and not merely in the loose soil in front of it.
At a rough estimate, the door was three feet across and just shy of six feet tall. It was made of four vertical oak planks; hollow moldings had been carved into them to make them join up perfectly. A narrower plank of oak had been put diagonally across the four vertical ones from the bottom-left to the top-right corners to maintain a rock-solid structural rigidity, and some kind of sticky pitch similar to that used by the master boat builders in ancient times had been used to seal the wooden joints to keep the chamber itself as safe from the elements as possible.
Although some woodrot had set in around the door's edges, only the outer five to eight inches were affected. Janice was impressed by its surprisingly solid state considering how long it had been covered by the soil - she had seen far, far worse on far newer installations. She surmised that whomever the craftsperson had been, it had to have been a master.
English-speaking voices approaching from behind the white church made her move back from the oak door. She gave it a final glance in its mostly untouched state before she climbed up the stepladder to greet Mel and the others. Her partner's excited tones made her break out in a smile as she dusted off her hands and nudged her fedora into sitting at the proper, crooked angle.
Mel's long hair had been tied into a neat bun to stop it from falling into her eyes at the wrong moments. She had changed into her work clothes - the combat coat and the heavy-duty overalls with the reinforced leather patches on the knees - and she carried the indispensable leather bag over her shoulder that, among other things, contained a magnifying glass, pencils and paper, and finally her own compendium listing the most common ancient letters and symbols. Though she smiled and spoke in excited tones to the elderly professor, she moved along the gravelly footpath in a purposeful stride that left no doubts as to her intentions.
Janice simply couldn't contain a cheesy grin from spreading over her features at the sight of her partner in full-on 'let's get this done'-mode. Pushing her fedora back from her brow, she let her eyes gaze over the tall figure who always delivered the goods in every kind of situation. The gaze only made the grin grow wider. "Sweet Aphrodite, I'm the luckiest gal on the planet… look at that dynamite dame right there…" she mumbled under her breath.
Professor Granfeldt still wore the breezy summer outfit he had worn at breakfast; in addition to that, he had donned a pair of what appeared to be gardening gloves. The ensemble was completed by a stylish leather briefcase that was pinned down under his left arm so he could have his hands free to illustrate certain points in the ongoing conversation.
Behind the two senior members of the short-range expedition, four junior associates dressed in typical work clothes hurried along to keep up with the vanguard - they were the assistants who performed the actual digging, sifting, cleaning and cataloging of the artifacts that were uncovered.
The assistants were two women and two men; all young and rosy-cheeked, their faces bore expressions that revealed they were equal parts excited and disquieted about the day that lay ahead now the two important American archaeologists were to work with them.
One of the assistants was Henning Mikkelsen, the bespectacled, inexperienced driver who had picked up Mel and Janice when they had arrived in Vejle. The young fellow next to Henning carried a large box that resembled a packing case. Made of metal, the box had reinforced corners and appeared heavy - the young man's arms were a great deal wider than Henning's and thus far better suited for the task.
"Hello again, Doctor Covington," the professor said once they were close enough. Coming to a halt next to Janice, he made a sweeping gesture at the four assistants. "Here's my team. Mr. Mikkelsen, Mr. Kjærsgaard, Miss Nielsen, Miss Chrone. You can introduce yourself to them later."
Janice smiled though the professor's brusque voice and manners toward his team irked her. It didn't take a genius to imagine how Granfeldt's young students would experience the lectures - not to mention the working environment on the digs he would lead personally. To show the elderly fellow it was entirely possible for a senior member of a dig to treat the staff with respect, she turned to the assistants and tipped her fedora. "Good morning, everybody. I'm Doctor Janice Covington. I know we can get something accomplished today if we work hard and think smart."
As the young people offered her various mumbled hellos and good mornings in return, Janice's smile turned to a smirk as she happened to look at Mel - the tall woman had to adjust her glasses as a sudden bout of embarrassment rolled over her at the way Janice had ignored the professor's words.
The professor didn't seem to notice any embarrassment and continued in his regular tone of voice: "Let's get to the important matters."
"Now you're talkin' my language!" Janice said and began to move back to the excavation site. It soon became clear from the professor's puzzled expression that he hadn't understood a word. "A figure of speech, Professor. The stage's all yours," she continued as she stepped aside.
"Ah… I see. We're not going into the chamber yet, Doctor Covington," the professor said and made a beeline for the largest of the three tents instead. "Over breakfast, Miss Pappas let it be known that you would much prefer to see the runestone first."
"Haw, I can't deny that!" Janice said with a grin. She turned to shoot a smile at Mel who adjusted her glasses all over again.
---
The open-sided tent had been put up on the flattest stretch of grass they had been able to find. It was equipped with a handful of lawn chairs and a large, wooden table that had a planed surface - one of the table's legs needed a block of wood as support which revealed the ground wasn't entirely flat after all.
The tent itself was roughly seven feet tall, and the floor area was twelve by twenty-five feet. It had five support beams on either side, and an intricate pattern of cross-beam laths had been built into a dome-shaped top that held up the fabric ceiling. Four hooks had been screwed into the cross-beams to provide suspension points for lamps burning kerosene or oil, but since all of the work in the tent would take place in daylight, there were no lamps present.
While Mel took the leather bag off her shoulder and prepared her gloves, her notepad and a medium-soft pencil perfect for drawing sketches of the fabled runestone, Torben Kjærsgaard moved the heavy box up onto the flat surface. Almost inevitably, the reinforced case knocked against the edge of the table on its way up there.
"Pas dog på, menneske!" Professor Granfeldt barked. The scolding made Torben's cheeks catch alight, but he carried out his task and placed the box on the wooden table. Four latches were quickly undone and the lid was opened.
Mel and Janice shared a brief look of sublime annoyance at how the professor treated his students, but even the feisty archaeologist chose not to make a comment - they weren't in charge, and they both knew how important it was not to undermine the authority of the site manager.
Professor Granfeldt soon unzipped the leather briefcase and retrieved a brown folder that he placed next to the box. Once the minutiae were in place, he reached into the box and retrieved a package wrapped in cotton wool. After putting it on the table with great care, he unfolded several layers of the protective fabric until a twelve-by-twenty-two inch runestone came into view.
The stone's colors were largely pale-gray with a few streaks of faint ocher mixed in. The natural coarseness of its texture was only interrupted by countless, densely carved lines of runic text that ran along the breadth of the stone. Similar to a typist feeding writing paper into a typewriter vertically instead of horizontally, the indentations that formed the runic symbols had been carved across the stone to give the runemaster enough room to print the message without breaking it up too badly.
