Free Wrack and Rune by Charlotte MacLeod Page B

nephew’s tractor.”
    “Can’t have no fun on a tractor.”
    Miss Hilda’s argument was unassailable. They compromised by Shandy’s driving the tractor on ahead to beat down a wider path over the route Swope had hacked out while Thorkjeld walked behind, carrying Uncle Sven under one arm and Miss Hilda under the other when the going got too rough for their century-old legs.
    The distance was not great, less than half a mile from the house, but it was solid brier patch most of the way and Cronkite Swope took an honored place in Shandy’s list of unsung heroes. Cronkite had even managed to clear a tiny space in front of the stone itself. Uncle Sven had room to kneel and use Thorkjeld’s pet magnifying glass to examine the inscription.
    The stone itself was nothing to get excited about as far as Shandy could see. It was merely a slab of granite perhaps four feet high and two feet wide at the base, such as the Great Glacier had strewn so lavishly over the area, to the dismay of early colonists who had to drag the stones off the fields they’d cut and burned clear and were trying to turn into farmland. Plenty of stones like this one had been piled into stone walls to keep out wandering pigs and shoot at Redcoats from behind.
    Shandy didn’t think much of the runes, either. To him they were only half-obliterated gouges in the granite. Uncle Sven, however, got so rapt in study that he forgot to retain his firm grasp on Miss Hilda, who flounced off in a fit of pique and seated herself on the tractor. He also lost his feeble grip on the English language, so that Thorkjeld had to act as translator as soon as there was anything to translate.
    “Well, what’s it say?” demanded Miss Hilda, considerably out of sorts at having been ditched for a slab of granite.
    “Give him time,” grunted President Svenson. “The inscription is badly defaced.”
    “H’mph. He ain’t in none too great shape hisself.”
    This was pure spite. Thorkjeld didn’t bother to relay the remark to his uncle, being wise in the ways of women and knowing Miss Hilda didn’t really mean it anyway.
    Sven Svenson went on peering and muttering, often using his sensitive scholar’s fingers to trace a mark that was too dim to make out by eye. At last he began to chuckle. He rocked back on his heels and read off the inscription to Thorkjeld, who laughed a good deal louder, then translated for the others.
    “‘Orm Tokesson found no good drink and only ill-tempered women. This place is cursed.’”
    “Must o’ been before my time,” said Miss Hilda blandly.
    “You mean it’s real?” Shandy gasped. “Good Lord! Now what do we do?”
    “Damned if I know. Get a bunch of archaeologists out here from Harvard or somewhere, I suppose. Let ’em do whatever the hell they do.”
    “I must say I find this hard to credit. Why should a Viking expend all that time and effort hacking a complaint about booze and women into solid granite?”
    “You don’t understand the soul of the Norsemen, Shandy. They were great poets.”
    “This is great poetry?”
    “Well, Orm might have spread himself more if the stone hadn’t been so damned hard. Yesus, what if you’d been cooped up in a longship for weeks, maybe months on end, with the ale running out and the meat going bad and not a goddamn thing to do but row or get seasick. Finally you reach land and go ashore all set for a rip-roaring drunk in sympathetic company and there isn’t any. Can’t you feel the agony behind those simple, poignant words? The dryness in the mouth, the—” Thorkjeld Svenson’s eye happened to light on Miss Hilda’s prim lilac print and he broke off what for him had been a long oration.
    “Poor Orm,” he finished sadly, with head bowed in tribute to one he clearly regarded as a fallen comrade.
    “M’yes,” Shandy conceded. “I hadn’t thought of the matter in that light. Besides, I daresay if your—er—profession involved a lot of hewing and slashing anyway, you wouldn’t