That night I dreamed about the wooden shutters, carved with runes, that covered the windows of a mysterious room. These shutters had appeared in my dreams before. Sometime the window seemed to be in the bedroom I shared with Tor; at others, in my childhood room. This time they appeared in a totally different space, barely more than six feet on a side, with dark walls and a low beamed ceiling. I got out of a bed built directly into the wall and walked over to the shutters. When I flung them open, I saw a snowy landscape, ringed by mountains, and felt a blast of cold air. I slammed them shut and woke up shivering in our warm bedroom in California.
Tor had ended up sleeping on his back, and he was snoring so loudly that he never heard me get out of bed. I went into the living room, picked up a sketchbook, and made a loose, deliberately sloppy drawing of what I’d dreamed. I didn’t want the picture coming alive on me. In the corner I drew the runes I’d seen carved into the shutters, two on the left shutter, two more on the right. Doing the sketch brought with it an immense feeling of relief, as if I’d been holding my breath for a long time and had finally released it to pull in clean, fresh air.
I went back to bed and poked Tor until he turned over onto his side. In the relative silence, I fell asleep with no more dreams. When I woke up in a room bright with sunlight, Tor was gone, and I could smell fresh coffee. I got dressed and hurried out to find him sitting at the breakfast bar and glaring at something on his laptop’s screen.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“Nothing. I was just checking the lunar calendar I’ve got on this machine. The moon goes dark tonight. Two weeks to the next bjarki battle.”
I sighed in sympathy and kissed him good morning. I fetched myself coffee from the glass carafe and yogurt from the fridge, then sat down next to him at the breakfast bar. While I ate, I debated showing him the dream-picture I’d drawn. Secrecy is a habit that dies hard. Finally I got strict with myself and retrieved the sketchbook.
“Something I dreamed last night.” I found the right page and laid it open on the counter. “This room looks medieval to me.”
“It sure does, yeah.” Tor moved his laptop out of the way and slid the book over in front of him. “Though I don’t know, there are plenty of rooms in Europe that still look like that. Especially in Eastern Europe. These runes—where were they?”
“On the window shutters, two on each shutter. I just drew them bigger up on the corner like that.”
“Okay, first, the left pair. There’s Othala again, your patrimony.” Tor laid a finger on the rune. “Paired with Need. And then we have the pair on the right, Wunjo reversed, Elhaz reversed.” He drank some of his coffee while he studied the page. “I wouldn’t call these real good omens.”
“When I’ve dreamed about them before, they always seemed really scary. It’s why I didn’t want to open the shutters. I did, though, in this dream and looked at the view outside. Whenever this room existed, it was in the mountains, lots of snow and sharp peaks.” A thought sidled into my mind. “Like Austria or Switzerland.”
“Then it could have been any time since about 1200 up to—well, up to now, for that matter. They build them that way to save heat. The bed should have curtains or even doors to keep the drafts out.”
“It might have had them. This was just a dream.”
“Huh! There isn’t any ‘just’ with dreams like this. I’m hoping you slept in that bed more recently than 1200, though. We’ve never untangled your last life. It’s bound to be important.” He tapped the sketch with his index finger. “Especially if these runes apply to it and not something way back in your past.”
My stomach clenched around a painful truth. Again, I had to force myself to talk instead of keeping what I’d just realized secret. “It was the life before this one. I just don’t know how I know.”
“Okay, that uncertainty? It’s common when you start remembering past lives. Let’s see what we can figure out. First, the runes Othala and Naudhiz, the ones on the left shutter. You brought those with you into your last life, the mystery life. Got that?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, so the way Magda’s life ended, suicide, meant you inherited a grim Necessity, a wyrd to work through.” He frowned down at the page. “These two reversed on the right hand shutter, they indicate you were stagnating, alienated from life, and stripped of protection, vulnerable.” He shook his head. “I wish we had more runes. It’s hard to move on from these four without others.”
“It’s weird, but when I dreamed about these shutters before, there were more runes. Now it’s just this four.”
