Forgotten Love: An Action-Packed Adventure Romance (The Forgotten Chronicles) (7 page)

"Do you know what this place is?" Theo asked her.

She nodded. "I think so."

They both whispered. Theo felt like he was standing in a church. The weight of the silence around him had a reverent, almost sacred feel to it. Neither of them wanted to interrupt it.

"In the fifteenth century," he said, putting words to what they were both thinking, "the Greenland Norse disappeared. Just vanished."

She picked up the story from there, her smile as wide as his own. "No one has ever known why. The climate changed, and everyone assumed they just moved on to somewhere else."

"But if this is what we think it is..."

"They didn't go anywhere. They stayed in Greenland as the climate got worse and worse, and they moved underground!"

Her last words echoed back from the distant walls, softly repeating over and over until it died out.

"This is the lost Norse civilization," he said. He'd give his right arm for a camera right now. The river had ruined his, and it had to be left behind with the GPS and cell phones. "They never left. That's why no one could find them! They followed the moulins underground, and created a whole civilization down here! Dear God, Gillian, this is the find of the century! We need to get a team down here, catalogue all of these artifacts, and preserve this site. When the scientific community hears about this! Dear God! Unbelievable. Simply...unbelievable."

"Theo?" she spoke his name, and he turned back to her to see that her brow was crinkled in thought.

"What is it?"

"Is there something missing from this picture?"

He didn't follow.

"This is a lost settlement. Of the Greenland Norse?"

"It has to be, Gillian," he answered, excitement flooding his voice.

"Look around. Don't you think this is kind of creepy? It looks like they just left. Then where are the people?"

"What, you think they went to a party and didn't invite us? They're dead, Gillian."

"Yeah," she said. "So where are their remains?"

That thought seeped into his brain and stole away his enthusiasm. Slowly, he made another turn around the empty village that seemed even more like a ghost town now than it had before. Because she was right. There should be people here. Remains. Bodies. Graves.

So where were they?

Chapter 9

THEO LED THEM
in a straight line through the buildings, toward the center where the sunlight filtered down strongest. It was as good a direction as any. And it made sense that the settlement would have been set up starting at that entrance. Which meant the further back they went this way, the more likely they were to find the end of it.

And maybe a way out. He still hadn't forgotten about that.

This was incredible. This place, these buildings, the whole damned area, constituted the single greatest find in modern history. It was impossible to say just what this would mean to scientists and anthropologists alike. The whole academic community would be turned on its ear. It was like finding the Lost Colony on Roanoke Island. It was like finding Atlantis.

And all Theo could do now was to give it a cursory once-over, just the briefest of examinations, stopping here to look at broken shovels made of whale bone or here to peek into the inside of one of the dwellings. He didn't have time to do more than look. He had to find a way out of here and back to the surface. There had to be a way out, didn't there? The Norse who had lived here had to have some way up and down. And obviously it wasn't the way he and Gillian had gotten here.

So he just had to keep looking until he found it. Once that was done, there would always be time to come back. When they were prepared. And when they hadn't lost most of their provisions.

Gillian walked close to him, and for the millionth time, he had to wonder what she was doing with Saul. Saul, for the love of God? Another example of his brain not being able to shut itself off and leave well enough alone.

"Uh, Gillian," he said, examining the side of a building where purple moss grew between the carefully set bricks of the wall, "do you mind if I ask you something?"

"Sure," she said, "What is it?"

"How did you and Saul meet?"

"In the usual way. You know. Boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, girl lets him buy her expensive things."

He wasn't sure if she was being serious. "Attracted to expensive things, are you?"

From an open windowsill she picked up a small soapstone statue shaped like a seal sitting up on its front flippers. "You mean like this? Yes. What more could a girl ask for?"

She looked closely at the seal's little face, and then gave it a kiss on its nose before putting it into a pocket in the side of her pants.

"I could, you know," he said, and then cringed. That was not supposed to be in his outside voice...

