The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) (24 page)

28

“Wel
l, now you’ve been through a ghost zone,” I said to the Tuttles, who looked a little wild-eyed. I suspected that the rest of us looked a bit wild-eyed too. Ghost zones were not the kind of thing you could get used to. There was no sense of exhilaration like you might get from, say, skydiving or climbing Mt. Everest (neither of which I had ever done), only a feeling of being blindsided and the realization that it might happen again at any time, without warning.

Coughing and with watery eyes, we staggered away from the charred area with its blackened remnants of vegetation, heading back into the woods without regard for direction, our only goal to get as far away as possible. The fire had mostly run its course, tapering off by design or because it had run out of fuel, leaving behind gently falling ash and six coughing time travelers.

Ron was limping, having twisted his ankle during our run into the valley, and was holding on to Ruth-Ann’s arm for support as he hobbled along. I hoped they didn’t regret coming with us. I wanted to ask Nate if he was all right—I knew the fire might have brought back some painful memories, however stoic he tried to be—but I didn’t want to ask him about it in front of the others. Next to me, Jacob was clutching his backpack, and up ahead, Dr. B was swatting ash off her clothes.

The kayaks were gone, melted into an unrecognizable black mass that we had left behind. It meant that we would be on foot from this point on, and unless we wanted to chance using the Slingshot again, were going to have a hard time getting back to STEWie’s basket on Runestone Island.

Well, at least my hair had dried quickly.

I had completely lost my sense of orientation, but thought that we’d doubled back a bit, into what would one day become the Andes Tower ski hill area. Soon we reached a small lake. In silent agreement, we dropped our backpacks onto the ground, happy to catch our breath and wash the soot off our faces in the cool water.

“It sent us right into a ghost zone,” Jacob said as he splashed water on his face. “The Slingshot.”

“I’m not sure it did, actually,” Dr. B said. “I think we actually walked into that one. We chose to go into the prairie, but there were other directions open to us. Just not the one we wanted.”

I lowered myself onto the uneven ground, feeling the coolness of the spongy moss on my hands, and asked the question that needed to be asked. “Do we keep trying to find Quinn and Dr. Holm even if it means risking falling into another ghost zone? Perhaps the wildfire was a sign that we should turn back.”

“I know you don’t think Dr. Holm needs rescuing, Julia,” Nate said. He was still on his feet, rubbing his jawline with one hand as if trying to decide which course of action would be best.

“I don’t. Do you?”

“I’d like to make sure, that’s all.”

“Besides, we could have guessed wrong…they might not even be coming here. What if they are camping out in Duluth or Hudson Bay or Newfoundland? Even if they
are
here, we still might miss them.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Nate said. “I think we might be here too early in the year. Judging from the vegetation, it must have been a long winter. I think we should jump ahead a few weeks.”

“Ron’s ankle might require medical attention,” I pointed out.

Ron had found a seat on a boulder and was loosening the laces of his hiking boots. He gingerly felt his left ankle as Ruth-Ann looked on with a furrowed brow. “It’s an old snowshoeing injury. I’ll be fine—I just need to rest the ankle a bit.” He reached up to wipe a bit of soot off Ruth-Ann’s cheek. “Ruth-Ann, what do you think?”

She handed him her water bottle. “That I’m in no hurry to go back. I don’t think you are either.”

“You know my opinion,” Dr. B said. “There’s no reason to think that we’re going to keep falling into ghost zones.”

“Jacob, you get a vote, too,” I said to him. The ginger-haired graduate student was sitting on a tree root with his arms wrapped around his knees, poking at the moss with a reed.

“Hmm, what, Julia?”

“You get a vote, too. Stay and keep looking for Quinn and Dr. Holm, or go home?”

The danger of what we had just been though must have finally sunk in. Instead of answering my question, he said with something of a dazed look, “Time travel isn’t at all like I imagined…I’ve been thinking about Sunniva.” I thought he meant the university, but he went on. “As a thesis topic, I mean. But that would mean going to the tenth century, and who knows
what
I’d encounter that far back?”

I realized that he was talking about the school’s namesake, the woman whose name meant “sun gift.” Sunniva, the patron saint of Western Norway, had an unusual story—the tenth-
century
Irish princess had fled aboard a ship to escape an unwanted marriage to a pagan king. She had ended up hiding in a cave off the coast of Norway, where she died after a rockfall blocked the entrance, causing her and her followers to starve. When the cave was opened decades later, her body was found intact, as if she had simply fallen asleep. Or so the legend went. Dr. Edberg of the European History department had not had much luck on his investigative runs to the region and so had moved on to other things. It
was
a good idea for a thesis topic. “I wonder what everyone is doing,” Jacob added pensively.