“Well, if you dream about them again, write them down, will you? It’s important.”
“Would they still apply now in this life?”
“Maybe.” He closed the sketchbook. “We need more information. We could start with Halvar.”
“Do we have to?”
“Yes. Iceland was neutral—sort of—in the Second World War. Real confused situation.” Tor paused for a sip of coffee. “Halvar was already connected to the government, just as a flunky, but connected. He sat the war out. Afterward he went traveling in Europe. I don’t have all the journals for those years, but later he talks about searching for someone. He never gives a name, but she was female. He never found her.” He quirked an eyebrow in my direction. “Were you dead by then?”
Caught off-guard I could only stammer.
“I bet you know, Maya. Think!”
I wanted to throw my coffee into his face. The feeling translated itself into an ache in my wrist and hand, as if someone had grabbed it and twisted. Someone had taken not a mug but a glass away from me before I could throw it at him. A glass of water. Someone long ago. Not Björn, not Kristjan.
I spoke in a language that my current mind couldn’t understand. I saw a fragment of a shadowy image—a good-looking man with dark hair coming through a door and snarling an order. The man who held my wrist let me go. I spoke again.
The breakfast bar and the kitchen re-appeared. Tor had set his coffee mug down and turned on his chair to look straight at me.
“What did I say?” I said. “What was that?”
“You spoke in German, a southern dialect. Not Swiss German, maybe Bavarian. Or an Austrian dialect.”
“Tor, you idiot! I don’t care about that. What did I say?”
“Sorry.” He smiled, but not his usual arrogant grin, more a nervous twitch of his mouth. “First you said, ‘Let me go! If he were here, you wouldn’t dare!’ Then you seemed to be listening to someone speak. Finally you said, ‘Otto, you’re back! Oh thank God.’” Tor smiled again, the same twitch. “Otto wasn’t or isn’t me, that’s for sure. Do you know who you meant?”
“No.” I had a gulp of hot coffee. The burn going down jarred me out of the strange trance state. “I saw someone, this Otto, come into the room where this other guy was harassing me. When he saw Otto, he let me go.”
“No memory of when or where?”
“No. They both wore military uniforms. Black ones.” I shut my eyes and got a brief, hazy impression. “With silver trim.”
“Shit! I was afraid of that.”
“Of what?”
“The SS.”
I set the coffee down before I spilled it. I’m no history buff, but I knew what that meant. Nazis. The worst kind of Nazis.
“What did he look like?” Tor said.
“Tall. Dark hair, real dark, slicked back. And a gaunt face. The uniform looked a little too big for him.” I hesitated, waited, felt a memory starting to rise. “He had something to do with runecraft.”
“He was young or old?”
“Youngish. Maybe thirty-something?”
“Not Wiligut, then, and thank Tyr for that! Huh. What about the Grail legends?”
The memory rose in a burst of the language I could no longer remember.
Yes,” I said. “That was important, the Grail.”
“Otto Rahn. Does that name mean anything to you?”
Knowledge hit me like a sl
ap to the soul, as Liv had put it. I nodded. “That’s the name of the guy I saw.”
“He was part of Himmler’s special SS unit, the one that worked with occult theories. The Ahnenerbe, they called it. Rahn had written a book about the Grail, and Himmler wanted him on the team.”
“Like that movie?”
“No, nothing like that stupid movie, if you mean the Indiana Jones one.” Tor’s usual arrogance came back in force. “Billy and JJ dragged me to it when it came out. Bunch of shit! No, Rahn was a medievalist, a scholar who made the mistake of playing with the big boys, Himmler and his crew. Though I don’t suppose he had any choice when they recruited him.”
“I don’t think you could say no to the SS.”
“Not if you valued your life. Rahn was part of that outfit until—I think it was ’39—he died. Officially he was killed in a mountaineering accident. It’s more likely he committed suicide because he was gay, and Himmler found out. Rahn knew mountains. He wouldn’t have made a fatal mistake, not where they found him, practically on a bunny slope. It was in the Tyrol somewhere.”