"You could what?" she asked in an absent-minded way, looking around at the archaeological wonder they had uncovered.

"I could poke around down here forever..."

"I'd rather not," she said.

Theo had to fight off his feelings of jealousy. She was with Saul, period. Was he better looking than Saul? Sure. Was he rich? Sure. Could he buy Gillian's affection away with things? Well. He could buy her things. He had the feeling that she gave her affections away only her own terms.

They had finally walked to the center of this little underground village, to where there were only a few structures standing. Theo halted and stared at the ground.

"Well, look at that," Gillian said.

There was soil here, dark and rich smelling covering a rectangular area about two hundred feet by one hundred feet. Here, the sunlight was more concentrated than anywhere else. This area had probably been used to grow vegetables back in the age when this was a thriving underground community filled with Greenland's missing Norsemen.

Something else grew out of it as well...

Dozens upon dozens of stone markers, each sticking out of the ground about two feet high, were arranged in specific patterns. Most were placed into the shape of footballs, squat ovals about nine or ten feet across from point to point. But there were triangles and circles and other shapes that Theo could see too.

"Are those gravestones?" Gillian asked him.

"Sort of. They're called stone ships. It was Viking tradition to burn their dead at sea. On ships. But when you didn't have a large supply of boats to sacrifice your dead in, a good Norseman placed stone markers in the shape of a boat and buried his dearly beloved inside the closed shape. You see the shapes that look like footballs? Those are ships. Think of the outline of a rowboat. Twenty-six of them, just in this one spot."

She nodded. "Okay, I see it. So these are burial mounds?"

"Exactly." Theo was impressed with how quickly she had picked up on it.

Gillian frowned. "Why aren't they mounded, then?"

She was right. The ground inside all of the shapes was perfectly flat. "I don't know," he admitted.

"It doesn't look like the entire settlement is buried here. So they didn't simply die out. They must have left."

"Not necessarily." Theo knelt down by one of the stones to take a closer look. There were runic inscriptions on several of the larger ones. "If there had been some kind of disease that spread in this enclosed space, for instance, it might have wiped them all out before they could even realize what was going on and prepare enough mounds. I don't suppose you can read Old Norse?"

"I actually read several ancient languages..."

Theo waited for her to say more.

"But Old Norse isn't one of them," she finally admitted. "Why would I need to read Old Norse?"

He waved a hand around them. "Plenty of reason now."

"Well, if I'd known I was going to get trapped underground with Indiana Jones in the Land of the Lost, I'd have boned up on it." She knelt down next to him, examining the text on the stones, correctly tracing it from right to left. "I can read several North Germanic dialects, and Old Norse is closely related."

Theo watched her, impressed and proud, that's when he knew he was getting in deep with this woman.

Dear God she was sexy.

"
Uti...uti ar weldude
. No.
Weladaude
. That's the first line, anyway."

"And it means...?"

"An evil death while away from home," she translated. "I think. That sounds...ominous."

Theo looked at the runic symbols. They made no sense to him. "It might just mean that the person who buried him was sad he had to die away from their native land of Norway. Stop being all doom and gloom, will you?" But something was making him jumpy. Something had happened here. All of these people, presumed dead but smart enough to go underground and recreate their society. And then what?

"Uh oh," Gillian said as her hands stopped tracing across the stone's inscription.

"Uh oh? Uh oh what?" he asked. "Don't just say 'uh oh' and then stop talking."

"
Naseu warb
...uh...something."

"Something?"

"Something," she said with a firm nod of her head. "Something covered in blood."

"Well, we are in a graveyard."

"Very funny. I think this word here means Devil. So, 'The Devil covers us in blood.' Or, 'The Devil covered in blood.' Or maybe 'Pour blood onto the Devil.'"

"That's less than helpful."

She slapped a hand against his leg. "Hey. Translating ancient languages is very rarely an exact word-for-word comparison. Languages all have their own different meanings for the same words. I'm doing my best here."

