Skyfire (26 page)

A crucial component of Norse myth, the Valkyries were maidens of Odin, the godlike character, who, like Zeus in Greek mythology, served as an omnipotent ruler. It was the Valkyries' mission to fly to the battlefield and decide at Odin's bidding who should live and who should die. They also served as conduits of information to Odin, providing him with eyes and ears amongst his domain.

It was also believed, though not generally spelled out in the very few authentic Norse myth texts, that the Valkyries were available to serve Odin's sexual desires. And it was this thought that ran through Dominique's mind now as she watched the banquet reach new heights of drunkenness and debauchery.

As the next course of food-consisting of several dozen roasted pigs-was brought on, it seemed as if more and more of the disinclined young women were being grabbed, stripped, and sexually set upon. Fistfights of varying intensities were also breaking out among Norsemen of opposing clans, the fisticuffs brought on no doubt by the volatile mixture of the psychedelic myx and the intoxicating cries of the ravaged young women.

Yet though the storm of drunken wantonness swirled about her, no Norseman dared approach Dominique. Even in their most inebriated state, each man knew that to disturb Verden's Valkyrie in any way would result in the most painful of deaths. Despite the myriad of distractions, Dominique kept a close watch on Verden, thoroughly mystified by what she saw. The man neither ate nor drank and barely did he look up at the raucous scene before him. Rather he spent most of the time with his good eye closed and his head hung down, more like he was a bishop in deep prayer than the presiding member of the banquet-cu/n-231

orgy.

Dominique couldn't help but wonder.

What could be worrying him so? she thought.

Deep in the lowest deck of the Great Ship, Yaz could clearly hear the screams, the cries and laughter of the feast.

Even though they were the enemy, and he was their prisoner, Yaz envied the Norsemen who were at that moment eating, drinking, and doing God-knows-what-else six decks above. Just the smell of the beef and ham cooking in the huge galley two levels above him was driving him nuts. All he had to subsist on was a hunk of hard black bread and a dirty gallon jug of incredibly bitter beer.

But at least he was still alive.

He took a long sip of the acrid-tasting lager and contemplated his situation.

He was in a tiny cabin barely larger than a closet. A dun bulb provided the only illumination, a lumpy mat served as his bed. Before him was nothing more glamorous than a two-foot-thick, crudely written, badly translated repair manual detailing the unsophisticated guts of each and every one of the Bats-as the Norsemen called their submarines. As dictated by Verden himself, Yaz's role in life for the forseeable future was to memorize the book and be ready to advise the Norsemen on what to do when one of their submersible claptraps broke down. To demur would have cost him a finger or an ear, or maybe an even more precious body part at the best, and death at the worst.

So study the guidebook he did.

But now, after poring over the manual for the better part of the last two days, it was slowly dawning on him that like bottles of cheap wine, no two of the raiders' submarines were built alike. Just as Smiley had told him, there were two classes of rudimentary subs: the Krig Bats (or war boats) to ferry raiders on their attacks and the Folk Bats (people boats) used mostly to transport the human cargo of slaves

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back to Scandinavia but also as supply and replenishment vessels.

But while the basic design of all these subs was consistent-in almost all cases, Panel A was welded to Panel B and so on-the interior layouts were almost always different with each vessel. Some boasted huge galleys, which left little room for sleeping quarters. Others had a surplus area for bunks, yet no kitchen. Some had been built with enough room for so much coal that, if filled to capacity, their buoyancy would have been nil. Others had to refuel almost daily because they carried almost no area for coal storage.

Above all, the electrical wiring and plumbing systems were the most convoluted; some of the boats could barely sustain burning two dozen fifty-watt lightbulbs, while others had power to spare. Many had been built entirely without toilets. Most of the air-circulation systems were a joke, as were the water repurification processes. Just about the only thing the subs had in common was that onboard escape and rescue systems were nonexistent.

