‘So, remind me, what are we doing here?’ A squint at the sun, head at angle, casual grip on his gun. Jack O’Neill. Behind him, a frustrated glance exchanged. Samantha Carter and Daniel Jackson, world weary. Teal’c, eyes surveying carefully, posture as solid as ever and one hand gripping his staff weapon. The eternal sentinel.
‘Well, this is P3X 009 and when SG4 visited here they reported finding a building containing inscriptions. Their description suggested that it might be similar to the runic script we found on Cimmeria.’ They we walking away from the gate, fanning out slightly, but keeping within hearing distance of Daniel, who gesticulated haphazardly along. The ground was undulating; the heather combing their legs as they pushed away from the platform. O’Neill scowled at his boots as peaty water oozed around them.
‘Did they say the bog men live here?’
‘Well actually, they didn’t meet any locals, we’re looking for ruins.’
‘Right, well I wouldn’t live in this bog either. Shall we walk on the higher ground?’ O’Neill struck out to the left.
‘Actually,’ said Carter, turning to follow him, ‘there’s no reason to assume the planet’s uninhabited. SG4 were on a strictly recon mission and they didn’t exactly get far from the gate.’
‘Those your ruins, Daniel?’ Daniel scrambled up the rise after O’Neill, wiping his peaty hands on his trousers. He followed the direction of O’Neill’s arm with his eyes and saw the grey concentric circular walls, the great slabs of rock lying beyond them, great markers of lost ways, and, in the centre, one tall, circular, funnel of a building. A grin of excitement crossed his face.
‘Doesn’t look much to me…’ O’Neill offered, but Daniel cut him off,
‘It looks like a broch’. The other three waited for him to continue as Daniel took off his glasses, cleaned them vigorously. ‘You know I think it is. I didn’t quite believe SG4’s description, but… Brochs were built in the Iron Age in Scotland, er, actually over quite a long period of time. Because the Picts, that’s the inhabitants of Scotland at that time, weren’t conquered by the Romans, they kind of maintained their old way of doing things right through to the 1st millennium AD. Brochs are structures synonymous with the social system of the time, small clans with strong centralisation around a laird living in a broch or a crannog.’
‘Crannog?’
‘Settlement built out on a loch, on stilts, or an artificial island. I visited an excavation of one back in..’
‘Nice. Let’s go take a look, shall we?’ O’Neill strode off, followed by Teal’c, while Carter listened to Daniel’s explanations as they made a slower descent towards the ruins. Half way toward it, O’Neill turned,
‘These Picts got anything to do with Thor?’
‘Well, that’s an interesting question. The Vikings did go to northern and western Scotland, particularly Orkney and they did influence and interact with Pictish culture of the time, but that was in the 10th century mostly.’
‘Cos Thor is why we’re here, right?’
‘So you were listening in the briefing’
‘Oh come on Daniel, you were talking, we were sleeping, but even I caught the word Thor.’
‘When I read SG4’s report’ Daniel trotted down the last piece of slope. ‘I was intrigued, they thought the inscriptions were possibly runic and you remember the rune stones on Cimmeria?’
‘On Thor’s hammer?’ Carter offered.
‘Yeah, well that’s a Swedish style of sculpture, but what SG4 described sounded more like the picture stones of Gotland.’ O’Neill was moving away again, so Daniel raised his voice. ‘And those picture stones don’t really concentrate on Thor, so much as on Odin.’ O’Neill turned and looked at Daniel, as was expected. ‘And Odin really was the leader of the Asgard, the Viking pantheon of gods. He was a warrior, a smith and he could change into animals. He’s strongly associated with the raven.’
‘I do not know this animal’ said Teal’c
‘It’s a bird, a corvid, found wild on moorland in Europe.’ Carter explained
‘Big, black and croaky,’ O’Neill added
‘We need to learn everything we can about Thor and the Asgard, if we want to make an alliance with him. And you’ve got to admit this is interesting’ Daniel had dropped down to examine one of the large slabs marking a way toward the broch. ‘Especially, if Odin’s involved too.’