Janice felt her pulse quicken at the sight. At face value, it was just an old stone with some odd symbols on it, but she had seen and dealt with enough uncovered artifacts to know that even the items that appeared slight and uninteresting could hold extreme value - not only of a monetary nature, but of historical importance. And even better, they might lead to further discoveries.
The professor cleared his voice to prepare for the presentation: "Now, as you can see, there are eleven lines of runes on the front of the object. They were carved using the Elder Futhark system," he chanted in a tone of voice that he undoubtedly used at his lectures; he pointed a gloved index finger at the runestone while he spoke. "From this alone, we can deduce the runestone was created at some point from the second to the eighth century, AD, with the highest probability being near the end of that period. As we have discovered through a scientific analysis, it was in fact made in the seventh century, AD. In turn, that means it was made during the era where Proto-Norse gradually gave way to Old Norse. The rear side has a few additional lines of runes, but they merely detail the name of the carver and his taskmaster, and are thus irrelevant at present."
Mel soon realized the design of the runes was far too intricate to draw a sketch of in the short time she had available, so she exchanged the medium-soft pencil for a harder one that she used to take notes of the professor's explanations.
"The initial translation of the lines of runes into contemporary Danish has resulted in the following," the professor continued as he took a type-written piece of paper from the brown folder. "Doctor, Miss Pappas, please bear in mind that I am translating it into English to the best of my abilities. Subtle discrepancies may occur."
"We understand, Professor Granfeldt," Mel said as she held her pencil ready. "Don't we, Jan?"
Janice nodded while she kept her eyes trained on the fascinating runestone. "Oh-yeah. Sure. Take it away, Professor."
Thorkild Granfeldt briefly furrowed his brow almost like he was thinking that the woman with the unusual clothing was speaking an alien language. When she appeared to be waiting for him to go on, he cleared his throat once more and concentrated on re-translating the text. "Very well. I quote… Upon leaf-fall, three travelers came from afar to assist the great King Wermund of the Jutes at a gathering of Kings on the eve of a war. The fearsome master swordsman Amphius of Xanten, leader of the men, had hair as dark as Othinn's ravens and skin the color of new leather. He exhumed-"
"Ah, pardon! That should probably be exuded, Professor Granfeldt," Mel interjected.
The professor was clearly not used to being interrupted during a lecture as he shot Mel a fierce glare; then he seemed to remember his manners. "I see. Thank you, Miss Pappas. Where was I… hmmm… skin the color of new leather. He exuded a great calming presence upon the rival Kings. The fair Garriallus Batticus of Polmus was a mediator though he carried arms as well. The quiet Gamberus of Aquae Granni was a master upon the bow and arrow. The negotiations lasted nine days and nights until a deal was struck and war was averted. The brave Gamberus paid with his life as he was slain on the final night. The ashes of the man of the forest continue to rest in this chamber where they shall remain until Ragnarok shall make all Kingdoms tremble. Unquote."
Mel chewed on her lips as she finished jotting down the essentials of what the professor had read aloud from the translation. Tapping the pencil against the notepad, she let out a sequence of "Hmmm… hmmm… hmmm… hmmm…" in various keys as she looked at four bullet points in particular: the Latin names of the people involved, their descriptions, the fact that Gamberus was cremated, and the odd term 'the man of the forest.'
While Professor Granfeldt put away the piece of paper and concentrated on wrapping the runestone in the layers of cotton wool to keep it safe, Janice moved over to Mel to have a look at the numerous notes that had been committed to paper. To gain a little privacy from the other members of the digging team, they shuffled over to the far side of the open-sided tent where they would be out of earshot. "So… what do you make of all that?" Janice said as she stuffed her hands into her leather jacket's side pockets.
"It's hard to say, Jan. It's certainly a fascinating tale," Mel said before she chewed a little on the pencil. " 'Fearsome master swordsman,' 'Hair as dark as Othinn's ravens.' I presume Othinn is Odin."
"Probably."
"It would also fit the context. And finally 'skin the color of new leather…' as the second descriptive of Amphius of Xanten."
"And the fair whatshisname…"
Mel moved the tip of the pencil down the list of notes until she came to the right one; then she tapped it against the line. "I have it as Garriallus Batticus of Polmus. Obviously Latin though I've never heard of Polmus. Perhaps a late-Roman garrison town located in what we would call West Germany now?"
"Perhaps. Garriallus… Amphius… Polmus… Xanten," Janice said and rubbed her chin absentmindedly. A hundred different scenarios, suggestions, theories and possible solutions ran through her mind; some were discarded, some were saved for further processing, some couldn't withstand closer scrutiny, and some were so blatantly ridiculous, even for a scholar of the notorious Xena Scrolls, that they were rejected at once.
What was left boiled down to every archaeologist's worst enemy - a mistake on the part of the translator that led the entire analysis down the wrong path altogether. Locking eyes with her partner, she took a deep breath and let it out slowly as sudden clarity bubbled up inside her. "Or… how about switching the letters around? How about Xena of Amphipolis and Gabrielle, the Battling Bard of Potaideia…?"
Mel broke out in a slow nod at the implications as she studied her notes once more. "Perhaps, but careful, Jan," she said quietly, "we're trying to make the facts fit our preconceived notions. We need more proof. But the coincidence regarding the names and description is remarkable, I'll give you that."
"Coincidence, my hairy butt," Janice replied in a similarly quiet voice - the comment made Mel smirk and adjust her glasses - "and speaking of preconceived notions, whoever translated the runes into Danish reverted to conformity by using male pronouns and giving the three visitors male names. No, it's Xena and Gabrielle. I'll bet my bottom dollar on it. But who did they travel with? Who's the mysterious third person?"
Mel turned to her bullet list and traced the final two lines with the tip of the pencil. It was almost possible to hear the gears grinding in her head as she - just like her other half had done only moments earlier - worked through the various permutations of Janice's question. "Gamberus of Aquae Granni… similar to the erroneous Polmus from before, the Latin placename pinpoints it as being somewhere within the regions controlled by the Roman Empire. And similar to Polmus, I can't say I've ever heard of it."
"Me neither. We can ask the 'fessor later."
"Right," Mel said and looked at her notes once more. " 'Man of the forest…' and he was cremated. Now… if we were back in Greece…" She fell quiet for a heartbeat or ten while she chewed on the dull end of the pencil. "I'd say that… that… hmmm…"
Janice allowed a further few seconds of silence to go by before she moved in even closer to get the full blast of the scoop that would undoubtedly come. "If we were back in Greece… what?"
"The third person was an Amazon. They had joined up with an Amazon, Jan!"
"Jumpin' Jehoshaphat, Toots! We're onto something. We're definitely onto something! And even better… this is new material. It's not covered in the Rhinegold scrolls," Jan said and punched her fist into her open palm.
