Brattahlid, Greenland

Present day

Chapter 1

     “Merde!” The French grad student wrinkled his aquiline nose. 

     “No, Francois, you’re not sifting through excrement.” Dr. Anne Tolstad chipped through a layer of sediment with her tiny rock hammer. She sighed in frustration. Francois always highjacked her class with his Gallic surliness.  

     “Merde is found in a cess pit. We’ve located one of those on the north end of the site. You’re in a midden heap, a sort of medieval garbage dump. See here.” She brushed back the dirt to reveal a blackened strap embedded in the strata. “A bit of leather with runic lettering on it.”

     Her students looked unimpressed.

     “What happened at Brattahlid may well be the best unsolved riddle in archeology.” Anne preferred to generate interest, but she’d settle for compliance. She needed their help. “Every artifact we unearth will help us solve the mystery.”

     “What mystery?” the coed from UCLA asked. Anne suspected the gum-popping blonde signed up for the dig only because she thought there’d be little reading and writing involved.

     “European settlements in Greenland flourished for nearly five hundred years. Then in the 15^th century,

when a trading vessel from Norway docked at Brattahlid, they found everyone gone. No sign of warfare. No evidence of plague. Everyone was simply . . . gone.” Anne spread her hands before her, palms up. “Don’t you want to know why?”

      “We will not find the reason here. Why are we not looking for something important?” Francois complained. “What use is there in going through garbage?”

       “Because what a person throws away tells you volumes about them,” a deep voice said from above them.

       A shadow fell over Anne and her students. She looked up, shielding her eyes against the cold northern sun. A man stood at the lip of the pit, the light behind him ringing his dark hair like a halo for a split second. Then he dropped into a squat to peer down at her. His face came into focus.

       Anne fought the urge to gape at him. A strongly chiseled jaw, a mouth that would tempt a nun, and a pair of haunting grey eyes beneath darkly even brows. She’d never seen a man with such perfectly balanced features.

       She’d been such in a hurry to get to the dig site that morning she skipped the small amount of make-up she usually wore. Her shoulder length mop was pulled up into a sagging pony-tail and she was pretty sure there was a dirt smudge on her forehead.

       Why was it she always met the most interesting men when she looked like a bag-lady?

       “Think about it for a moment,” the man went on. His unusual pewter-colored eyes flicked over each of them, then returned to Anne. His direct gaze made her fidgety. “Where do identity thieves search when they want to find personal information?”

       “The internet?” Francois said with a shrug.

       “Ah, but we have firewalls and virus blockers and spy-ware. Not much help for a thief unless a person is careless with their passwords. But if the same thief goes through your garbage?” The man held up his hand and ticked items off on his long fingers. “What you had for dinner. Your credit card numbers. Who you called on your cell-phone and how long you talked. How many X-rated movies you rented last month.”

       The students laughed nervously. Anne figured more than one of them liked dirty movies.

       “So think of yourselves as identity thieves in this midden heap,” the man said. “Only the people whose identity you are trying to steal have been dead nearly six hundred years.”

        Anne resisted the pull of his hypnotic gaze, but it was difficult. He spoke with a cross between a Scottish burr and the overly round vowels of a Scandinavian. She was usually good at accents, but she couldn’t place this one.

        “Sift through what they discarded and you will learn who these people were,” the stranger promised.

        The students stood transfixed for a moment, then one by one, they picked up their brushes and rock-hammers, and went to work.

         Even Francois.

        “Remember, carefully is better than quickly,” Anne said as she walked to the foot of the ladder. “Context is everything. If you make a find, take pictures of the object in situ before full excavation and—“

        “Oui, professor, we know,” Francois interrupted. “Document the merde out of everything.”

        Anne looked up at the man again. He was grinning down at her like a cat peering into a fish bowl. A frisson of irritation rippled through her chest. With his quick tongue and mesmerizing eyes this stranger had usurped her class with a few well-chosen words and set them to their task with much more enthusiasm than she ever generated. Field work was her passion, but she’d never had a knack for the classroom.

         Even a classroom on a dig.

        “I don’t believe I know you,” she said as she climbed out of the midden.

        The man extended his hand to help her over the lip of the pit. “Dr. Cirdan Inglorion. I’m a great admirer of yours. Of your work,” he hastily amended. “Your theories on the demise of the Greenland settlement are ground-breaking.”

        His handshake was warm and firm and a shiver ran up her arm as if she were a middle-schooler in the throes of a first crush. He held her hand in his a moment longer than necessary, his unusual eyes darkening as his pupils dilated.

        Anne gave herself a mental shake and tugged her hand free. “Thank you, Dr.—“

        “Please, call me Cirdan.”

        Anne swallowed her smile. His name sounded like ‘Sir Don’, as if he were a knight errant. An unlikely name for a knight at that, but when his quick grin carved a dimple in his left cheek, she thought she could learn to like the name easily enough. But Inglorion? His accent still puzzled her. She tried to place his nationality based on his last name and came up empty.

        “Step into my office, Cirdan.” She led the way toward the aging Airstream at the edge of the site. “We don’t get too many visitors here, but I can offer you a beer.”

        “A little early for alcohol, isn’t it? It’s not even noon.”

        “A dig site runs on fermented grain,” Anne said with a shrug. “We’re just living a little history here. The ancients used beer not just as an intoxicant, but as an efficient way to store calories through the winter. I don’t know about you, but I rise before sun-up and my breakfast was a tad rushed.” She unlocked the tinny door to her Airstream. “What brings you to Brattahlid?”

