Magnus shook his head. Arni would be demanding a personal interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger next. Besides, Magnus would rather approach Lawrence Feldman in his own way without his Icelandic puppy at his heels. ‘We’ll see.’
Deflated, Arni drove over the pass beyond Mosfell Heath and down towards the lake. It wasn’t actually raining, but there was a stiff breeze that ruffled the surface. Their approach was watched by a posse of sturdy Icelandic horses from the farm behind the cottages, their long golden forelocks flopping down over their eyes.
Magnus noticed a boy and a girl playing by the shore of the lake – the boy was about eight, the girl much smaller. Again, only the one summer house with the Range Rover was occupied. Agnar’s property was still a crime scene, with yellow tape fluttering in the wind and a police car parked outside, in which sat a solitary constable reading a book. Crime and Punishment by one F.M. Dostojevski, it transpired. Magnus smiled. Cops everywhere liked to read about crime; it wasn’t surprising that the Icelanders had a more literary approach to it than their American counterparts.
The policeman was glad of the company and let Magnus and Arni into the house. It was cold and still. Fingerprint dust covered most of the smooth surfaces, adding to the sense of desolation, and there were chalk marks around the traces of blood on the floor.
Magnus examined the desk: drawers full of papers, most of them printouts from a computer. There was also a low cupboard just to the left of the desk, in which more reams of paper lay.
‘OK, you check out the cabinet, I’ll check out the desk,’ Magnus said, slipping on a pair of white latex gloves.
The first bundle he examined was a French translation of the Laxdaela Saga, on which were scribbled comments in French. These only covered the first half of the manuscript. Magnus had learned some French at school, and he guessed that Arni had been correcting or commenting on the work of another translator, probably an Icelandic-speaking Frenchman.
‘What have you got, Arni?’
‘ Gaukur’s Saga,’ he said. ‘Have you ever heard of it?’
‘No,’ said Magnus. That wasn’t necessarily a surprise. There were dozens of sagas, some well-known, some much less so. ‘Wait a minute. Wasn’t Gaukur the guy who lived at Stong?’
‘That’s right,’ said Arni. ‘I went there when I was a kid. I was scared out of my wits.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Magnus. ‘My father took me there when I was sixteen. There was something really creepy about that place.’
Stong was an abandoned farm about twenty kilometres north of the volcano, Mount Hekla. It had been smothered in ash after a massive eruption some time in the middle ages, and had only been rediscovered in the twentieth century. It lay at the end of a rough track which wound its way through a landscape of blackened destruction: mounds of sand and small outcrops of lava twisted into grotesque shapes. When Magnus read of the apocalypse, he thought of the road to Stong.
‘Let me take a look.’
Arni handed the manuscript to Magnus. It was about a hundred and twenty crisp, newly printed pages, in English. On the cover were the simple words: ‘Gaukur’s Saga, translated by Agnar Haraldsson’.
Magnus turned the page, scanning the text. On the second page he came upon a word that brought his eyes to an abrupt halt.
Isildur.
‘Arni, look at this!’ He flicked rapidly through more pages. Isildur. Isildur. Isildur. Isildur.
The name cropped up several times on each page. Isildur wasn’t a bit player in this saga, he was a main character.
‘Wow,’ said Arni. ‘Shall we take it back to headquarters to get forensics to look at it?’
‘I’m going to read it,’ Magnus said. ‘Then forensics can take a look.’
So he sat down in a comfortable armchair, and began to read, passing each page carefully to Arni as he finished with it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Isildur and Gaukur were two brothers who lived at a farm called Stong. Isildur was strong and brave with dark hair. He had a hare lip and some people thought he was ugly. He was a skilled carver of wood. Gaukur, although two years younger than Isildur, was even stronger. He had fair hair and was very handsome, but he was vain. He was an expert with a battleaxe. Both brothers were honest and popular in the region.
Their father, Trandill, wanted to pay a visit to his uncle in Norway and to go on Viking raids. Their mother had died when the boys were small, so Trandill sent them to a friend, Ellida-Grimur of Tongue, to be fostered. Ellida- Grimur agreed to manage the farm at Stong in Trandill’s absence. Ellida-Grimur had a son, Asgrimur, who was the same age as Isildur. The three boys became fast friends.
Trandill was away for three years, spending the summers raiding and trading in the Baltic and in Ireland, and the winters with his uncle, Earl Gandalf the White, in Norway.
One day a traveller returning to Iceland from Norway arrived at Tongue with a message. Trandill had been killed in a fight with Erlendur, Earl Gandalf’s son. Gandalf was willing to pay the compensation that was due to Trandill’s sons, and to hand over the inheritance if one of the brothers would come to Norway to collect it.
When Isildur was nineteen, he decided to travel to Norway to visit his great uncle and claim his inheritance. Gandalf and his son Erlendur welcomed him with great warmth and hospitality. Gandalf said that Erlendur had killed Trandill in self-defence when Trandill had attacked him in a drunken rage. The other men at the court who had witnessed Trandill’s death agreed that this was the case.
Isildur decided to spend the summer on Viking raids with Erlendur. They went to Courland and Karelia in the East Baltic. Isildur was a brave warrior and won much booty. After many adventures, he returned to the house of Gandalf a wealthy man.
Isildur told Gandalf that he wanted to return to Iceland. Gandalf gave Isildur the compensation he was owed for his father’s death, and also Trandill’s treasure. But the night before Isildur was due to set sail, Gandalf said he had something else to give him. It was locked in a small chest.
Inside was an ancient ring.
Gandalf explained that Trandill had won the ring on a raid in Frisia when he had fought the famous warrior chieftain, Ulf Leg Lopper. Ulf Leg Lopper was ninety years old, but he appeared to be no older than forty and he was still a fearsome fighter. After a long struggle, Trandill felled him. He saw the ring on Ulf Leg Lopper’s finger and chopped the finger off.
Despite the fact that he was dying, Ulf Leg Lopper smiled. ‘I give you thanks for relieving me of my burden. I found this ring in the River Rhine seventy years ago. I have worn it every day since then. During that time I have won great victories and wealth in battle. Yet although I wear the ring, I feel that the ring owns me. It will bring you great power, but then it will bring you death. And now I can die, in peace at last.’
Trandill examined the ring. Inside were inscribed in runes the words ‘The Ring of Andvari’. He was going to ask Ulf more about the ring, but when he looked down, Ulf was dead, a smile on his face, no longer a great warrior, but a wrinkled old man.
Gandalf told Isildur the legend of the ring. It had belonged to a dwarf named Andvari, who used to fish by some waterfalls. The ring was seized from Andvari, together with a hoard of gold, by Odin and Loki, two ancient gods. Andvari laid a curse on the ring, saying it would take possession of its bearer and use the bearer’s power to destroy him, and would continue to do so until it was taken home to Hel. [Translator’s footnote: Hel was the domain of Hel, the goddess of death and Loki’s daughter.]
Odin, foremost of the gods, reluctantly gave the ring to a man named Hreidmar as compensation for killing his son. The ring had drawn great power from Odin. In the following years the ring fell into the possession of a number of keepers, each of which was corrupted, including Hreidmar’s son Fafnir, who became a dragon; the hero Sigurd; the Valkyrie Brynhild and Sigurd’s sons Gunnar and Hogni. Everywhere it went it left a trail of treachery and murder in its wake, until finally it was hidden by Gunnar in the Rhine so that his father-in-law Atli could not get hold of it.