Mel nodded excitedly while she scribbled a few of her thoughts in the notepad while they were fresh. After crossing the T's and dotting the I's, she continued: "Why, I do believe you're right, Jan. This is a brand new adventure. Xena, Gabrielle and an Amazon traveled north to help settle some kind of disagreement between rival kings. Perhaps a border dispute. But why?"
"Why did Xena do anything, Toots? She may have had the bigger picture in mind. Who knows. I'm more interested in finding out who the Amazon was. Which tribe did she belong to? Why did she come along? And what was she involved in to get herself killed on the final night of the negotiations?" Janice said while she held out one finger at a time to count the questions. "Damn, this lights one helluva fire in my belly!"
"I've noticed," Mel said and concealed a snicker with her graceful hand.
Janice grinned back and reached out to swat playfully at Mel's tall frame. "Heh… yeah. C'mon, sweetheart… Xena's calling and we can't leave her hanging. Hey, Professor? Professor Granfeldt, we have a few questions we'd like to ask if ya don't mind," she said and strode back to the others.
Over by the table, the professor was once again interrupted in the middle of a lecture he was giving to his assistants - this time, the topic seemed to be how to properly preserve brittle fragments of fabric. "By all means, Doctor Covington," the elderly man said in a voice that held an annoyed undertone.
"We may have a theory, but we need a general timeline first to get a few things lined up in the proper sequence. Would ya mind providing one for us?"
"Oh… of course not," the professor said and reached into the folder to retrieve the translation he had read aloud earlier. He studied it for a while before he looked back at Janice. "Well, first of all, King Wermund wasn't royalty as we know it today. Rather, he was a warrior chieftain who had command over this geographical region in the early decades of the second century, AD. Back then, Jelling would have been very close to the border of the Anglian and Jute kingdoms."
Mel's pencil flew back and forth across an empty page in her notepad to keep up with Professor Granfeldt's words. When she was done jotting everything down, she licked the graphite tip of the pencil to have it ready for the next burst.
"From what I know," the professor continued, "and I must admit my knowledge of the Proto-Norse field is somewhat limited… Wermund of the Jutes was succeeded by his son Uffa in one-hundred-thirty-eight, AD. The gathering of Kings is believed to have taken place around one-hundred-twenty-five, AD, but there is precious little information available. The runestone has been meticulously dated to the mid-seventh century, AD. Why it was carved then, I cannot tell you. The burial mound is several centuries older and is most likely from the period described in the runes."
Mel scribbled for all she was worth as she gathered up all the new information; when she had finished, she adjusted her glasses, scratched her temple and chewed on the pencil all over again. "One-twenty-five, AD… one-thirty-eight, AD… that's no good, Jan. It's too late. It's a full century too late."
"Yeah… dammit," Janice said quietly.
The professor eyed both women for a moment before he slid the translation back into the folder. "Does that help or hinder your theory, Doctor Covington?"
Janice let out a grunt as she crossed over to the table to glare at the wrapped bundle containing the runestone like it had insulted her on a personal level. "Well, it certainly doesn't help it, but…"
"But?"
"This business with King Wermund of the Jutes, his son Uffa and the Gathering… are those dates written in stone? No pun intended."
The professor furrowed his brow for a moment as he parsed the question and the closing quip. He gave up on the last part but was able to answer the first: "Well, Doctor, you and I both know that many historical dates are merely conjecture. Especially regarding events that took place this long ago. Our estimate may be off a century or more in either direction."
"So it's possible the Gathering of Kings and… uh… Amphius of Xanten's visit took place in, say, twenty-five AD rather than a century later?"
"Yes. Or in two-hundred-and-twenty-five, AD. Look, Doctor Covington, we don't even know if the so-called Gathering is fact or myth. We simply cannot be certain about anything when it comes to ancient events of such minor importance. Quite frankly, you ought to know that."
"Oh, I do. I've been bitten more than once, thank you."
The professor's brow once more grew furrowed at the doctor's strange usage of the English language. Shaking his head at the seemingly nonsensical words, he turned back to his assistants to underline that the subject had been exhausted and that he wanted to continue the lecture.
"Professor Granfeldt," Mel said and stepped forward, "what Doctor Covington is trying to say is that we theorize the three visitors from afar aren't men at all, but the legendary Greek warriors Xena of Amphipolis and her soulmate Gabrielle of Potaideia. The third person may be an-"
"Women? Impossible. Simply impossible, Miss Pappas," Thorkild Granfeldt said sternly. "Don't commit the mistake of projecting current notions and sensibilities onto the ancient worlds. I presume you know full well that in those days, women could not, and would not, have been allowed to act as warriors or mediators. In fact, many cultures wouldn't allow women to travel on their own without male escorts. And all the way from the Eastern Mediterranean to here? No. No, no, no, I cannot believe that for a second. They were men… mark my words. If that's your theory, I'm afraid you need to come up with a better one."
Mel's left eyebrow began a slow journey up her forehead while her eyelids narrowed down into slits. Her lips were reduced to thin lines in her face before she suddenly drew a deep breath to let out an explosive: "It is our theory, an' Ah dare say it's a sound one, Professah Granfeldt!" - The outburst had been said in a voice that had suddenly gained a stronger Southern accent than usual. "Xena of Amphipolis had hair the color of Odin's ravens, and she had olive-toned skin. Gabrielle of Potaideia was a highly skilled bard and warrior, and she would have relished the challenge of mediating between warring kings. And her hair and skin were fair like a Norsewoman's!"
At first, Thorkild Granfeldt appeared shocked by his American guest's detailed descriptions; then his face darkened and he seemed to count to ten inwardly. After a short stare-down that he didn't win, he began to speak in a voice that started out quite civil. "Really, Miss Pappas… stating with such conviction that someone's hair or skin tone was this, that or the other when the person lived in ancient times is bordering on pseudoscience! We have no way of knowing!"
"Except that we do, Professor," Janice said, jumping into the conversation to prevent a possible takeover from Mel's distant ancestor, "because Gabrielle wrote countless scrolls about the journeys she and Xena went on two thousand years ago. Mel and I got an entire book of them. This particular event may be new to us, but that doesn't mean it wasn't Xena and Gabrielle. They moved around a great deal… hell, they were true globetrotters before the term even existed."
The acute embarrassment among the professor's assistants grew to stratospheric levels as the conversation between the three senior members of the dig went off the proverbial rails. Henning Mikkelsen and the others looked as if they had no idea about what they should do or who they should support in the ongoing argument - ultimately, he just took off his round glasses to concentrate on wiping the lenses. Next to Henning, Torben Kjærsgaard kept scuffing his boots on his pantlegs while Hanne Nielsen and Ellen Chrone both seemed grossly insulted by their professor's blank rejection of the female-angled theory.
