Studying Her Vikings Read online

  "T. T. A.," she said as she wrote the letters on the board. "Time Travel Academy. The only school in the world where you can travel into the past as part of your studies."

  She turned to us and smiled. "And you've all made it here. Lovely. Welcome to the Academy. Being selected means that you're some of the brightest and most talented young people. Thousands apply to us each year, and we only take thirty at the most. This year, we have twenty-eight."

  I quickly looked around the room. I'd soon get to know everyone here. These were going to be the people I'd spend all my time with. Living at a school was strange. Back when I was in high school, there was a clear separation between school and personal life. Here, it was all muddled up. As Sue had said, there wasn't going to be any privacy. Twenty-four hours surrounded by the same people. For an introvert like me, this wasn't going to be easy. I'd spent the last two years with my mother, rarely seeing other people besides shopkeepers, doctors and the occasional friend of my mum's. I'd got used to being on my own.

  "Three of you managed to be admitted to the fast- track programme," Professor Tape continued. "Raise your hands, please."

  Kaycee immediately waved her arm, desperate for attention. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes and lifted my own hand.

  "The three of you will share some of your classes with the rest of the Hummingbirds, but you'll also have some more intense tuition to prepare you for your first jumps through time."

  "Hummingbirds, Professor?" A boy at the back asked.

  "Has nobody explained this yet? First-year students are called Hummingbirds, then you become Nightingales, then Seagulls and finally Eagles. Four years of study await you. By the end, maybe ten of you will remain." Her voice turned serious. "This Academy values talent, but we don't tolerate bad and irresponsible behaviour. If you misbehave or fail at your studies, you will be expelled, no matter how talented you are." She turned to our small trio of fast-trackers. "That goes for the three of you, too."

  One of the four teachers took a stack of papers from the desk and began to hand them out.

  Rules of the Time Travel Academy.

  1. You may not leave the Academy premises without permission.

  2. Everything that happens at the Academy is confidential. You may not talk about TTA business to outsiders.

  3. No contact with family members until you graduate from the Academy. This includes electronic communication.

  4. We operate a strict hierarchy. Students in higher years have authority over students in lower years. Teachers have the absolute authority, only superseded by the headteacher and official time agents.

  5. Graduating from the Academy does not guarantee a job as a time agent.

  6. Time travel is dangerous. We take no responsibility for injuries or fatalities resulting from reckless behaviour.

  7. No unsupervised time travel. No use of equipment without a teacher present.

  8. For additional rules, please refer to the Time Travel Regulations and the Student Behaviour Manual.

  I swallowed hard. The truth of it all was beginning to sink in. This was real. This was happening. I smiled. I was ready for it.

  "Over the next few years, you will study a variety of subjects," Professor Tape continued once she'd made sure that we'd all read the rules. "While the Hummingbird is very generic and targeted to prepare you for time travel in general, the following years focus very much on the time periods you will be visiting. At the end of this year, you will undergo a series of tests that will determine how far back in the past you will be allowed to travel. This decision will be final. If you're caught travelling further back than what your certification allows, you will be expelled from the Academy. In your second year, you will study mostly history and foreign languages to prepare for your first assignments. To become a Seagull, you will have to successfully undergo your first unsupervised time travel."

  My heart began to beat faster at the prospect. This couldn't come soon enough. I wanted to learn all about it, how to travel, how to integrate with past cultures, how it would all help our present society.

  "In your third year, you will study psychology, the art of seduction and a range of techniques that will help you survive in the past."

  "Art of seduction?" Kaycee whispered behind me. "I don't need to learn that. I've been pulling guys since I grew boobs."

  I suppressed a snicker.

  "Your Eagle year will be mostly self-study," the headmistress continued. "You will work on your own independent projects and will be assigned a tutor each who will guide and advise you. Depending on how well you perform throughout that final year, you will be offered a position as a time agent, as staff here at TTA or another job."

