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Two

Huck

Back when I still did publicity for my books—when I still wrote books—an interviewer from NPR asked me how I got my ideas.

It was a simple question on the surface.

An interest I understood. After all, the creative process and the idiosyncratic nature of inspiration is intriguing.

I owed people a glimpse behind the curtain even though a shred of me always worried that, like in The Wizard of Oz , they’d end up disappointed by the man with the microphone…

Still, I should’ve been happy to share. The people watching bought my books, doled out stars to me like first-grade teachers—Good job, Huck, exclamation point, smiley face.

Four and a half stars, rounded up. They paid my rent and fed my self-esteem.

They made me forget that I was worthless; at least they did when they loved me, when they told me I was great.

I owed them attention, access, answers to their questions.

I’d waxed poetic about reaping the fields of my life for kernels of inspiration and the host had nodded along generously, feigning interest, before moving on to a cooking segment with some celebrity chef who didn’t have allegations of impropriety yet.

I didn’t have an answer for how I got my ideas.

If I knew, I wouldn’t have been trying to find them at the bottom of a bottle of ale in a bar set atop an active volcano.

Months ago, my agent and longtime friend, Jim, had decided to get real with me.

“Listen, Huck. I’ve held off the pressure as long as I can.

You have to write something. What’s it going to take for you to break out of this funk and get something new together? ”

I didn’t have an answer for that question either.

I’d exhausted pretty much every other avenue of unblocking my writing and gotten so demoralized that Jim promptly hung up the phone, booked a trip to Iceland on his own dime, packed my duffel, and shoved me onto the tarmac.

He knew me well enough to realize I’d never do it myself.

This trip felt like my last chance to make something, but I’d been failing so miserably that at this point, I figured I might need to move to Iceland permanently, change my name, and go full fucking hermit.

No more books, no more questions. The fact that I didn’t speak the language was a serious plus.

And yet, a woman stood at a bar minding her own business, and for some incomprehensible reason, I found myself wanting to talk to her.

Even before she’d acknowledged my presence.

Even when she recognized my books, which shocked me to my core.

After my last book tanked, I punished myself by reading the posts on social media that called me a has-been, or worse.

I got used to seeing my name intentionally mangled to Hack Sullivan and receiving emphatic messages telling me to give up, go underground, never write another thing.

Worse things that I couldn’t bring myself to talk about.

Maybe I’d let those messages get to me. Most of them weren’t anything I hadn’t heard before.

My own inadequacy had been hammered into me even before I put myself out there for public consumption.

My aversion to writing had to be more than some form of horrible inertia.

After years of trying and now coming up empty on this charity trip to Iceland, a place that could inspire poetry from stone, I was starting to believe that whatever my problem was, it might not be something that I’d ever overcome.

And yet, we started talking and we hadn’t stopped.

I told her about the Casablanca Chronicles and she didn’t throw her drink in my face.

She somehow managed to make me feel comfortable.

I went from telling her about my downfall, something that would normally have sent me to the bottom of a well of self-loathing, to laughing about sheep.

I racked my brain trying to remember the last time I’d laughed.

Months? Years? No, had it actually been years?

I had binge-watched Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Young Sheldon in that time, so no, I’d laughed in between, but not with another human.

Until her. It was natural. So easy. And then she started telling me about herself and I was hooked.

Her focus as she talked was utterly entrancing; I almost forgot about my problems.

“Can I get you another?” the bartender asked.

I shook my head. My beer was empty, but I was so riveted by the story Stella was telling about a Viking named Arnbjorg Gunnarsson who had amassed a fortune in English gold and silver that I was almost drunk on her words.

I glanced over at her. There was something about the way she spoke with her hands, in smooth almost artistic arcs and fine gestures.

I couldn’t bring myself to stop watching her.

She practically shimmered with enthusiasm as she described ancient texts and Icelandic legends.

I was rapt. The combination of self-assuredness and excitement transformed a topic that could’ve been considered boring on the surface into one that I couldn’t get enough of.

Even though I didn’t claim the title of writer anymore, I was sure that she had main character energy.

Stella was like a book I wouldn’t want to put down.

The kind that could keep a person up all night dying to know what happens next.

How was it that this majestic ball of energy just happened to appear beside me at this random bar in the middle of Iceland a thousand miles from home?

I wondered. I was not a lucky guy; the past four years had confirmed that for me.

But in this random place, she found me, and even though the bar was full of aesthetically pleasing people, who were probably way more interesting than a failed author, she stayed and kept talking with me.

I think I would’ve found her interesting even if she hadn’t been beautiful.

She was beautiful, though—hazel eyes, a kaleidoscope of green, gold, and brown; golden hair falling over her shoulders; smooth skin smattered with freckles.

Her lips were rosy and vaguely chapped; I found myself staring at her mouth wishing I were the kind of guy who carried a ChapStick in my pocket so I could brandish it like some sort of hero saving the day just to watch her put it on.

“This Gunnarsson guy was a raider?” I asked, trying to get my mind off her lips. “ And a poet? That’s an interesting combination.”