The tension continued to mount until the professor - after eyeing his blushing assistants - decided to cut a long argument short. "Doctor Covington, Miss Pappas, let's resume our discussion in private later on. If you will, you can analyze a few of the other artifacts we've found while I conclude my lecture. Mr. Kjærsgaard will assist you."
"Sounds like a plan, Professor. Torben, give us a couple of minutes, yeah?" Janice said as she put a hand on the small of the seething Mel's back. The two women soon moved out of the open-sided tent to gain some privacy.
They walked for twenty paces - around the far side of the recently excavated third burial mound - before Janice moved her hand up on Mel's arm to halt her stomping progress. "Whoa! Simmer down, simmer down, Mel. Or do I need to call you Warrior Princess?"
Mel grunted several times while her lips formed unspoken oaths and curses at the professor's obduracy. Finally calming down, she cleared her throat a couple of times before she continued at a regular volume. "No. It's still me. You know I haven't been visited by my ancestor for nearly a year now… but make no mistake… if I wanted to, I wouldn't need Xena's guidance to make that infuriating, pompous fellow eat his words!"
"I hear ya loud and clear, Toots. There's never a dull moment, is there?" Janice said with a grin. She glanced around to make sure they were alone; then she got up on tip-toes to place a little kiss on Mel's lush lips. "The more I evaluate our theory, the more I'm convinced it's true. Xena and Gabrielle were here. I'm sure of it. Why they were here is still a mystery… and I just love solving mysteries. The identity and general story of their Amazon friend is pretty dog-gone intriguing too, right?"
"Quite…"
"You betcha it is," Janice said and rubbed Mel's arm. "We have a load of questions that demand answers, so… c'mon, let's take a look at the rest of the stuff they've found. Let's shake the apple tree and see what falls down… there may be a few clues waiting for us."
"Yes… yes, you're right, Jan. Let's build a case strong enough to make even Professor Granfeldt see the error of his set ways," Mel said as she used her lavender-laced handkerchief to wipe away a small bead of adrenaline-induced sweat that had formed at her hairline.
"Haw, that'll be the day! But anyhow, let's get busy. I'm dyin' to get some dirt under my fingernails… they're way too clean!" Janice said and promptly held up her fingers - the nails were in fact cleaner than they had ever been on any kind of dig. Grinning, she pushed her fedora back from her brow and escorted Mel over to the open-sided tent once more.
-*-*-*-
Slightly less than an hour and a half later, the wooden table at the center of the open-sided tent resembled a garage sale on Easter Sunday. Dozens of recent, old, older and ancient artifacts had been lined up in order of discovery; Henning Mikkelsen and Torben Kjærsgaard were busy putting the items on the table as well as updating the records and catalogues with the new information provided by the two visiting Americans. As the various artifacts were processed, the young men spoke in hushed tones to each other so they wouldn't disturb and thus seem disrespectful toward the senior members of the dig.
While all that was going on inside the tent, Hanne Nielsen and Ellen Chrone were down at the bottom of the pit at the burial mound. The students carefully dragged trowels and three-pronged forks through the soil in front of the oak door to see if anything had been overlooked during the initial excavation. The young women had donned cotton gloves and knee pads, and they were fully concentrated on their task.
The professor sat on a lawn chair by the edge of the pit to supervise the digging process. He made the occasional brief comment about potential artifacts found by his two female students, but the comments were always followed by a surly silence. It was obvious he was still annoyed after the heated discussion and that he had no desire to return to the tent until the regulatory break for lunch at the earliest.
Mel in particular wasn't too displeased about that development. She relished being able to delve into the work without needing to concern herself about the stubborn fellow. She had brought out her strong magnifying glass and was presently looking at the rusty remains of something that could have been a sword once upon an eon ago.
Rust and the relentless onslaught of time had reduced the erstwhile lethal weapon to hardly anything at all, but she could recognize what appeared to be a ten-inch hilt meant for a two-handed grip, a pair of four-inch crossguards and a seven-inch main blade that had been snapped as witnessed by the jagged edges that ran across the fracture zone.
The magnifying glass was used to study the lower end of the hilt for traces of the material originally used to construct the grip, but she was unable to see anything but rust. Grunting, she placed the broken blade onto the strips of cotton wool that were used for protection.
The next item on the table was a piece of bronze jewelry in the shape of a brooch with a diameter of two inches. Perfectly round save for a dent on one side that may have come from being in the ground for so long, the ornament seemed to have been modeled after a standard military shield: four tiny bumps had been laid out in perfect symmetry around an embossed center that was half an inch wide. The reverse side was open, and it had a minute, open tube protruding from it.
Mel rearranged her spectacles to get an unmagnified look at the item. It was obvious a stud of some kind was meant to be inserted into the open tube to lock the brooch in place around a piece of cloth. Holding it against the chest of her shirt, it struck her it was a little too plain and featureless to have much value as jewelry. "Jan? Jan, I need you to take a look at this. Would this work better as a brooch… or as a clasp holding a cape in place across the shoulders?"
Janice looked up from her own artifact - a dull-brown potsherd that didn't reveal much of anything - to take a look at the bronze item. "A clasp," she said after a few seconds.
"I tend to agree." Putting down the old bronze item with great care, Mel leaned over to look at the index that listed all the objects found in, at or close by the recently discovered third burial mound. The supposed brooch was referred to as 'Objekt Nr.: 11. Type: Broche. Materiale: Bronze. Alder: Skal fastlægges.' "Mr. Kjærsgaard… Torben, would you mind? I need you to translate something for me," Mel continued as she waved the young assistant over to her.
Torben Kjærsgaard was - like his friend Henning - in his early-to-mid-twenties. He was of a sturdier stock than the other male assistant and seemed as if he would be more at home driving agricultural machinery than studying to be an archaeologist. He had dark-brown hair and eyes that were a shade lighter; his broad jaw, large ears and pronounced nose gave him a boorish look. "Y- yes, Miss Pappas?" he squeaked like he had expected another scolding for something he had done - or perhaps failed to do.
Mel smiled at the young fellow to temper his fears a little before she held up the index and pointed at it. "I understand the words object, type and material, but please, what do the final words say in English?"
"Ah… ah… age to be… uh… det- determined, Miss Pappas," Torben said in an English that carried a much stronger Danish rural accent than his friend's.
"Oh, I should have guessed that," Mel said with a smile. "That makes sense. However, I do believe the type-field needs to be updated. My experience tells me it's a clasp rather than a brooch."
"Oh… ah… we do that right now, Miss Pappas."
"Why, thank you, Torben!"
Nodding a 'you're welcome', Torben gulped audibly before he hurried back to Henning to update the master catalogue and continue with the rest of the items.
