Part 22 (1/2)

”I know.”

Conclusions. They threw the last big logs on the fire, and flames roared up, yellow licks breaking free among the stars. The professor felt numb all over, his heart was cold, the firelit faces were smeary primitive masks, dancing in the light. The songs were harsh and raucous, he couldn't understand the words. The wind was chilling, and the hot skin of his arms and neck goosepimpled uncomfortably. He felt sick with alcohol, and knew it would be a while before his body could overmaster it. They threw the last big logs on the fire, and flames roared up, yellow licks breaking free among the stars. The professor felt numb all over, his heart was cold, the firelit faces were smeary primitive masks, dancing in the light. The songs were harsh and raucous, he couldn't understand the words. The wind was chilling, and the hot skin of his arms and neck goosepimpled uncomfortably. He felt sick with alcohol, and knew it would be a while before his body could overmaster it.

The minister led him away from the fire, then up the rocky ridge. Getting him away from the students and laborers, no doubt, so he wouldn't embarra.s.s himself. Starlight illuminated the heather and broken granite under their feet. He stumbled. He tried to explain to her what it meant, to be an archaeologist whose most important work was the discovery that a bit of their past was a falsehood.

”It's like a mosaic,” he said, drunkenly trying to follow the fugitive thought. ”A puzzle with most of the pieces gone. A tapestry. And if you pull a thread out... it's ruined. So little lasts! We need every bit we can find!”

She seemed to understand. In her student days, she told him, she had waitressed at a cafe in Montreal. Years later she had gone down the street to have a look, just for nostalgia's sake. The cafe was gone. The street was completely different. And she couldn't remember the names of any of the people she had worked with. ”This was my own past, not all that many years ago!”

The professor nodded. Cognac was rus.h.i.+ng through his veins, and as he looked at the minister, so beautiful in the starlight, she seemed to him a kind of muse, a spirit sent to comfort him, or frighten him, he couldn't tell which. Clio, he thought. The muse of history. Someone he could talk to.

She laughed softly. ”Sometimes it seems our lives are much longer than we usually think. So that we live through incarnations, and looking back later we have nothing but....” She waved a hand.

”Bronze pins,” the professor said. ”Iron rivets.”

”Yes.” She looked at him. Her eyes were bright in the starlight. ”We need an archeology for our own lives.”

Acknowledgments. Later he walked her back to the fire, now reduced to banked red coals. She put her hand to his upper arm as they walked, steadying herself, and he felt in the touch some kind of portent; but couldn't understand it. He had drunk so much! Why be so upset about it, why? It was his job to find the truth; having found it, he should be happy! Why had no one told him what he would feel? Later he walked her back to the fire, now reduced to banked red coals. She put her hand to his upper arm as they walked, steadying herself, and he felt in the touch some kind of portent; but couldn't understand it. He had drunk so much! Why be so upset about it, why? It was his job to find the truth; having found it, he should be happy! Why had no one told him what he would feel?

The minister said goodnight. She was off to bed; she suggested he do likewise. Her look was compa.s.sionate, her voice firm.

When she was gone he hunted down the bottle of cognac, and drank the rest of it. The fire was dying, the students and workers scattered-in the tents, or out in the night, in couples.

He walked by himself back down to the site.

Low mounds, of walls that had never been. Beyond the actual site were rounded buildings, models built by the park service, to show tourists what the ”real” buildings had looked like. When Vikings had camped on the edge of the new world. Repairing their boats. Finding food. Fighting among themselves, mad with epic jealousies. Fighting the dangerous Indians. Getting killed, and then driven away from this land, so much lusher than Greenland.

A creak in the brush and he jumped, startled. It would have been like that: death in the night, creeping up on you-he turned with a jerk, and every starlit shadow bounced with hidden skraelings, their bows drawn taut, their arrows aimed at his heart. He quivered, hunched over.

