Читать книгу The Woman Who Couldn't Die - Stringer Arthur - Страница 8

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When the Lief Erickson burned at her pier through the explosion of an oil-stove and Wickstram and Lodbrog started homeward as steerage passengers on an Anchor liner, this same placid-eyed Knutsson showed no intention of going with them and betrayed no chagrin at their departure. He merely told me he had other plans. And more than once, as autumn deepened into winter, I found Pareso and his ward deep in a study of papers and charts which they put quietly away when I happened to intrude on their conferences. But I could not rid myself of the feeling that something was being conjured up, that mysterious enterprises were being considered.

I had my own troubles, at the time, for certain changes on the Herald staff were making my work there none too satisfying either to my editor or to myself. And I did not see so much of Pareso and his companion as I might have wished. It was not that they deliberately shut me out from their little circle. They were exceptionally lonely in that city and were, I think, always glad to see me. But to be frank, I met a Scotch girl just out from Dumbarton that autumn and had a bit o’ trouble wi’ a skirt, as we used to put it in Glasgow. I don’t know whether it was the soft gray of her eyes or the bonnie soft burr of her voice, but, at any rate, I got to thinking about her more than was good for me. I scrabbled through my day’s work and neglected many a night assignment that I might take her out of an evening. But she was cool in the face of my ardency, and disapproved of me and my friends as improvident and too given to drink. And five weeks after I first lost my heart to her she quietly married a Glengarry man with a fat cattle-farm somewhere in western Ontario.

That both bowled me over like a nine-pin and left a strange unrest in my heart. I’d had my fill of romance. I took from my desk the few frugal little notes she had sent me and tore them to shreds. I was about to tear up also the old Valiquette script that lay next to them, feeling the latter to be as foolishly apart from my workaday world as the former, when an unexpected call from Pareso took me to the door. Knutsson, he explained, had slipped away and lost himself somewhere in the city, and his keeper was anxious for my help in recovering the truant.

We found him eventually, thanks to my friendliness with the police. We found him late that night in an unsavory estaminet beyond the Bonsecours Market, bending silver half-dollars between his great fingers. He was much muddled with Holland gin and much given to music as we convoyed him back to his quarters. But until he was safely back in the fold Pareso made me think of a hen on a hot griddle, or a mare who had lost her foal. He not only breathed easier when he had the big blond once more under his wing, but he opened a bottle of cognac for me and drank my health as his benefactor.

“Why should you worry about that empty-headed ash-blond?” I demanded, my tongue plainly a little loosened with the brandy I had swallowed.

“Ah, but I have use for him!” he proclaimed with an intensity which I attributed to the liquor beside him.

“Are you going to take him on tour?” I asked, a trifle mockingly, remembering the care with which that blond giant had been fed and groomed and hardened for unseen ends. For day by day the strange pair had been seen legging it over the neighboring hills; and with the coming of winter they took to snow-shoes and tramped the blue-shadowed valleys and farmlands, ten hours at a time.

“There may be more in that than you imagine,” was Pareso’s somewhat enigmatic reply.

“Then I’d like to know about it,” I admitted.

And Pareso looked at me with a questioning eye. But, on second thought, he hesitated at the brink of what he seemed about to say.

“It is a little enterprise of my own devising,” he finally asserted, by way of escape.

I was as much surprised as Pareso, I think, by my next question.

“Couldn’t I figure in it?” I found myself bold enough to inquire. But I was discouraged and unhappy and the restlessness of spring was in my blood.

“In what way are you qualified for an enterprise like mine?” demanded Pareso as he studied my person with that deep-set and oddly luminous eye of his.

“I can’t answer that until I know the nature of your confounded enterprise,” I countered, lightly enough, yet none too pleased at the touch of scorn on his face. “Just where are you bound for?”

He sat silent for a minute or two, weighing, apparently, either the expediency of speech or the actual words he hesitated to utter.

“When the trail is open,” he finally told me, “I’m going to head for the Klondike, for the Klondike by the overland route from Edmonton.”