Janice had followed the exchange with a grin on her face. She let the boring potsherd be and strolled over to her partner. On her way there, she happened to glance at the bronze object that had been the topic of the recent chat. A brief "Hmmm…" escaped her as she cocked her head to take a closer look.
Noticing Janice's interest, Mel's eyes zoomed in on the bronze clasp as well without finding more than what she had already seen. "A dinar for your thoughts, Jan?"
"I was just thinking… doesn't this design remind you of something from back home? And when I say back home, I mean Thrace," Janice said while she gave the small object a little nudge with a gloved index finger.
Mel gave the bronze item a third glance but came up short once more. She adjusted her glasses and looked up at Janice. "Well, it resembles a military shield. That's why I didn't think it was a piece of jewelry. There's no splendor."
"It reminds me of the Amazon shields that were found in the forests around the eastern parts of Thrace… or modern-day Bulgaria if you will. I think some have also been found in modern-day Turkey. Four small bumps around an embossed center… see what I mean?"
Furrowing her brow, Mel took the bronze object and stared at it through the magnifying glass once more. "Why, I do believe you're right! It actually does. If I recall correctly, the bumps on the Amazon shields represented the forest, the land, the Amazon spirit and Artemis. They were used by long-range scouts and in some cases elite units who went far behind enemy lines… I supposed we would call them commando units today. In one of Gabrielle's earliest scrolls, Queen Melosa's weapons master Eponin was told to be among the most prominent of those elite Amazons."
"So we might be looking at a clasp that belonged to their Amazon travelling companion? Or perhaps even Gabrielle herself?"
Mel scratched her temple before she put the bronze clasp and the magnifying glass away. "Well… now we're trying to bend the facts to fit our theory again, Jan. For now, this is merely a clasp or a brooch. We need to take a firm scientific approach. Military shields were generally of a common design save for the square ones used by the Roman Legions. It hasn't been dated yet so it could also be of Viking origin."
"I suppose. Always the voice of reason, eh?" Janice said with a smile. Shrugging, she moved over to stand next to Mel to look at what else could be found on the table. "But anyway… didya find anything exciting yet?"
"Not yet, Jan. But we've really only just started," Mel said and made a sweeping gesture at the countless old artifacts that were lined up all over the wooden table. "Frankly, I'm amazed you're even here and not down on your hands and knees helping the students digging through the soil right now. Didn't you say you wanted your fingernails dirty?"
"The professor's over there," Janice said like it would explain everything - and it did.
"Point taken. He leaves much to be desired when it comes to a modern view of certain things," Mel said and adjusted her glasses. "Of course, he's probably been a professor since the mid-1920s… back when our fathers applied their trade. Just think of how much has changed since then… I mean, how much more we know about the ancient worlds through the Xena Scrolls."
"True… but that doesn't excuse crappy manners and a closed mind."
"I suppose it doesn't. Oh, we nearly had our first argument at the breakfast table shortly after you had left." - Behind the lenses, Mel's eyes performed a brief, rolling tour of the tent's ceiling - "The topic was Beowulf and King Hrothgar, and Professor Granfeldt flat out refused to acknowledge either of them as real people. He was adamant they were fictitious characters that had been created in a poem of no more value than a comic book! There was nothing I could say that would sway his opinion. I even offered to show him a transcript of the Rhinegold Scrolls, but he couldn't care less!"
Janice shook her head. "Like I said. A closed mind. Let's hope we can find some solid proof soon so we can shut Mista Palooka up for good. What's next on your agenda?"
"This wooden case," Mel said and pulled the next item closer to her. The lidded object was dark-brown and only four by six by two inches in size. It seemed to have a carved relief of Thor's Hammer gracing the lid which dated it even without having to carry out advanced chemical tests on the frayed woodwork - the first glance revealed nothing of great importance; it was simply a common household object.
When she tried to lift the lid, she found it had grown stuck. There were no hinges on the back or front, so the lid was most likely meant to come off the base in one piece. "A sewing box, perhaps?" she continued as she leaned over to look at the index. The item was catalogued as 'Objekt Nr.: 12. Type: Skrin. Materiale: Træ. Alder: Skal fastlægges,' but that didn't give her anything.
"Well," Janice said and pushed herself off the edge of the table, "I wish you the best of luck with it… whatever it is."
Mel concentrated on getting the lid to come off. Though she had strong fingers, it took plenty of cajoling to make even the tiniest of gaps appear in the frayed wood. She added a little pressure, then a little more, then a little more - and then the lid popped off and fell onto the table. She grinned and adjusted her glasses at the small success, but when her eyes caught a glimpse of a jagged fragment inside the box, she drew a fast breath. "Tweezers… I need a pair of tweezers!" she said in an excited voice; she looked around in the hope such a tool would appear out of nowhere.
Janice was back at Mel's side in an instant and nearly poked her nose into the wooden box to see what had her usually cool, calm and collected partner so riled up. Henning came to Mel's rescue at once and put a pair of soft-tipped tweezers on the table right in front of her.
The translator didn't have time for anything but the fragment, so Janice reached out to give the young assistant's shoulder a playful swat. "Thanks, Henning. I think you ought to stick around. Hey, Torben… come over here. This could be important."
As the two students lined up shoulder by shoulder at a respectful distance so they could watch without disturbing, Mel used the metal tool to extract the fragment from the wooden case - the container itself was soon pushed aside and promptly forgotten about. "It's parchment. Very old… very, very old. Far older than the box. Half an inch tall and three inches wide. Oh! Jan! Jan, it's been folded in two!" Mel suddenly exclaimed as the soft-tipped tweezers caught the edge of the parchment by accident.
Moving with extreme care, she unfolded the fragment to look at what had been hidden for so long. As she spoke, her voice trembled with excitement: "It's only a fragment, but there's a short sequence of letters on it. Perhaps the upper left corner of a scroll of some kind. Or bottom right, I suppose."
"When were runes ever written on parchment?" Jan said as she eyed the fragment that came into view from the dark spot it had been hiding in for centuries or perhaps even millennia.
"They're not runes. Nor is it Latin." Keeping the fragment pinned down between the tweezers' jaws, she brought it to her nose to take a careful sniff. "Earthy but not moldy or musty. Somewhat leathery. Torben, where was object number twelve located?"
"Ah… ah…" the young man mumbled before he realized it would be best for all concerned if he had the catalogue in front of him before he would make a fool of himself. He hurried back to the other side of the table to pick up the master index that he and Henning had been working on. "Ah, object twelve was uncovered inside the mound… inside the chamber. By Professor Granfeldt. It was on its side in the earth. Fourteen centimeters down into inner earth and a hand from the oak door, Miss Pappas," he said in a voice that carried an even heavier Danish accent than usual.
"A hand?"
"Ah… ah… hand… hand width? Like this," Torben said and held out a flat hand to illustrate the point he was trying to make.
