The Festival of Bones: Mythworld Book One (3 page)

Were it merely for the long-post-mortem slander directed at a cherished cultural myth, the British scholars could have possibly forgiven Michael for bringing it to the attention of the world; but it was the fact that he had done the proper thing and consulted them privately first, that they could not bear to countenance.

They had rejected the document as a fraud, without bothering to test it chemically, examine the site report, or even do a complete translation.

Michael then took it to a group of scholars in Denmark who could have cared less who was sharing King Arthur’s bed, and they ran a chemical analysis, picked through three separate site reports, and ordered a full translation—after which they declared it to be genuine.

The British were furious, as were, by association, the French.

Turkey and Greece, who jointly governed Cyprus, demanded the extradition of whomever had smuggled the document off of the island, until it was revealed that a minor Turkish Government official had actually authorized the export papers in exchange for three minutes alone in a broom closet with one of the female assistant archaeologists.

In America, Turner Classic Movies re-released the film version of Lerner and Lowe’s
Camelot
as
Arthur and Lance
, and the videocassette promptly outsold
Titanic
and all four
Star Wars
films combined; although a minor scandal was caused when the producers of those films contested the sales figures, and it was discovered that ninety percent of the tapes had been bought up and destroyed by representatives of British Parliament and the Prince of Wales.

And in Vienna, there was a tremendous explosion—the sound of the top of the University’s Administrative Director’s head blowing off when the total expense receipts for the whole debacle arrived from the Department of Ancient Literature and Historical Studies. All told, the balance of underwriting an eight-month archaeological dig in Cyprus, arranging not-strictly-legal export papers, commandeering a Danish chemical laboratory for three weeks, and hosting a full-blown international symposium came to approximately three million and twelve dollars—the twelve, because the British had returned the document to Vienna by mail, postage due.

There were official pronouncements and apologies and all of those diplomatic things which are done whenever it is demanded they be done, but the end result of all of the hullabaloo was that the University of Vienna had in its possession a very expensive, probably wholly authentic, completely scandalous document, which had already become a great embarrassment to the one culture which could mitigate the costs by legitimizing it as an object of study.

During the symposium, the Æthelbert Document had been secured in a strongbox in the University Library’s restricted section. Sometime in the month since, the key was lost, and last week, the box itself disappeared. Thus, the letter Michael had received was not, to be honest, that much of a surprise.

* * *

It was the completion of a broad circle of years that the object which may have ended up becoming Michael’s personal Hindenburg was named for a Saxon king; he had been born in Saxony, in the city of Dresden. He liked to believe that his city was the center of the universe, although just about anyone who lived there and was over the age of thirty would admit that Dresden’s long gone golden age was early in the eighteenth century, when Saxony also ruled most of Poland. True, there were many treasures: treasures artistic and treasures architectural; but then again, the same could be said of Budapest, Prague, and half a dozen other cities in that region of Europe. Once, as a young man, he had hiked the length of the Elbe River to the Atlantic, and had come to the conclusion that there truly was no better place to extend his roots than in Dresden. But that was before Vienna. That was before Elena.

They had met and fallen in love when his family first relocated to Vienna, but his academic career had beckoned, and Michael was trundled off to Oxford. He exchanged letters with her for a time, but her replies eventually began to decrease to a mere trickle, then ceased altogether. When he had managed to return to Vienna, he found her married; not long after his return, she also became pregnant.

Michael saw the chance to reclaim the lost track of his life the night Elena’s daughter was born—that same evening, Elena’s husband vanished from Vienna, unaccountably, untraceably, gone. Some months later, Michael Langbein married Elena Strugatski.

The two moved briefly to Oxford, so Michael could finish his education, then returned one final time to Vienna, where he began teaching high school philosophy courses. When they had saved enough money, Michael and Elena moved into a three-hundred-year-old villa in the picturesque woods on the northern outskirts of Vienna. Nothing was ever seen of Elena’s first husband, although Michael suspected he may have communicated infrequently with his daughter via letters sent to her through her grandparents, who had accepted Michael only grudgingly.

Michael’s own parents, who had never condoned the marriage, died only a few years after the union, and for a few years, Michael, Elena, and Elena’s daughter, whom they named Meredith, lived a very rich life, all of which would’ve made an excellent story if it had ended there, which it didn’t. The richness began to tarnish one night before Meredith left for college at Oxford, on a scholarship her father had helped her to attain.

She had gone to visit her grandparents, to say her good-byes, but when she returned just minutes before midnight, the only goodbye she said that night was to Michael, and it was said with a cold, angry look in her eyes, and the fact that she had chosen not to speak to him—a covenant she had kept in all the years since. Even last year, when after a long, arduous struggle with pneumonia, Elena died, Meredith didn’t speak to him—the trip from Oxford took long enough that she missed the funeral. And although Michael later discovered that she had chosen to return to Vienna, and had in fact already begun her career as a photojournalist, she never once returned to the villa, or sought him out at the University. Several months after Elena’s passing, he cleared out the home he had so loved and returned to the city proper.

The apartment in the heart of Vienna just north of the University was a spectacular find, with not much less space than the villa, but for Michael, it was much larger, for there were fewer ghosts.

* * *

Traveling abroad had a great appeal for Michael, and the very real option of just dropping his trousers and showing the University the sunny side of his personality was greatly tempting. Leaving the University of Vienna meant no curriculums, no justification, no budgets; none of the necessary irritations that had a great deal to do with the business of teaching and practically nothing to do with teaching itself. It also would probably mean the end of his career as a respected academic, given that a wide swath of his credibility came from his University letterhead, and after the Æthelbert Document fiasco, employable only by a research lab in Denmark and the Greek State Department.

