The juddering journey resumed. It did not take long for the explorers to see that Eddie’s reading of the map had been correct: The landscape grew steeper and more rocky, the waterway narrowing. They continued up it, at one point almost doubling back as they rounded a hairpin bend before curving back to the northwest. A couple of kilometers farther and the banks rose higher, turning the valley into a ravine. Nina caught up with her husband. “If the sides get much taller, we won’t be able to see anything,” she called.
“Yeah, I know,” he replied, looking up at the overhanging trees before turning his gaze back to the ice ahead. “Whoa, slow down. There’s a load of rocks in the river.” He eased off the throttle as the group approached a cluster of snow-covered shapes rising above the surface.
Tova also reduced speed, changing course to avoid the obstacles. “If the Vikings were on foot, they would have gone away from the river here. Perhaps we should do the same.”
“Might be an idea,” said Eddie. He craned his neck to check the ravine’s top. The western side was noticeably higher than the eastern. “Dunno if we’ll get the snowmobiles up there, though.”
Nina, however, was now looking ahead. “Guys! You think that might be our bridge?”
The others followed her gaze. Crossing the top of the ravine was a huge slab of rock, a chunk of mountain that had been torn away and carried downhill by a glacier in eons past, before eventually being dumped when the ice retreated. Shaded stripes ran lengthways through it, the various strata exposed. Some of the layers glinted in the sunlight.
The snowmobiles stopped. “Yeah, it’s a bridge,” said Eddie, “but it’s not a rainbow one. It’s a bit gray. Unless the Viking who made the runestones was color-blind?”
“I guess,” Nina said, disappointed. “It’s quite pretty, though. There must be a lot of quartz in it to get that effect with the light.”
“Damn, and I was hoping it was full of diamonds.” He was about to set off again when he noticed Tova staring up at the slab with an expression that suggested she had someone’s name on the tip of her tongue but couldn’t quite remember it. “Tova? What’s up?”
“The rainbow bridge,” she said, more to herself than in response to his question. “No, Eddie is right, it is not a rainbow. It is, it is …” She suddenly flinched, excited. “It is not a rainbow bridge! The translation, it is wrong!”
“What do you mean?” Nina asked.
“The translation of the runestone—not just the one that was stolen from the museum, but many others. The description of Bifröst is usually translated as ‘the rainbow bridge,’ which we think of as being many colors, yes? But there is another possible translation, which is … oh! What is the word in English?” She frowned and closed her eyes, thinking hard. “The word, the word …” She snapped them open. “Shimmering! It can also mean ‘the shimmering bridge’! The light changes as you look at it!”
Nina regarded the rock again. The quartz crystals indeed shimmered, reflected sunlight subtly shifting as she moved her head. “That would definitely fit. But if you’re right, and that really is Bifröst, then …”
“Then Asgard is on the far side—and so is Valhalla!” Tova cried in delight. “It is real, it is up there!”
Kagan was more skeptical. “We do not know for sure. You may be seeing what you want to see.”
“I want to see a nice pub with a roaring log fire, but it’s not happening,” said Eddie. “We’ve got to check it out, at least. If there’s nothing up there, we can just come back and carry on.”
“Yeah, we need to look,” Nina agreed. She brought her snowmobile around.
Although Kagan was still dubious, they headed back downriver to the foot of the ravine. Eddie took the lead, revving his engine in controlled bursts to bring his vehicle up the steepening slope. Nina, Tova, and Kagan followed his tracks between the trees. The snowmobiles lurched and bumped over obstacles hidden under the snow. “Bollocks,” Eddie said after fifty yards. “It’s getting really rocky. Probably a good idea to leave the snowmobiles and go the rest of the way on foot. If anything breaks, it’ll be an absolute pain in the arse to fix out here.”
Nina was feeling faintly seasick from being thrown about. “Yes, definitely,” she agreed, stopping and dismounting with relief. She gazed back the way they had come as the others also switched off their engines. The frozen river weaved away into the distance until it was swallowed by the forest, the sun reflecting dazzlingly off the ice. The stillness and sudden silence made the starkly beautiful sight seem almost like a painting. There was definitely a mythical quality to the snow-draped landscape; she could easily imagine the Vikings of old marching through it.