Yaz found the reading complicated and frustratingly confusing. Plus, nowhere in the volumes were the mysterious Fire Bats even alluded to. Yet it never left his mind that while he was studying the manual, he was also drinking up volumes of valuable intelligence on the enemy. Being able to understand submarine technology had been his life-saving grace so far. And though he hadn't seen her since coming aboard the Great Ship, he liked to think it was what had kept Dominique close by also. It had also given him this chance to learn more about the Norseman's Bats than they probably knew themselves.

As an officer of the United American Armed Forces, it was up to him to take as much of an advantage as possible of the mind-numbing yet luckily fortuitous situation.

With this in mind, he set aside the glass of incredibly bitter beer and turned to the next page. Six decks above, it sounded as if the orgy had shifted into high gear.

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It was one of the handmaidens who passed the note to Dominique.

Just barely making her way across the chaotic banquet-hall floor, the woman ceremoniously slipped the piece of paper into Dominique's cleavage and then returned to her own rug without a word. Reading the roughly scratched letters, it took Dominique several moments before she realized that the message was from Verden. He had left the banquet about a half hour before, slipping through a side door without so much as a salute from his horde of barbaric soldiers.

Now he was summoning Dominique to his quarters.

No sooner had she reread the note and folded it when two Norsemen, wearing the all-white cloth uniform of Ver-den's personal security squad, appeared and motioned that she follow them. Like a parting of the waves, these two men cleared a path for her through the sprawling and screaming bodies of the Norsemen and their victims.

She passed unhindered to the opposite end of the hall, not one of the raiders daring to touch her or even look directly into her eyes.

She arrived at Verden's third-deck quarters ten minutes later.

The door was open and the man was sitting on a throne-like wooden chair placed at the far end of the cabin. The room was very dark, six weary candles providing the only light.

In an instant, her two escorts were gone.

"Come in, my beautiful friend," Verden said in his heavily accented, withdrawn, and raspy voice. "It's with pleasure that I greet you. I'm happy that you decided to pay me a visit."

"Your note was an order," she replied, walking to a spot 234

about fifteen feet from the throne. "I had little choice but to obey."

He looked up at her, making an effort to distinguish her features in the dark room with his good eye.

"An order or an invitation," he shrugged, ". . . what's the difference?"

"I am your prisoner," Dominique said. "I must do as you say or suffer the consequences."

He lowered his head to his hand and pulled worriedly on his beard.

"That is true, my lovely," he said in his dreary monotone, grabbing a goblet filled with myx and practically draining it in a single swallow. "But you are not like the others. This you must know by now. I have chosen you above them all to be my Valkyrie. This is a position that millions of women would give their lives for . . ."

"And so I must give mine?" she countered.

He poured and gulped another cup of myx and then stared hard at her.

"I drink so rarely," he said. "But now that I do, I simply cannot believe your beauty . . ."

"I have had the myx," she said, "I know how it distorts reality."

"No," he said, shaking his finger at her. "Your loveliness transcends the myx."

"Then it is just another part of your dream," she said, spreading her hands to indicate everything from his throne to the shipload of drunken Vikings. "This dream . . ."

Suddenly, Verden's voice became deeper, clearer, and, for lack of a better description, more contemporary.

"Don't be entirely fooled by what you see around you," he told her. "To you, my men and I probably look like actors in an old movie or people drawn in a comic book. But believe me, before the Big War, we weren't all that different from you-you and your 'civilized' American friends."

Another goblet was filled and quickly consumed.

"True, many of my men are from the mountains," Verden 235

went on. "And from the small villages up near the Arctic where it seems to be dark every hour of every day of every year. Modem civilization was something that intruded in on us only every so often.

"But don't be deluded, my lovely creature, that we are totally ignorant of convention. We know that planes fly and bombs destroy and that men have walked on the moon. We also know that the blood of Eric and Leif and the others runs in our veins, and that it was they who first discovered America and not this Italian interloper.

"As I told you before, we are simply returning to recapture our claim."