  Another job? What was that going to be? The Academy was all about preparing us for time travel. I doubted I would be able to be happy with a mundane office job after four years of study. I steeled my jaw. I was going to succeed. I was going to put everything I had into my studies. Time travel couldn't be all that hard, could it?

  BY THE END OF THE INTRODUCTORY session, my confidence had crumbled away. We'd been given even more rules, even more warnings, and several stories of how students had been expelled for minor mistakes. I knew they were trying to scare us into behaving well, but their tactic was working. The knot in my stomach was growing. It felt like they were heaping pressure on us, more and more until only some of us were able to withstand it. Weeding out the people cut out for this job. I had thought getting into the Academy was hard. Now it turned out that staying here was going to be a whole lot harder.

  ᚴᛅᛒᛁᛏᚢᛚᛁ 4

  Being in a large classroom all by ourselves was strange. Maryam and Kaycee were sitting on either side of me, in the second row, which seemed better than sitting right at the front. Hjalmar was running late. Was I even going to be able to call him that? Or did we have to call him Mister something? Professor Murderer?

  I glanced at my TTA branded notebook. We'd each been given a bag full of stationary at the end of the intro session, and told that we could get more supplies at the student support office. Not that I knew where that was yet. We had a map, but no time to actually explore. I took it out and studied it for the tenth time. The building was four floors tall, with the top floor reserved for teachers and staff. The ground floor had the dining hall, a big kitchen, some unspecified offices as well as rooms labelled 'training'. On the first floor were our dorms and bedroom, the common rooms, bathrooms and a couple of storage rooms. The second floor was where we were now. Classrooms, labs, a lecture theatre, and the library.

  Something was bothering me about the map, but I couldn't figure out what it was. I ran a finger over the entrance hall where we'd arrived yesterday. It was adjacent to the dining hall and surrounded by several training rooms, plus the staircase leading to the first floor. Just a normal room. Nothing special, except for its size.

  "Something wrong?"

  Hjalmar's voice made me sit up straight. I'd not noticed him enter the room, let alone see him approach our table.

  I shook my head. "Just getting familiar with the map."

  He stared at me, his lips twitching. "Noticed something strange?"

  I looked up at him in surprise and his smirk widened into a grin. "I'm not sure," I muttered, annoyed that I hadn't figured it out yet. "But something is off."

  Hjalmar nodded. "Indeed. Let me know when you realise the truth. Most people get a little anxious when they do."

  "What are you talking about?" Kaycee demanded. "It's just a map."

  The teacher turned to her and looked at fire-hair girl from top to bottom. “Yes, it’s just a map.”

  He stepped back and sat down on his desk, his legs casually spread. My eyes were almost automatically drawn to his crotch, before I quickly looked back up, taking in the rest of him. In contrast to the teachers earlier, he wasn’t wearing the white TTA uniform. He was in tight black leather trousers and a red plaid shirt that was unbuttoned one button too far down to be professional. Some blond chest hair was p
eeking through, making me wonder how the rest of his chest looked like. From the way his shirt was stretched in places, I imagined him to be muscular beneath his clothes. Hard, defined muscles.

  No, I had to stop thinking like that. He was my teacher. We were all adults here, but there was a distinct line between students and teachers that shouldn’t be crossed. No matter how good-looking the teacher was. No matter how much his smirk provoked me. He knew exactly what I was thinking, and he enjoyed teasing me. His eyes were locked with mine, completely ignoring that there were two other people in the room. The longer I looked into his eyes, the brighter their beautiful blue shimmer seemed. I could get lost in those eyes...

  Maryam cleared her throat and the spell was broken. My cheeks heated when I realised that I had blatantly been checking out my teacher. I now wished I’d sat somewhere else at dinner last night. This wasn’t going to end well. I had to stay away from him before I turned into a lovesick teenager with a crush on a sexy teacher.

