Just then I saw the tiny Swiss Army knife open in Jalil’s hand.
He slashed at the knife hand of the guy who had Christopher.
The big man gaped at the small red wound on his hand.
Christopher twisted around on his back, pulled both his legs up into fetal position, and unloaded with every muscle in his body.
His feet hit the big Viking in the very location that no man —not even a big Viking — wants to be kicked.
“Argh!” the Norseman said. He stumbled back and grabbed himself.
His companion guffawed like an idiot and said, “Now I’ll have the woman to myself! Haw, haw, haw.”
April swung. The heel of her hand came up and nailed the end of the man’s nose. I grabbed his sword arm, slammed his elbow against the rock, and yanked his sword from his numbed hand.
We didn’t stay around to see any more. We hauled.
“The air shaft,” Jalil panted. “Only way.”
It was just fifty feet down the tunnel. A hundred feet down the tunnel was a new rush of armed men.
A race.
I hit the air shaft first, about three seconds before the wave of Norsemen. I jumped to block them from reaching the opening.
“Go! Go! Go!” I yelled to the others.
I held the sword out, ready. A huge man, blond hair greased into Heidi pigtails that hung down from his dingy helmet, stood facing me. He was holding a long-handled battle-ax.
He looked like I was the best thing he’d seen in years. He laughed. He grinned the happy grin of a mad warrior getting ready to do battle.
He roared a threat at me, like some World Wrestling Federation character putting on a ferocious act. Only this was no act.
The others were all in the air shaft, crawling like infants. An undignified parade of butts.
I could stay and fight. I’d lose. I barely knew which end of a sword to hold on to. Or I could run for it.
I backed up into the air shaft, keeping my sword out. The Viking looked disappointed. But he wasn’t going to let me get away. In he came after me.
I was crab-walking, scuffling, backward-crawling, losing more skin off my knees, banging my head on the low ceiling. I swung the sword weakly, back and forth.
“I’ll kill you!” I yelled.
The Viking laughed. With good reason. He was crawling forward, I was going backward. I was scared to death. He was at a party. He was having the time of his life. He was grinning like a guy who’d just scored the winning touchdown.
But he’d overlooked one major fact: It’s hard to do much with a four-foot-long ax in a four-foot-square tunnel. He jabbed, but I could stay out of reach and even knock his sword aside occasionally.
I heard Christopher cursing behind me. “There’s nothing here!” he yelled.
I kept backing up.
“It’s like, a five-hundred-foot drop into the water!”
The choices were not good. But I knew one thing: There might be a ninety-nine-percent chance that a drop that far would kill us all. There was a one-hundred-percent chance we’d die if we stayed to talk things over with the Vikings.
“Do it!” I yelled.
“Oh, man, I should have just let the snake eat me,” Jalil said.
I glanced over my shoulder. The square of light was closer than I’d expected. I could see it past Jalil’s butt and April’s hair.
The Viking took advantage of the distraction. He lunged with the ax. The side of the blade bit into my chest just below my collarbone.
“Just jump!” I bellowed in panic. “Jump! Jump, he’s gonna kill me!”
I backed and backed and backed, and suddenly there was nowhere else to back.
The last thing I saw as I fell was the Viking’s crestfallen face.
Chapter
XV
I dropped rear-first from the air shaft.
My foot caught and spun me so I twisted around facedown.
I could see the others below me. I could see the inky water below them. I could see the cut-with-a-knife cliffs all around us.
We were falling.
Falling four hundred feet. The height of a forty-story building.
Like jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, which people did when they didn’t expect to survive.
I was going to hit that water and die.
Except that I was still falling. And so was Christopher, who was closest to hitting. We were all still falling. But slowly. Way too slowly. The air felt normal; it wasn’t whipping past. I breathed it in short, desperate gulps. My heart was hammering.
My deep brain was still convinced I would be crushed by the impact.
But then I saw Christopher hit. He entered the water with barely a ripple. Like an Olympic diver.
