Victoria smirked. “If you had any sort of education you’d realize the significance.”
“The significance of what?” said Gunnar.
They turned to see him standing in the door with a tray laden with coffee cups and a shiny tin of biscuits.
“Siegfried,” Hawke said, giving Victoria a sly glance.
“Ah — a man of culture!” Gunnar said in his melodic Icelandic accent. “I knew it as soon as I saw you.”
“I try my best,” Hawke said with another flick of the eyes to the English archaeologist.
Victoria started to speak. “Hang on, you just said…”
Hawke interrupted Victoria before she could finish her sentence. “As I said earlier, Gunnar — we really need your help — so perhaps you could explain for Lea here the significance of Siegfried.”
Lea rolled her eyes as she took a coffee and relaxed back in her chair.
“Well, yes of course… Siegfried was in two of Wagner’s operas, but Wagner himself took the character straight from German folklore, and that of course derived from the ancient Norse mythology.”
“See, Lea?” Hawke said. “I told you.”
“Listen, Josiah, if you…”
“Please, Gunnar, continue,” Hawke said with a wink at the Irishwoman.
“As one of the most legendary heroes of the entire Norse mythological canon, Siegfried, or Sigurd, as we call him, is central to the folklore of all the Scandinavian nations. Here in Iceland we have the famous Völsunga saga, an eight hundred year-old saga featuring him. As I say, he is central to the folklore.”
“But,” Hawke said, taking a sip of coffee, “and I know Lea will want to know the answer to this question more than anyone — what has this glass bead got to do with Sigurd?”
“It’s obvious to anyone who knows the legend, Mr Hawke — and I already told you earlier when I mentioned the Tarnkappe.”
“Ah, yes…”
“The Tarnkappe was Sigurd’s secret power — the power he used in the Nibelungenlied to help Gunther beat the Queen of Iceland in a javelin-throwing competition.”
“Am I on drugs or something?” Lea asked, confused.
Gunnar ignored the comment. “The Tarnkappe gave him the power to win.”
“Like some kind of protein shake then?” Lea said.
Gunnar stared at her expressionless for a moment. “No… Sigurd’s secret power was the Tarnkappe — the Cloak of Invisibility, and I believe this bead was once part of that cloak — proving once and for all that the legends were more than just myth, and that all of these legendary heroes really existed!”
“You mean Sigurd was real?” Victoria said, astonished.
Gunnar held out the bead. “If this is real, then why not?”
“But if Sigurd was real,” Victoria said, her voice hushing to a whisper barely audible over the sound of the crackling fire, “then Thor must be real as well — just what Nate was talking about. Maybe this means that even… Valhalla was real!”
A heavy silence fell over the small room as the implications of Victoria’s words sunk in, but then Gunnar broke the tension with a smile and a vigorous shake of the head. “No… no I think that might be taking things a little far. I am ever-cautious and I think now would be as good a time as any to pull back and not jump the gun, as you say.”
“But she could be right,” Lea said.
“No… really, I must insist.” Gunnar set his coffee cup down and scratched his chin absent-mindedly. He pulled off his glasses and polished them with the hem of his jumper. “There’s deduction, and extrapolation, and then there’s this… Just because we have a strange bead which seems to have the power of invisibility, and just because Sigurd had an invisible cloak, doesn’t mean we can infer the existence of one of the world’s most famous mythological locations. I think this is going too far.”
“But just imagine,” Victoria said. “Speaking as an archaeologist I can say it would be the greatest discovery of all history.”
“Perhaps, but it’s wise to be cautious.”
“But you’re the one who said the bead must belong to some kind Harry Potter cape,” Lea said. “If that’s not a leap then what is?”
Gunnar smiled. “Yes… I am guilty of that, I admit — but what else could it be? If what you say is true then this bead was found in a small Canadian fishing village and is thousands of years old. Even today this technology is only in its most basic form and nothing as efficient and amazing as this.”
“Which is exactly what Ryan told us,” Hawke said.
“Whatever civilization produced this bead was far ahead of ours in technological terms.”
“And you think it could be evidence of Sigurd’s Cloak of Invisibility?” Lea asked.
“Yes, but…” said Gunnar apologetically, “unless you have more information it’s very hard for me to give any more assistance.”
“Wait!” Hawke said. “Lea — After Smets stole the flash-drive, Alex sent your father’s research to your iPhone, yes?”
Lea took out her phone and started to scroll through the research files Alex had re-sent after her flash-drive was stolen in Florida. Gunnar watched in amazement as the text and images flashed by in front of his eyes.
“I’ve never seen so many references to the old Norse culture,” he said. “This is a treasure trove in itself! It seems to be focussed on stories about healing. How did your father get this information?”
Lea shook her head and sighed. “I don’t know… yet.”
“Wait — go back!”
She looked at the professor and then began to scroll backwards. “What did you see?”
Gunnar gave an innocent grin and almost jumped up and down on the spot with excitement.
“There’s something here — but it’s written in a very old Runic script.”
“I know — I couldn’t understand any of it.”
“But I can read it,” Gunnar said. “I’ve spent my life working on this.” His voice became a whisper. “I thought I was the only one…”
“You can translate this?” Lea asked.
Gunnar nodded. “Yes… my understanding of this script is not complete, but almost. Here are my notes.”
He handed Lea a scrappy notebook. She leafed through the dog-eared pages and saw endless scrawls of the strange symbols with heavy annotation in Icelandic.
Hawke looked at Gunnar. “So what does it say?”
“It’s a reference to Basque raiding parties in Newfoundland.”
“Raiding parties?”
Gunnar nodded his head and smiled. “We’ve always known about the connection between Atlantic Canada and the Vikings, and consequently what connects that part of the world with Norse mythology, and we’ve also always known about the seventeenth century raiding parties from Europe who sailed the Atlantic looking for new lands to plunder, but this is something else!”
“Go on.”
Gunnar peered closer at the text on the phone. “This looks like a description of an account given by the raiding party in question. It says that in the case of the Mi’kmaq culture and territory of Newfoundland, one specific raiding party was a Spanish frigate crewed by Basques, and there seems to be an obscure reference to…” Gunnar stopped and looked at the strange script with a furrowed brow. “I think it’s referring to something they described as a kind of cloak made of hardened water. They said when they held it to the sky they could still see the clouds. This is clearly the same thing we have here in this room now, only they describe an entire garment made of it!”
“You think the raiding party found this Tarnkappe?” Hawke said.
Gunnar nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, my friend! If this script is right then yes — absolutely!”
“Wait a minute,” Lea said. “Most of the research in Dad’s files was written in English, and a little was in Irish too, but that weird Runic stuff I presumed he’d copied from somewhere else. If it’s mentioning Basque raiding parties in the seventeenth century it couldn’t have been written by ancient Norse gods.”