  “I’m here to teach you the way of the Vikings,” Hjalmar said, pointing at a poster near the door. It was covered in runes. “That includes Old Norse and the Futhark.”

  Kaycee raised her hand. “Why do we need to speak their language? Don’t we get one of those translator implants that does it for you?”

  Hjalmar frowned at her. “What happens if the implant breaks? What will you do when you’re stranded in the past, unable to communicate with the people you’re staying with? They will turn against you, they’ll see you as an enemy, or an evil spirit if you’re particularly unlucky. Besides, a language teaches you a lot about a culture. In Old Norse, the word for sword is sverð, but if you were feeling poetic, you could also call it a war-leek or a wound-hoe.”

  He turned to the blackboard and wrote down several words that looked like gibberish to me.

  sterkr bani hvess viðar — the strong killer of every tree

  bǫl markar — the harm of the forest

  húsþjófr — the house-thief

  aldrnari — life-nourisher

  “All these phrases can be expressed in a single word. Can anyone guess what it is?”

  I read through the list several times, but before I could tell Hjalmar my answer, Kaycee let out a dramatic sigh. “Does that mean we don’t just have to learn the normal words, but also these poetic expressions?”

  The teacher grinned. “Yes, and the runes to spell them, obviously. You’re not going to start speaking Old Norse overnight. You do, however, have the advantage that I may be able to take you on field trips to let you hear the language being spoken by other native speakers.”

  “Other?” I blurted before I could stop myself.

  He ignored me, which only made my mind spin faster. Old Norse wasn’t spoken nowadays, it hadn’t been for centuries. That meant... my teacher was a Viking. Fuck me.

  “An axe?” Maryam suggested, reminding me of the riddle.

  “Fire,” I said quickly, before going back to opening my mind to the prospect of having a real-life Viking in the room with me. And we hadn’t even travelled in time.

  “Can’t we just call it fire?” Kaycee moaned, oblivious to the big revelation. “I don’t get why we need to make it so complicated.”

  Hjalmar frowned at her. “You can call it fire, but what if a Norseman talks to you about the sacred life-nourisher and you don’t know what he means? It could get you in trouble, and trouble is what you want to avoid during time travel.”

  Maryam lifted her hand. “Were all those fire expressions used during the same period or did they develop over time? I’m just thinking, what if we call it the house-thief and they don’t actually use that expression yet? What if they then add it to their vocabulary? Wouldn’t that be bad? Create a paradox?”

  Hjalmar gave her a smile. “Very good. That’s why we stick to using basic vocabulary ourselves and leave the flowery phrases to the natives. The main thing is that you understand them. But before you can learn Old Norse, you need to know the Futhark.”

  He got up from the desk and walked to the poster he’d pointed at before. “The Futhark is the runic alphabet. Why do we call our alphabet the ABC?”

  “Because it starts with A, B and C,” I said.

  “Exactly, and that’s why the rune alphabet is called the Futhark. It starts with F, U, and so on. I would love to tell you that there’s only one alphabet you need to learn, but sadly, there’s the Elder, the Younger and a couple of other Futharks.”

  Kaycee sighed. “I wish I were in the standard class,” she whispered. “I’d be happy to travel to the 1920s where everyone speaks English.”

  Maryam snickered and rolled her eyes. “Only if you’re sent to an English-speaking country.”

  Hjalmar walked over and towered over Kaycee, staring her down. “Nothing is forcing you to be at the Academy,” he said coldly. “You’re free to leave if you’re not interested.”

  A blush spread on her freckle-covered cheeks and she bowed her head and began to copy the Futhark alphabet into her notebook. I suppressed a grin, but couldn’t help but smile when Hjalmar winked at me.

  For the rest of the lesson, we learned about the runes that made up the Elder Futhark. Some of them were surprisingly similar to our own alphabet, others were deceiving and looked like one letter but meant another. X was actually a G and M was E. This was going to take a while to learn without getting confused.