Right behind him, April and Jalil. Both with no more impact than if they’d jumped off the side of a pool.
I had time to straighten myself up, to pull my legs up, then extend them again, pointing downward.
And as I did this I happened to see a pinpoint of light shining from between two daggerlike rocks atop the cliff. The light shone, then winked, came on again and, just as I hit the water, disappeared.
My feet hit water. I plunged down, but no more than five or six feet.
For a few seconds the water actually felt good. My wrists were scraped to the meat, my upper chest had been stabbed, and my nose was still a mess.
More to the point, the water cleaned away the rank smell of my own cowardice.
But then, cold. The water was about one degree away from being a big block of ice. I plowed back up to the surface.
“Oh!” Jalil said, sucking in air not two feet from me. “Oh, that’s cold.”
Christopher and April were not far away.
“Swim for shore,” I said.
“Gee, do you think?” Christopher chattered. “I was wondering if maybe we could get up a game of water polo.”
I kicked hard to push myself up for a better view. We were in some kind of narrow inlet. The black clif s rose around us on al sides. We almost could have been in some huge wel . I felt I could sense which way the open water lay, but I couldn’t see it.
The cliffs seemed to hang like curtains in every direction I looked.
I saw a boat. Instinctively I ducked. But that was stupid.
Anyone in the boat would have seen us falling. Besides, the boat seemed to be drifting.
“There’s a boat,” I said. The cold was really attacking my muscles now.
“Leonardo,” April muttered through shuddering teeth.
“What?” I said.
“Leo DiCaprio. Titanic. Drowned in the icy North Atlantic.
Cold like this.”
“I didn’t see it. Come on, let’s swim for the boat.”
“You didn’t see Titanic?” Her incredulous voice followed me as I began swimming hard for the boat.
It wasn’t far. I grabbed the gunwale and rocked the boat down so I could look inside. No one.
Some stuff tied up with rope and a couple of oars.
The boat belonged to someone. But it was my boat now.
I hauled myself up like I was doing a push-up, then twisted and squirmed until I flopped, wet and frozen, in the bottom of the boat.
I wanted to just lie there and rest, but I hauled my lead-heavy body up to my knees and helped manhandle Christopher up and over. The two of us easily yanked Jalil and April up out of the water.
Then we all just lay there, lifeless, crumpled, arms and legs splayed out, staying as we’d fallen.
We knew we should be running or at least rowing for our lives. But we’d been long since exhausted, and nothing adds to weariness like cold.
I hauled my granite-stiff body up and leaned back against the tied bundle. It was soft. I closed my eyes. I never intended to fall asleep, not there, rocking in a twenty-foot rowboat. But I was done for.
I closed my eyes on the black cliffs towering over my head.
And I opened them in World Civilizations. Last period.
“Ahhh!” I sat u
pright in my desk. My book went sliding off and hit the floor.
Chapter
XVII
“Yes, Mr. Levin?” the teacher, Mr. Arbuthnot, asked me, arching one eyebrow and peering over the top of his half-glasses. “Was that an exclamation of delight at the contributions made by Galileo?”
I grabbed my desktop. I stared at the girl sitting across the aisle from me. I was in my desk. In my desk.
I was dry. Warm. I was dressed in jeans and a baggy cotton sweater. I stared at my wrists.
Nothing! No blood, no scabs, no scars.
I slapped my hand to my chest. No stab wound.
I touched my nose. Cotton bandages. My nose was tender.
At least that was real.
“A dream?” I muttered.
Mr. Arbuthnot had lost patience. “Mr. Levin, we are rather busy studying the Italian Renaissance. Granted, only two or three of your fellow students are paying attention, but do you suppose that for their sake you could control yourself?”
This was insane. It had all been a dream? No way. Not poss—
My eyes snapped open. Open on Jalil’s annoyed face. He was smothering me, his hand clamped over my nose and mouth.
I slapped his icy fingers away. “What the hell are you doing?”
