It just seemed wrong that anything so pretty should be destroyed. As he topped the rise, he looked back to see Napier engaged in earnest conversation with the girl.
In front of him was a small hollow. The trees had been cut back to make room for a walled enclosure. Stone pillars reached up about fifteen feet, with wooden palisades between the pillars. The corporal and the two scouts stood before a gate—not entering, just looking. Another road joined the first, just before the gate; from the wear on the ground, it looked like it was used as much as the other. Carter followed the second road back with his eyes and saw that it disappeared into a thicket of spruce, heading west. Carter sniffed the air: no smoke or any smells out of place. Some birds twittered in a nearby tree. It all seemed peaceful and safe.
Carter trotted down to join his men. The grass growing between the walls and the forest had been cut so that it was only a couple of inches high, like the lawn that Carter had played on as a child back home.
As he drew closer, he noticed that the wood forming the palisade had geometric shapes inscribed on it, and the gate itself was inlaid with a carving of an elaborate tree. Carter had specialized in Greek and Roman classics, but two classes from Professor Lundgren on Nordic languages had intrigued him enough to enable him to remember much of the content. His mind shifted gears, dusting off old information and finding fresh meaning in what his eyes saw. The geometric shapes were obviously Nordic runes. He didn’t remember what the shapes meant; his talents ran more to the auditory side of languages. The tree on the gate was obviously Yggdrasil, a giant ash called the World Tree, with a small deer at the base nibbling at its branches. This tree connected all nine worlds of Norse cosmology, from the abode of the gods in Asgard to the middle realm of Midgard where humans lived, down to Niflheim, the cold land of mists and ice, where Hel, the daughter of Loki and the giantess Angrboda, ruled.
“Shall I open it, sir?” the corporal asked. Finney had already been a sergeant twice. He was a reliable man on the battlefield, but a drunk on leave, which had cost him his rank both times.
Carter looked back and saw that his troops were approaching, maintaining their distance from each other, not clumping up like amateurs. “Second section, reconnoiter the surrounding woods,” Carter called out. “First section, follow us in.”
Finney hauled at the ring set to the side of the gate, leaning back to take the weight of what must have been a full ton of wood. He fell as the gate opened smoothly on oiled hinges. Perfectly balanced, Carter thought, as he stepped back to let the gate drift open. Good German engineering.
The wall enclosed about four acres—a garden with trimmed grass, groomed walkways of white gravel, manicured bushes, and oak and beech trees to give shade. Someone had been taking care of the place, perhaps even that morning. From the inside it was obvious that the walls formed the shape of an octagon, with eight stone towers. Stone pillars, covered with runes, some as tall as a man, were scattered about, seemingly at random, yet Carter suspected there was order to their placements. Dominating the center of the space was a giant oak tree, reaching some forty feet into the air, with a base ten feet wide, and thick branches standing firm under the weight of lush foliage.
The men scattered to explore the small buildings built against the inner walls, some of dressed stone, others of carved wood. Carter was drawn to the giant oak. He was reminded of Irminsul, meaning “great pillar” in the Old Saxon tongue, a precursor to modern German. Irminsul was a great tree that represented the connection between heaven and earth, a center of worship for the Saxons who lived in Germany in ancient times. Charlemagne, in his campaigns against the Saxons and the Danes, captured the temple and burned the tree. He intended to destroy the old pagan religions.
As he drew closer, Carter saw iron rings hanging from hooks driven into the tree about eight feet above the ground. The tree bark underneath the rings was patchy and discolored with dark splotches. In a small shrine nearby he found human skulls arranged on shelves. In a flash, it all came together. The virgins from Dachau being brought her, tied to the rings, scraping the bark off the tree with frantic motions, sacrificed, and their skulls kept as trophies, or perhaps offerings. The whole idea left him feeling sad; so much of the rage he would have liked to feel had been exhausted by the morning at the concentration camp.
A screech from a bird jerked his eyes upward. Two ravens burst from the giant tree and circled around, screaming their displeasure. The dark birds alighted on one of the stone towers and perched there, intently watching the American soldiers. A chill went through Carter as he recalled the ravens of Odin, Huginn and Muninn, meaning “Thought” and “Memory,” who traveled the world, acting as spies for the Norse god.
“Sir,” one of the soldiers called from a nearby building. “You’ve got to see this.”
Carter shook himself, making his whole body move, as if this would slough off the malaise that he felt. He trotted over to the building. It was narrow in depth, with wide doors that the soldier had pulled open. Arranged on shelves were silver bowls, steel knives, and small boxes of gold coins. The bowls were of exquisite manufacture, with runes and stylized Nordic faces embossed on them.
The soldier’s eyes gleamed. “Can we liberate some of these, sir?”
Carter allowed himself a small smile. A roundabout way to ask if looting was allowed. While Carter found looting to be unseemly, not the act of a gentleman, he knew that many of his soldiers took pilfering as their due as conquerors, as it had been for millennia.
“I recommend that you don’t,” Carter said. “This a cursed area, and these are cursed items. They will only bring bad luck. Over there, women were murdered by the Nazis as human sacrifices to pagan gods.”
The soldier’s eyes went wide as he pushed the doors closed. Carter was surprised with himself at the words that had burst out. Brought up as a Methodist and now a deist, he was not a superstitious man given to believing in rabbit-foot charms, or any of the little rituals that many of his soldiers clung to. But confronting the evidence of such raw evil made a man think in a more primitive way, of spirits and curses, of basic emotions and fundamental values.
The doors of the building held a wonderful wooden cutting of the great serpent Jormungand, who encircled all of Midgard, with his head eating his tail. Inside the serpent was a map of Europe. A great swastika showed the location of Germany. He was intrigued to find three more smaller swastikas, one in Poland, another in Austria, and still another further north in Sweden. Another great swastika, as large as the one in Germany, was located at the very top, near the North Pole. In the Holy Land, the British colony of Palestine, a cross lay broken.
Glorious music suddenly poured from the trees. Carter dropped to a crouch, looking around like a trapped animal, his carbine at the ready. He looked up at a nearby tree and saw a speaker, painted in camouflage brown, nestled in the branches. There were speakers in other trees and in recessed cavities inside the buildings. A sound expert had laid everything out so that the grove vibrated with the music. It was Wagner; Ride of the Valkyries, if he wasn’t mistaken, certainly something from the Ring Cycle. He had heard that Wagner was Hitler’s favorite composer. The Ring was based on ancient epic pagan stories, so it all made sense.
“Captain—I mean, Major,” a soldier called out. Carter had only been promoted a couple of weeks earlier, and not everyone was used to the new rank. Carter himself wasn’t used to it. Normally a captain commanded a company, so he was supposed to move up to battalion staff, but he had asked to remain with his company. The war against the Germans would only last a few more weeks at most, and he wanted to finish the war with his men; he would submit to staff work when they were transferred to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan.
Carter walked over to the soldier and was shown the interior of another of the buildings that huddled up against the temple wall. Two phonographs sat on a table, with one rotating the record on top. More