But no. It hadn't been like that. Not at all. Instead, a man with spectacles and a bag full of old junk, directing some unemployed sailors as they dug. Nondescript, taciturn, nameless; one night he would have wandered back there into the forest, perhaps fallen or had a heart attack-become a skeleton wearing leathers and sword-belt, with spectacles over the skull's eyesockets, the anachronism that gave him away at last.... The professor staggered over the low mounds toward the trees, intent on finding that inadvertent grave....

But no. It wouldn't be there. The taciturn figure hadn't been like that. He would have been far away when he died, nothing to show what he had spent years of his life doing. A man in a hospital for the poor, the bronze pin in his pocket overlooked by the doctor, stolen by an undertaker's a.s.sistant. An anonymous figure, to the grave and beyond. The creator of Vinland. Never to be found.

The professor looked around, confused and sick. There was a waist-high rock, a glacial erratic. He sat on it. Put his head on his hands. Really quite unprofessional. All those books he had read as a child. What would the minister think! Grant money. No reason to feel so bad!

At that lat.i.tude midsummer nights are short, and the party had lasted late. The sky to the east was already gray. He could see down onto the site, and its long sod roofs. On the beach, a trio of long narrow high-ended s.h.i.+ps. Small figures in furs emerged from the longhouses and went down to the water, and he walked among them and heard their speech, a sort of dialect of Norwegian that he could mostly understand. They would leave that day, it was time to load the s.h.i.+ps. They were going to take everything with them, they didn't plan to return. Too many skraelings in the forest, too many quick arrow deaths. He walked among them, helping them load stores. Then a little man in a black coat scurried behind the forge, and he roared and took off after him, scooping up a rock on the way, ready to deal out a skraeling death to that black intruder.

The minister woke him with a touch of her hand. He almost fell off the rock. He shook his head; he was still drunk. The hangover wouldn't begin for a couple more hours, though the sun was already up.

”I should have known all along,” he said to her angrily. ”They were stretched to the limit in Greenland, and the climate was worsening. It was amazing they got that far. Vinland”-he waved a hand at the site-”was just some dreamer's story.”

Regarding him calmly, the minister said, ”I am not sure it matters.”

He looked up at her. ”What do you mean?”

”History is made of stories people tell. And fictions, dreams, hoaxes-they also are made of stories people tell. True or false, it's the stories that matter to us. Certain qualities in the stories themselves make them true or false.”

He shook his head. ”Some things really happened in the past. And some things didn't.”

”But how can you know for sure which is which? You can't go back and see for yourself. Maybe Vinland was the invention of this mysterious stranger of yours; maybe the Vikings came here after all, and landed somewhere else. Either way it can never be anything more than a story to us.”

”But...” He swallowed. ”Surely it matters whether it is a true story or not!”

She paced before him. ”A friend of mine once told me something he had read in a book,” she said. ”It was by a man who sailed the Red Sea, long ago. He told of a servant boy on one of the dhows, who could not remember ever having been cared for. The boy had become a sailor at age three-before that, he had been a beachcomber.” She stopped pacing and looked at the beach below them. ”Often I imagined that little boy's life. Surviving alone on a beach, at that age-it astonished me. It made me... happy.”

She turned to look at him. ”But later I told this story to an expert in child development, and he just shook his head. 'It probably wasn't true,' he said. Not a lie, exactly, but a....”

”A stretcher,” the professor suggested.

”A stretcher, exactly. He supposed that the boy had been somewhat older, or had had some help. You know.”

The professor nodded.

”But in the end,” the minister said, ”I found this judgment did not matter to me. In my mind I still saw that toddler, searching the tidepools for his daily food. And so for me the story lives. And that is all that matters. We judge all the stories from history like that-we value them according to how much they spur our imaginations.”

The professor stared at her. He rubbed his jaw, looked around. Things had the sharp-edged clarity they sometimes get after a sleepless night, as if glowing with internal light. He said, ”Someone with opinions like yours probably shouldn't have the job that you do.”

”I didn't know I had them,” the minister said. ”I only just came upon them in the last couple hours, thinking about it.”

The professor was surprised. ”You didn't sleep?”

She shook her head. ”Who could sleep on a night like this?”