“Of course, love.”
Nina gestured apologetically as she rushed over to him.
“Professor Lockhart! So good of you to meet me here,” she said. He looked downright disturbed by the situation, clutching his brown satchel anxiously.
“Who is that? A biker?” he asked without peeling his eyes from Val, who sipped her coffee self-consciously at the strange man’s glaring.
“Um, she is just a friend. Would you like to join us?” Nina coaxed.
“No, thank you,” he said hastily, his tone declaring a distinct distrust in the seated stranger. “I will just give you your book. You will notice it has no ISBN, for good reason. I received the funds alright and all, so I am just delivering it to you.”
Nina frowned at his behavior. Professor Lockhart was usually a bit eccentric and uncomfortable with other people, but he was acting especially restless, so she decided not to press him. Before he gave her the book, his eyes darted between the book and Nina’s eyes, then to Val and back to the book.
“Are you trying to tell me something, Professor?” Nina asked impatiently.
“Read the book, Dr. Gould,” he said firmly, and with a glance back at her as he started leaving, he added, “And mind the company you keep.”
Nina could not believe his erratic comment. Given his expertise and his own idiosyncratic ways, she would have thought him more tolerant of unusual looking people.
“He looked pissed off,” was Val’s first remark when Nina sat down with her antique book.
“Nah, he is like that, old grump. He asked if you are a biker,” Nina laughed and drank down her cold coffee.
“Did you tell him I am a Hell’s Angel?” Val snickered. “Because I am a biker, you know? I ride a Harley and I break beer bottles over the heads of innocent bar patrons in Swedish Black Metal clubs.”
The two women had a good laugh at that. Nina kept her eye on Val’s antique neck piece. However, she did not notice that Val checked out the title of her rare, banned book on ancient reliquaries in turn.
Chapter 5
From the thawing, light blue jaws of ice a group of bear skin clad men appeared, ascending up the slope of the white that smothered the mountain rocks. They were approximately 20 in number and moved in a military formation, it seemed; their chieftain and two of his generals forming a three point lead with their respective warriors in tail. The sleet and ice was merciless and the thick bound pelt of the men’s boots fell inches deep into half frozen terrain as sheets of blizzard wind battered their bodies. Above them, the sky was red and blue, separated by a path of molten clouds which churned and curled across the ethereal sky. Crows, as large as carrion birds from pre-history, circled the frozen air and looked down hungrily at the moving flesh that spoke.
At the head of the spear was a man larger than others, his voice like thunder and his hands like hammers. Without consulting any parchment or course indicator, he knew the way by looking up, standing still to listen and then leading his men onward by the points of the mountain range surrounding them. They showed no fear, these warriors, not because they were invincible, but because they feared not death or disease, onslaught or battle. One of them looked up with a hearty laugh, observing the great birds above and jested about having plenty of food following at will. The men roared in laughter in the wailing cry of the rushing white hell as they came to stand still upon the hill’s crest. Looking down, the leader pointed to a river and said: “Volkhov.”
In awe they stood, each running his eyes along the lines of the Volkhov River below to see if there were any settlements, any promising land. Should they claim the territory? They descended rapidly, considering the rate of difficulty they were met with embarking on the scouting of a new landscape they had never seen before. As they went lower along the steep ledges of snow and brown protruding rock face, they passed the animals that lived there. Mountain goats as white as the weather stood watching them with caution from the safety of their perches where no man, no matter how skilled, would reach without the reward of death.
With their massive blades and axes brandished from the shelter of their thick clothing, the mighty men, mature and with long hair, made their perilous way towards the river which found life in the waters of Ladoga. From there they wanted to sail northwards, to seek out further uncharted land for their sons, for their blood. Making trade was their main objective, but the great old leader suggested that he wanted to conquer yet farther up, more to the west of the waters they had sailed upon.
From the soft grey flow of the water emerged men, like men walking in a field, but they came from the depths of the Volkhov with no eyes and steel on their chests. Blind, they only felt the men were coming from the mountain and so they came for them. The great leader roared his war cry and, automatically, his men took their stances in a formation of warfare. They argued playfully on the selection of their victims and wagered upon the outcome of their swift battle.
The men with braids in their beards and hair bearing the tears of frozen water salivated at the thrill of war. From their mouths came foam, their eyes on fire, and their cries became the howl of monsters that sent the animals cowering in terror. The Blind River Cadavers were not like the Norsemen. Their limbs were not covered by bear skins and their feet walked on black cloven hoof. Their brows and crowns were covered not in horns and steel and chainmail, but carried black fabric with the symbol of Thor himself, corrupted from its power and its significance given to another, a lesser leader. This angered the great bearded men and they tore the Swastika’s from the heads of the walking dead, dismembering them, for defiling Thor for their own stolen power.
Furious and unstoppable, the Norse warriors lunged on the enemy that did not drown and from their ranks, stepped a younger man. His semblance was not like theirs, but he held allegiance with the great leader. Black of hair and black of eye, he did not wear the skins and steel or the red and black corruption of Thor’s sigil upon him. He wore no shoes and his upper body was bare. With no beard and no tribe ring to identify him, he came from nowhere and spoke.
They all heard him, even when his voice was like the hiss of the wind through stalks of wheat. His tongue was unknown to them, but his words held power, for one by one the blind dead fell to the river from whence they had come, filling the icy current with blood as red as the bleeding sky where the black carrion birds still swooped. Crimson, the cascades of water ran north to Novaya Ladoga and filled the lake with screams. Through the surface of the lake broke a sea of hands, claws of the dying — women and children they were — and their weeping filled all of Creation, subduing the rage of the storm.
The stranger who spoke the wrong words stepped onto the bank of the scarlet river and turned to face the great leader. He called the chieftain ‘Wotan’ and Wotan showed him the portal in the rocks, upon which was drawn a diagram of three intertwined triangles that formed a triangle in itself.
Then the great men with hair braided lay down as if to sleep and with the ground they settled, pulling the luscious green grass over them like the blankets of their wives. They went to sleep, leaving the green banks of the Volkhov raised where their bodies slumbered.
Behind the rocks where the symbol was painted rose a modern city, a terrible creation of eons later, fuelled by other motivators than land, food and godliness. A mark in numbers was etched underneath, ‘871±2’ it read in bloody red strokes that fell into the crevices and porous texture of the stone.
Nina frowned. It was hard to remember the numbers in sequence, even not knowing that she was dreaming. The narrator in her mind, who told her the story she watched playing like a movie in her deep sleep, faded at first a little, then gradually faded more and more as the scenes progressed until her voice was completely distant upon the hard wind that blew through the tale. Trying to memorize the sequence of them, she knew that numerical references were always important because they usually represented precise coordinates, distinct measurements, or important dates. But as she drew closer to the rock, where it was now dead silent apart from the trickle of the river’s flow behind her, a demoness rose from behind the stone.