The Lost Gate (15 page)

Danny shrugged. Of course he did, it was one of the languages descended from Old Norse, but he could hardly explain to her that he had grown up with Old Norse. Along with Fistalk, the ancient language of the Germans before their language was bent by the Phoenician colonies along the North Sea and Baltic coasts. It was one of the languages of the Family, one that some of the old books were written in. It wasn't exactly taught, but the books were there, and some words and phrases of it were spoken when the Family was speaking Old Norse. Danny picked up languages as easily as breathing. He could read Fistalk in the runes that it used to be written in. Runes like the ones reproduced on the open page of the book.

“When this book was catalogued,” the woman told him, “it was placed in the American history section because it was supposed to be about the colonization of New Sweden. But then somebody who read Danish said that it was nothing of the kind, it was actually about Eric the Red and Lief Ericson and the colony in Vinland. So it was moved here. Then, when I was doing my graduate work here before I got this job, I found the book and realized that it was something else. It's a book
about
a book
about
an ancient runic record.”

“You read Danish?” asked Danny.

“I
am
Danish,” said the woman. “I moved here with my parents when I was seven, which is why I don't have a Danish accent. But I had already learned to read in Denmark and I haven't forgotten because there were lots of Danish books in the house. You see, this book is describing an old manuscript that the author discovered in an old accounting house in Copenhagen, where some of the library of a monastery had been deposited when the monastery was closed. The book he described was written in a combination of Latin and Old Norse, and
it
was reproducing a supposedly ancient runic record in an unknown language. The Danish author of
this
book had tried to decode it—there are two chapters on his efforts to do that—and he
did
succeed in translating the Latin and Old Norse sections of the old manuscript, but he had no luck at all with the runes.”

Danny wanted to be bored—this had nothing to do with his quest for knowledge about gates—but in fact he was fascinated. Because he could read the runes right off the page, the very ones that the author had failed to decode.

“ ‘Here Tiu dashed the ships of Carthage against the rocks, because they would not pay tribute to the valkyrie,' ” said Danny.

“What?” asked the woman.

Danny kept reading. “ ‘Here Loki twisted a new gate to heaven and the valkyrie passed through it many times, because the Carthaginians had eaten the old gate. Here Odin raged with the sky and crushed the might of Carthage until the survivors wept in the blood of their children.' ”

“What are you talking about?” asked the woman.

Danny nodded. “This
is
what I was looking for,” he said. “How did you know?”

“I remembered that his translation of the Old Norse sections was full of references to the old gods and the magic of doors and gates. And there you were, googling ‘magic' and ‘gate,' and I knew that this book would never pop up on your search so I thought you'd want to see it. But what you said before, what were you quoting?”

“I wasn't quoting,” said Danny. “I was reading.”

The woman scanned the pages that were open. “Where did you read that? There's nothing like that in the Danish.”

Danny pointed at the copied-out runes. “That's what it says.”

“Talking about Carthaginians and Tiu and Loki and Odin?”

“What I can't figure out is how the Carthaginians could have eaten a gate,” said Danny. “Is this the whole runic inscription?”

“There are three others,” said the woman. “On the next three pages. But … are you saying that you can
read
this?”

“Of course not,” said Danny. “I'm just imagining what it might say.” He couldn't help lying. He was enjoying this game of telling her a truth he could not possibly know, and then pretending that it wasn't true after all. He shouldn't toy with her like this, it wasn't nice, and she had been very kind and helpful to him, but Danny sometimes couldn't resist doing such things. Showing off. The other kids had resented it, but the Aunts and Uncles had often seemed to enjoy it, back in the days before they began to think of Danny as drekka.

“How could the runes say anything about Carthage?” asked the woman.

Danny pointed to a few characters. “It's written in the way Semites write their words and names—no vowels. K-R-T-G. Back when the Germans were just separating from the Norse, they were under the domination of a Carthaginian colony at the neck of the Jutland peninsula.” Danny had this much of the story from the version of Family history they taught the children.

“I've never heard of this. Was it discovered by archaeologists? Because it's in none of the histories.”

“From the time when Carthage was at its peak, before they went to war with Rome for the first time. The German gods broke the power of the Carthaginians. This has to date from that time. But I'd never heard of any reference to Loki or a gate to heaven.”

“That doesn't even sound Norse—they don't talk about heaven.”

“But the Carthaginians did. It's referring to another planet—so far away that the light of its star can't be seen even on a clear night. High in the sky, see? Heaven. And Loki made a gate to take them there.”

“So that's the kind of magical gate you were looking for?” asked the woman.

Danny didn't answer her directly. “I never heard it said that Loki would
twist
a gate. See? That's the same word you use for making rope. Wouldn't you think that a gate would be ‘cut' or ‘opened' or ‘built' or ‘carved' or something like that? How can you
twist
a gate?” Danny knew she couldn't understand what he was talking about. His questions were real enough, but they weren't for her. What he was doing with her was breaking the Family's taboo against telling Family business or Family history to strangers. And it felt good to do it.

The woman looked baffled. “Who are you? Where are you from? What school do you go to?”

“I was home-schooled,” said Danny. “May I see the other runes?”

“What language
is
it, then, if you can read them?”

“Widdensprak,” said Danny, using the term for “the way the people we know talk.” But it wasn't true—nobody talked quite this way. But it was close to Fistalk.

“I've never heard of it,” she said.

“Am I allowed to turn the page, or is that something you need to do?”

She reached down and turned the page, carefully and slowly.

