He was close. He could sense the answer buried somewhere in everything he’d learned and studied since he’d stood next to Talfour’s body and considered the eeriness of death amid the water and reeds and mist. What was it in the human heart that—over the centuries—continually linked the sacred and the violent? The same part that worshipped gods as superior beings but also believed that honoring them required the blood sacrifice of animals and people. At some point in the killer’s life, violence and sacrifice had become so intertwined in the killer’s mind that they could no longer be unwoven. Once again, Evan opened Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. Fate goes ever as it must. After a moment, he returned the book to the stack. If he was playing the role of the hunter, it was a good thing no one was waiting dinner on him. He stood. He needed to give his brain time to chew on things. Plus, it was way past time for him to feed Ginny. He called Addie on the landline and left a message expressing his concerns...then he casually mentioned that he was heading home. When she learned he’d violated her wishes, she’d be livid. But he’d find a way to make it up to her. Maybe with tickets to Hamilton... Next, he dialed the campus police and let them know he was ready to head out. They agreed to meet him near the main doors. He tucked the gun in his coat pocket, picked up his satchel, then flipped off the desk lamp and made his way to the door through the semidarkness, his path lit by the university lights shining through the windows. He lifted his coat from the hook and opened the door. In the hall—hands clenched, breathing hard—stood Tommy Snow...
He opened his journal to the drawing he’d done of Talfour’s body, the corpse set like a broken jewel amid the mud and reeds. Immediately in front of him, he squared a foolscap writing pad—he liked the additional room offered by the larger pages—and next to it, a fountain pen. He stretched, turned his neck from side to side to work out the kinks, and frowned down at the table. The most important thing to do whenever he was attempting to form a picture out of a scattering of puzzle pieces was to create some mental space between himself and the mystery. Distance was the key to finding the outside limits of the puzzle—the corners and sides, so to speak. Distance quieted the chatter of his brain and allowed the more intuitive thoughts to surface. He had several strategies for distracting his monkey mind when he was trying to dive deep on a problem. The wooden puzzles he was so fond of. Walking the grounds around the house. Taking Ginny out to fly. And baking sweet and savory pastries; he was particularly fond of some of the baking shows from his native Britain.
Tonight, he decided that music would be his technique of choice. He turned on the sound system and selected the chant for the dead sung during the requiem mass, “In Paradisum.” The choral voices soothed both him and Ginny and felt right for the work at hand. He nodded down at the documents laid out on the table. “And so we begin.” He pulled over a chair of a comfortable height and eased into it. He then picked up the pen and bent over the foolscap, touching ink to paper. A small dot appeared. His earlier unease vanished like a chill dropping away from his skin, leaving only a residual disquiet from the two deaths.
And even that disappeared as he began to work. Solving a puzzle of any form was a balm to heart and soul. Every enigma had an answer, every riddle a response. It remained only to find the correct key to set the universe to rights. He wrote out the runes left by the killer, getting the feel for their shapes. The lines and branches, the crosses and arcs. Although his medium was different—paper and pen versus wood and bone and a sharp-bladed tool—he could easily imagine the killer’s satisfaction as the characters took shape beneath his hand, unspooling the killer’s story. Then, as Rhinehart had done, he transliterated the runic alphabet into the Latin one. Here, he referred to the chart he’d made that morning. His transliteration was very close to Rhinehart’s. So despite the man’s refusal to consider other aspects of the crime scene, the man at least knew his runes. Finished with the first task, Evan sat back in his chair, sipped the Old-Fashioned, and watched as lamplight played along the cut crystal.