“See?” he said calmly. “No need to yell. Simply shut off the flow of oxygen and a person will wake up.”
He sat back, clutching his arms, shivering.
I blinked at him. Utter confusion. A wet April and a wet Christopher glared at me.
“How can you sleep?” April demanded, outraged.
“He has the only pillow.” Christopher pushed past me and began untying the bundle I was leaning on. But the knots wouldn’t give way to his blue-tinged fingers.
Jalil unfolded his knife, inspected the ropes and cut once. He pulled the rope away, wound it up, and stuck it into April’s backpack.
I stared, uncomprehending. I was still dealing with having been in Arbuthnot’s class. Was that a dream? Was this? Both had seemed real. Both had felt… complete.
“Clothes,” Christopher said. “Warm clothes. Here.” He tossed a dull gray wool dress to April.
“I must have dreamed,” I said. “I was back home. In class.
Last period. World Civ.”
“Yeah? Well, your dreams suck,” Christopher said. “You could have dreamed anything. You come up with World Civ? Here.”
He handed me a skin. Shaggy gray fur. Actually two, crudely stitched together. I wrapped it around myself. I found a belt and cinched it around the waist. Then realized I had the rough garment on upside down. There was no neck hole, but the skins formed vague shoulders.
And really all that mattered to me was that it was warm.
“Okay, does anyone else have a slight problem with this?”
Jalil asked. “There just happens to be a boat and no one around? There just happens to be a bunch of warm clothing that just happens to fit us?”
I rose gingerly to my feet, careful not to capsize the boat. I looked around. Bare rock wall plunged straight from the clouds down into the water and probably hundreds of feet farther down. I saw no beach. No place to get out of the water, except for a tumble of boulders where one of the rock faces had collapsed.
“If we hadn’t found the boat, we’d have frozen and died,” I said. “No way out of the water.”
“We were awfully lucky, then,” April said darkly. “Way lucky.”
“How about the way we fell?” Christopher asked. “Like slow motion. You can’t be jumping that far and survive.”
“Someone wants us alive,” April said. “And I want to thank them.”
Jalil shook his head. He was bundled in a sheepskin jacket, fur turned inward. He’d found a matching hat. I would have laughed, only I was wearing a fur coat. And to be honest, I was jealous of the hat. It looked warm.
“Before I thank them I want to know how they did it,” Jalil said. “How do you make someone fall slowly? No wires? No parachute? How do you make someone fall slowly?”
Christopher looked like he was trying to work up a snappy comeback. But instead he unwrapped a small parcel that had been with the clothing. He pulled out what looked like it might be a turkey drumstick.
“What? No cornbread dressing?” he said wonderingly.
“There’s four of these. I don’t see any maggots or mildew or anything.”
“I’m a vegetarian,” April said. “And even if I weren’t, I don’t think I’d be eating skanky old turkey legs.”
“I’d eat a live turkey about now,” Christopher said.
“Let’s get this boat moving,” I said. “Anyone know how to row? How to handle a boat?”
“What’s to know?” Christopher asked as he ripped a mouthful of meat from his drumstick.
“What’s to know,” I muttered. “Figures. I’d better row.”
I settled myself facing the stern and fitted the oars to the carved bone oarlocks. I dipped the oars and the boat began to move. It was a sluggish thing, but I felt better moving.
“We need to think about where we are, what we’re doing,”
Jalil said.
Christopher grinned over his drumstick. “Surely you know where we are? We’re up a certain well-known creek, but with a paddle.”
Jalil did not smile. April did. And she glanced at the meat, too.
“Want some?” Christopher offered a piece to Jalil.
Jalil shook his head. “No. I’m waiting to see if you die first.
Salmonella. Botulism. Poison…”
Christopher took a defiant bite.
Jalil said, “So, here’s what we have. We’ve been transported to some place that shouldn’t exist, but obviously does. We’ve run into creatures who shouldn’t exist, but obviously do. Loki, Fenrir, that snake the size of a derailed Amtrak, trolls. Not to mention Vikings. We jump and fall too slowly, just happening to land near a boat loaded with clothes for three males and one female. And while we’re at it: Why does a Norse god speak English?”