‘Sir, didn’t Thor say that he was commander of the Asgard fleet?’ Carter looked at O’Neill.
‘Well, yeah, that’s what he ... his hologram said to me’
‘So where does that leave Odin?’ Carter asked. Daniel looked up at her, smiling,
‘Good question.’ He replied
‘O'Neill, these are wolf prints’. Teal’c had squatted down next to Daniel, but now he was looking away to the group of conifers in the distance. O’Neill glanced around, saw Carter doing the same, both suddenly less casual about their rifles. Their survey revealed only moor, marsh and woodland. Daniel seemed not to have heard and had moved onto the next stone. He scrabbled at the reedy stems growing around it.
‘It’s inscribed, it’s a picture stone.’ His hand flew to his pocket to withdraw a notebook, but then instantly changed his mind and reached to remove his pack. O’Neill found himself smiling,
‘Happy Christmas, Daniel.’ As the doctor pulled out his video recorder, he added, ‘Carter, you stay with Daniel, make an estimate of how much there is to see’ he glanced resignedly at the numerous slabs around the broch ‘and how long it will take you look at it. Teal’c and I will go scout around, ok?’ Sam watched them go, then looked first to the sky, which was beginning to cloud over, and then once more at the woods. It was wild country, no doubting that, but it felt good on the skin and now that they weren’t squelching through tough peat, Sam suddenly felt exhilarated by the smell of the earth and the wind. There was an honest smile of appreciation on her face as she turned back to Daniel.
‘This is fascinating, isn’t it’ he said, grinning back at her. She picked her way around the broch, pausing now and then to look at the slabs. Some were inscribed, but most weren’t. The broch itself was dug out of the ground, with a grey outer wall and the funnel tower in the centre. In between, these two walls were the foundations of small individual rooms packed against one another and the outer walls. It was easy to understand them as lean-to cells and Sam skirted around them, following the narrow ways between, for once fully appreciating Daniel’s interest. There were no inscribed stones within this outer circuit, however, and she reached for her torch as she ducked through the very low, square entrance to the funnelled building. She stood and met a second wall, as tall as the outer one and not more than a foot within it. She hastily backed out.
‘Daniel, I’m just going in here, ok?’ she called, her voice dropping as he rose from behind a slab a few yards away, but he sounded distant as he replied
‘Ok, no problem.’
‘Anything interesting?’
‘Um, I’m not sure’ He scratched his head with his pencil, pushing back his floppy hair. Sam watched his perplexed head disappear again and ducked back into the broch tower. There was no need for her torch as even with the narrowing of the walls, light came in from above. No rain would though, she thought, as she edged around the space between the outer and inner wall, at least unless it was coming at an angle. She smiled, thinking of the wind outside: strong, but somehow gentle when compared to the landscape. She thought it could be a lot more fitting to the moorland expanse than it was today. Today it was playing, like the fitful sunshine. The way in through the inner wall appeared when she reached the opposite side to the entrance. It was hardly a staircase, but more like a set of diagonal footholds which ran up the wall to a dip at the top. She pulled her rifle over her head as well as her shoulder, made sure it was secure on her back. It was easy to haul herself up the steps and at the top she sat astride the thick wall, feeling the little breeze, which reached in ruffling her hair, and staring up at the circle of sky above the framing of the taller, outer wall. Sam felt the strangeness of the place in the stonework, or rather felt her strangeness to it, her removal.
Inside there were proper steps leading down, there would have to be, considering how the wall was built to taper in. The inner space was no more than twenty feet in diameter, scattered with thin slabs of rock that Sam was tempted to reconstruct as chairs, large chairs. And there were tall thin pillars, four of them, each inscribed as the stones outside with myriad hunt scenes, strange animals and men with distorted limbs. There was runic script running vertically up the edges and, was that a raven? She moved closer, fingers keen to trace what her eyes had identified. A raven, above a mounted man on an eight-legged horse. She glanced at the pillar opposite. It held a similar motif, although without the bird. In between these two pillars was the largest rough stone ‘chair’, and its back, a jagged slate resting against the wall bore the picture again and in this case, the raven’s head, she saw, emerged from the back of the warriors head, where a queue of hair might have been.
