The Orkney Scroll (18 page)

Then I went back to the Stones of Stenness and walked around the Ring of Brodgar. The pastoral view was truly lovely, and I wished Percy were there to share it. After that I just drove around the island, I don’t know why, maybe searching for someone who looked as if he’d killed my strange friend, Percy. Occasionally I stopped to eat. Stuffing food down my throat seemed to be the only thing that kept me from doing something else, although what that something else was I didn’t know. I did know I didn’t feel like crying.

It was thus that I found Willow in the Quoyburray Inn in Tankerness a couple of days later, but by then I didn’t care. She was sitting alone at a table in the corner of the bar with a plate offish and chips in front of her, and, in a choice of questionable taste given the recent demise of her boyfriend and the means of his dispatch, a bottle of Skull-splitter beer. With Percy’s death, my interest in Blair and Trevor, the furniture, and therefore Willow had evaporated.

Willow, and I’ve thought about this a lot since, seemed very surprised to see me. I didn’t care about that either. In fact, I didn’t give a fig about anything, although a small part of my brain was trying to tell me I should. Willow dropped her fork, put her hand to her mouth, and said “Lara!” in a rather strange tone of voice. There was a pause, and then she said, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

Sure you have,
I thought.
You have been roaring around Orkney on the back of a motorcycle piloted by a rather well-built young man in red and blue leather just hoping to see me standing by the side of the road.

“What I mean is, I thought I’d missed you, that you would have gone home by now. I’m so glad you’re here.”

“I don’t believe I knew you were coming to Orkney, Willow,” I said, through clenched teeth. “Had I known, I would of course have told you where I was staying.”

“I know that,” she said. “I trust you.” If I hadn’t felt so awful, I probably would have laughed. She gestured to me to sit down and then leaned forward conspiratorially. “I found it,” she whispered. “As soon as I found it, I called your shop, and a nice man told me you were taking a bit of a holiday in Britain. I knew that meant you’d headed for Orkney, so I flew out the very next day. I figured I’d just find you here somewhere. After all, it’s not a very big island.”

A nice man? Surely she didn’t mean Clive. “You found what?” I asked in a normal speaking voice. “The money?”

“Shush,” she said. “Not the money, but the closest thing to it.”

“And what might that be?”

She leaned forward again. “The treasure map,” she mouthed.

Oh, spare me,
I thought. “I see,” I said. “That’s exciting. I knew you were here, actually, Willow. I saw you get off the ferry and then again on South Ronaldsay, but I couldn’t catch you because you were on a motorcycle with a rather fetching young man.”

“That’s Kenny. Isn’t he cute as anything? All that leather! I met him on the ferry, and he’s helping me find the you-know-what.”

“That’s nice,” I said, but my tone betrayed me.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” she said. “You think I’d cut you out of the deal. But I’m going to show you what I found, and when Kenny gets here, he’ll confirm that I made it very clear to him that you are to be a part of this, that we’d split it three ways, and that our number one priority, well, maybe number two, has been to find you. We asked for you at all the hotels in Kirkwall and Stromness, believe me. Oh, there he is. Kenny, we’re over here!”

Kenny was there all right, all six-foot-something of him, with dark curly hair and lovely deep blue eyes, and a physique that was indeed rather impressive in all that leather. He was, as Willow had already pointed out, cute as anything.

“Hello,” he said to me, before leaning over to peck Willow on the cheek.

“This is Lara,” Willow said, before he could say anything else.

“Lara!” he exclaimed. “Wow! Brilliant! Nice to meet you. I’m Kenny. How did you find each other?”

“She found me,” Willow said, going on to explain in some detail that I’d seen them both and where. Alarms bells were ringing here. It might be that she really wanted Kenny to know all about it, or that she was trying to make sure he knew so he wouldn’t say anything she didn’t want me to hear.

“Brilliant!” he repeated. “Willow thought, she was afraid you know, you’d be headed back home by now.”

Oh, please,
I thought again.

“Actually, why aren’t you heading back by now?” Willow said. I pointed to the newspaper sitting in front of her, tapping the article about Percy’s demise.