But would they have been heading for Valhalla—a real, physical place, not just a legend? She looked up the slope. Nothing was visible but raw nature: trees, rocks, snow. If the great hall was here, it was well hidden.
“Everyone ready?” she asked, though addressing the question mostly to Tova.
The Swede nodded. “Yes. I cannot wait to see what we find! If the rock bridge really is Bifröst …”
“Then let’s see if it is, eh?” said Eddie as he took a backpack from his snowmobile and donned it. “What about you, Kagan? You don’t look too excited.”
“My leg is hurt, so I had hoped not to walk very far,” the Russian grumbled as he collected his own gear.
They proceeded up the hill. The going was slow, the thick snow and uneven ground making each step an effort. But before long they reached the top of the slope, and the glistening slab of quartz came into view. Another few minutes and they reached it.
Eddie assessed the bridge. “Shouldn’t be too hard to get across,” he said, brushing away snow to check the rock beneath. The great span was shaped roughly like a spearhead, the narrow end on the far side of the ravine. “Seems pretty flat under the snow. Looks solid, too.”
“I will let you test that,” said Kagan with a faint smile.
Eddie took a coiled rope from his pack. “Tie the end to that tree,” he said, fastening one end around his waist and handing the other to the Russian. “And don’t use a bloody granny knot!”
The line was quickly secured. Eddie set out over the crossing. Nina watched his progress anxiously—the drop to the ice below was at least thirty feet—but despite a couple of heart-stopping moments when he almost stumbled, he was soon on the other side. “Piece of piss!” he called. “I’ll fix the rope so you can get across.”
With the guideline in place and pulled taut, the others quickly followed him. Nina, last to cross, surveyed her surroundings as she set foot on solid ground. “So if that really was Bifröst we just crossed, then technically … this is Asgard. The home of the Norse gods.”
“That is true,” said Tova, thrilled at the prospect. “If the Old Norse myths are euhemeristic, then Thor, Odin, Loki, Freyja … they all came from here. This is the land from which they ruled.”
“There’s not much to rule, though,” Eddie said. “Except pine trees.”
“It might not always have been forest,” Tova said, a little defensively. “There have been warmer periods in the past. It may once have been able to support farming.”
“Tova, where do we go from here?” said Nina, keen to move on.
The Swede checked her notes. “The runestone said, ‘Across, follow the stream to the falls.’ There must be a stream nearby.” She pointed ahead. “This way, I think.”
“You’ve been right about these things so far,” said Nina reassuringly.
“So what are we actually looking for?” Eddie asked as they began their trek into the forest. “Valhalla’s some sort of hall, but I doubt we’re going to find a building just standing in the middle of the woods.”
“I do not know,” admitted Tova. “It depends on how much of the Eddas are based on truth, and how much Snorri created himself, or took from sources that had already added their own details to the mythology. In the Poetic Edda, Valhalla is described as a hall with five hundred and forty rooms.”
“Big place. The heating bills must be a bugger.”
She smiled. “In the Prose Edda, though, the huge golden hall that King Gylfi sees when he arrives in Asgard may be an illusion created to impress him. So there is no way to know what was real.”
“Until we find it,” said Nina. “But if the runestones were describing a real place, we can’t be far from it now. Is there anything else mentioned in the Eddas or other sources that might be useful? Like a landmark?”
“There is a tree, or a grove of trees, called Glasir,” Tova replied. “It depends on the translation whether it is just one tree or many. But Glasir is supposed to mark the entrance to Valhalla. There has been speculation that it is connected to Yggdrasil, the world-tree, which would make it an ash.”
“So we just need to watch out for an ash tree, then,” said Eddie. “Not that I know what an ash tree looks like. Anyone else?” Nina and Kagan shrugged.
“I do,” said Tova, before adding, “I think.”