‘Daniel?’ She knew he wouldn’t hear and even as she hastily turned back to the staircase she saw other things her eyes had missed, cubby holes high up in the walls and down below, what looked almost like ways in. Well, the wall was thick enough for it, she thought as she straddled the top once more before scrambling down the other side. She doubted the Colonel was going to like it, but she knew they’d have to stay here, at least for a while.
-
In fact, dislike it as he might, O’Neill brought further news which ensured that they set up camp, for he and Teal’c had found a loch and on it, a ruined crannog. Two days later, he was growing increasingly bored watching and hindering as Teal’c and Carter helped Daniel with his work. Daniel would talk enthusiastically about it all given the slightest provocation, and, interested though O’Neill was in the Asgard and the prospects they might bring, should SG1 ever find them, he would wave a dismissive hand and grumpily find some other task for himself. There was always firewood to gather, since at night the wolf prints prayed more greatly on their minds and a fire seemed justified when the landscape seemed so abandoned. That said, the only moment of excitement created by anything other than inscribed stone was when Teal’c spotted what might have been a craft at the far loch’s end. With this in mind, on the third day, O’Neill called Teal’c away and the pair set off down the lochside to discover what was to be seen beyond the conifers that reached down to the shores there.
-
The day was fairer than any of those previous. The wind no more than a dancing skate across the loch’s reflective surface and the lightness touched Sam and Daniel’s spirits as they worked among the crannog ruins. There were no inscriptions here, that they’d found, but the complex was nothing like that which Daniel had expected. The ruins started on the shore, a group of round buildings, some with walls still standing several feet, and stretched out into the loch, where small islands reached, slimy and guanoed, out of the dark water. The islands held walls and slabs, all ruined, and were connected by what seemed like widely spread stepping stones – platforms for wooden plankways that had been removed, or rotted away. As the sun rose higher, they finished their work on the shore and, jacket discarded, Daniel eagerly began to attempt the stepping stones. The spaces between them were too wide to reach without making an all-out jump and, on his third attempt, he missed his footing entirely and crashed from the rock into the loch. Sam, who had been readying to follow, hastily dropped jacket, rifle in a heap and rushed forward to pull him out.
-
Their laughter drifted across the water. Magpie, who had grown confident as she recognised the stranger’s preoccupation, peered out from behind a ruined wall and watched the woman brush off her sopping companion and replace his glasses. Voices, and then another burst of laughter. Magpie felt herself smile too, drawn to their easiness, as she had been to their fire the night before. She quickly scrambled the distance between this wall to the next, the nearest to the water’s edge. She felt a tinge of excitement in being so close, knew it for risk and kept her head down for several minutes. When she looked up again, the pair were returning to their efforts to get out to the first island. The woman jumping between rocks, the man wading, black shirt stripped off and held above his head. Once they reached it, they began an investigation as earnest as that which Magpie had witnessed earlier in the day. Magpie gave a small smile, seeing her chance, and grabbed it. A dart from cover, a snatch, and back into the walls. Pleased with her catch she pulled on the black sleeveless jacket, examining the strange pockets which stuck shut again after being pulled open. She carefully assessed the contents of each of these pockets, most of which were a mystery to her, carefully replacing each item. The belt had a knife, a very sharp knife, and this excited Magpie a lot more. She spent several minutes balancing this first in one hand, then the other, before replacing it in its sheath. The belt was too big for her, even at its narrowest setting, so instead she slung it over one shoulder. The rifle was heavy and cold and Magpie instinctively disliked it, but uncertain of the worth of this and the handguns, she carefully hung her body with these too. She wrapped the green jackets into a bundle and tucked it under one thin arm. She was delighted with the haul, and her eyes moved up the slope to the higher ground where the strangers had their camp, unguarded.
