Page 2 of Her Viking Guardian

The inscription continued. I had to lean so close that my nose nearly grazed the tesserae, and then pull back, as if I were looking at a concealed 3D image. I had cleaned this section thoroughly, and the mosaic had suffered miraculously little damage. The runes remained very hard to make out, so hard that I began to think the artist had purposely concealed them in the knotwork.

Directions, along the coast southeast of Palermo. I recognized the Norman names of tiny settlements. Some had become towns that remained to this day, while others no longer existed except on our oldest maps.

Coordinates, really, of a kind. The sort of directional language that a Norman knight who had sailed from Rouen would have understood instinctively. Distances rendered in a unit I recognized as a Norman variation of the Roman mille passus. A landmark: one rock among three. A coastline: a bend toward the rising sun. A cliff described in terms that, if I was reading them correctly, could only refer to something in the limestone escarpment on Capo Zafferano, twenty-three kilometers almost directly east of where I was currently crouching in the dirt with my heart in my throat.

I stayed very still for a long moment.

Then I took out my phone.

I photographed everything. Every centimeter of the inscription. The full composition with the tree and the silver-haired woman at its roots and the border text running beneath like a secret the mosaic had been waiting nine centuries to tell someone. I worked methodically, the way I always worked, overlap between frames, multiple angles, with flash and then without. My hands had stopped shaking. That meant I had made a decision, somewhere in my body, that my mind hadn’t yet caught up to.

When I had what I needed, I put my phone away.

Then I took my trowel and, with the same care I had used to uncover it, I began to cover the mosaic back up. Loose soil first, worked gently into the gaps between tesserae. Then the larger aggregate. Then the surface layer, tamped down and textured to match the surrounding undisturbed earth. I had watched enough sites get backfilled to know how it was done. In three weeks, the supermarket’s foundation crew would arrive and pour concrete over this entire section, and the mosaic of the Filii Mercurii would sleep for another nine centuries, or forever, beneath a car park.

No one would find it.

No one except me had found it.

I told myself I had protected the mosaic. I had shielded the site from the kind of attention that would bring in authorities and journalists and rival academics and ultimately the concrete anyway, just with more paperwork. I told myself that as I smoothed the last of the surface soil with the flat of my palm, and I almost believed it.

The pendant at my throat still felt warm.

I reached the coast two hours later, just as the light had started to become golden over the Tyrrhenian Sea. Sicily looked like a landscape, and a seascape, from ancient myth. I drove the dig’s battered Fiat to the nearest point the road allowed and then walked, following a goat track down through maquis scrub that smelled of wild rosemary. In one of my cargo pockets I had my phone and a small torch. In the other I had the water bottle I had remembered at the last moment to bring.

The inscription had mentioned a rock among three. To my astonishment, I found a candidate almost immediately: one part of the looming precipice that jutted further than the two by its side. I stood at its base and looked at the shoreline and saw nothing but rock and sea.

Then I looked at the rock more carefully, passing back and forth, trying to make my eyes focus on different distances to keep from being fooled by the similarity of background to foreground.

The fissure was narrow enough that I walked past it twice before I registered what I was seeing. Not a cave mouth, exactly. More like the coastline had developed an opinion about itself and decided to keep that opinion a secret. The limestone had folded in a way that presented a solid face to anyone approaching from the water and a near-invisible vertical crack to anyone approaching from the land, and only at this specific angle, with the evening light hitting the cliff face from precisely this direction, was the darkness behind the crack visible at all.

I turned sideways and pushed through.

The passage stretched about four meters. It smelled of salt and cold stone. There was something underneath those things, though, something organic that didn’t seem to fit the ocean setting. My mind fastened on the scent-impression of the inside of a chest that had held important things for a very long time.

Then that chest opened.

The cavern was enormous. That was the first thing. The limestone had opened into a space that had no business existing inside a coastal cliff, a vault thirty meters high at least, the ceiling lost in shadow, the floor descending in a series of natural terraces toward a still inner pool that caught the last of the exterior light through some crack or channel I couldn’t locate. The air was cool and felt completely dry. The acoustics were extraordinary. I could hear my own breathing echoing the way it might in a cathedral.

And in the center of the lowest terrace, resting on a cradle of ancient timber that had been reinforced, I could see now, with more recent work—that newer wood looked old, but not nine centuries old, some of it merely decades—was a ship.

A longship. A dragon ship.

I turned my torch on and walked toward it with a specific quality of attention that it seemed I was learning to bring to things that couldn’t possibly be real.

The hull looked intact. That was the second impossible thing. Clinker-built, the overlapping strakes fastened with iron rivets that had oxidized to a dark red-brown, the whole surface treated with something that had preserved the wood against the salt air with a thoroughness that no natural process could account for. Someone had maintained this at some point in the last hundred years, if perhaps not recently. Someone had come here and cared for this ship over the centuries.

The prow had the head of a serpentine creature whose open mouth faced toward the sealed cave entrance, toward the sea it had not tasted in God knew how many years—if ever. With a frown at the unlikeliness of it all, I realized that the thing must have been assembled, or reassembled, inside this cavern, since it could never have passed through the narrow opening I had just entered by.

I ran my torch along the hull and then up and across to the cavern walls, and that was when I stopped walking.

The walls were covered in images.

Floor to ceiling, from the tideline on the lower terrace to the point where the limestone curved inward toward the vault, the walls of the cavern had been carved in deep relief, with the patient and authoritative skill of people who had considered this work important enough to do properly.

I approached the nearest section and held my torch close.

The figures were large. Men and women, some of them dressed in Viking clothing. Most of them, though…