Once again, he lowered his head and stared into the empty goblet.

"Though, I must admit," he said, his voice returning to its original sad timbre, "that it is the myx that makes our blood boil and permits the ghosts of our ancestors to burst through. Then, perhaps, we do look like comic book characters."

Several minutes of a stone-cold silence descended on the room. The candles flickered and the ship rolled gently in the Atlantic swell. Verden stayed almost motionless, staring at his empty cup, the aura of despondency almost visible around his hulking frame.

"You belong to another?" he asked her, suddenly looking up.

Dominique slowly nodded her reply.

"And do you think he is still alive?"

"I know he is . . ." she whispered.

"And he will be faithful, even after he knows you're gone?"

"That makes no difference," she said.

He tilted his head up to look at her again. "And why is that?" he asked.

"Because he is looking for me," she replied. "And he will keep looking until he finds me."

Verden reached for his flask and refilled his goblet once 236

again with myx.

"You know him so well, do you?" he asked.

"Yes. . ."

Verden downed the full cup of myx in a loud gulp, wiping his mouth with the end of his sleeve. His movements were shaky and almost convulsive now, due to the large quantity of the powerful mind-bending liquor he'd consumed in just the past few minutes.

"But he is not here now," the chieftain slurred. "And you are my Valkyrie.

Thus, you shall do what I say . . ."

He drained another cup of myx, and coughed hard. Then he poured out another full goblet and handed to Dominique.

"Drink this, my lovely," he commanded. "This and two more . . ."

"And if I refuse?" she asked, trying to stay calm. "Certainly you wouldn't kill your Valkyrie so soon after selecting her."

For the first time, Verden smiled.

"No, my dear," he said, now barely able to prop his head up on one elbow. "But if you do refuse, then I will kill that friend of yours, who right now sits at the bottom of this ship."

Dominique drank the myx.

His name was Thorgils, Son of Verden. In the cabin full of clan leaders on the other side of the Great Ship he was the only one without a beard.

Two decks below them, they could hear the orgy reach a new height of ferocity.

But frivolities such as eating and jricking young slave girls were of little concern to Thorgils and the other dozen men in the room. Before them was a map of the East Coast of America, around which they were discussing the largest Norse assault yet on the American continent.

"The spies tell us that much of the East Florida coast is 237

still inhabited," Thorgils told them in rapid, tense Norwegian. "The lack of fuel has forced many of the people there to stay put. Plus, the Americans haven't yet started to ship troops and equipment down there by rail, again because of the fuel situation. Therefore the opportunity lies with us."

Thorgils pointed to the multicolored squares of cloth that dotted the map along the eastern Florida coast.

"There are twenty-five targets," he said of the various markers that ran from Jacksonville in the north to Orlando in the south. "You know your clan colors.

Those are the targets you should suggest to your men. Each target has three means of access and retreat. When your raiding party goes ashore, they will have a choice of which direction to attack from and how to withdraw. These multiple routes will also confuse the enemy."

The clan leaders murmured in silent approval. It had been this way since the campaign had started. The dozen men-they being the senior commanders representing the twelve major clans that made up the overall Norse raiding force-would come to the Great Ship for a thing, the Norse traditional gathering. While their officers and selected warriors reveled in the mandatory prebattle orgy, the clan elders would quietly meet with Thorgils and learn his thoughts for the upcoming assault.

This was not a "strategy session," however-there really wasn't any phrase in the Norse vernacular for such an event. Thorgils drew the map, worked out a timetable, and suggested to the clan leaders where and when to strike. It was up to them to fill in the blanks.

Usually the rest of the clan leaders would simply nod or more likely, grunt their approval of Thorgils's plans. They rarely even spoke. Thorgils was, after all, the oldest son of Verden, and therefore his word was good for them.

If he suggested a target and a way to approach it, the clan elders would go along with him more often than not.

The clan heads welcomed this hands-off approach. When it came to making war, the Norse had traditionally