“Wait till you hear where this one came from,” Macleod said. “When Kangia rescued Kunzl and the other German from the crevasse they were struggling over something, but the smaller man slipped and nearly lost his hold. Kangia had seen him slash at the other man with a knife but drop it into the crevasse. He was in a fury about something else he’d lost, but with the storm raging it became a matter of life and death to get them out and the struggle was forgotten. Before they left the ice cap Kunzl gave this stone to Kangia for safekeeping. He said it came from the ship in the ice. Kunzl apparently told the Nazi he’d dropped it in the crevasse, but the smaller man suspected he still had it and was rifling through his belongings in the night. Kunzl told Kangia it was a sacred stone, that he must never let the other man know he had it. Kangia loathed the Nazi and was only too happy to oblige.”
“Kunzl must have translated it,” Maria murmured. “He was the best runologist of his day, an expert in all the Norse scripts. In those few desperate moments in the crevasse he must have read something that made him determined never to let it fall into the hands of his despised SS colleagues in the Ahnenerbe.”
“Kunzl told Kangia that if he was unable to return to Greenland Kangia must keep the stone secret for the rest of his life, and only pass it on to another who in his heart he could trust. The war sealed Kunzl’s fate, and now you are that man.”
While the others were talking, Kangia’s arm had fallen back over his chest and he had begun to breathe in shallow rasps, his eyes half closed and staring at the ceiling. Inuva turned and looked at them with urgency in her expression. “Now it is truly time.”
Macleod nodded and they all got up to leave, ducking in single file under the flap at the entrance to the tent. Jack remained to the last, and before going he turned back and knelt down beside the old man, talking quietly to him and then saying a few words to his daughter. He touched Kangia’s hand before getting up and following Maria out into the bleak ruins of the old settlement.
“What did you say to him?” Maria asked.
“I wished him and his dogs godspeed across the ice, wherever their journey should take them. I told him that he had been right to pass on his treasure to us, that we would hold his trust sacred.”
Inuva appeared at the tent flap to bid them farewell.
“What will happen to him?” Maria asked, her voice soft.
“After the shaman comes we will help him to the high cliff overlooking the fjord, to the place we call K?llingekloften. We will leave him there, and tomorrow he will be gone.”
“You mean suicide?” Maria said in a hushed voice.
“At K?llingekloften we gather every year to watch the sun appear for the first time over the glacier after the weeks of winter darkness, and at that same place those who are tired of life leap into the icy depths of the fjord to join the spirit world. It is the traditional way. My father has finished here now and is eager to go on his next journey.”
She lowered her eyes and backed into the tent, closing the flap behind her. High up on a crag a dog raised its head to the west and howled, and then strained on its chain as it saw them, flattening its head like a hyena and baring its teeth in a snarl. Maria shuddered and pulled her coat around her, drawing closer to Jack as they made their way down the rocky path towards the sea.
“What is it?” he asked.
“An ancient Norse legend.” She paused as they negotiated a boggy patch. “The dread wolf Fenrir, one of a monstrous brood produced by a giantess, brother of the world-serpent Jormungard and the creature Hel, guardian of the dead. Odin heard a prophecy that the wolf and his kin would one day destroy the gods, so he chained Fenrir to a rock. Thar liggr hann til ragnaroks, there he waits till Ragnarok, till the final showdown at the end of the world, when he will wreak his vengeance on the gods.”
“It’s a sled dog, not a wolf,” Jack said.
“I know. It’s irrational.” Maria glanced back at the distant figure of the dog and turned quickly back to the path. “But I feel as if we’ve reached the edge of that world of myth, a threshold between the world the Vikings knew and a world that even their gods couldn’t control. The Vikings who came here must have felt the same, a sense of foreboding as they looked over the icy sea to the west, wondering whether the horizon held riches and a new life or the nightmare of Ragnarok. It’s as if we’re being warned, that others have been this way before us and not returned.”
Jack put his arm around Maria and gave her a reassuring hug. “I take it as a good sign. If Fenrir is here, then we must be on the right track.” He smiled and passed her the swaddled package he had been given by the old man. “Anyway, ancient legends will have to wait for a while. You’ve got your work cut out for you. The sooner we can have a translation of these runes, the better.”
“The Greenland Norse saw those storms, you know, the piteraqs,” Maria said. “There’s a haunting fragment from a poem called Nor?rsetudrapa about these northern hunting lands. It goes something like: Strong blasts from the white mountain walls wove the waters, and the daughters of the waves, frost-nurtured, tore the fabric asunder, rejoicing in the storm. It’s virtually the only writing to survive from Norse Greenland, preserved in an Icelandic saga.”
“Don’t worry,” Jack said. “We’ll be careful.”
A few minutes later they reached the shoreline and clambered into the waiting Zodiac. It was early evening now, but in the perpetual sunlight of the Arctic summer it was impossible to gauge the time of day, an effect Jack found vaguely disorientating. After he had helped Maria over the bow and they were all settled again on the inflatable pontoons, Macleod gave the crewman a signal and the Evinrude roared into life. They zipped up their survival suits and donned their life jackets as the crewman reversed out and then swung round the bay in a wide arc, the propeller churning up the brash as he searched for a passage between the floating slabs of ice. As they rounded the promontory at the head of the fjord the iceberg came dramatically into view, dwarfing the flotilla of Zodiacs that were drawn up alongside it laden with equipment and technicians. Costas anxiously scanned the scene as they sped towards Seaquest II, then visibly relaxed and looked over at Jack. He gave a thumbs-up signal and then shouted against the engine and the wind, his words lost but the excited refrain familiar to Jack over the years: “Time to kit up.”
8
All systems operational. We’regood to go.”
Costas flipped aside his microphone headset and grinned at Jack. Outside the Plexiglas dome they could see the two crewmen on the platform release the tethering lines, and the Aquapod began to bob uncomfortably on the surface as it drifted towards the iceberg. Costas quickly activated the water jets and reversed the submersible back to their descent position. It was nearly midnight, but in the continuous sun the dome had begun to heat up, and Jack reached down for the temperature control on his E-suit.
“Don’t adjust it too much.” Costas wiped the beads of sweat off his forehead. “We’ll cool down rapidly as soon as we’re submerged.”
The bustle of activity on the platform as they departed now seemed to belong to another place and time, and they listened as the last of the Zodiacs carrying the crewmen sped out of the danger zone and back towards Seaquest II. They were almost on their own now, their final human contact awaiting in the Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle nestled against the berg thirty metres below. Costas tightened his straps, scanned the instrument panel and gripped the controls. With its bubble dome and tubular ballast tanks on either side, the two-man Aquapod was not unlike a small helicopter, an impression enhanced by the multidirectional water-jet propulsion system which gave it even greater agility than its counterpart in the air.