He smiled sardonically. “I’d look it up on my phone, but I don’t think I’ll get much of a signal out here.”
“I think it’ll just be a case of ‘not one of these,’ ” Nina joked, gesturing toward the conifers surrounding them.
Eddie grinned, then continued onward. After a few minutes, he spotted something ahead. “Ay up.”
“You’ve seen an ash tree?” said his wife.
“No, but that matches what Tova said, don’t you think?” A hundred yards away, the forest was split by an ice-filled streambed that had cut deeply into the ground. “What was the translation? Something about following a stream to a waterfall?” Tova nodded.
“The water is frozen, though,” said Kagan as they approached. “Which way do we follow it?”
“I’m not an expert,” Nina said with gentle sarcasm, “but I’m fairly sure that water doesn’t run uphill.” She looked up the slope toward the stream’s source. “Over there.” In the distance between the trees, the group saw the rocky line of a cliff.
They followed the icy waterway. “Oh, that is beautiful,” said Tova as they reached the cliff’s foot. There was indeed the base of a waterfall there, but like the stream it was frozen, cascading water turned to overlapping sheets of icicles.
Eddie was more interested in the surrounding rocks. The falls had cut quite deeply into the cliff, exposing step-like strata on each side. “Shouldn’t be too hard to climb up,” he said, clambering onto the lowest level. “I’ll find a good route, then you follow me.”
He began his ascent. As he had predicted, it was not a difficult task; there were a few places where he had to haul himself up to higher ledges, producing grunts of exertion and muttered obscenities, but before long he was at the top. “Okay, it’s pretty straightforward,” he announced. “Just watch out for that ledge about halfway up—there’s a lot of ice on it.”
“Got it,” said Nina, beginning her own climb. “What can you see up there?”
“Loads of future Billy bookshelves. Which way are we supposed to go?”
“The runes said to the summit,” Tova called to him. “You must be close.”
“All right. I’ll have a look around.”
“Don’t get lost,” said Nina.
He smiled, then disappeared from view. She kept climbing. It took her longer than Eddie to reach the top—she took care negotiating the ledge he had warned her about—but she pulled herself up onto level ground with nothing more than a slight shortness of breath.
She glanced down to see how Tova and Kagan were doing. The Russian was following the archaeologist, his injured leg only slowing him slightly. Beyond them, the stream had carved a path through the forest—providing another view back along the frozen river. If anything, the sight was even more captivating than it had been from the rock bridge.
Nina finally turned away, finding with mild surprise that her husband was out of sight. “Eddie? Where are you?” The dappled light through the trees made his tracks in the snow surprisingly hard to follow.
“Over here” came the reply from a dip about fifty yards away. She headed for it. Eddie came into view below as she approached its edge. “Have a gander at this.”
“At what?” she asked. There was nothing immediately unusual in sight; a large bowl-shaped depression had a long hump at its center, snow-laden trees atop it. But his expectant half smirk told her she had missed something. She followed his path down the slope, looking in all directions. Was there an opening in the ground, or a group of stones that might once have been part of a structure? Nothing presented itself—
The answer suddenly appeared with such obviousness that she couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it immediately. “You got it now?” Eddie asked.
“Yeah, I got it,” she said, laughing. “Talk about not seeing the wood for the trees.”
The forest surrounding them was made up entirely of evergreens—but the trees on top of the mound were devoid of leaves beneath their coatings of snow and ice. Wiry branches spread out to form roughly spherical shapes, in contrast with the distinctive cones of the conifers. “So you think that’s an ash tree?” said Eddie.
“I think that’s an ash tree,” gasped Tova, hurrying up behind Nina.
“An ash grove,” Nina corrected. She counted at least a dozen of the interlopers. A few small evergreens had managed to take root among the group, but otherwise the ashes seemed to have been in possession of the hillock for a long time. “Is this it? Have we found Valhalla?”
“I do not know. Come on, we must search!” Tova rushed past Nina down the slope.
“If there were any buildings here, they’re long gone,” Eddie said as Nina followed the Swede.