He bent down closer to her and put a hand on her shoulder. She didn't pull away "I know you're trying, Gillian. I know. Look, this is...simply amazing. But our main priority now has to be getting out of here."

"And something about a devil awakening."

"Devil?"

"Yes. And this next line is something about a sacrifice."

Theo did see. But he didn't want to admit it. Not that he was afraid of the legend, of course. He simply didn't want to transfer any fear to Gillian. "Okay, so what does the rest of this say about the devil?"

"I don't know."

"What do you mean, you don't know?"

"I mean, I don't know. It's a warning of some kind but that's all I can get out of it." She pointed at a string of symbols that looked like dance instructions for chickens.

He nodded, running his tongue around his teeth thoughtfully. "Okay. So the stone says these people had a bad death for painting the Devil with blood he woke up. I didn't think the Vikings believed in the Christian God?"

"No, Theo, they didn't. The Vikings, Norsemen, whatever you call them, did not believe in the Christian God. So why are they writing about the Devil on their inscriptions?"

"I don't know," he said. "You're the one who can read it."

She stared intently at the tablet.

"Serpent!" she suddenly yelled out loud. "Not Devil. Serpent."

He pushed himself up onto his knees. "Well, that makes more sense," he said sarcastically.

She read the inscription again. "An evil death away from home," she read, "the serpent covers us in blood. Our sacrifice is not enough. It's Minik's legend..." She looked up at him with her eyes large and round.

He knew she was scared and suddenly felt protective of her. He smiled and said, "Hey, I'm kidding. These people lived centuries ago. They wrote legends to explain natural phenomena that they couldn't explain. Those air vents hissing sound an awful lot like snakes, don't they? And these people clearly made a sacrifice by moving underground, right?"

He saw her try to relax.

"Trust me. I'm Indiana Jones."

She finally smiled. "Yeah. I saw that movie... I know how you feel about snakes."

They both laughed.

"I'm just not used to this," Gillian said. "Field experience, real experience, I mean, has been hard to come by."

"I've got to say, Gillian, for a woman who doesn't do the actual grunt work, the hands-on work, very often, you're proving yourself really good at it."

She smiled a little. "Got any pointers for me?" she asked.

"Don't die. The rest of it will come to you."

She stood in a beam of sunlight, pride and fear fighting for control of her expression. The sun outlined her curves and backlit her red hair seeming almost like it was an extension of her soul. He traced the outline of her face with his eyes. She was smart, very smart and she had some guts.

Very alluring.

Damn sexy.

If they ever got out of here—when they got out of here, he corrected himself, not if—he was definitely making a play to get her away from Saul.

"So, has a way out of here come to you?" she asked.

Theo pointed up. "Sunlight gets in." He gestured around them. "These people got down here some how and it sure wasn't the way we came. Probably the same way the sun gets in. We just need to find a way up and we've got to do it before Minik sounds the alarm and brings the entire Dutch army out looking for us and gives our location away. Tomorrow we make some phone calls to the right people, then we come back with a team of experts, and take photographs and measurements and get published in all the scientific journals for being the two people who solved a centuries old mystery. Lost Viking settlement, found!"

"Promise me," she demanded in a soft voice. "Promise me you'll get us out of here. You promised you wouldn't let me die back when we were hanging out over empty space in the middle of an ice shaft, and I believed you, and you kept your promise. So promise me again, now."

He didn't know how he was going to get them out. If he was being honest, he didn't really know if he could get them out. Up to this point it had just been a matter of surviving. But looking into her eyes, he knew he wouldn't stop trying. "I promise."

"You'd better." She took his face in her hands, and she kissed him.

He'd known Gillian for all of a day, and he could already tell that she was the kind of woman that threw herself completely into everything that she did. There was no halfway with this woman. It was in the way she worked, and the way she lived, and even in the way that she kissed.