She joined Hawke at the front and looked at his face as he moved fearlessly into the darkness. His strong profile and unshaven jaw were now lit an eerie green in the light of the glow-stick.
He turned to her. “What is it?”
“You just look kind of spooky,” she said with a quick smile.
“Do I?”
“Chemiluminescence will do that for a man,” Ryan said from behind her. “Even a rugged daredevil like Joe here.”
“I wonder what you would look like with a glow stick up your arse, Ryan?” Scarlet said, tipping her head back and pretending to visualize the spectacle.
“I’d like to see you try!” Ryan said. “No wait, that didn’t come out right.”
“Look at the walls!” Victoria said quietly. She ran her hand along the rock. “The carving at the entrance looked manual, but these tramlines here suggest some sort of machinery.”
“Machinery?” Ryan asked. “Are you sure?”
Victoria took a step back from the wall and nodded. “Almost certain — in fact the lower part here looks like it’s constituted of rectilinear stone blocks cut to size by high-precision cutting tools.”
Hawke frowned. “Modern stuff?”
“Sounds mad but yes,” Victoria said.
“Ryan?”
Ryan weighed it up. “The temple complex at Pumapunku in Bolivia has attracted a lot of conspiracy theories for the same reason — high-precision engineering of stonework around fifteen hundred years old that many people say must have been done by a higher intelligence. The thing is the theories are highly questionable because the stone there is a mix of red sandstone and andesite, both of which are conducive to precision carving by hand.”
“But this isn’t sandstone,” Victoria said. “This is granite.”
Ryan tipped his head to one side and stared at the tunnel wall for a moment, silent and perplexed. “Granite… yes. Odd.”
They descended the declining tunnel until they reached the inner chamber. Immediately the atmosphere changed and they felt the temperature drop again.
“This must be it!” Ryan said.
“It can’t be,” Victoria said in a whisper. Her eyes crawled over the cavern, lit low by the flickering glow sticks. “Thor’s tomb?”
“Got it in one,” Hawke said. “Now let’s see where the old boy’s hiding out.”
Ryan clicked his teeth and shook his head gently. “Blasphemous mockery of the gods is not a good idea, Joe.”
Hawke said nothing as they progressed into the tomb complex, but Lea was starting to think Ryan might have a point. The place reminded her of what she had seen in Kefalonia when they’d discovered the vault of Poseidon. Ancient motifs were carved into the chamber walls, there were faded renderings of Thor on the floor tiles and a bewildering array of weapons was stacked up in piles wherever she looked. Yet this place seemed different from Poseidon’s tomb. It felt more military.
She heard Scarlet whisper a few feet behind her. “Take look at this place!”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Victoria said, running her hands over the smooth, painted walls. “Apart from some deterioration in the paint pigments it’s like they just finished it yesterday.”
They saw Thor’s sarcophagus and moved toward it, their flashlights illuminating the dust they’d kicked up as they walked through the frozen chamber.
Lea’s breath formed into a thick cloud in front of her face. “It’s all very similar to the Poseidon tomb. That’s bothering me.”
“It definitely raises a few questions,” said Hawke. “Not only were none of these legends supposed to exist in the first place, but their mythologies all grew up thousands of miles apart from each other.”
The sarcophagus was a similar shape and size to Poseidon’s, but it didn’t stop there — leaning against the base of the pedestal was a stone shield covered in carved letters — the same letters they had seen back in Kefalonia.
“Looks like Thor went on holiday to Greece,” Hawke said.
“Or maybe Poseidon took a visit up here to see the northern lights or something like that?” Scarlet said, lowering her voice in the sombre atmosphere.
“Or something like that,” Lea said, turning over the shield with the tip of her boot. It clattered to the floor with startling volume in the icy silence of the tomb.
Hawke frowned. “I don’t think it was just Poseidon who came here — don’t forget this is pretty much where the NSA found Medusa’s head back in the sixties. Why am I getting the feeling we’re just not getting something about all of this?”
“Beats me,” Scarlet said with a sigh. She shone her flashlight over the sarcophagus for a second and then swept the beam around the chamber. It illuminated rows of swords and axes. “We’re certainly not getting any bloody treasure out of it, that’s for sure. I mean look at this place — it’s like an ancient arsenal but where’s the loot?”
“Yes, but look at all these weapons!” Ryan said. “I’ve never seen so many swords in all my life.”
“Leave them alone, boy,” Scarlet said. “They’re not Fisher Price.”
“And check this out!” Ryan said, lifting a leather belt studded with gold and emeralds from the floor. He blew the dust off it and strapped it around his waist.
Scarlet raised an eyebrow. “What is this — professional wrestling?”
“Get lost, Scarlet.”
“What would your wrestling name be? What about Big Mummy?”
“Leave it, Cairo,” Hawke said. He turned to Ryan. “It’s not a wrestling belt, obviously — but what is it?”
A look of recognition spread on Victoria’s face. “I know! It’s the megingjörð.”
Ryan beamed, barely able to contain himself. “I know!”
Scarlet sighed. “Well that clears that up. Shall we move on and look for some gold?”
“Just wait where you are, Cairo.” Hawke looked at Ryan and Victoria. “In English please, for the rest of us.”
“Sorry!” Ryan said with excitement. “This is Thor’s magical power-belt, the megingjörð!”
“Then take it off, Ryan!” Lea said.
“Yeah, better stop pissing about, mate.”
“One hates to be a clock-watcher,” Victoria said, pointing at the sarcophagus. “But oughtn’t we get on and take a look in that thing or not?”
Lea saw Hawke glance at her and then at the others. “That’s what we do, so… yeah.”
It took longer than they thought to prise the lid off the sarcophagus, even with the climbing ropes and crow bars they had brought with them from the plane’s hold. After tying off the massive, stone lid and making sure it was secure, they took a tentative step forward toward the gaping black hole in front of them.
“Well…” Lea said with a casual resigned tone usually reserved for the most banal of observations. “That’s Thor’s corpse, all right.”
“Thank God it’s so cold in here,” Hawke said quietly. “Or it might have thawed out by now.”
Lea laughed, but Scarlet was less amused. “Oh please,” she said. “That was not funny in the least.”
“I thought it was,” Lea said.
“You’d laugh at anything. You married Ryan after all.”
Lea ignored her and joined Hawke as he leaned over the edge of the sarcophagus with a flashlight in his hand. There was certainly a mummified corpse inside but more interesting than that was the unmistakable shape of what could only be a hammer, a heavy, square anvil of a thing on a thick wooden handle. Beside it was a rolled-up scroll of parchment which Hawke gently picked up and looked at under the bright beam of the flashlight.