“I guess that fits, if what I saw is real.” In my mind I saw the view from the window again, a rounded hill with a long snowy slope, gently rising between dark banks of forest to either side. Behind it rose the high mountains.
“If, yeah. I’m betting it is because it came to you spontaneously.” Tor frowned. “And because of the language you heard. And every time the Nazis have come up, you’ve freaked.”
I realized that I was trying to keep secrets from myself, not him. Don’t lie! I told myself. You know it’s real. “I remember getting upset,” I said. “I guess it is a lead.”
“This is worth pursuing. I want to go downstairs and get a history book my father had. Can you draw me a portrait of Otto Rahn? While I’m not in the room.”
I started to snarl and say no, of course I couldn’t draw someone I’d never seen, but his image appeared in my inner vision—no, he appeared, whole and alive, in a lot of different memories, as if I were looking at a video montage.
“Okay.” I picked up the sketchbook. “I’ll try.”
And so I took my sketchbook into the living room, sat down on the couch, and drew what some people would call a ‘spirit portrait’ of a man who’d been dead for seventy years. I worked in Conté, mostly black and grey, just a touch of burnt sienna here and there. Memories rose with every stroke I laid in. I refused to draw him in uniform—he’d hated wearing it, there at the end—and put him instead in a soft shirt, open at the throat, because he hated stiff collars and ties, too. As I drew I remembered other things, that I’d loved him but hopelessly because I knew he preferred men. He told me though that he loved me in his own way. I could be his lady, like in the days of the troubadours that meant so much to him, and he’d be my knight. I clung to that fantasy for years. I’d thought he was just being nice to a woman he considered little more than a child, but in the end, he showed me how true it was.
When I finished the drawing, I signed it.
I tossed the Conté stick back in the box and woke up. It felt like waking, anyway, when the trance broke and the images drained away from my mind. I realized that Tor, with a book in his hand, had been standing and watching me for some minutes. He sat down next to me and opened the book to the page he’d marked with a slip of paper. When he put it down on the table, I saw a photograph of Otto Rahn. Tor took the sketchbook from my exhausted hands and laid it down beside the book. The history book’s text was in German, but I didn’t need the caption. The same man looked out from both pictures.
“Evidence,” Tor said. “Can you remember more about him?”
I didn’t want to tell Tor how much I’d loved another man, even if it was in another life and a long time before. “How much he hated being in uniform,” I said. “I must have known him pretty well. He was supposed to be a civilian adjunct or something, but they made him join the SS, and then he had to wear the uniform.”
“That’s what this particular book says.” Tor was frowning at the open volume. “But we can’t trust everything in it. It’s one of those lurid histories, the kind that believe the whole Nazi movement was crazy for the occult. It wasn’t.”
I knew that, too, from somewhere or some time. “You told me that they perverted the runes,” I said. “They put the swastika on everything, didn’t they? Sowilo doubled.”
“That was propaganda, playing on a lot of older sentiments. The folk tradition, the völkisch sentimental crap. They exploited that and the dangerous themes, too. Pure Aryan blood and past Germanic glory and shit like that.” He leaned forward and glanced at the portrait. “Huh—Mia? You signed the picture Mia.”
“I did?” I leaned forward and checked the name at the bottom of the page. “Whoa, that’s a surprise!”
“That must have been your name then. It’s a nickname for Maria.”
“Maria sounds right. When I was looking out the window in the dream, I saw mountains, Alps, but they weren’t the famous Swiss ones. No Matterhorn, nothing like that.”
“Maybe Austria, then. Your childhood home?”
I shook my head no. “A ski hostel of some kind. I honestly don’t know more’n that.”
“Past life memories can be bitches, yeah. You get broken pictures, pieces of conversation, a couple of bars of music, sometimes. Hard names and dates, no, they don’t cough those up easily.” Tor was flipping through the pages of the history book while he talked. “There’s something more in here, if I can find it, about Rahn and—yeah! Here!” He looked up. “The SS sent Rahn to Iceland in 1936. An archeological expedition, they called it, and his part of it might have been just that. I wonder—some high-ranking men came with him, probably to negotiate with the government while he went around researching pure Aryan culture crap.”