As she rose to go, she saw a flash of light; the sun reflecting off Daniel’s glasses. They were further out on the loch and progressing toward the outmost of the islands. Magpie wondered what they could be about. Not fishing the way they disturbed the whole valley with their cries and blunders. But Magpie sunk back down and watched. The sun reached its zenith and began to descend and still the pair explored the loch ruins, and Magpie watched. At around noon, the woman had fallen in too; their voices had carried over the water as they sat basking afterwards, faces turned up to the sun. Magpie recognised their relaxed contentedness and also their curiosity and found her own curiosity aroused. She watched the way they worked together, hearing the strains of their banter, if not their meaning. They disturbed a cormorant on the one of the islands, Magpie wondered why it had not taken flight before and watched it power away from the loch. She knew it was time for her to leave as well. Reluctantly she crept, heavily laden, through the ruins and up to the camp. There was little here worth taking, few possessions and Magpie already felt like a tree hung about with creepers. She turned away and disappeared back into the conifers from which she had come.
-
The light was going and, very suddenly, Sam felt how cold she had become. Daniel did not feel it, his passion kept him warm so that even now he was happily standing knee deep in the water the better to survey the assemblage of white splattered slates. She felt herself begin to shiver and thought of the shore, and the fire. They had stayed at it too long and her creeping sense of irritation led her to call shortly to Daniel and to make for the shore. There, the creep turned into something else, an internalisation of sinking cold. Their jackets and guns were gone, some scuffled footprints added to their footprints on the fine shingle where they had left them. The footprints disappeared on the wiry grass and the growing shadows of the ruins created a sense of eeriness that had not lingered before. For a few minutes, while they searched the area, they did not speak. Eventually, Daniel came to her, teeth chattering. She had been scanning the edge of the conifers, the shadows in the undulating moor, but the dusk light made the grey areas difficult to focus upon. Now she focused more easily on Daniel, who suddenly awake to the situation, looked as through he had been torn from a dream.
‘Come on, let’s go make a fire to dry out’
‘But...’
‘There’s nothing we can do’ she glanced around even as she said it. ‘We may as well get out of these wet clothes’ They began to climb the slope.
‘Should we make a fire?’ His voice sounded small, doubtful.
‘I think it’ll be alright, we should get it going. After all, Teal’c and the Colonel will be back soon.’
The tents had been flattened. The way the canvas moved in the wind it was clear that it had been ripped. The ashes from the fire had been kicked over the debris of their sleeping kit.
‘Sam?’ They had instinctively turned back to back, eyes scanning the darkening horizon, at least to the west there was still some light, but elsewhere the shadows were long, the silence pregnant. They both inwardly cursed their stupidity, Daniel reaching for his knife, the only weapon they hadn’t left on the shore.
‘So, maybe best not to light the fire.’ Her response was little above a whisper.
‘You’re shaking.’
‘It’s cold.’
Daniel plucked at his damp shirt, he was frozen too. ‘I feel naked.’ She turned her face towards him, questioning, the smallest quirk of amusement playing on her lips. ‘Well, you know, exposed.’ He added.
‘Colonel O’Neill and Teal’c will find us if we stay here, but lets move a little.’ They moved warily away from the camp. Sam was torn between seeking a hollow in which to hide and a high point from which to keep watch.
‘Do you think wolves…?’
Sam shook her head. ‘Our guns.’ He nodded and they continued up the slope in silence. The movement generated a little warmth and Sam had decided that, considering their position was clearly already known, it would be more useful to try and see the enemy, than to hide from it. Later, she wondered that she did not contemplate hiding in the broch. Not that it would have made any difference if they had.
For this was where the men were waiting for them. They did not pass close to the ruins, but rather steered around them and once they had moved on enough for the emergence to go unnoticed, the men spilt out. There was almost no fight. Both heard the running feet before the men reached them, both turned, Daniel fumbling with his knife. They moved forwards, rather than running, but a little courage and a single blade was nothing to the opposition, whose many bodies quickly surrounded them and brought a swift conclusion in the dim light.
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