Page 9 of Thor

EIGHT

Sibyl wasn't sure what was worse – the hangover from drinking too much aquavit with Jorunn last night, or the porridge Lara had insisted she eat to combat the hangover, which now swirled in her stomach, threatening to come right back up again and splatter across the rocks. The rocks she was supposed to be surveying for artefacts...

She rested a hand on the rock cairn she knew dated back over a thousand years – it had been surveyed at length on an earlier dig. As long as she didn't knock it over, no one would mind if she took a quick break to get her stomach contents under control. She was never eating porridge ever again. Goldilocks could keep the foul gloop.

Now her vision was playing tricks on her. The rocks in front of her looked lighter than the others, like someone had parked a car on them when it was raining, leaving the stone beneath bone dry, while the rest was damp and dark. Then another lighter patch, a couple of metres further along, and a third patch, too. Very small cars, though. Only a couple of metres long and barely a metre wide. More like someone had laid their swag tents on these three spots, instead of cars. Which was crazy, because this whole area was loose rock on top of permafrost, and trying to sleep on a surface like that was more like something out of the princess and the pea...only the whole surface was peas, and the peas were fist sized and sharp.

She scuffed her boot at the nearest patch of pale rock, dislodging a couple, before a third came up with part of a broken sheet of ice. Like someone had poured water here and it had frozen in a sheet beneath the stones...

Sibyl kicked aside a few more rocks, revealing more and more of the ice sheet, until she'd revealed it all. Yes, the ice sheet was about as big as a swag...but it had melted in the warm weather, so it was thin enough to break when she tapped it with her marker sticks.

Well, if she really wanted to see what lay under the ice...

Sibyl poked the bundle of sticks under the nearest edge of the ice sheet, slowly working it deeper underneath it until it was about as far as it could go. Then she put her weight to the lever, pushing with all her strength to flip the sheet over. It took a couple of tries, especially as the sheet kept breaking, until she finally managed to shift that, too.

Only to find another layer of ice, which didn't shatter the way the first one had when she tapped it. In fact, it almost sounded like metal...

Throwing the sticks aside, she raked her boot across the ice. Yep, that was metal, all right. Almost as big as her boot, and glinting in the sun. She tried to dig around it with her gloved hands, but whatever it was, it was stuck firmly in the ice.

"Guys, I think I found something," she called to the rest of the team, who'd continued walking their transects without realising she'd fallen behind.

Nik said something Sibyl was certain was a swear word in Norwegian. "Just put a flag in it and keep moving. You're holding us up." He turned his back on her and kept going.

The others didn't dismiss her so easily.

"What is it?" Karl asked eagerly.

"Something big and metal," Sibyl shouted back.

She saw his shoulders sag as if he was disappointed. Of course, it was no secret Karl wanted to find his own ice man.

But he planted his marker sticks in the spot where he'd ended his survey, and trudged back to where Sibyl knelt.

"The rocks looked lighter than the ones around it, so I shifted a few, and found an ice sheet underneath, so I moved that, too," Sibyl said, pointing. "And under it was this."

Karl dropped to his knees beside her and pulled out his canteen. He unscrewed the lid, then carefully poured the contents over the artefact and the surrounding ice.

A wisp of steam rose up, then vanished.

Sibyl dared to look down again, and gasped.

Whatever it was had been intricately carved or forged in...

"Jelling style," Karl breathed, in almost the same moment as Sibyl thought it. "See the swirling and intertwining, with the heads in profile? You know how old this is?"

"At least a thousand years," Sibyl said, barely believing it.

"It looks like an axe, but something this ornate would never have been used as a weapon. We'll have to dig it out of the ice to see," Karl said.

By day's end, they'd all carried pan after pan of warm water over to the site and dumped it on the axe head, which turned out to still have its haft, too, bound in leather. By the time they stopped for dinner, they'd melted enough ice to chip the weapon out of its glacial grave, so they could place it and the not inconsiderable amount of ice still encrusting it into a tray where it might melt overnight in the warmth of the mess tent.

Sibyl barely tasted her dinner. She couldn't keep her eyes off her axe, though she knew it wasn't really hers. But she had found it, and it was from the right period, and it definitely wasn't something used in hunting. Not something that ornate.

She scraped the bottom of the bowl, only to discover she'd eaten it all. Time to wash up, then.

But when Sibyl picked up the sponge, Lara shook her head. "You called that find. You're not doing the washing up tonight."

Sibyl could only laugh. "I did not predict that we'd find a ceremonial axe today."

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