"Oh, a hand's breadth from the door. I see. Thank you, Torben." Mel's face assumed an expression of full concentration as she grabbed the strong magnifying glass and began to study the squiggles of text on the scroll fragment. Her left eye grew to the size of a small moon behind the strong lens which added a comical touch to the excitement.
While still looking through the magnifying glass, Mel's free hand dabbed the tabletop nearest her to find her compendium listing the most common letters and symbols in Ancient Greek - it wasn't until Janice pushed it the rest of the way over to her that she could reach it. The next two minutes were spent comparing the few letters found on the new fragment with the data she had assembled herself.
Another few moments went by in silence - save for the four thumping hearts in the open-sided tent - before Mel took a step back. "Jan, this has possibly been written by Gabrielle of Potaideia. I see strong similarities… there aren't enough letters on it to draw a full conclusion, but I can definitely recognize her style in the drawing of the symbols."
"Jebediah Criminy, Mel! Fantastic work… can you make out what it says?"
Mel shook her head slowly even without taking her eyes off the fragment. "No… what's here is only the early part of a sentence. But the symbols do seem to form a name. And that name could be Yannberah."
"Yannberah? Not Gambarus or whatever it said on the runestone?"
Finally pulling back from the fragment, Mel took off her glasses to polish the lenses that had almost begun to mist over from the excitement. "No. Of course, I could be mistaken…"
"Haw, that would be the first time in a decade-"
It was only then the four people huddled up by the table noticed the loud cursing and the occasional high-pitched yelling that reached them from the excavation site. Spinning around, Janice needed to rub her eyes twice at the sight of the curtain of rain outside the tent - the wet stuff came down so hard it appeared someone was emptying an entire bathtub over the area. Worse, the winds had picked up and were blowing a gale as the localized shower hit. "Sonovabitch! That Goddamned rain!" she cried and bolted from the tent.
She was over at the dig site in a matter of seconds where she helped a red-faced Professor Granfeldt and the two female students spread out a large, blue tarpaulin meant to keep everything dry.
The fierce gusts of wind repeatedly caught the tarp and threatened to send it - and the people holding onto its edges - out somewhere beyond the colorful rainbow that reached across the heavens in the middle distance at the far edge of the shower. Working as a slightly disorganized and uncoordinated team, Janice, the professor and his two assistants eventually managed to hammer a tent peg through a metal eye in each corner of the tarp to keep it firmly on the ground.
Semi-drowned and fully miserable, Hanne Nielsen, Ellen Chrone and Professor Granfeldt worked at fever pitch to collect their tools, books and the items they had worked on for the past two hours. The strong winds continued to wreak havoc on their hard work, and one particular gust tore an entire folder filled with papers from Professor Granfeldt's hands. As the papers - and his flat-brimmed straw hat - fluttered around in the air, the driving rain made sure everything was thoroughly ruined.
Janice scooped up the hat, a few stray pages and finally an armful of the equipment before she raced back to the open-sided tent where Mel and the others waited for the returnees - all the way there, she let out a constant stream of curses aimed at the supposed summer weather.
After dumping everything on the dry floor, she tore back to the dig site but only made it halfway there before she was intercepted by the professor and the two young ladies. Instead of carrying more, Janice took the arm of the youngest of the students, Hanne, to help her maintain her balance.
A quick glance at the sky proved that while the present ferocious shower didn't have much life left, an entire assembly line of black rain clouds that followed the first one would keep everyone indoors for the rest of the day. "Damn… damn, damn, damn…" she mumbled under her breath. "Just when we were gettin' somewhere! Dammit!"
"Who's yelling? Is everyone all right back here?" Ulrikke Jensen cried as she ran along the gravelly footpath past the white church. The security guard had her rifle at the ready to be able to deal with any eventualities, but when she spotted the soaked and bedraggled members of the digging team being escorted back to dry land, she swung it over her shoulder and helped the elderly professor get inside the open-sided tent.
"Oh, my!" Mel said as she clapped eyes on the dripping-wet states of Hanne Nielsen and Ellen Chrone as they came stumbling back into the tent. She had already retrieved a handkerchief from one of the numerous pockets of her heavy-duty overalls when she realized the small piece of fabric would be woefully inadequate when dealing with the aftermath of the shower - a quick glance at the various items in the tent proved they had nothing that could be used as a towel.
Ulrikke Jensen soon helped the professor sit down on one of the lawn chairs. The elderly fellow let out a sigh that came from the bottom of his soul as he ran his hands over his wet face. The somber state of his mood wasn't brightened by Janice depositing the ruined straw hat and a pile of soggy papers in his lap - after taking but a single look at it, he threw everything onto the ground in disgust.
Then the deluge gradually petered out until it was merely a persistent summer rain. The winds that had howled around the corners of the white church slowly died down as well; the swallows were soon out in force to round up the insects that were foolish enough to return to their regular tasks. A cacophony of merry chirping and shrieking filled the air to prove the birds were having a field day with the free smorgasbord.
"Goddammit, I coulda lived without that…" Janice said as she stripped her leather jacket off her shoulders. The entire back of her shirt had been soaked through - a result of the rain having found its way down the crack between the trailing edge of her fedora and the jacket's collar. She locked eyes with Mel to exchange a glance; she eventually shook her head but let out a chuckle nonetheless.
Mel wrung her hands as she tried to find a towel or the like so Hanne and Ellen could dry their dripping-wet hair, but her search proved to be in vain. Hurrying back to the young assistants, she broke out in a wide shrug. "I'm terribly sorry, ladies… we don't have anything you can use…" she said as she took in the pitiful sight of the two students who couldn't have been wetter had they jumped into a swimming pool fully dressed.
Ulrikke Jensen walked from one of the rain-affected people to the next to see if anyone needed medical attention. When everyone was deemed to be in fine fettle - if not exactly in a sunny mood - she strode out of the open-sided tent to get back to her sentry box.
Professor Granfeldt tried to wipe his face and brow dry, but the small handkerchief he'd had in his blazer jacket had already become too saturated to soak up further water. "Jeg beklager inderligt, men jeg kan ikke mere i dag," he said in a tired, listless voice that suddenly made him seem frail. "Så snart bygen er overstået tager vi tilbage til kroen."
The four students obviously understood their professor's downcast message, but Mel and Janice didn't. "Torben," Mel said quietly so she wouldn't disturb the tired, elderly man too much. "Goodness me, the professor seems ill all of a sudden… what did he say?"
"Ah… ah…" Torben said before he licked his lips several times. "Uh… no, I'm not be good to… to… Henning, kan du oversætte hvad professoren sagde?"