Now for the difficult part. Picking out the actual meaning from the string of characters. “I’ll be disappointed in you,” he said to the air, addressing the killer as if the man stood before him. “Very disappointed indeed if most of what you’ve given us is the kind of nonsense Rhinehart proposed.” He set down the glass and began, again, to write. He scratched things out, circled around, rewrote the words, rewrote entire lines. At one point, he murmured, “It is a numbering system,” as he scratched out and reordered some of the lines. The poet had not only used boustrophedon so that the lines had to be read in alternating directions but had also reordered his lines by moving every third line down, presumably to make the decipherment more difficult. Now and again, Evan consulted his phone to check a word or definition on the internet. Half an hour later, he laid down the pen and leaned back to survey his work. “It’s only a guess at the moment,” he said again to the lurking shadows, which lay deep enough along the walls to harbor a murderer. “I’ve no doubt made mistakes. But still, your poem speaks its own strange language.” Ginny twitched her head left, then right, as if searching the room for another human. “Your poem is also difficult,” Evan continued. “There are words and lines I don’t yet understand. You are a trickster. Exactly like any Old English poet worth his weight. But”—he picked up his glass and raised it in a mock salute—“what you gave us isn’t gibberish.”
He turned down the requiem mass until it was only a whisper in the background and tapped a button on his small audio recorder. He read the lines aloud. First the Desser runes and then Talfour’s. 2 Thus from my bothy I came homeland’s ward for cattle of riding 3 to sacrifice the innocent at night she takes back her sons and daughters 4 who rived and tholed and peeled her flesh like ripe fruit 9 blessing giver my blood-feud stillbirths your further crimes 10 Listen up! Mighty men I undo and unto earth I send 11 Their water weighted corses. I am a dam-ned scop 12 A death driven mere plague, the brume that binds up evil. 13 A weary warrior wailing with wyrded wergild, 14 A slayer of the bone halls breaking Fjorgyn. 15 You know why! Over the sun swimmer home I came 16 For mine! Mine mine gone. Bowel buried, busted by big bosses 17 That war crime, sword shaker, heart of my bawn entombed. 18 Making me bodulfr war wolf and lendreg and ageclaa, all, bearing the. 19 What of this bone cage? This skin sinner is ox of riding. 20 By Skollfud’s light I laid him low. Wight is he and soon wight. 21 In warding I reward. Into his mouth of hearing I poured my mead. 22 Tell me! By Mani’s lait I laid it out. Prick me this. But 23 His honey maker held still, so I held tight, strong as nnn men. 24 He felt the weight of his wight, knew wyrd is wicked. 25 With his mirror I did mirror mere to mere 26 His thole was thus that he thanked the hel guard 27 When wailing the word weaver arrived a bletsian. The word bletsian died away, swallowed by the chant for the dead. The drapes stirred as the heater kicked on. Outside, the trees shook their needled robes. “Now, to some of the more difficult phrases,”
Evan said, still recording so that the police would have access to his thought process if needed. “Skollfud’s light, for example. By Skollfud’s light I laid him low. Not, as Rhinehart suggested, by skull food lait. Skoll is the name of the wolf in Viking poetry who will one day devour the sun goddess. So perhaps the killer named the sun Skoll’s food. And since we know Talfour was placed by the river just before dawn, let’s assume the killer meant morning’s light, not daylight or evening.” He could hear Addie pushing back, questioning him. Why didn’t he just write morning, then, if that’s what he meant? she’d ask. Because, he’d answer. Old English poets loved riddles. They performed tricks with their words. Note how cleverly the killer took something generally considered positive—a sunrise—and turned it into a violent metaphor of a wolf devouring a goddess.