Danny scanned the runes. Just as before, the words were ones he knew or were like words he knew, and the grammar was easy. Where it differed from Fistalk, it was more like Westil, though Westil was normally written with yet another alphabet. Or, rather, syllabet, since there were separate characters for every consonant-vowel combination. There were also separate characters for each of the common noun and verb endings. It took up far less room on the page, but you had to learn 181 separate characters, and some of them were pretty hard to tell apart. On the whole, Danny preferred alphabets. Fistalk was written with the runes used as an alphabet, though some of them sometimes stood for syllables, too. It was confusing, and most of the cousins had simply refused to make any serious effort to learn to read or write Fistalk
or
Westil. Aunt Lummy had often said that she expected the knowledge of Westil to die, “so if a Great Gate were ever opened, we wouldn't even know how to talk to our distant kinfolk from our home world.”

The message on the page was a continuation of the previous one. “ ‘Hear us in the land of Mitherkame, hear us among the great ships of Iceway, among the charging dunes of Dapnu Dap, among the silent mages of the Forest and the swift riders of the Wold: We have faced Bel and he has ruled the hearts of many. Bold men ran like deer from his face, but Loki did not run.' ”

“You're just making this up,” said the woman.

“Next page?” Danny suggested.

“There is zero chance that the Semitic god Bel or Baal was ever spoken of in any Indo-European language, let alone some ancient form of German.”

“You lose the bet,” said Danny. “Do you think the Hittites never spoke the name?”

To Danny, the Hittites were just another branch of the Family, albeit an extinct one. To this woman, though, it seemed remarkable that he even knew of them. “How old
are
you?” asked the woman. “What are you really doing here?”

“I'd like to read the next page,” said Danny.

“You aren't reading, you're just playing. This is just a lark to you, but it's my life's work to me.”

Danny shook his head. “Really, ma'am, it's at least as important to me as it is to you.”

“I thought you'd like to see something old. I didn't expect you to mock me by pretending to read it.”

“I'm not pretending.”

The woman closed the book. “Come on, we're done here.”

She was right, of course—Danny
was
playing with her, though not in the way that she supposed. But he was through playing with her now. He reached down and picked up the book.

Immediately she grabbed for it. “How dare you touch that!” she said. “I trusted you.”

“The book belongs to the one who can read it,” said Danny.

She pulled harder. He held tighter. If he made a gate right now and passed through it, would she be dragged along with him, because she was holding on to the book that he was holding on to?

“The book belongs to the Library of Congress, for the use of serious scholars.”

Again, Danny resorted to truth, because he knew he would not be believed. “These inscriptions are about Loki, a gatemaker. I'm a gatemaker, and I have to learn whatever it has to teach me.”

“This is a nightmare. Let go of the book, you're going to damage it.”

“And if I do, who will lose her job? Not me,” said Danny. “Just let me read the rest of the runes and you can have it back.”

“Security!” she shouted.

Danny made a gate and let it suck him through.

He was in the restroom again, holding the book. She was not with him. She must be back in that employees-only room, clutching at nothing. Let her tell security what happened. See whether they believed it.

He took a paper towel and dried the counter around the sink, then set the book on it and opened it.

The third page of runes said:

Loki found the dark gate of Bel through which their god poured fear into the world and through which he carried off the hearts of brave men to eat at his feasting table.

Loki's heart was stabbed with the fear of Bel and the jaws of Bel seized his heart to carry it away.

Loki held tight to his own heart and followed the jaws of the beast.

Danny read it twice to make sure his reading was accurate and it was locked in his memory. Then he turned to the next page that held a copy of the untranslated runes:

Loki tricked Bel into thinking he was captive, but he was not captive.

His heart held the jaws; the jaws did not hold his heart.

And when he found the gate of Bel, he moved the mouth over the heart of the sun.

Let Bel eat the heart of the Sun and drag it back to his dark world!

He has no more home in Mittlegard.

Well, how nice. A commemorative inscription about the achievements of the Loki of that age. No pariah then—there had apparently been some kind of war with the Carthaginian god, or perhaps merely with the Carthaginians, and Loki was given credit for shutting down the enemy. By moving the entrance to a gate, apparently, though Danny had no idea how such a thing might be done, especially if he really moved one end of it to the center of the Sun.

Enough. Danny had read it now. It was memorized. He had it.

Danny reached into the bottom of the trash receptacle and pulled out his backpack. He shouldered it, picked up the book, and made a gate back to the room where the woman had shown him the book. He could hear her in the hall, shouting for Security. Poor foolish drowther. Did she think she had any kind of control here?

He set the book right where it had been and opened it to the first runic inscription. He was tempted to stay long enough to smile at her when she returned, but no, he really did not need to be any more flamboyant than he had already been. In fact, he felt more than a little ashamed of himself now, for having responded to her trust and kindness by flaunting his knowledge and then doing something in front of her that was undeniable magery.

At the same time, he still felt the thrill of having done it—of having proven before a witness that he, too, was one of the mages of the North Family, and not a trivial mage, either. A dangerous one—so dangerous that he should be killed and put into Hammernip Hill.

He used his gate to the restroom again and then immediately outside to where he had been when he first gated into the library.

Eric was standing there, grinning. “You kept me waiting a long time in this cold, boy,” he said. “You got some explaining to do.”

7

S
TONE
'
S
H
OUSE

Danny thought of simply making a gate and getting away. Or going back through the gate into the library.

But then he remembered that Eric was useful. And then Danny remembered that he didn't like thinking of drowthers the way the Family did—dividing them into the two categories “useful” and “expendable.” No, if Danny was going to get the hang of being a human being and not a sort of pathetic halfway wannabe god, he was going to have to think of Eric as something else. Perhaps “friend.”