Henning pushed his freshly-wiped round glasses back up his nose before he shuffled over to the two Americans. "Professor Granfeldt said he regretted it deeply, but he can't go on today. We'll head back to the inn once the shower's over," he said in his typically flat Danish accent.
"Why, thank you, Henning," Mel said and offered the young assistant a winning smile that made him blush. Her smile faded when she looked over at the professor whose expression of fatigue and deep resignation made him appear ten years older than his actual age - he had been pale all day, but now his complexion almost seemed colorless. "Professor Granfeldt, are you unwell? Do you want us to fetch a doctor?"
"Oh, I'm… I'm all right. Thank you, Miss Pappas," the elderly man said as he tried to achieve a more upright position on the lawn chair. "This sudden storm took a lot out of me. I'm not a strapping lad anymore. I'll be fine after some rest."
"Well, if there's anything we can do, just let me know…"
"I will. Thank you, Miss Pappas," the professor said and even managed to send his American guest a tired smile.
Janice had spent the brief conversation trying to get the soaked shirt to stay off her back, but the endeavor continued to prove unsuccessful; she squirmed as the wet sensation returned at once. "Mel, I need to hop into something dry or I'll chafe. I'll make sure the old fella gets back safely if you wanna keep working here."
"Oh, I badly need some coffee so I'll join you at the inn," Mel said and adjusted her glasses. "I've taken the liberty of putting the scroll fragment into a protective pouch in my bag. I need all my notes and books at hand to make sure it really is from one of Gabrielle's scrolls."
"Okay. I can't imagine that'll be a problem," Janice said before she looked outside to gauge the intensity of the rain. While it seemed to have eased off even further, the gloomy tone of light proved the next shower couldn't be far off. "It's still spittin' with rain but I think we ought to get going now. The old fella's gonna walk slower than this morning so we're probably gonna have to give him a hand. And quickly, too. I don't want another nasty surprise of the wet and windy kind."
"I agree wholeheartedly, Jan. I'll take his left arm," Mel said as she swung her leather bag containing the compendium, the scroll fragment and all the other items over her shoulder.
*
*
CHAPTER 3
Twenty past midnight, the only room at the historical inn that still saw an outline of light behind the curtains was the one Mel and Janice stayed in. Mel had been working non-stop after returning from a quick dinner, but her mind had finally cried enough. She rose from the hard chair at the table and shuffled over to the wall to click off the light. Before she flipped the switch, her dead-tired eyes glanced one last time at the extraordinary mess she had left all over the dinner table.
Her compendium, the hand-written transcripts of Gabrielle's scrolls, and every last book she had brought with her had been opened to the appropriate pages to assist her in translating the tiny amount of text they had discovered on the scroll fragment.
She had used several different pencils and color-coded notepads to keep track of her thoughts as she studied the symbols on the parchment. The magnifying glass had been given such a workout it had nearly begun to glow red around the edges - incidentally matched step by step by her eyes - and she had spent so long with her nose buried an inch above the surface of the fragment that she had developed a severe crimp in her neck.
No less than four empty mugs littered the table because she hadn't had time to return them to the restaurant once she had finished the coffee - in fact, the contents of two of them had turned stone cold after she had forgotten all about them in her eagerness to press on with her project. Though highly annoying, she was used to it as it was one of the most common risks of the trade.
The familiar sound of rain pelting against the window panes made her let out a deep sigh as she flipped the light switch to let a merciful darkness fall over the room. After donning a pair of loafers, she left for the central bathroom in the hallway to say goodbye to the coffee she had consumed.
---
She had planned to brush her teeth after doing the other business, but a sudden tide of fatigue had rolled over her as she had stared at the gray, lined visage in the bathroom mirror; all she had been able to do was to shuffle back to the room and over to the bed already occupied by her partner.
Mel's comfy pajamas had already been laid out and were ready to jump into. Though her fingers acted on reflex alone by opening the top button of the double-breasted shirt she used on the digs, she was too tired to complete the mission.
Staring at the bed and the pajamas, she decided on the spot that all that walking - first returning to the bathroom to brush her teeth and then going back to the room to change into her sleeping outfit - would be too much for her. It would have to wait five minutes while she rested her neck and her stinging eyes.
Janice had gone to bed an hour earlier, and she had kept everything nice and warm under the large duvet; after stirring, she quickly understood it was finally bedtime for Mel. No time was wasted as she reached over to sweep the duvet aside. Mel promptly sat down, moved her legs up into the bed and snuggled down into her partner's grasp. "So… what's the score?" Janice whispered.
"I still need'a brush mah teeth…" Mel slurred in a voice that held an even stronger Southern accent than usual.
Chuckling, Janice leaned down and placed a kiss on Mel's lips to prove she didn't care about such topics. "And change into your PJs. No, I meant with the scroll."
"Gabrielle wrote it. No doubt about that… an' from what Ah gather, it could be some kind'a…"
"What?"
ZZZZZzzzz…
"Mel?"
ZZZzzz- "Wha'?"
"Some kind of what?" Janice whispered before adding another kiss to give a little life to her exhausted partner.
"Elegy…" - ZZZZZZzzzz, ZZZZZZZZZZzzzzz…
A few moments went by where Janice could only stare at the Sleeping Beauty in her arms. She soon realized it would be cruel to wake Mel up for a second time so she carefully removed her black, horn-rimmed spectacles and put them on her own bedside table. A proper goodnight kiss was in order, so one was duly delivered.
"Yannberah's elegy… damn, I hope we can find the rest of it," Janice whispered as she snuggled down next to the fully-dressed Mel. She knew there would be plenty of time to discuss the fascinating development later on - the fragment had already spent nearly two millennia in the ground so another eight hours wouldn't hurt it. Yawning, she pulled up the winter duvet to cover both of them.
-*-*-*-
Like the first night had been, the second one that Mel and Janice spent at the historical inn was chilly but brief. In fact, it would turn out to be even briefer than either of them wanted. Exactly seven minutes past seven in the morning, somebody began to knock hard and insistently on the door to their room.
'Miss Pappas! Miss Pappas! Please open the door! Something's wrong!' Henning Mikkelsen cried; a mix of concern and anxiety was plainly evident in his voice which added another layer to his typically flat accent. 'It's urgent! Miss Pappas! We can't get in touch with Professor Granfeldt… and Doctor Covington is missing!'
At the second round of fierce knocking - that had turned to frantic thumping by then - Janice bolted from the bed with a face like thunder. She was distinctly underdressed for the wintery conditions inside the room so she jumped into her pants and her spare shirt before she stomped over to the door.
Back at the bed, Mel's crimp in the neck had returned with a vengeance, and she could hardly turn onto her left side. She had been flat on her back the entire night after the intended five-minute slumber had turned into a seven-hour blackout.