A poet? Addie would ask. Indeed. Make no mistake . . . our killer is a poet. Perhaps an indifferent one. But a poet nonetheless. He circled back to line eighteen, with its anagrams. Almost immediately, he cried, “Yes!” Ginny fluttered awake. Annoyed at his outburst, she shook her wings. Now on his feet, Evan made his way to the bookcase still carrying the recorder. “But the Old English style of this poem confirms my suspicions. Lendreg is most definitely an anagram for the monster Grendel.” He gazed at the shelf that held his books of medieval poetry. “For any listeners unfamiliar with Beowulf, it’s the tale of a Viking hero who slays a terrible monster named Grendel. Later, Beowulf kills Grendel’s mother, the second monster of the saga. And at the very end of the story, he slaughters a dragon and is himself mortally wounded. Heroic and tragic, all at once.” Ginny lifted a foot, studied the razor-sharp talons like a woman admiring her pedicure. “Important for our purposes, Grendel is an aglaeca, a word that also appears in the killer’s poem. It means monster. But ironically, the word is related to the later Middle English word egleche, which means brave and warlike. A contradiction that is, perhaps, indicative of our killer’s mindset.” Evan stopped recording and raised his gaze to the windows, vaguely aware of the mist twining through the hedges in the knot garden and banking against the dormant lavender. Had he heard something? But it was only the chant for the dead, looping through a second time. Once again, he tapped the “Record” button. “Moreover, we have the word bodulfr. This word isn’t an anagram. Bodulfr is the Icelandic word for war wolf. In the interest of saving time, I’ll skip over the etymological variants that lead us from boldulfr to Beowulf. You’ll have to trust me on that linguistic point. The important thing we need to know is that the killer is telling us he is both monster and monster slayer.” He paused. “What are we to make of that?”
Ginny failed to look impressed by Evan’s philological prowess. And Evan, moving from the windows to the bookcases, failed to find his copies of Beowulf. He owned translations from Heaney, Tolkien, and Liuzza. All of them were gone. “God’s bones,” Evan said. “I must have loaned them out.” Although he had no recollection of doing so. Not that it was uncommon for him to forget. As much as he loved his books, he was often careless with them, relying on those who borrowed a title to be trustworthy about returning it. As he scanned the nearby shelves, an old medieval curse rang in his head.
Steal not this Book my honest friend For fear the gallows be your end For when you die the Lord will say Where is the book you stole away.
~~~
This was one of the most fascinating, multi-genre books I've ever read. You will read about ancient mythology during the age of Vikings, Odin et.al. It is brilliantly done as the history is explored from the past to merge with the present... I've been talking about seeing connections more and more and this book brought several to my mind... I think it is helpful to work to understand what is happening in our nation at this time...
In this book, in Chicago where the book is set, there now were those who had looked much further back into history, to the age of Vikings... Those who banned together to bring back the glory of white supremacy and, again, violence as their main objective.
But another connection came to mind as well. Nickless in her extensive reading and research for this fantastic novel, learned that there were/are no actual historical records that were written during that time... It was only later that individuals began to do research of whatever they were able to pull together and thus a sort of cult activity was begun, making heroes out of those individuals who were called Vikings...
I've been reading a nonfiction book written by Mary Magdalene. Her book had been either lost or hidden which, undoubtedly, would have forced questions of the Bible itself... This book enforced my present ruminations about the Old Testament in particular and in relation to the "full story" in the present New Testament. This is not meant to be critical. It is merely an observation and a gaining of insight such as through The First Light that people routinely hone in on what you might call the Strong Men of history and begin to emulate or at least attempt to follow somebody that they admire--forming a cult of sorts.
There was even a place for those who followed the Viking ways... The Ragnarök ax-throwing establishment owned and managed, by a man named Sten Elger.
shorter alley and had axes to throw... Lots of fun and drinking... But readers will also meet a number of those who will be major or minor characters that have caught the attention of the police...
Because a murder had occurred... And the detective who caught the case, once she saw the body, immediately called her best friend, who is the main character of this trilogy (I've already purchased the other two books--that's how much this book impressed me).
Excerpt from The Narratives of Serial Killers Semiotician: Evan Wilding, PhD, SSA, IASS Proceedings of the International Conference on Semiotics Every murderer creates his own story. This story may be simple or elaborate, coherent or deeply fragmented. Serial murderers often leave signs and symbols at the crime scene—messages for the police to decipher. Notes, maps, images. The posing of the body, a unique modus operandi. The killer is the riddler extraordinaire, and his narrative—the story he wishes to tell—is the enigma he presents to the detective. Someone—perhaps Nietzsche—once said that those seen dancing were thought insane by those who could not hear the music. Our job is to find the killer’s music.
