Free Valhalla by Robert J. Mrazek Page A

recurring pattern of furrows, interspersed with small round fissures in the ice every forty or fifty feet.
    She had done some rock climbing over the years, and the tiny fissures resembled those left by a piton. She then remembered that Rob was an experienced climber. It would have been easy for him to rig up a chest harness. The only thing he would have needed to rappel down the shaft was enough stout line.
    In the glare of the flashlight beam, the base of the shaft finally arrived beneath her. Stepping off the rig into the black tunnel, she turned on her flashlight.
    The Viking ship looked untouched to her, but she saw that someone had been there since their last visit. The block of ice that Steve Macaulay had placed in front of the cave opening had been shoved to one side, and the hole was now uncovered.
    Inside the cave, ice melt was drizzling from the ceiling,although the bodies of the Norsemen appeared to still be free of decomposition. When she looked down at the flaxen-haired Viking whose outer garment had been trimmed in red and gold braid, she saw that his cloak had been ripped open and the side pockets of his tunic torn out. Whatever he had possessed was gone.
    At the back of the cave, the stonecutter was still lying where they had left him, but when she raised her flashlight to the rune stone, she saw that the ice shield that had covered it was no longer there.
    She saw how Rob had done it. On their first visit, the Norsemen’s iron firepots had been lying on their sides, empty. Now, two of them sat upright at the base of the stone. An empty plastic Coke bottle lay next to them. She sniffed its remaining contents. It was diesel fuel.
    Her hands were trembling as she knelt in front of the stone and examined the top row of the inscription in the beam of the flashlight. Some of the symbols had been so crudely etched that she could not immediately interpret the individual characters, and thus their meaning. A few of the other symbols were unfamiliar to her, reflecting an idiom she had never encountered in translating other ancient texts.
    She quickly concluded that a full translation of the saga would require hours of research, including an analysis of all the early Norse phrases and symbols she had catalogued back in St. Paul.
    There were enough legible characters for her to conclude that if the stonecutter was recording true events, it was the most important archaeological discovery since the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
    We have come through the storm and survived,
she read.
    Her instincts had been correct. They had been part of Leif Eriksson’s final expedition to Vinland in 1016. On their way back to Greenland, they had encountered something fearsome and powerful on an island where they had been forced to seek shelter. In battling it, Eriksson had been killed and was buried there.
    He lies in the hallowed place. . . .
    A voice suddenly startled her. It came through the earphones of her radio transceiver.
    â€œLexy, you need to get up here right away,” said Steve Macaulay.
    â€œAll right,” she said, her mind involuntarily continuing to translate the remaining symbols in the next row.
    The next markings were meant to be a set of signposts for a new expedition of Norsemen to find Eriksson’s burial place and whatever was buried there with him. The stonecutter had recorded descriptions of landmarks to help them find their way back there, places that had existed a thousand years earlier.
    Under the tail,
she read from the next line.
    â€œGeorge says you’re not in the stirrups yet,” called out Macaulay over the radio in a worried tone. “Is anything wrong?”
    â€œI’m coming,” she said, reluctantly retracing her path through the cave and out into the tunnel.
    After restoring the block of ice to the mouth of the cave, she radioed George Cabot that she was ready to come up. In a few moments, the power winch began cranking and she was on her