The fact she hadn't had enough energy to brush her teeth before going to bed came back to her haunt her in the shape of a putrid taste of stale coffee in her mouth; she nearly gagged before she had produced enough saliva to swallow.
With her glasses missing, she was unable to see anything beyond the tip of her nose, but she could feel that her hair was a mess - and she knew instinctively that her clothes wouldn't be far off that. A long groan escaped her as a quick pat-pat-patting of herself revealed that she still wore her working clothes rather than her exquisite satin pajamas. After making a single attempt at swinging her legs over the side of the bed, she gave up the unequal struggle with gravity and reality, and simply pulled the winter duvet fully over her head.
'Miss Pappas!' Henning continued while he thumped for all he was worth. 'It's urgent! Doctor Covington is-'
"Right here, Henning," Janice growled as she whooshed the door open. "Mel worked half the Goddamned night on that Goddamned scroll fragment, and now you wake us up at Goddamned Dark O'Clock! What in the hell, bub? Is the toilet backed up or something? What's so Goddamned important it couldn't wait until Goddamned breakfast?!"
Henning wrung his hands at the growled response; when he noticed that the doctor had only done up a single button in her shirt and that there was a great deal of tummy skin on display, his eyes darted around while his cheeks blushed fire-engine red. "Oh… Doctor… I'm… I'm sorry… you weren't in your… your-"
"Cut to the chase, Mista!"
"Ah… we… can't… we can't get in touch with the professor. The door to his room is locked from the inside," Henning continued in a frantic tone of voice. "We've called for him several times, but he doesn't respond!"
Janice's temper settled down at once upon hearing the potentially bad news. When she had last seen Professor Granfeldt, the elderly fellow had been pale and exhausted. Svend-Aage, the innkeeper, had escorted him upstairs to his room just past eight in the evening, so almost twelve hours had gone by without contact. "Dammit! All right, that's a different story. I need to put on my boots… then I'll join ya. Where's the professor's room?"
"It's the one on the right at the far end of the hallway," Henning said and turned around so he could point.
Following the pointing finger, Janice spotted Torben, Hanne and Ellen waiting by the door to the other room - the grim expressions on their faces revealed they were all worried. "I'll be right there, Henning. And quit that damn hollerin', yeah? Only crackpots, hookers and winos holler at seven in the Goddamned morning."
"Uh… I'm sorr-" Henning said, but he was cut off when Janice slammed the door in his face.
Running her hands through her wild mane of hair, Janice stomped back to the bed and quickly slipped on her socks and her boots so she would be properly dressed for the task. "Toots, there's something wrong with the old fella. Henning said they couldn't get in touch with him," she said as she quickly unbuckled her pants to tuck in her shirt and close all the buttons.
Mel poked her head out from underneath the comfortable duvet. As a facsimile of the notorious Medusa from the Greek legends, her dark hair looked like an entire family of vicious snake monsters used it as a cozy nest. Because she wasn't wearing her glasses, her eyes seemed curiously unfocused. "Oh, no… do you suppose he's-"
"I'm not supposing anything. Fact is he looked like Hades warmed over last night."
"Quite. Oh, I… I better get up. I need my… my… my glasses. Where are my glasses?" Mel said and began to pat down the duvet starting from the top and moving down.
Janice let out a brief chuckle at the sight of Mel trying to figure out which way the world turned. "I put 'em on my bedside table- never mind. Here ya go," she said as she retrieved the black frame and guided her partner's probing fingers onto one of the frame's arms.
"Goodness me, thank you…" Mel said as she slid the frame up her regal nose.
"You're welcome, Toots."
"What time is it?"
"Way, way, way too damn early!" Janice said before she donned her fedora out of sheer reflex. Grunting, she took it off again and left it atop the duvet.
---
While Janice was away, Mel carried out a few of her regular morning routines - brushing her teeth had been at the top of that particular list. She had needed to improvise to accomplish the task since the hallway leading to the shared bathroom had been awash in people concerned about the professor, and she hadn't wanted to add to the commotion.
The teeth were clean and fresh once more which was a definite plus, and a quick gurgle in Boyd Kennedy Laboratories' mouthwash took care of the rest of the putrid taste. Though it didn't adhere to the etiquette that any Southern Belle was expected to follow, she kept her working clothes on instead of changing into her travel dress - it would save time later in the day when she and Janice would hopefully return to the dig site. The snake monsters inhabiting her hair came last. They took a great deal of persuasion to relocate to a new nest elsewhere, but they eventually yielded to her commands and her hard work with the hairbrush.
She was just as concerned about the professor as the rest, but she knew there was nothing she could do about it at that moment in time. Instead, she sat down at the messy dinner table to pick up where she had left off the night before. Time flew by as always as she continued to translate the scroll fragment one meticulously drawn symbol at a time; soon, half an hour had disappeared without her even noticing it.
A fumbled knocking on the door was quickly followed by a: 'Mel! It's me… I got us some breakfast!'
"Oh!" Mel said and got up from the uncomfortable chair. Ushering Janice inside, she eagerly eyed the slices of toast, jars of jam, lumps of butter and glasses of milk that were distributed evenly on a tray. "You can put it down on the writing desk, Jan… there isn't room anywhere else."
"Will do, Toots," Janice said and held the tray in perfect balance so the milk wouldn't slosh over. The whole thing was soon put down on the writing desk with nary a drop spilled.
"And… the professor…?"
"Yeah, he's fallen ill, all right. He's coughing pretty badly and he's running a temperature. Svend-Aage Lindholm called for the Yelling doctor who showed up when I was there. He said the old fella's caught a bad cold. No wonder with all this crappy weather the whole, damn time…" Janice said as she took a butter knife and dug it into one of the lumps of the dark-yellow substance. The butter had soon been spread over one of the slices of toast, and plenty of sweet-smelling strawberry jam came hot on its heels. "He's definitely down for the count. I think he's gonna be out of the picture for a while. This is our dig now, Toots," she continued before she took a huge bite out of the crunchy toast.
"Oh, my goodness… well! All right," Mel said and adjusted her glasses. Falling silent, she took another of the slices of toast and mirrored her partner's actions by applying healthy layers of butter and strawberry jam on it. "Yesterday morning at the breakfast table, the professor told me he had been directly commissioned by the National Museum in Copenhagen to lead the dig. I wonder if they'll allow us to take over. Perhaps-"
"We'll deal with the bureaucrats if or when they show up," Janice said and downed a large swig of fresh whole-milk to go with the dry toast. "In the meantime, we're in charge. Let's make the most of it. Yeah?"
Nodding thoughtfully, Mel concentrated on her own slice of toast. Soon, crunching and slurping were the only sounds heard in the room - and, of course, their constant companion: the inevitable drops of rain that tapped a depressing tune against the window panes.
-*-*-*-