“For gold?” I asked, in no way startled by a statement far from exceptional in those days of mad migrations.

“For gold—and for more than gold!” was his slightly retarded response.

“What more?” I inquired, watching him as he downed another glass of cognac.

“What business is that of yours?” he challenged as he pushed one of his unholy specimens in vitro farther over on his desk.

“I thought we were friends,” I reminded him, with a head-nod toward the snoring Knutsson. And after another silence the man of science wagged his head slowly up and down.

“You are right,” he said, with a kindlier light in his eye. And I watched him as he turned to a desk-drawer and from its depth drew out a small metal object that glittered bright in the lamplight. I saw, as he held it out to me, that it was an arrow-head. And when I took it up and examined it more closely I saw that this arrow-head was fashioned of solid gold.

“We are going where this came from!”

Yet the words, at the moment, carried no particular message to me. I remembered, for the first time, a story I had once heard from the lips of Andrew McCosh, a vague story about a half-breed in the Barren Grounds bringing down a wild goose with an arrow-head of gold encysted in the breast-meat with which he later fed his hungry family. I had also heard of patients in a Mazatlan hospital, soldiers who had been wounded fighting the Yaqui Indians, having bullets of gold dug out of their battered bodies. But I had never been told of a people so primitive that they shafted and feathered two ounces of the precious metal to bring down either a teal-duck or a tribal enemy. I had never heard of such yarns, I inwardly protested, until I suddenly remembered about the Valiquette parchment which I carried at the moment in my pocket. And I’ll never forget the small tingle of excitement that went needling up and down my backbone as I sensed even this shadowy confirmation of a story which I had accepted as phantasy.

“Can you read French?” I asked soberly enough. “Old French?”

I could hear Pareso’s laugh as I reached into my pocket for those time-yellowed pages.

“I was born a Frenchman,” he reminded me. “And in seven languages I am not altogether at sea.”

“Then supposing you run your eye over this,” I said as carelessly as I was able.

He took the parchment, with scant show of interest. He even glanced over his shoulder toward the sleeping Knutsson, before unfolding the pages.

I leaned back in my chair, watching Pareso.

He rubbed his temple, grunted once or twice, shifted in his seat and resumed his reading with what looked like a frown of annoyance on his face. Then, as he read, I saw his eyes grow hard with interest. He leaned closer over the script, looking more hawklike than ever as he deciphered the time-dulled words.

When he had finished he sat for a full five minutes, staring into space, without speaking or moving. Then he abstractedly opened a desk-drawer, took out what seemed to be a blue-paper map of his own, and placed it beside the abraded parchment chart attached to the Valiquette script. I could see his lungs fill with a deep breath as he studied and compared the two apparently inchoate designs.

“This is a gift from God!” he finally said. And he said it in a low and tremulous voice, more to himself than to me.

“On the contrary,” I retorted with a wilful sort of quietness, “it came from a drunken ne’er-do-well who was a little off in his upper story!” And I told him, as briefly as I could, about Donald Christie and his foolish dreams of Arctic crusades.

There was a touch of impatience on Pareso’s face as he sat studying me. Instead of deriding my flippancy, however, he once more reached into his desk-drawer and produced a wrist-bracelet of heavy gold, in the rough form of a serpent, and a crescent broad-ax inlaid with silver.

“Do you know anything about such matters?” he demanded as he placed them before me.

I had to acknowledge that I did not.

“That is Scandinavian metal-work of the tenth century,” he proclaimed. “That ax was made about the time Ottar of Helgeland first rounded the North Cape and saw the midnight sun, before Eric the Red discovered Greenland and founded a Norse settlement on its shores. And that bracelet was once worn by Thera, the daughter of Olaf Halfdan, nearly four centuries before Columbus discovered America.”

“Well,” I still perversely maintained, “she must be good and dead by this time.”

“I’m not so sure of that!” he said with a sudden and absurd clenching of his lean jaw. “She’s waiting for us!”

