Page 2 of The Outlaw Viking

“Yes, but more intense…and graphic. Sometimes I feel like I’m caught in a vortex, being drawn toward something—or someone—in terrible need or pain. In a way, that’s why I decided to become a doctor, you know. The pictures of death and despair I saw in my dreams—well, I interpreted them as a kind of calling to the medical profession.”

“That and that blasted pacifism of yours.”

Rain smiled, knowing her outspoken mother didn’t share her views on nonviolence.

“It doesn’t help that you work in that inner-city hospital, you know. Talk about a daily dose of needless violence!”

Rain decided to steer the conversation away from that volatile topic. Her mother would much prefer her surgeon daughter to practice in a nice, safe suburb, closer to home.

“Anyhow, Mom, the dreams occur almost nightly now. I hate going to sleep anymore. And I wake with the most grueling migraine headaches. I wonder if—”

Her words halted in midsentence as a group of tourists exited the underground Jorvik Viking Centre and the line in which Rain stood began to inch forward. Ever since Rain’s mother had read of the Coppergate archaeological dig here years ago, she’d devoured newspaper and magazine articles detailing the thousands of artifacts taken from the site—treasures that gave new insight into the fierce, proud people who’d flourished there under a series of Viking kings from 850 to 954 A.D. She’d yearned to return to the site of her alleged time-travel journey.

After they paid their money and entered the building, the docents ushered them into “time cars” which would whisk them back one thousand years through a reconstruction of an actual street in Jorvik, Viking Age York. The museum was populated by life-sized, lifelike figures of primitive Norsemen and its sounds and smells were redolent of a teeming market town of the early medieval period.

About to remark on the wonderfully executed dioramas, Rain looked at her mother and took a quick, sharp breath of alarm at her white complexion and hands clasped to her chest.

“Mother! What’s wrong?” The doctor in Rain emerged immediately. She feared her sixty-eight-year-old mother was suffering chest pains.

“It’s just like it was then,” Ruby whispered shakily.

“What is?”

“This street—Coppergate. See the thatched roofs, the wattle-and-daub houses? Oh, Rain, it takes me back so vividly!”

Rain breathed a sigh of relief that her mother wasn’t ill. Personally, she considered the houses pretty crude and failed to share her mother’s enthusiasm, but she kept her thoughts to herself.

They moved on and watched a burly blacksmith making the much-prized Viking sword. He worked five rods of metal into tightly twisted ropes, then hammered, filed, and welded again until he’d forged the deadly weapon. He explained that the whole pattern-welding process took one hundred hours for just one sword and that the Vikings valued them so much that they gave them names, like Leg-biter or Adder.

As their car moved along slowly, haunting medieval music permeated the air, floating sweetly from a primitive carved pan pipe played by a blond-haired boy. In fact, all the figures in the exhibit had pale hair, from the lightest shades of platinum to fiery red. The huge men sported carefully groomed beards and mustaches and hair down to their shoulders. Most of the women and girls wore braids, some hanging to the waist and others tucked under neat cloth caps.

Industrious craftsmen toiled in front of the houses, carving wooden bowls, polishing amber stones, or working with brass. They gave the lie to the traditional image of Vikings as ferocious rapers and pillagers of peaceful folks.

Rain inhaled deeply, picking out the odors of fresh straw, wood shavings from the shipbuilders, smoke from the hearth fires, and faint, inland salt-water breezes—even some of the unpleasant smells that would have prevailed in a primitive city of this size.

After completing the one-hour tour of the Viking museum, they strolled arm-in-arm around the lobby, viewing drawings and photos of the archaeological excavation.

“Oh!” her mother exclaimed sharply, coming to an abrupt halt.

They’d come to a massive oil painting depicting the Battle of Brunanburh in 937 A.D. which had ended, once and for all, Viking dominance in Northumbria, according to the small card under the picture. The Dark Age knights battled on a flat-topped volcanic hill near Solway Firth. The huge painting detailed artistically the thousands of fallen warriors, including five Viking kings and seven jarls, a son of the Scots King Constantine, and two cousins, two earls, and two bishops of the Saxon King Athelstan.

Her mother’s voice trailed on, but Rain heard none of it. A chill rippled over her body, and a migraine headache slammed full-force behind her eyes. Tears streamed in a silent path down her face.

Rain’s nightmare vision had come to life.

Over the years, like pieces of a crossword puzzle, she’d viewed parts of this battle scene in her dreams—the blood-soaked earth, gaping wounds, hacked-off body parts, screaming horses, and overwhelming carnage. No wonder she’d become a pacifist, opposed to all wars as senseless, after viewing this human tragedy over and over and over.

Even the man in the center of the painting was familiar. The tall blond giant stood with widespread legs encased in cross-gartered leather shoes. Many of the men around him wore leather or metal helmets with nose guards, but the handsome Viking’s long platinum hair blew freely in the wind. Blood soaked his short-sleeved, calf-length mail tunic and dripped from the sword and shield that he held in arms outstretched in entreaty to the gloomy gray sky, as if calling out in anguish to Odin. His ravaged, desperate face drew Rain, almost seemed to pull her into the painting, into the midst of the horrible maelstrom.

Rain stepped back sharply to escape the magnetic pull of the scene. The painting frightened her.

Her mother’s face drained bloodless, and her lips trembled as she exclaimed, “Oh, my God! It’s Selik.”

“Selik?” Rain croaked out, barely holding raw emotion in check. “Who’s Selik?”

“Don’t you remember the young man I told you about who was a Jomsviking knight, along with your father Thork?”

Oh, no! Not the time-travel stuff again!