At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(70)

“My apologies,” Simon said. “Christina, I was just mentioning you. Dr. Christina Johansen, meet Dr. Evan Wilding.”

“Distinguished service professor of Germanic Studies,” she said. “I’m at the U of C, same as you. It’s a shame our paths have never crossed, but here we are at last. Now, please, Simon. A scone and some tea. The smell is driving me mad.”

She set her messenger bag on the floor and sank into the chair next to Evan’s. The scent of damp wool drifted up from her black turtleneck sweater. She wore leggings and military-style boots and had a pleasant, sharply intelligent face decorated on the right cheek with a tattoo of green Celtic knots. Bright-red lipstick stood out on her pale face, and silver rings covered her slender fingers. Her black hair had been cut to within an inch of its life. Evan placed her in her midthirties.

“Your accent,” he said. “The Swedish island of Gotland?”

She gave him an approving look. “Bravo! I’ve been here seven years, and my parents swear when I go home, they can’t understand me anymore. Of course, they speak the Gutnish dialect. They can’t understand anyone.”

Simon slid a scone onto a plate and pushed it, along with a cup of tea, across the table. “Christina is my Viking expert. Thank you, Christina, for braving the weather in order to meet us.”

“The weather suits me perfectly. The early-morning hour, not so much. But you promised Vikings and Dr. Wilding, so here I am, the hour be damned.” She turned to Evan. “How can I help?”

His heart gave a small flutter at her smoke-gray gaze. Beautiful, intelligent women were his weakness. And what man would blame him? “I need a crash course on Vikings, if you would.”

“I must first say that the term Viking is a bit unfortunate.”

“How so?”

“The people of the Viking Age would not have called themselves Vikings. They perhaps would have known the Old Norse word vikingr. But they would have considered it a label for a single individual, a pirate or raider. Not as a name for an entire culture. It’s thought that the word might have originally derived from the Old Norse vik, which means bay people.”

“Bay people,” Evan murmured. Yet another link to the water.

“Yes.” Christina broke off a corner of her scone. “The term referred to people waiting in their ships, hiding in the bays to strike at passing mariners.”

“So our whole idea of a Viking people . . .”

“Is artificial. A convenient label for a large group of people living in a particular area during a particular time. And unlike all these racists who have co-opted Viking symbolism and culture, there is every indication that the Viking Age people lived in an open society with a healthy population of immigrants who were accorded no prejudice or disdain. There was never a concept of a pure Aryan bloodline. The very idea probably would have bewildered them.”

“So not racists.”

“Definitely not racists. The Vikings were many things. Our rather limited and limiting idea that they were nothing more than bearded and blond men who took their battle-axes with them on shockingly violent raiding parties isn’t—”

“An accurate summation?”

“It isn’t entirely inaccurate.” She pursed her lips, puffed out some air, and eyed Evan through a newly narrowed gaze. “They were appallingly cruel sometimes. Practiced human and animal sacrifice. Enslaved children. Slaughtered Christians left and right. Indulged in a great deal of plunder and rape. But—” She leaned forward until her knees touched Evan’s. She smiled into his eyes.

Evan swallowed. There was, he noted, nothing that looked like a wedding band among all the silver on her fingers.

“There is,” she said, “rather a great deal more to them. Their mysterious cosmos, their elaborate funerary rites, the epic tales they loved. What is it you most want to know?”

Evan considered. His recall of the Viking Age and of the so-called Viking literature was a rather ragged patchwork quilt of this and that. It was probably due to his poor job, as a hormone-laden teenager, of encoding the information in his memory palace. He knew a little about Odin and the ?sir. Something of Scandinavian geography. A touch more about Beowulf.

What would the killer care most about?

He set down his tea. “I need to know how the Vikings saw their world and their place in it. I don’t mean politically or even their social structure. But in terms of the gods and their relationship with those gods. Their spiritual beliefs. How they viewed the dead and their concept of sacrifice and appeasement. And”—he tapped his fingertips on the table—“their ideas around crime and punishment and revenge.”

Christina offered a delicately arched brow. “Do you believe in spirits, Dr. Wilding?”

He cleared his throat. “The jury’s out on that, I’m afraid.”

“Hmm.” She gave him a soft smile. “You see, the key to understanding the Vikings is exactly what you mentioned—to see the world through their eyes. They knew—in the same way we know the earth revolves around the sun—that multiple beings walked invisibly beside them. The gods. The gods’ servants. Strange spirits and otherworldly creatures. Some friendly. Some most definitely not. Some of whom could be appeased only through human sacrifice. All of them traveling to and from worlds that humans could also visit, if they could find the way.”