I sat down on the tree root next to him. “Everyone home at St. Sunniva? Here, have some water.”

“No, everyone in the whole world. I miss being connected.”

I guessed he was talking about his online buddies. “You can catch up on Twitter news when you get back. Are you saying you’d rather go home, then?”

“Hmm? What? No. We can’t give up now, can we?” He dropped the reed onto the forest floor and brushed soot off his jeans. “I’m ready.”

I turned back to the others. “Sounds like we’re pushing on.”

Nate nodded to me and sat down with a penknife to fashion a walking stick for Ron. “Same location but three weeks from now, please, Dr. B.”

29

A safe jump of three weeks and a meal of granola bars and fresh water gave us renewed energy. The steady pace through the woods kept us too busy for conversation. The air was warmer and the forest now denser, with only intermittent shafts of light filtering in through the canopy, illuminating bountiful wildflowers and ferns. Birds chirped and dragonflies flitted among old oak and elm trees like miniature helicopters. A squirrel toddled by. I wondered if we might run into a moose or a caribou this far south—or, more unnervingly, a bear or a wolf. I had a sudden vision of us getting lost in the seemingly endless forest and slowly starving to death over the course of several weeks as we unsuccessfully tried to hunt down deer and other large game with nothing but a pointy stick…which was when I remembered that Nate had brought a gun. Of course we weren’t going to get lost—Dr. B had left a beacon on Runestone Island—but I was suddenly happy that we had a means of self-defense. Hopefully it would work if we really needed it.

“Nice woods,” said Jacob, who seemed to have completely perked up.

We struggled through for a good two hours, pushing low-hanging branches out of the way, stepping over fallen and decomposing logs and thriving ferns, all the while swatting mosquitoes out of our faces. All of us were scratched up and bug bitten. I had never realized how difficult it was to walk through the woods without an established path to follow. North, south, west, east, no matter what the direction, there were just…more trees. If we had not possessed a compass, it would have been hard to know which direction we were heading in, not that we had much choice in the matter—even with the adjustment in time, History’s hand was still leading us where it wanted. It took all my energy to focus on staying on my feet without tripping or twisting an ankle to match Ron’s injured one. It probably helped him that we were making such slow progress, but as the afternoon wore on, his face took on an increasingly pale hue. I caught Ruth-Ann casting a concerned look in his direction several times, as if she was wondering if we’d made the right decision in continuing our quest.

“Dammit, I wish we hadn’t lost the kayaks,” Nate said as we wound our way around the marshy shores of another sprawling lake. Like all of us, he no doubt realized that the kayaks would have made things a whole lot easier for Ron.

Dr. B, as if reading my mind, said, “Maybe we should think about setting up camp here, Chief Kirkland. It’s as good a spot as any. Sheltered, with access to water.” Almost imperceptibly, she nodded in Ron’s direction.

T
he end of our second day in the fourteenth century found us much worse off than the first—cold, without our kayaks, and in low spirits. Like the previous night, Nate’s lighter and the Tuttle’s matches wouldn’t produce a flame and the stove stayed cold, but our various electronic devices, with their tiny lights, worked just fine. By the glow of Jacob’s cell phone and a setting half-moon, Ron told us of Vinland and the Norse sagas as we munched on dry food and rested our tired legs.

“The Vikings would not have had firearms,” he said, “like Columbus did. They only had spears, axes, bows and arrows, perhaps a sword if they could afford it. They came here not as invaders but looking to settle a land, as they had with Iceland around 870 AD,” he explained. “After that they pushed farther west, to Greenland, led by Erik the Red. He was a hot-blooded outlaw who had been exiled for committing murder—more than once—back home in Iceland. He chose to sail west, to the land that had been spotted by ships blown off course. The sagas tell his story and that of his offspring, three sons, Leif, Thorvald, and Thorstein, and one daughter, Freydis. As for his Greenland—” Ron paused for a drink of water from his bottle. “The name is all wrong, you know, an example of an early PR machine at work. Erik the Red was trying to woo colonists over from Iceland. Most of Greenland is covered with ice throughout the year—the only parts that are green are the edges of the fjords. Erik the Red and his colonists built two settlements, one at the southern tip and the other a bit farther north on Greenland’s west coast. The problem was that they used up the trees quickly and found it a struggle to survive on their farming lifestyle—cattle and sheep didn’t adapt easily to Greenland’s harsh climate.