  “You’ll be pleased to know that the basic Old Norse vocabulary isn’t actually all that large. If you know the two-hundred-forty-six most frequent words, you’ll understand eighty per cent of the sagas. Which is why I want you to know these words by next week.”

  Kaycee sighed, but she stayed quiet this time. She wasn’t the only one depressed by this amount of homework. We’d only had one lesson so far and already, I was dreading my evening study periods. One week meant I had to learn thirty-five words a day, plus keep working on my rune writing. Why did I decide to go back to school?

  Ah, yes. Time travel. I took the list of words Hjalmar handed me and looked at it with newfound enthusiasm. This wasn’t just boring homework. This was preparation to travel into the past.

  THE NEXT LESSON WAS in the big lecture theatre that I’d seen on the map. Once again, we were joined by the standard class of Hummingbirds, who Kaycee referred to as the ‘pukers’. While we were waiting for a teacher to show up, I took out the map again. It was bugging me that I still hadn’t figured out its strangeness. The lecture theatre was on the right side of the second floor, surrounded by classrooms on three sides. The wall to my right had to be an exterior one, but there were no windows to verify that. Now that I came to think of it, I hadn’t seen a single window so far. Until now, I’d assumed that was because it was such a large building and most of the rooms I’d been in were closed in by other rooms, but that wasn’t the case with the lecture theatre.

  “Do you think we’re underground?” I whispered to Maryam. “There are no windows.”

  Her eyes widened. “I hadn’t realised.”

  “Neither had I. But look at the map, we’re at the very edge of the building. And...”

  The scales fell from my eyes. It had been staring right at my face. “There’s no door,” I muttered, staring at the map. “We arrived by porting, so we didn’t need one. There wasn’t a door leading outside from the entrance hall. There are none on the map. We can’t leave this place.”

  It felt like a bucket of icy water had just been thrown at me.

  “We’re trapped,” Maryam whispered, realising what I had just understood myself. “We can’t port without cyber bracelets, so there’s no way we could leave on our own.”

  “This is a prison.” Kaycee was leaning over, having overheard our conversation. “That’s crazy. They can’t do that to us. We’re here voluntarily.”

  “Hey girls!” Sue’s cheery voice made us all jump. Our mentor slid into a seat next to Kaycee and grinned at us. “What’s up?”

  I wordlessly pointed at the map in front of me, watching
her closely. Sue’s smile wavered a tiny bit, then she laughed.

  “Figured it out, have you?”

  “Is it true?” Kaycee asked, her voice shrill and verging on hysterical. “Are we prisoners? Are we trapped in here until you let us go?”

  Sue almost choked on her laughter. “Prisoners? Why would you think that? If you want to leave, someone will port you to wherever you want to go. After a memory wipe, obviously.”

  “But what if I want to go for a walk?” I asked, claustrophobia settling into my mind. “What if I need some fresh air?”

  “Honey, we’re not keeping you here. But you can't go outside, nobody can. I couldn't port outside either, because there is no outside."

  "No outside?" I asked. "Are we in space?"

  She chuckled. "Might as well be. We're underground, far beneath the Earth's surface. It's the only way to keep our instruments shielded from all the waves and signals up there. There is nothing but earth and stone outside these walls. Definitely no way to go for a stroll."

  Underground. Deep, deep underground. I suddenly felt pressure all around me, the earth trying to reclaim the part that had been ripped from her. Millions of tons of rock were waiting to crash down on us. No roof could sustain that pressure for long, right? We'd be crushed into dust.

  "Hey, don't panic," she said and reached over to grab my hand. "We're safe here. Safest place on Earth, actually. If anything happens, we can port to wherever it's safer. Don't worry. The building won't collapse, no matter how afraid you are."

  I looked at her, unable to keep the doubt from my expression. I'd never liked enclosed spaces and had been grateful that the bedroom I shared with Kaycee was large and spacious. Now, however, after realising that there was no air outside... I was having trouble breathing.