         You, she thought she heard the man say clearly. Then she realized his lips hadn’t moved. She really needed to get more sleep.

         Or maybe he was right about the beer.

         By some trick of tiny musculature, the corners of his mouth were turned up in a perpetual half-smile.

         Like a two-legged dolphin, Anne thought.

         The man’s smile deepened.

         “I understand you’ve made a new find,” he said.

         “A new find?” Her voice caught in her throat.

It’d been a week since she unearthed the unusual object. Anne hadn’t sent word out about it yet, not to her archaeology department head, not even to the Svartian Symposium, the international corporate sponsor of her dig. Mostly because she wasn’t sure what to say. Even though some faint symbology was etched on the eight-inch oblong, she had no clue what it might be. Until she understood more about the strange artifact, she intended to keep its existence, and her bewilderment about it, a secret.

Cirdan ducked his head as he entered the trailer. It was a cramped space, cluttered with Anne’s notes and books and the remains of her half-eaten breakfast, but he settled amiably into the booth seating.

“There’s no need to be coy,” he said. “I’ve no intention of stealing your thunder.”

She opened the apartment-sized fridge and pulled out a Sam Adams for the visiting doctor. Startling good looks aside, she was liking him less with each passing moment. If he was here to snatch a find from her, he was in for a disappointment.

“Look, I don’t care what you think you know about my dig, but—“

I know a great deal about you, Anne.

There it was again—the man’s voice somehow reverberating in her head, the golden timbre warm and shivery at the same time. And the sudden flare of heat in his grey eyes spoke of ‘knowing’ in the biblical sense—deep, intimate knowledge. Then just as suddenly his eyes went cool and dispassionate.

“We know plenty,” Cirdan said. “We’ve followed your findings with great interest. And we approve your methods and your motives. You’ve done some excellent work. Your climate change study was absolutely on point. We know the earth was warmer in the year 1000 than it is today. The temperature drop in the 1400’s no doubt played a role in the Greenland settlement’s death. But this new find of yours. . . ” He waved a long-fingered hand as if he might pluck the right words from the air. “Let’s just say, we think you’re in over your head.”

“Oh, really?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Who is ‘we’?”

“I’m with the A.E.L.F.”

“Never heard of them.”

“Avari Earth League Fellowship,” he explained.

“An environmental group?”

“Not exactly.” His smile was absolutely intoxicating and even though Anne didn’t trust him farther than she could toss her half-eaten bagel, she found herself fixated on the play of his tongue against his white teeth as he spoke. “A.E.L.F is a consortium of academic and business interests. We monitor archeological advances, keep up with historical journals and the like. We’re funding a DNA study of the Inuit to see if your Greenlanders might have intermarried and dispersed into the aboriginal culture as the Norse raiders did throughout Europe. Once we have the data, I’ll forward the results to you, if you like.”

She gave him a grudging nod. “Thank you.”

“We’re keenly interested in the artifact you’ve found and all it represents.”

He leaned toward her and the room seemed to brighten around him. A lesser woman might have been distracted by the pull of his appeal, but Anne wasn’t about to give a stranger, even a guy with movie-star looks and an unpronounceable name, proprietary information about her find.

She stared at him stonily.

“You have no idea what it is, do you?” he said.

“You know, on second thought, perhaps you should take your beer and go.” Anne threw the door open and waited for him to take the not-so-subtle hint.

Instead of complying, Cirdan Inglorion popped the top on the Sam Adams and knocked the bottle back.

“When you first unearthed it, the oblong felt grainy, like carved stone,” he said as if he’d actually seen the object. “But now that it’s been exposed to air for a while, the surface is different. Smoother. Almost like hardened leather. And you don’t know what to make of it.”

Anne swallowed her surprise. Her students had all seen the unusual object when it was first unearthed, but she hadn’t shown it to them again since the initial discovery. She certainly hadn’t told anyone of the change in the texture of the artifact. Once she transported it back to her lab in Seattle, she’d perform a chemical analysis. There had to be a logical explanation for the metamorphosis.

And she must have a spy in her crew.

The world of archeology was a small one, filled with as much espionage as corporate or political realms. There was constant pressure to publish and without a major find, corporate sponsorships for digs tended to dry up and float away.

There had even been a few cases of outright theft of artifacts. The treasures disappeared into the private collections of the uber-wealthy. As a precaution, Anne installed a small safe under the floor of the closet in the Airstream. She cached the most tempting items there till she could move them to a secure location.

Right now, the only thing in the safe was this puzzling new find.

“Dr. Inglorion, I’m not going to ask you again,” she said. “I’m running a privately funded, state-sanctioned dig. If you don’t leave immediately, I’ll call the authorities.”

He tipped the beer again and drained the bottle. Then he stood and ducked back through the door. “Suit yourself. When you’re ready for answers to your questions, you can find me on the WindSprite. She’s anchored beyond the mouth of Eriksfjord. Bring it with you when you come.”

Like that’s going to happen.

“Thanks for the beer, Anne,” he said pleasantly. He shoved his hands into his jean pockets and strode off, his dark hair whipped by wind.

Damn, he looks good walking away.

Too bad he was trying to finesse a major find, possibly a career-making find, out from under her. 

“Oh, just one more question,” he said over his shoulder.

Anne averted her gaze so he wouldn’t catch her staring at his denim-clad ass. “What’s that?”

He turned back to face her, concern flitting over his perfect features.

“Has its temperature started to rise yet?”      

* * *