“Valued patrons and guests of—”
Jonas Askeland, Guest Experience Assistant Curator and Communal Narrative Facilitator at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, had barely begun reading the English language version of “The End-of-the-Day Announcement” over the museum’s PA system, reminding the museum’s esteemed visitors that the museum would shortly be closing for the day, urging them to take any final gift shop purchases to the cash register, where friendly staff members waited to help, when another voice emerged from somewhere inside the building, its near-melody soaring, piercing the wallpaper order of things, a sound escaping from another realm.
“Come closer, my Jomsvikings. Now you must be quiet and good and sit still. It is most important that you listen carefully to the song of Adlai. The safety of the Nine Worlds depends on it. Njal, Njal! Be quiet, Njal! You too, Egil! You are making it most difficult for the other Jomsvikings to listen.”
It was a child's voice, a little girl's voice, a voice familiar to every museum employee, resonating in a way that made them second guess that its story was merely make-believe.
Raven-like, it glided through the museum, fluttering among the trinity of longships suspended by stilts, reverberating off the horse cart's glass walls, touching the church-like ceiling, reaching the gift shop’s heart, making an elderly American couple clad in matching Dale of Norway sweaters to cease their aimless browsing and search for the source of the sound. Thomas, at the ticket counter, looked up and scanned the building, double-checking that he wasn't mishearing things because he didn't remember the strange child coming through that day. And for the first time in six years and three months, Jonas had to start the announcement over after offering a humble apology that stumbled out in a frazzled staccato sequence. But at the gift shop cash register, Emma was much too busy assisting a unique guest for the voice to penetrate her distracted senses.
“…hadn’t burned the Narvik Scrolls, this would all be in the history books.”
He was a Brit or Australian or something or another, just an average-looking guy who had brought a Viking Troll t-shirt in medium to the register. Emma would ring him up and send him on his way, the automatic actions of her body as her mind entertained after-work plans. But then he began talking, said his name was Clarklove, and she smiled politely.
“Loads of people haven't even got a clue that Nordic Isrealism didn't originate with the nine Narvik Scrolls, but in Western America fifty years before. A young man named Abner Kane…”
Then this Clarklove person started explaining some incoherent theory concerning a connection between the Norse and the ancient Hebrews. For ten minutes, he had been talking and talking, rattling off disconnected shatters of evidence proving that a group of Israelites with no sense of direction had founded the Nordic nations, and whenever it seemed that he had found a natural ending to his theory, he would start up again with another bit of data, another thread of the story, another tangent…
“...wasn’t too clever. He was just a farmer. He worked all his life on his family’s farm. And then one day, he had a visionary experience…”
It was the day before Sankthans, and the rest of the museum was slow. At the register next to her, Sigurd was looking at her phone. But Emma had the luck to be stuck listening to this British shit prattle on about his dumb theory. What a fucking week. Two days earlier, Peter, Emma’s live-in partner of almost a year, had left Emma for a train engineer named Kirsten. They had met each other at Menys and got to talking. Peter had never meant for it to happen. Kirsten helped Peter move out. She was blond, pretty, and smoked constantly.
“...such as it was, moving away from civilization with his followers into the wilderness. And there…”
God, would he ever stop? Where did he come up with stuff? There must be a chat room somewhere in an arcane province of the Internet with a dozen members (it couldn’t be more than a dozen). They spent all day posting their theories, sharing whatever passed for their research, confident they had found a truth hidden from the notice of the unenlightened.
If it only wasn't Liv's day off. Liv loved dealing with the crazy ones, the guests who believed that the Norse had established a settlement in the American Midwest or had learned their longship technology from alien astronauts. She knew what to say to them. She knew how to play at listening intently, pretending to sympathize with their theories so they would add a few Viking Buddha pins or perhaps even an educational DVD to their purchase. Liv told her she had picked it up in her teenage years while working part-time in a tourist hotel in Bergen.
“And that’s where I’m off to next. Have you heard of...”
At the next register, Eva rang up an elderly American couple in only a few moments, despite some small talk, just like it was supposed to.
Jonas informed all guests and patrons that the museum would close in five minutes.
“Closing already?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Hell. I thought you would be open for another hour or so. I hate to leave. It has been wonderful chatting with you. It’s good to find someone who understands what I’m talking about. Most think I’m some madman with strange ideas. And seeing these ships is quite an astonishing experience, almost spiritual. How much is that pin you mentioned earlier?”
When the Clarklove finally left, Jonas walked over to Emma.
“Emma, could you do us a favor?”
“Yeah, yeah. Sure.
“It’s that little Dagmar girl. Well, she won’t leave. And we can’t find her mother or her brother anywhere. Could you please try talking to her?”
“Of course.”
He slapped his hand on the counter and smiled. “Good, thanks. In the meantime, I will find her mother’s phone number. I think it’s somewhere in the office.”
“With one foot in front of the other, holding his fear prisoner inside a tiny room in his chest, our beloved Adlai, the most beautiful and courageous boy in all the Nine Worlds, walked into the forbidden jungle.”
Emma found Dagmar standing in front of the Buddha Bucket. Dagmar wore an archetypal outfit: a lollipop red rain-slick; a graphic tee hosting a fern-green dragon flying over mountains of snow and flame; white jeans freckled with magenta paint; and her ever-present silver Viking helmet which tilted dangerously on top of her shoulder-length copper-red hair.
Of course, the helmet didn't have horns; Dagmar would never wear anything Viking-related that wasn't historically accurate.
