Silhouette in Scarlet - Elizabeth Peters [16]
I decided I needed a cup of coffee. Or three.
While I made it and drank it, I sent a silent apology to my subconscious. It hadn’t solved the problem I had set it before I went to bed – to call or not to call Cousin Gustaf – but it had reminded me of something important.
Leif’s presence in the dream probably didn’t mean anything except that all of my mind, sub – and super-conscious, has excellent taste. The silhouette cutter was one of those random contributions one often finds in dreams; he was a bizarre figure, and the encounter had been unusual. The point of the dream was the chalice. It had numerous mythic connotations – Arthurian legend, the Holy Grail, the chalice from the palace . . . No, that was from an old Danny Kaye movie.
I wrenched my frivolous mind back to business. The important thing was that the dream chalice was no figment of my imagination. It actually existed. I had seen a photograph of it only a few days before.
I had been kidding myself when I tried to dismiss ‘Wayland’s work’ as a meaningless joke. The phrase had nagged at me for days, while I packed and shopped and cleaned out the fridge and called the kennel and performed all the other chores my temporary absence required. Finally, the day before I was due to leave, I succumbed. I spent several hours in the museum library, looking up objects to which that enigmatic description might apply.
The reference was even more ambiguous than I had supposed. Wayland was a northern god originally, but his story had travelled far and endured for centuries. ‘Wayland’s work’ might describe an art object produced anywhere in northern Europe over a period of several hundred years – Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Celtic – or even treasures brought back from Russia or Byzantium by far-ranging Scandinavian traders.
‘That’s not my field’ is a statement often made by scholars to excuse their ignorance when they are asked to explain something they don’t understand. However, northern Europe between 400 and 1100 a.d. is not my field. As I browsed in the library that afternoon, going farther and farther from my original research as my interest increased, I realized that, like a good many people, I had underestimated my remote ancestors.
The popular impression of the Germanic tribes is that of bloody-minded savages trampling the delicate blossoms of civilization underfoot. In all the stories I had read they were the villains. The Vikings burned villages, looted churches, raped and murdered; the Saxons fought noble King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table; the Vandals gave their name to successive generations of destroyers. Admittedly they were a crude lot, but their opponents weren’t much better. They were courageous explorers, fighters, and traders. The might of Rome, which had crushed the civilized empires of the Near East, faltered and fell in the German forests. Many a Roman standard graced the hut of a Germanic chieftain after the defeat of the legion that had carried it.
The Vikings became the finest seamen of their time, daring the perils of the unknown west. Even I knew that Leif the Lucky had been the first to discover America, centuries before Columbus. What I didn’t know, or had forgotten, was that the Scandinavians also followed the caravan routes to the east. The tribes from whom the name ‘Russia’ derives were northerners. Tall blond warriors formed the honour guard of the emperors of Byzantium, and traders brought back coins minted in Damascus, Baghdad, and Tashkent. As a runic inscription on an ancient tombstone put it, ‘Valiantly we journeyed afar for gold; and in the east we fed the eagles.’
Among the objects brought back to Scandinavia by