It was more than his reputation which kept him in Vienna, however—he believed that there were some places to which one’s heart belonged, and that those places formed bonds stronger than fear, stronger than love, stronger even than death. Other than Vienna, the only place where he had felt even a stirring of emotion that strongly was in Bayreuth, during his annual pilgrimage to the festival there.

There was also the issue of the acquisitions he had made during his time at the University—if the school’s officials were lax enough to allow a three-million-dollar document, in their possession less than a month, to vanish, then the rest of the collection had all the assurances of a hen in a fox house (although he suspected that the disappearance of the Æthelbert Document would likely coincide with the receipt of a substantial donation to the University by an unnamed British benefactor whose check bore a Royal seal). If nothing else, the range, scope, and unabashed quality of the books and documents Michael had amassed was enough to guarantee him a footnote in every research journal published for the next fifty years.

The United States knew of at least three preliminary copies of the Declaration of Independence, but only Michael Langbein had discovered the parchment, annotated by Thomas Jefferson, which outlined the well-known document, and appeared to have been written by a Dutchman living with Iroquois Indians in the sixteenth century. That was the transaction which convinced the University of Vienna to fund the department of Ancient Literature and Historical Studies—the sum paid by the United States to ‘reacquire’ the thin paper made from beaten tree bark was sufficiently large enough for the school to build the entire Central Library for Physics.

In the three years of Michael’s professorship, that had been the only divestment; everything else had remained in the library.

There was an early copy of the Magna Carta—presumably the only one which advocated the invasion of Egypt as a basic right of the English Barons. This was probably just an effort on the part of King John to placate the gentry and maintain his hold on the country, but it didn’t survive into the final version, which he had no intention of implementing anyway, which is why the Barons invited King Louis VII of France to boot John from the throne. Michael thought that if the version he’d found had been kept, then perhaps the entire sordid history of bad British cooking might have been avoided.

About eighteen months ago, he found a parchment written by a previously unknown student of the philosopher Parmenides, in which he proffered an early version of what would eventually be known to the world as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Since the viewpoint of this student, whose name was Thiassus, brought a heretofore unexpected layer of comprehension to Parmenides’ argument that reality must necessarily be changeless and uniform in contrast to the shifting diversity of the everyday world of appearances, the older man had him executed. Had Thiassus lived only a few years more until the rise of the atomists, the application of his methods of thinking to theirs could have accelerated the advent of Cosmology by two thousand years.

If those documents could be considered the main body of Michael’s collection, the item which was both the head and heart had to be the Uppsala Dance.

Named after a loosely connected and very significant document called the Uppsala Codex, the Uppsala Dance was the smallest, most expensive, and most studied item in all of Michael’s trove. A scrap of parchment not six inches across and eight inches long, the Dance—called so because it employed a form of poetry which had become popular in twelfth-century Iceland—consisted of six sets of four lines of minutely scumbled text, the content of which had been seen in only three other documents known to exist. The one Michael had the greatest access to was known as the Uppsala Codex. Written on parchment sometime during the first few decades of the fourteenth century, the Codex was one of the more important manuscripts of Snorri Sturluson’s
Prose Edda
, which was significant for two reasons: one, the
Edda
was considered to be the refining account of the mythologies of the Icelandic, Norse, and Germanic peoples; and two, it was the nearly-all-consuming passion of Michael Langbein.

The reason he had better access to the Codex as opposed to the other two existing documents was that he hadn’t actually tried to touch it before he had his academic credentials and a formal invitation. It was sheer luck that when he came across the Dance he recognized it as being in the same hand as the Codex; unfortunately, the amateur archaeologist (read: smuggler) who presented it to him for sale was educated, and knew as well as Michael just what it was he had.

It took less than a heartbeat for Michael to agree to the transaction, a few seconds more to sign the check, and several days, even with assistance from colleagues at the University of Reykjavik, to explain to the University of Vienna’s Administrative Director why he paid six point two million dollars for bad poetry on a tattered sheet of parchment the size of a Kleenex.

The significance was in the form as much as the content. A dance was a four-line improvisation using everyday words set to a loose rhythm, in which all metrical rules and disciplines were utterly disregarded. Sturluson hated dance poetry, and even went so far as to compose a section in the
Edda
which carefully specified the proper use of poetic forms, along with a warning that if those forms were set aside and fell into disuse, then much of the historical writings and the people’s understanding of their own mythologies would be lost.

The inclusion (or adaptation) of material from the
Prose Edda
in the Uppsala Dance could be interpreted only when it was discovered at what point it was written—if it was written at the same time as the Codex, then it would represent a significant shift in how Sturluson was actually perceived not far removed from his own time. If it was written before or after, then it could simply be dismissed as the efforts of another poetical wanna-be—except for the fact that the writing on both the Dance and the Codex were identical, and further, that chemical analysis revealed them to be written on identically-made and similarly-dated parchment.

Michael had fully expected, even with the astronomical cost, that the discovery of the Uppsala Dance would be the catalyst for permanently establishing his department at the University, but less than a week after he found it at the beginning of the school year, the University signed an employment contract with a mathematics prodigy who was not yet even old enough to drink, and as they had been looking for a reason to garner press attention for their new Central Library for Physics, the new professor became the glamour boy of the moment and Michael, with his seven-figure Kleenex, was quickly forgotten.

* * *

That was several months ago, and the overall conditions regarding his future had not brightened. Michael was committed to teaching through the end of the school year, and had hoped to get both Summer sessions as well, so he could better afford the trip to Bayreuth in August, but before he could take a step in any direction, he had to decide where he was going. Abroad, he could pursue his research freely, but he would lose the resources of an institution backing him, and although he had traveled often, he had never been without some sort of permanent place to return to. In Vienna, he was settled if not entirely happy, and he loved his work.