She scanned it for a moment. “Lara! How awful!” She leapt up and threw her arms around me as Kenny grabbed the paper to see what we were talking about. “Omigod,” she kept saying over and over. “I didn’t even see your name until right this minute. This is just too horrible. First Trevor, and now this complete stranger. How unlucky can you get?”

That was a good question, even if Percy had hardly been a complete stranger, a fact I decided I was not going to mention. She would hardly put the name Magnus Budge and Percy together. Even I was having trouble with that.

“I guess that’s why you didn’t e-mail me that you were staying over,” she said. I bit my tongue, and, instead of clawing her eyes out, just gave her a baleful glance. “Did you not
get
mine?” she said.

“Strangely enough I didn’t, no.”

“No wonder you’re looking at me like that. Did you check your e-mails?”

“I did.” I had, too, every day in Glasgow, at the airport before I left, and in the only Internet cafe I could find, in Kirkwall, when I took Percy back with his ruined bicycle. There had been no e-mail from Willow.

“Technology,” she said. “Great when it works, and a real pain when it doesn’t.” I said nothing.

“This is a terrible tragedy,” Kenny said solemnly, pointing to the newspaper. “But we’ve got something to take your mind off it. Now that you’re here, we can turn all of our attention to our, um, project.”

“He means finding the you-know-what,” Willow said. She and Kenny exchanged glances.

“Exactly,” he said.

“You two had better order something to eat, to keep up your strength,” she said. “The fish and chips are excellent.” She was right about that. I enjoyed my meal very much despite their tiresome attempts to persuade me that they’d spent their every waking moment looking for me. Soon I was driving down the highway behind the motorcycle, this time traveling at a pace I could match. I had no idea what Willow wanted to show me, but what else did I have to do until the expertise that normally resided outwith Orkney did its thing?

Willow and Kenny were staying at a pleasant bed-and-breakfast place in Deerness. They had separate rooms, they assured me, as if I cared, but it seemed rather a technicality given they shared a bathroom in one of those arrangements where there is a door from each room into the bathroom. We gathered in Willow’s room.

“Ready?” she exclaimed, placing in front of me a rather odd object. It was a long piece of cloth, rather scroll-like in appearance with a primitive but unusual drawing on it. There was a central panel on which was depicted, from the top, an animal, probably a camel, then a castle, a zigzag design, a head with mouth and eyes open, an image that made me feel a bit queasy, and, at the bottom, a bowl-shaped object of some kind. Down the sides were twiglike figures, and along the bottom some wavy lines in an irregular pattern.

“I found it hidden in the suitcase that Trevor had packed for his getaway,” she said. “It was under the lining. I almost gave the bag and its contents all away to a charity, but there was this long thread that didn’t look right in the lining, and I opened it up and there it was. Trevor couldn’t sew to save his life.” I thought that was maybe an unfortunate choice of phrase, but I suppose if she could drink Skullsplitter beer without a qualm, she was well over Trevor. I’m sure the delectable Kenny was helping with this transition a lot.

“I wasn’t sure what I had, other than it looked like a map, but Trevor’s ticket, the around-the-world ticket that I believe I have mentioned I paid for, had a first stop in Orkney. I am just guessing, of course, but I’m willing to bet he found this in that writing thing that you are so keen on finding. You did tell me that you thought the desk came from either Glasgow or Orkney, did you not? So I figure there is no money, but there is a treasure somewhere, and Trevor was heading off to find it. Or maybe, I suppose, it’s possible he already did, but then where is it? I flew to Edinburgh, took the bus to Scrabster and then the ferry, hoping, assuming, I’d be able to find you here. Fortuitously, I met Kenny on the boat. He knows all about this kind of thing, don’t you, Kenny?”

“A little,” he said. “I’m studying Scottish history in Edinburgh. My thesis is on Viking Scotland with particular reference to Orkney. That’s why I could decipher the runes around the side here. Stop me if you know all this, Lara, but Orkney was an important part of the Viking world. It was settled by the Norwegians, Norse in other words, probably some time in the ninth century. The Vikings
jarls
or ”earls“ were very powerful men, some of whom extended their territories into northern Scotland, Caithness, and Sutherland, and even beyond. We know about this period from archaeology, but also from something called the Orkneyinga Saga which is the story of the earls of Orkney. It is probably part history, part myth, but useful just the same. I think we’re really on to something, that there is a real Viking treasure to be found. I don’t know if you’ve been to Maeshowe, Lara, but if so you’ll know there are many Viking runes there, which we can actually read. The alphabet is called
futhark
for its first six letters,
th
counting as one.”