“Waiting for us?” I echoed, staring at the cognac bottle to see how much of it he really had drunk. “I don’t quite follow you.”

“Of course you don’t,” derided Pareso. “But there’s a point or two I’d like to make plain to you. I myself have hunted gold in Kamchatka and Anadir. I have gathered fossil ivory on the Taimyr coast and lived on dog-flesh for a week in Liakhov. I have gone hungry in strange countries and have lived among people with strange ways. And at Chutoskoi, where I saved a fugitive seal-poacher from death, I came into possession of these pieces of metal and certain information as to their origin.”

“Your story,” I ventured, “must go back pretty far.”

Pareso, I knew, was not a man of emotion. But in the lamplight I could see his eyes glow like coals.

“It goes back, sir, a thousand long years,” he said with a fist-thump on the table-end. “It goes back to the time of Sigurd Blödoxe, who had been a follower of Eric the Red and the captain of a band of sea-pirates from the Island of Wollin, at the mouth of the Oder. It was this same Blödoxe who abducted Thera, the daughter of a certain Earl Olaf, a Viking chief of Hordoland, the Thera of such soft and queenly beauty that sagas were once written about her.”

“Is this,” I interrupted, “fairy-tale or fact?”

“It’s fact,” retorted Pareso. “It’s as much history as the discovery of this America of yours. But kindly permit me to proceed with my story. When Jarl Olaf and a younger prince named Haakon, presumably a prospective son-in-law of Olaf, started in pursuit of Blödoxe, the latter tried to put half the Atlantic between him and his enemies by fleeing to Iceland, known to the Norse of the ninth and tenth century, I understand, as Jöklarland. But Olaf and Haakon, it seems, came up with Blödoxe, and the abductor of Thera was compelled to go on to Greenland. Even there, however, he must have been menaced by his pursuers, for he again took to sea and again fled westward. He must, in fact, have dared the Northwest Passage. We know, at any rate, that he, together with his captive and crew, became lost somewhere along those Polar seas west of what you now call Baffin Land. And he got that far, remember, in nothing more than an oak-built skuta with a square-sail of woven wool and a bank of oars along a freeboard little higher than a modern life-boat’s.”

“And with the lady still aboard?” I questioned, in an effort at levity that for some reason fell short.

“With the lady still aboard,” replied Pareso, ignoring my sophomoric mockery. “But for all his brawn and bravery Blödoxe and his queenly blond captive could not find peace in the world. They threw off their pursuers, it is true, but in their New World they found new enemies. A hostile tribe of natives, whom we know from runic inscriptions only as the Fish-Eaters, opposed and captured this shipload of Norse invaders. There was a battle along some lonely Arctic coast, a battle apparently fought in falling snow, but a battle to the death. We have substantial reasons for believing that, while Blödoxe and Thera were taken prisoners every last man of that crew, that travel-worn and bloodstained crew, was put to death. But the chief of that tribe of yellow-haired and white-skinned natives, a chief called Ootah, seems to have regarded Thera as too beautiful to be butchered like a walrus. At any rate, he held back his followers and saved her from death, just as he saved Blödoxe, obviously for future torture. Now, as far as we can learn, a change took place in Thera’s attitude toward her abductor. Instead of hating the man who had carried her so far from her own home and people, she had mysteriously but most unmistakably grown to love him. For after Ootah, the better to hold his prisoners, had retreated from the coast and carried them up into the higher mountainous region toward the western sea, we find Blödoxe, in his extremity, secretly giving Thera a small ivory knife, with which to open a vein in her arm, should the worst come to the worst. So, when Ootah, after due pagan rites, was determined to take Thera as his wife, or as one of his wives, we find the unhappy daughter of Olaf secretly stealing to her lover, where they are found together by Ootah. That wily Fish-Eater, instead of thrusting a walrus-spear through the two of them, swallowed his big-chief’s wounded pride and cunningly bottled up his natural pagan rage. He announced, instead, that he had undergone a change of heart. He proclaimed that since these two loved each other so deeply, they should mate after the manner of man and woman unwaveringly attached to each other. And once mated, they should be free to seek their own ends and contemplate the fulness of their own happiness. The bride, proclaimed Ootah, should be given to her fated groom. But before that final rite, added the chief of the yellow-haired Fish-Eaters, she must be duly prepared for the bridal-bed, as befitted a queen of such beauty. And whatever else there is doubt about, there is little doubt about the fact that Thera was beautiful, beautiful, I suppose, as Helen of Troy was once beautiful, strangely desired of men, but leaving little happiness in the wake of her loveliness.”