Tor returned to reading. In a minute he made an odd snorting sound and looked up.
“What?” I said.
“Rahn bought some Dark Age Icelandic gold objects for the German government while he was there, runic artifacts, this book calls them. I wonder if some of my family’s treasures were part of the buy? The ones that Halvar’s father dug up on the farm. He’d sold some of the pieces to Germans for a really high price.”
“Halvar was how old in ‘36?”
“Sixteen, maybe seventeen, old enough to have written something about it in his journal.” Tor considered for a moment. “I think I’ve got some journals from the ‘30s. I’m not sure. It would be interesting if he’d met Rahn.”
Interesting. Does a fly find it interesting when it feels the spider’s strands wrapping around it, holding it tight and hopeless in the web? One of the strands around me: a memory of drawing a precise, careful record in pen and ink of two gold rings, each with a square bezel that had lost its stone. Around each band ran a line of runes. I was working at a wooden drafting table in some kind of office. I could hear voices murmuring behind me in a language that sounded like German and the clack of a mechanical typewriter like the ones in the old movies.
“Maya!” Tor shut the book with a snap. “What is it?”
I came back, woke up, whatever you want to call it, at the sound of his voice.
“I was hired by the SS as a civilian worker,” I said, “and I drew the stuff Rahn brought back. Photographs weren’t clear enough to really show every detail of an artifact in a scientific way. I guess they’re still not. I’m willing to bet that some of that stuff came from your grandfather—or your great-grandfather, I mean. Everything’s all tied up together. I feel like I’m caught in a net.”
“I can see why, but nets are meant to be unraveled. You’ve got me to pull it apart, don’t forget.”
“As long as you don’t pull me apart, too.”
Tor tossed the book onto the table. He caught my hands in his and moved close to kiss me.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know these things take time.”
I took another kiss and clung to him, my solid, real, present-day lover, the man I was
going to marry. The past is dead, I told myself. What happened then doesn’t matter. Even Otto—Audo was my pet name for him, the way he’d called me Mia—even Audo doesn’t matter anymore. This time I knew I was telling myself the truth.
What did matter was what I’d learned. I began to understand what Tor meant about the value of knowing your past lives. Would I ever have fallen so hard for a gay man, an intellectual lost in his dreams of extreme religious heresies, if he hadn’t been the opposite of the brutal hunter, Björn? I doubted it. My dim memories of being Mia told me she’d been no fool, even though she’d acted like one.
The importance of those memories lay elsewhere. Where? I needed to find out. Something painful lay behind those memories, like poison locked up in a coffer. The man I’d loved in that life would give me the key, if only I could find the lock.
Chapter 7
That Sunday the Raiders played a home game. Tor and his buddies had tickets to the Black Hole section of the stadium, down close to the field behind one of the end zones. Although Tor offered to take me, I turned him down. Now that I no longer needed to bump into strangers to steal élan, I could avoid the noise, the awful restrooms, and the crowds.
“It can get dangerous for a girl,” I said to Tor. “Especially with guys like you there.”
He laughed at me. The game made me see a whole new side of Tor. While he waited for Billy to come pick him up, he dressed in black jeans, black Raiders tee shirt, and silvery-gray Raiders baseball cap. He even painted his face silver with black stripes across his cheekbones.
“I won’t kiss you goodbye,” he said. “It’d spoil my make-up.”
I had to laugh at that, and he grinned through the face paint. When Billy drove up, he stopped his Land Rover at the curb and honked the horn. Tor grabbed his Raiders’ hoodie and ran down the stairs like a teen-ager. I waved from the window.
I had a standing invitation at Jim and Cynthia’s to come watch the games on their enormous TV, since Tor refused to have a television in his house. Now that I’d decided to get serious about researching my past, I called them to beg off. I spread my drawing tools and sketchbooks out on the coffee table and started with my memory of the office and the drawing table.