“Adlai’s feet shook with fear when they touched the jungle’s mushy ground.”
She held her hands up in surrender before the display, stretching her fingers as far as she could, their tips threatening to touch the glass. She was telling herself a crazy story without pause or hesitation, the words coming out in an unbroken stream as if they were as familiar to her as the letters of her name, written in blue and red crayon. Her head moved back and forth, the motions in time with the telling, as though she was performing a ceremony designed to placate some deity that only she could see.
"Our precious Adlai tried not to think about all the stories he had heard about the dark jungle since he was old enough to listen properly. He tried not to think about the tigers that were even bigger than the Frost Giants of Jotunheim and ten times as dangerous. Our beloved Adlai tried not to think about the apes that were hungrier than trolls and as wise as any man. He tried not to think about the trees and flowers that had waited since Loki had cut off Sif's hair to trap something as sweet and noble as our Adlai. Our beautiful boy tried not to think of these things because deep inside the jungle, something that made the other monsters look as sweet and lovely as a walk through a garden of unicorn blooms held the Princess of the Northlands prisoner. Because he was the only one in all the Nine Worlds who could rescue her. But it was all one of Nidhogg's schemes to lure our Adlai into a realm of danger where none of his loyal friends could help him."
Dagmar stopped her story, dropping the museum into silence, and turned around, looking for some phantom troublemaker that only could see as her mouth narrowed to a stern line.
“Vagn! Stop your loud bragging about how you once kidnapped an Irish king and sold him to trolls and listen quietly, or something terrible will happen! Why must you always misbehave? We are still most disappointed you ate the whole liter of ice cream Momma bought for Magnus' birthday.”
The last time Emma had seen Dagmar had been over a month before.
“Can you see the ship riding on the seas like a snow dragon, Magnus? Can you hear the Ten-Thousand singing?”
“She should be on TV,” Liv had said. “Yes. On a special program devoted to her. They could do it here at the museum. It could air on one of the old Norse holidays or something. It would be a couple of hours, maybe longer. A TV personality could interview her, and then she could answer questions from a live studio audience filled with kids her age. She could spout from memory dozens of obscure bits of Norse lore. She could explain why she prefers the Gokstad ship and sneak in a few reminders of the museum's hours. It would make fantastic PR. Maybe Jonas could write a proposal for the TV people. I don’t see why NRK1 wouldn’t be interested. It would be much more interesting than that six-hour-long train program everyone loved a few months ago.”
Liv’s idea reminded Emma of a story her grandmother told her about an elkhound who could play Rachmaninoff. The dog won acclaim all over Norway, only to be killed by the Germans on the same day Rachmaninoff died because they didn't like the dog's taste in composers.
Had Emma ever gotten around to telling management her idea?
“Our precious Adlai had only taken a few steps in the forbidden jungle when a shiny Cobra-Snake slithered in his way. The Cobra-Snake danced and sang poetry even worthy of one-eyed Odin himself. But the most beautiful boy in the Nine Worlds put his hands over his ears, so the Cobra-Snake’s singing wouldn’t trick him. He knew that the Cobra-Snake was a servant of Nidhogg and wanted to eat him like a mouse.”
And then, Dagmar stopped her story again.
“Be quiet, Invar! Stop whispering to the others about Serkland! Can’t you see that they are trying to listen? All your noise puts the Nine Worlds in the greatest of dangers! Don’t you know that our Adlai will be here tomorrow? If SHE finds out who our Adlai is, SHE will call out to the servants of Nidhogg for help to make him HER own! And Fenrir will make a home for him in his belly. We must ready ourselves. Besides, we’ve all heard your tales a thousand times!”
“That’s quite the story.”
“It’s a true story, Emma. I saw it myself. My eyes are good at seeing things.”
“Where are your mother and brother?”
“Momma is working on her painting today, and Magnus is off somewhere behaving foolishly again. One day, the great wolf will make a tasty treat of him.”
“You came to the museum all by yourself?”
“I’m not by myself. My Ten-Thousand Jomsvikings are with me. So be most careful that you don’t bump into them.”
Then Dagmar turned again to the display case, continuing the story from where she had left off as though Liv hadn't been there.
Emma was halfway back to the gift shop when she realized she had forgotten to remind Dagmar that the museum was about to close. But when she returned to the Buddha Bucket exhibit, Dagmar was already gone.
For some months after, almost a year, when Emma was alone, doing something mundane: eating lunch in the King’s Garden; walking along Karl Johan Gate after the sun had settled for the night and all the shops’ lights had come on; wandering the five floors of the Oslo City shopping center for some satisfying purchase while thinking about getting an advanced degree in history or maybe archeology; or just caught in a dangling moment, with her ears more attentive than usual, listening to snatches of conversation in a noisy cafe, or vanilla pop songs piping out of invisible speakers, or the hum of airliners flying overhead; she heard the dim echoes of ships breaking on the waves, and the music of distant singing, buried beneath the sounds of fleeting things.
Dagmar will delight and amaze you! She is everyone's favorite! I'm sorry to disappoint you, but the scrolls are just a throwaway conspiracy theory to give that Clarklove guy a slight amount of characterization. He's obsessed with the idea that the Brits/Scandinavians are from the "lost tribes of Israel." I don't explain it or anything, because it's just a throwaway. But it does sort of connect to the history of the fictional town where Adlai goes to university, which was founded by a religious sect with similar beliefs. It is also a recurring motif with the gift shop employees (Emma and Liv) that they have to listen to people's conspiracy theories about Vikings.
I love Dagmar so much.