“And she was given to Blödoxe?” I prompted.

“She was given to him,” pursued Pareso, “after Ootah’s women had carried her up to a mountaintop temple, where, it was explained, her bridal-bath was to be prepared for her. But Thera must have suspected Ootah’s treachery, for we know that the unhappy woman opened a vein with her little bone dagger, before she slipped into that final sleep of unconsciousness. At any rate, when Blödoxe’s bride was delivered to him, she was brought to his side embalmed in ice, bare and white and beautiful, but frozen in a slab of ice as solid as granite. Blödoxe, as we decipher the runes, went mad at that. He——”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted, promptly smelling a rat. “Who was left to write those runes, if, as you say, all of Blödoxe’s band were put to death?”

Pareso’s opaque eye rested for a moment on my face.

“Who wrote the other runes found at times along your coasts from Umanak down to Vineland? Norse seamen were threading those waters, remember, five centuries before John Davis rediscovered Greenland, as you call it to-day. And it would be natural for compatriots of Blödoxe to pick up his story and leave some record of it. And according to those broken records Blödoxe went mad at this wanton murder of Thera. He burst the deer-thongs with which he was lashed, crushed Ootah’s skull with a snow ax and killed many men before he was finally captured and subdued. Then what was left of the Fish-Eaters, feeling that this strange blond woman had been at the root of all their troubles, unceremoniously committed that repugnant white body enclosed in ice to a glacial crevasse, where the eternal snows received it and swallowed it up. And Blödoxe they lashed to a cross of wood, high on a lonely moraine of ice, overlooking the crevasse, where, before he slowly froze to death, he might contemplate the grave of his lost bride.”

I don’t know how long silence reigned in that room after Pareso had stopped speaking. But I know I sat there for a ponderable stretch of time, doing my best to follow the drift of those strange and barbaric adventures.

“And so they were lost to the world,” I heavily observed as I turned the heavy yellow bracelet over in the lamplight.

“You are a fool!” cried Pareso, with quite unexpected vigor.

“I’m at least a sober one,” I countered, resenting that open note of scorn.

“She was lost to the world,” proclaimed Pareso, pointing to his glassful of shriveled wheat-kernels, “the same as that mummy wheat was lost to the world when it was committed to an Egyptian sarcophagus in the Valley of Tombs, two thousand years ago.”

“I don’t quite follow you,” I said, oppressed by the heat of the room.

“The grave,” intoned Pareso, “has been known to deliver its dead.”

I did my best to grope toward some undefined goal which he had already reached.

“Great God!” I gasped at last, “you don’t mean you’re going to mine a glacier for a dead woman’s body?”

“There is no need for that,” said Pareso, his lank forefinger resting on the yellowed parchment before him. “That task, apparently, has already been performed by the slow processes of time. And death does not always corrupt!”

“But I don’t understand,” I began.

“You will,” asserted the swarthy man at the table, his forefinger tapping along a portion of the abraded parchment map, “when you come with me across those mountains.”

“Ah, then I’m to be one of you?” I inquired as Knutsson, sitting up on his bed, began a guttural muttering in the half-light. He had been sweating, apparently, in the heat of the room, and I could see the high lights on his columnar blond neck as he blinked urbanely out at us from his shadowy corner.

“There will be the three of us,” said Pareso. And he said it in a voice that had both a touch of finality and a note of mastery in its quietness.