“But a forested land had been sighted even farther to the west, again by ships that had been blown off course. The oldest son, Leif, set sail with a crew of thirty-five. They first made landfall probably somewhere on the coast of Labrador. After two more days at sea, the sagas say, they came across a place that suited them just fine—a fertile, warmer land where wild grapes grew, a place the Norse called Vinland the Good. They decided to winter there and build their houses. But people were already living there.
Skraelings
, the Norse called them in a not very complimentary fashion. Wretches who screech. The sagas talk of skirmishes with the locals and the colonists soon went back to Greenland, though they occasionally returned for lumber.”

“They would have been Peoples of the Dawnland,” Ruth-Ann said quietly, “those who lived where the sun first rises. Speakers of Algonquian.”

“The sagas tell of five voyages made to Vinland by Greenlanders. But here’s the thing about L’Anse aux Meadows. Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad found the remnants of eight houses, four boat sheds, an iron smithy, and other workshops…but no wild grapes, which all of the stories mention. It must have just been a stepping-stone to Vinland, like your Dr. Holm guessed, with Vinland itself being farther south down the coast, where wild grapes would have been sure to grow.

“As for our Norsemen, of whom we haven’t seen a trace—well, they could be traders looking to set up a new route to the west to match their established one to the east. Another theory is that that they might be Knights Templar. Fascinating but f
ar-fetch
ed. I have a different take.”

“Ron,” said Ruth-Ann, with a fond look at her husband, “thinks he might know what happened to the Greenlanders.”

“All these theories assume that the runestone carvers came to North America directly from Scandinavia, sailing across the North Atlantic. Here’s the thing. The two Greenland colonies struggled in the unforgiving climate and in the end disappeared, the more northern one by 1362—does that date sound
familiar
?—and the other one a bit later. No one knows what happened, where they went. I think at least some of them gave up on treeless Greenland, where it was difficult to support their way of life, and followed Leif Erikson’s footsteps and the lure of Vinland.”

“The date fits with the runestone,” I said. “But why would they call themselves Norwegians and Gotlanders on the stone?”

“I don’t think they would have thought of themselves as Greenlanders as such. They had strong ties to Norway and depended on it for goods, bishops, and the latest social mores.” Ron frowned. “It’s more problematic that the runestone talks of fishing. Greenlanders didn’t fish.”

“What do you mean they didn’t fish?” Nate asked. “They must have.”

“Nope. They made cheese from cow’s, sheep’s, and goat’s milk and hunted caribou and seals. The seals were the poor man’s meat, caribou the farm owner’s. But maybe things changed when they came here.” He paused. “As for what happened—will happen—to our Norsemen from Greenland…”

“Never mind the verb tense,” Dr. B said. “There’s no good solution. We tend to use the present tense to minimize confusion.”

“Okay, then. Here’s how I picture it. Vinland is on the eastern seaboard. Our runestone carvers set out early in the spring, perhaps with a local guide to take them along the St. Lawrence River trade route, or they wing it. The main center of the Psinomani culture was—is—the large inland lake halfway between where we are now and Duluth. In the twenty-first century we call it, somewhat redundantly, Mille Lacs Lake.

“It could be that the Norsemen spend some time with the Psinomani there and trade iron for some furs and a canoe or two. They depart to do a bit of exploring on their own and set up camp. One morning, a smaller group splinters off to go fishing at dawn, only to return in the afternoon to find that disaster had struck the camp. Maybe there was a misunderstanding with the
Psinomani, or the theory about the Black Death is the correct one.
Either way, there’s nothing they can do. They wait until morning, perhaps fearing that the same thing might happen to them.”

“Could it have been a fire like the one we just lived through?” Nate asked.

Ron shook his head. “Would they have used the description ‘red from blood’ on the stone if that had been the case? I don’t think so. In any case, at dawn they bury their dead, gather their things and leave, moving fast to get away from the place of death. Clearly they feel safe once they reach Runestone Island. They camp there the two or three days necessary to carve their tale into the stone. Perhaps that means the Black Death was responsible after all, since they didn’t think the danger would catch up to them.”

I brought up a point about the runestone that had been bothering me for days. “The runes look so—fresh. I had a hard time believing they were a hundred years old, let alone almost a thousand.”