“I don’t think we’re looking for an actual building,” she replied. “I think we’re looking for that.” She pointed at the hump.
He was less than impressed. “You think that’s Valhalla?”
“No, but Valhalla is under it!” said Tova. “The Vikings often put their dead in burial mounds—the largest in Sweden is called Anundshög, in Västmanland. It is big, over nine meters high.” She led the way around the little hill. “Perhaps that is even where the name came from; Valhalla means ‘the hall of the slain,’ but if whatever was built here was buried to hide or protect it, then it would have looked just like a burial mound.”
“It’d match the runes,” Nina noted. “They said Odin’s hall was now of the slain.”
“You mean Valhalla might just be a nickname?” Eddie asked dubiously.
Nina smiled. “You’ve heard of Emperor Caligula?”
“The mad, pervy one? ’Course I have.”
“Caligula was a nickname—it was a type of soldier’s boot. His real name was Gaius Germanicus.”
“No wonder he changed it. But if this place was so important to the Vikings, why would they bury it? What were they trying to protect?”
“The eitr,” said Kagan as he caught up. “They were afraid of it, because they knew how deadly it was—but they also knew some people would still be crazy enough to look for it.”
“That might be where the myth of Loki comes from,” Nina said thoughtfully. “He was a Norse god like Thor and Odin, but he betrayed them and sided with the serpent and the wolf at Ragnarök. Maybe he was like Hoyt—he wanted to use the eitr as a weapon.”
“So they hid the map to the eitr pits so that only Vikings they trusted would know how to find it?” said Eddie.
Tova nodded. “The only time they would need it would be when Ragnarök was upon them.”
“Kind of an open-in-event-of-doomsday thing?”
“It’d explain why they went to such lengths to hide it,” said Nina. “You don’t want your people deciding to go out there on a macho whim. If you think the Midgard Serpent’s about to surface, though, that’s when you gather the troops and follow the secret path to Valhalla. It’s a mobilization point. Once you’re here, the next stop is the serpent’s pit—the source of the eitr.”
“Novaya Zemlya,” Kagan said
. “Or … the other place. We have to find it—before Hoyt and Berkeley do.”
“We’ve got to get inside first,” Eddie pointed out. He looked up at the mound. “And we might have to do a lot of digging—this thing’s big, it must be at least forty feet high. We’ll need to find a door.”
Tova stopped. “A compass! Does anyone have a compass?” Phones were produced in unison. “Ah, of course. But we should go to the west side of the mound. Which way is it?”
Eddie checked his compass app. “Keep going this way around it. Shouldn’t be far.”
“Why the west side?” Nina asked.
The Swede set off again, her pace quicker than before. “The entrance to Valhalla is supposed to be on the western side, guarded by a wolf.”
“A wolf, eh?” said Eddie, suddenly on alert and checking the surrounding forest. “Good job I brought the Wildey.”
“I don’t think it’ll still be on guard after a thousand years,” said Nina. She now almost had to jog to keep up with Tova, who had picked up a stick and was scampering along the edge of the barrow, poking at the snow. “What are you looking for?”
“They may have left a marker, even a runestone, just as they did in the Arctic,” Tova replied. “Are we at the west side yet?”
“Pretty much,” Eddie answered.
“Then there could be something that would show the way in. Help me look for it, please.”
The others joined in her search. Nina soon found something under the snow that seemed promising, but a tap with her boot revealed nothing more than a lump of broken wood. Disappointed, she continued around the mound. If Valhalla really was buried beneath it, it could be a very large structure: She guessed the barrow’s total length at close to three hundred feet. If there was no marker, then Eddie would be right—it would require a lot of digging to open it up …
She approached a tree, a small conifer rather than an ash. Its trunk was tilted at an angle, and as she drew closer she saw why: The ground dropped away on its far side, almost as if a trench had been cut into the earthen slope. She reached its edge and looked down into it. The overhanging tree, some of its roots exposed where the unstable soil had slid away, had shielded it from most of the snow.