I was getting into the rowing. The familiar rhythm was reassuring. But it was causing blood to seep from the shallow puncture in my chest. Not much blood. Not enough to worry about. But it wasn’t going to heal with me rowing.
The cliff face passed by, undifferentiated, featureless. I glanced over my shoulder every so often.
Nothing visible ahead, either.
I saw April smile mischievously at Jalil. “It’s magic. It’s all magic.” She was baiting Jalil. I guess she knew something about him that I didn’t.
Jalil jumped at the bait. “Magic? You mean, what?
Something supernatural?”
The word “supernatural” was a sneer.
“Superstitious nonsense. It’s for idiots. Horoscopes, New Age baloney, magic, auras, all of it. If something exists, it’s part of nature. So the whole idea of something being ‘supernatural’ is ridiculous. I mean, by definition nature is the sum of all things that exist, so if something exists, it’s in nature.”
April grinned, satisfied at having provoked Jalil. “So what’s your explanation, Jalil? I may be wrong, but that guy back there calling himself Loki looked pretty supernatural to me.”
“No. No. see, that’s my point. I’m obviously not denying that Loki and all the rest of this is real. I’m just saying that one way or another there will be a logical, natural explanation.”
Christopher laughed. “You know, I thought all black guys in Chicago area wanted to grow up to be Michael Jordan. You want to grow up to be Mr. Tuvok.”
“Who’s Mr. Tuvok?” Jalil said coldly. “And by the way, all black guys don’t want any one thing. Oh, wait: No, we do all want not to be stereotyped by ignorant white trash.”
Christopher held up his hands, palms out, miming “no offense.” Then he said, “Hey, I basically agree with you. I believe in what I can see and touch and eat and drink and spend.
Everything else is bull.”
April nodded. “You are so right, Chris
topher. I mean, you are so right and so forceful and all that, you just get me hot. I mean, you really do, and we’re going to die anyway, so just take me now.” She scooted back toward Christopher and lowered her voice to a husky whisper. “You think I’m kidding, but I’m not. I want you here and now.”
She was just convincing enough that Christopher made a sort of move to put his arm around her. She pushed away, laughing slyly.
“Ah, so you just believe in what you can see, huh? Looks to me like you were ready to believe in a miracle.”
Christopher flushed, gaped, and then laughed. I gave him credit for that. Lots of guys can laugh at someone else.
Christopher could laugh at himself. You see a lot less of that.
I kept rowing. I was thinking about what Jalil had said. He had definite beliefs. Me, I was clueless. I just knew one thing: All of it involved Senna.
I was remembering her when we came around a sharp corner and were, very suddenly, not alone.
Chapter
XVII
The longboats wallowed at anchor, masts bare, empty.
Other ships lay beached at the bottom of the crescent-shaped harbor. They’d been pulled up onto a stingy strip of black sand.
All together there must have been thirty or forty warships and an equal number of broader-beamed cargo ships.
There was a village to our port side — left, if you’re facing the bow. I saw smoke curling up. Through the masts, over the low-slung ships, I glimpsed crude stone houses. I saw people moving back and forth, lots of people.
The black cliffs curved up and behind the village, petering down into a series of upjutting rock teeth. Trees grew behind that dragon’s spine of stone. A forest of tall, straight, dark pines rising on a gentle slope.
I noticed some sort of wall, but I couldn’t see it very well, just bits and pieces. Between the wall and the rocks was bare grass. Open space. It had probably been forest once, cut down to build the town.
“Get us out of here!” Christopher hissed. “Before they see us.”
“They’ve already seen us,” I said. I nodded toward a man standing on a nearby anchored ship. He stood with his foot on the gunwale. He was resting his hand on a longbow and watching us with a marksman’s eye. “I wonder if he’s any good with that bow.”