Ron, his ankle elevated on his backpack, didn’t seem too disturbed by my comment. “Collateral damage from the stone having been cleaned. After it was dug up, mud was scraped from most of the runes with a nail. Only a few were left undisturbed, on the side of the stone.”

“In reading your book,” I said, looking from Ron to Ruth-Ann and back, “I couldn’t tell which way the two of you come down on the issue, for or against.”

“We take turns,” Ruth-Ann said. “There are times when Ron is quite convinced the runestone is genuine and I’m not, and times when it’s the other way around. We have yet to agree on it.”

“And today?” I asked.

Ron hung his head. “I came out here feeling certain that we’d find them, especially when I saw the stone just lying there waiting. Now I’m not so sure. Like I said, we haven’t seen a single trace of them. We came across the Psinomani, but there have been no signs of the Norsemen…”

Jacob piped up. “Time travel kind of messes with your head, doesn’t it? Yesterday the moon was full and then we jumped ahead and now it’s a first quarter moon.”

“It’s more than that,” Ron said. “I guess I thought they’d be here because we were coming to look for them. Silly, I know.”

Ruth-Ann rubbed her husband’s shoulder fondly. “I wasn’t convinced at all as we climbed into the Time Machine basket. But…there’s a legend.”

This must be the Dakota legend that Nate’s grandmother had mentioned.

“Tell us about it, please, Ms. Tuttle,” Jacob said, passing his cell phone with its light to her. Ruth-Ann took over as the campfire-story teller.

“The account was given by the Good Earth Woman—Makawastewin was her Dakota name, Susan Windgrow her English name. She lived on Prairie Island, on the Mississippi near the Wisconsin border. Her story tells of events that happened long ago, before her own lifetime. Good Earth Woman was born in the ‘month of yellow corn,’ ” Ruth-Ann quoted. “November, that is. She said that her ancestors—and mine—lived in a northern land where the winters were long and game and other resources were scarce. Our forefathers and foremothers journeyed south and west, until they found a home by a large lake where the climate was more temperate and the game more plentiful. It might have been Lake Superior.”

She went on. “Picture the Good Earth Woman, ninety years old, stooped in her coat and flowered dress as she sat in a chair, her hair tied back with a scarf. She told her story in 1935 to anthropologist Ruth Landes in the Dakota tongue, with her twenty-eight-year-old grandson sitting by her side to translate. One spring long ago, she said, our people sighted a sailboat on the large lake. The boat had a mast with carved snakes and a figurehead at the prow—a horse-like creature with horns, a scaly body, and wings. Thirty-eight sailors with horned headpieces manned the oars.”

“To me it’s always sounded like she’s describing a longship,” Ron said, “what with the oars and the carved figurehead. But Greenlanders would not have built such an elaborate thing, nor would they have had horned headpieces.”

“Thirty-eight sailors. It doesn’t match, either,” I heard Nate mutter. “The stone says twenty-two Norwegians and eight Gotlanders, which is thirty.”

“It’s runestone math,” Ron said. “Were there thirty Norsemen total who left Vinland—
Eight Gotlanders and twenty two Norwegians on a journey from Vinland—
or does that count only include those who went inland? Or only those who survived to carve the stone?” He shook his head.

“I wish it would all line up,” Jacob complained. “Is this normal for history?”

“More or less,” said Dr. B.

“You can make any story fit if you try hard enough,” Nate said. “Didn’t you say that there were no horses here that far back, Ron? If we’re assuming it all happened in the fourteenth century, how would they have known that the boat figurehead was supposed to be a horse?” He seemed to be channeling Dr. Payne for some reason. It had been a long day and it probably wasn’t easy to be responsible for the safety of six people—eight, if you counted Dr. Holm and Quinn.

I shushed him. “You can’t have it both ways. You said an eyewitness report where every detail lined up was more suspicious than one where every detail didn’t mesh. It was a boat with strangers on it. Go on, Ruth-Ann, please.”

“A story is like a birthday card passed around the office—everyone adds a bit of themselves to it. Anyways, a Native American story is meant to be an interpretation of events, rather than a factual briefing—you know that, Chief Kirkland. But I’ll let you judge for yourselves. Here is what the Good Earth Woman said next. The strangers gave gifts of iron knives and axes and were taught in return how to canoe and portage. They stayed for three seasons—the summer, fall, and winter—then left the next spring, saying they would return one day. They never did. In time, our ancestors moved westward from the large lake under pressure from their neighbors, the Ojibwe and the Winnebago tribes. Then the French fur traders entered the picture in the seventeenth century and everything changed—”