“Isn’t the word
futhark
cute?” Willow said. “The things you learn.”

“Some of the runes found in Maeshowe refer to well-hidden treasure in the tomb,” Kenny said. Thanks to Percy, I already knew that. “Treasure for the Vikings, I have to tell you, almost invariably means gold and silver. But Viking treasure wasn’t found in Maeshowe. Maybe it’s somewhere else. I’m thinking that these swirls along the bottom are actually a map of the shoreline where the treasure was buried.”

I was suddenly very depressed. A treasure map, of all things, a map to buried Viking jewelry or something. I mean, how tiresome! Should I point out the obvious to them? I decided I would, even if it felt like too much of an effort. “What would a camel be doing in Orkney in Viking times?” I asked. “Or any other time for that matter?” If Orkney had a zoo I hadn’t seen it yet.

“We were wondering about that, too,” Willow said. “I don’t think it’s a camel, though. The artist wasn’t exactly Rembrandt or anything. Unfortunately the rather poor talent for perspective here is not going to help us at all. It’s probably a horse. They had horses, right, Kenny?”

“Right. Some have claimed the islands were once named for the horses, Hrossey, that is, and there is still a festival of the horse held on South Ronaldsay every summer. So yes, this is most likely a horse.”

“It has a hump,” I said. I was feeling disagreeable and it showed.

“I’m sure that was just a mistake,” Willow replied. “It’s a horse.” She was obviously determined that there was treasure to be found. She hadn’t managed to find the cash of Trevor’s that she so desperately believed in. Now she’d transferred this desire to a treasure map. She saw what she wanted to, but I suffered under no such illusion, and it was very plainly a camel.

My friend Moira says I can be a spoilsport from time to time. A poop is what she calls me. Maybe she’s right. “If these swirls are the coastline, would that have not perhaps changed over the intervening, say, one thousand years. You did say the Vikings came here in the ninth century and stayed for how long?”

“The era of the Viking earls ended in the thirteenth century,” Kenny said. “I suppose it might have changed a bit since.”

Good grief again. I posed my next disagreeable question. “How old would this scroll have to be?” Personally I made it nineteenth century at best, the day before yesterday at worst, and while I was no expert on the Vikings in any shape or form, and I would certainly get something like this tested, I could tell just looking at it that it wasn’t a thousand years old.

“I know what you’re thinking, that this isn’t that old,” Willow said, smart young woman that she is.

“It could be based on something much older though,” Kenny said. “There is something about it.” Could that something be called wishful thinking, do you suppose? “This hill might be a chamber tomb, like Maeshowe or the Tomb of the Eagles, perhaps one as yet uncovered. That would be amazing in and of itself. It would be even more so if it turned out to be a place where Vikings stashed their treasure.”

Tomb of the Eagles,
I thought. Was that the name? It didn’t sound quite right to me, but why? But yes, it was called that. I’d been there. It was nice. Anyway, surely Kenny who was not only cute but obviously intelligent knew what the tomb thing was called, even if he wanted to believe this scroll was several centuries old. More to the point, why was this conversation upsetting me, other than the obvious, which is to say, the total futility of it? I could feel my heart pounding a little, my palms sweating, and I felt a little shaky, almost like a panic attack, or maybe as if I’d just gulped four quick espressos in a row. I just couldn’t think of any reason to feel like this at this particular moment.

“I think this is a map, of sorts. See there’s water, and a shoreline, a bay really, with a very distinctive shape. I think we need to find that piece of shoreline. There is a tower, too, a broch. So we’re looking for a distinctive piece of shoreline where there was once a tower, with a hill, or rather an undiscovered tomb nearby. There are some other really interesting symbols here as well, that make me think that it’s old. The disembodied head that speaks, for example, was a very important image in pagan times, as is the castle and the maze.” Kenny gestured to the symbols down the side. The word “maze,” of course, took me back to Percy, bleeding to death: The Wasteland, the maze, the wounded king. Even with that, though, I was not prepared for what was coming.