She nodded. “It is, isn’t it? But yeah, he was supposedly.

He’s featured in Gunnar’s Saga, which details his bloodline, conquests, and how he secretly stashed his treasure.

Several epic poems are attributed to him.

According to the saga, he took four of his servants out to a bog in the dead of night to hide his treasure, but the servants never returned.

The saga mentions a few places in southern Iceland where it might have been stashed, but no one ever claimed to have discovered it. ”

“Maybe they secretly kept it?”

She shook her head. “I mean, I guess, but chests of ancient English silver, golden armbands, maybe even a massive axe made of precious metals and gems? It’s not exactly the kind of thing a person could keep in their hut without anyone finding out.

In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we have to assume it’s never been found. ”

“So, it’s still out there somewhere.”

She pulled up some pictures on her phone and pushed it toward me.

Our fingertips made momentary contact as I took the phone from her, a spark of static electricity discharging between us in the dry air.

“There are six cairns that mark important locations in the saga, but this one”—she tapped the table for emphasis—“near Tórsmork, has a placard that says ‘Hér liggur gull og silfur Gunnarsson.’?”

I squinted at the image briefly before looking back. She was eyeing me intently, awaiting my reaction.

“Does that mean what it sounds like?” I asked. Even though I’d been in Iceland a few weeks and the many hours spent trying to learn the language had been an exercise in futility, some of the words sounded vaguely familiar.

She gifted me a conspiratorial grin and pushed her hair away from her face.

The movement revealed a tattoo shaped like a compass rose, discreetly placed on the nape of her neck, small and special.

I liked knowing it was there, this tiny secret treasure on her skin that in that moment in the crowd, only I knew about.

“?‘Here lies the gold and silver of Gunnarsson,’?” she said.

“There was no sign of it, though. Anyway, so far we’ve searched all over southern Iceland, where he lived, but didn’t find anything there.

Then I had this idea. The saga also says that Gunnarsson never told anyone the true location, and it got me thinking…

maybe the locations suggested in the saga are wrong?

The four men he sent never returned, which suggests to me that he didn’t want the location revealed.

Gunnarsson was a brilliant man, egotistical and proud.

He loved his sons but wanted them to earn his treasure.

I started to wonder if we’d missed something.

It occurred to me that the only part of the saga that came directly from Gunnarsson were the poems that had been included. ”

“You’re thinking that he left a clue somewhere in one of the poems for his sons to decipher?”

“Exactly. I’ve been studying the poems trying to see if anything in them reflects a landmark or something that could give us an idea of where the treasure might be hidden, but so far nothing’s jumped out.

There was a line about gold and giant’s bones, so we searched near a peak that looks like the skeleton of an ogre but found nothing. ”

“Do you have the poems?” I asked.

She nodded and pulled up a document on her phone. “They’re all here.”

“Mind if I have a go?” I asked.

I pored over the words on the page. The language was beautiful, stark in places, but rife with meaning and imagery. “There’s something about a massive tree here.”

“Hopefully it wasn’t buried beneath a tree,” she said. “We’d never find it.”

I remembered that Iceland was nearly devoid of trees, mostly as a result of Vikings like Gunnarsson razing the forests long ago, and felt like an idiot. Shit. I returned to the poems and scanned for anything that alluded to treasure or gold. I needed to redeem myself.

My gaze ran over a line. Gold of my life, spoils of blood spilt and treasure taken, behind the constant storm, within the slice of earth, you wait in dark of night and rainbow of light. I gulped.

“What? Have you got something?” Stella asked.

“Maybe.” I showed her the line.

“?‘Behind the constant storm,’?” she muttered, thinking.

Her eyes widened and my heart started to pound.

Loud, exciting percussion in my chest, in my ears.

It beat the way it used to when I got a really good idea for a story.

I wasn’t sure exactly what was happening, but I knew what she was thinking. We were completely on the same page.

“Constant storm, like a roaring sound,” I said.

“Dark, but with rainbows around in the sun…from flowing water.” She looked at me, biting her lip.

“Did we just figure this out?” I asked.

She grinned, nodding, her eyes crinkling at their corners, and I felt more alive and inspired than I had in recent memory.

“It’s behind a waterfall,” we said almost in sync.

A puff of air escaped my lips. “Damn.”

“I had a feeling about you when we met, Huck Sullivan. Not everyone can see it, but you do. I can tell about these things.”

She was right, which was, frankly, a little freaking terrifying.

Because I had a feeling about her too. And if she could tell that I could understand the mystery of the treasure hunt and the clue an ancient writer had left in a poem, she was probably keenly aware of the obsession I was developing with her mouth and the three freckles gracing her pouty bottom lip where I wanted to kiss her under the warm bar lights.

I saw the whole story about the treasure. I saw her.

How do I get my ideas? I imagined myself answering a crowded room with confidence. Easy. They sidle up to me at a bar in Iceland and change my life.

I had thought I would never write again, but I didn’t think that was true anymore. Now, I had a different problem.

I’d never have an idea as good as her.

No one was that lucky.