"To you your father should be as a god."

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
A Midsummer Night's Dream
1595

"Unexploded ordinance can make a hell of a hole, mate!" Nigel said to me as he peered into the small crater near the dry lakebed. The blonde scientist with a British accent pointed and grinned at the hole in the Austrian countryside. The Englishman was slight of build but confident in his manner. He could barely contain his exuberance as he said, "Ever think such a thing was possible, Dr. Blackthorn?"

"It is truly amazing that a bomb dropped by the Nazis could still be active all of these years later," I commented as I peered over the shorter man. A vast area was cleared near the crater, expanding our a hundred yards each way. In this bed lay dozens of skeletons partially preserved. Though only scant bones remained making up jigsaw versions of skeletons, I didn't see a single skull. Carefully stepping amongst these freshly brushed bones, the young students present played hard at being archeologists. They began to leave the area as we journeyed in closer.

Nigel looked up at me and winked, gesturing at the dirty hole being vacated by Austrian college students. He rubbed his hands together and informed me, "It was an American bomb, really. The shell casing was made in an arsenal in Joliet, Illinois. That piece of evidence was made to disappear yesterday by agents claiming to be from INTERPOL. We are spinning it to the press, as you Americans say, as a Nazi bomb."

"Really?"

"Less environmentalists showing up that way, we find."

Mildly amused by the deception on the part of the archeological team from Vienna, I smiled at the college students. Did they realize they were rewriting history just a tad by their lie? Truly, the old adage is so, to the victor come the spoils...and the eraser for the history books. Most of them did a double take when they looked up at me. Not many visiting archeologists resemble me, I wager. Honestly, how many six foot ten American Indians do they see in Austria?

"Where are the relics?"

Nigel nodded and waved for me to follow him into the crater. He jogged down the jagged slope, but I moved down the area in a few strides. "Tell, me Nigel, what are you doing in these parts?"

Somewhat confused by my words, Nigel thought for a minute and answered, "Oh, I'm on loan from the British museum and was researching Celtic origins nearby."

I swiped my hand across my broad forehead and said, "Yes, I knew the first Celt settlements were in Austria. Not a widely known fact, but I believe we forgot more about history than is recorded."

As I cuffed my denim sleeves to the elbows, Nigel leaned over and gripped the edge of a large, gray tarpaulin. "Is it true what they say about you, mate?"

Knowing where the conversation was bound, my eyes rested on the hunched over scientist from London. "What might that be?"

His grip on the tarp relaxed and he stated, "One hears things, doesn't one? Calling you in from the Miskatonic Institute of Technology, we knew what we were getting, Dr. Blackthorn. Your archeological papers are famous for the rare, bizarre or the unexplained. We heard tell you, well..."

"Spit it out," I instructed, but my eyes then looked across the dry bed of the lake. The tie in my hair popped off when I descended the slope further and my long black hair drifted in the breeze. "I can take it."

Nigel pulled the tarp up a foot, leaving the contents under it cloaked in shadows and said, "That you can see events in the past. It all sounds bloody daft to me, holding a relic and witnessing the distant past. Right wonky!"

"It is called psychometry," I said flatly. "It doesn't work all of the time, and I will never be able to swear to it under oath...because there is no way to prove what I see is true beyond my testimony. It isn't much of a gift, aside from my research papers. I can find materials hidden via viewing the past. Although many won't acknowledge my ability, they cannot comprehend how I can find elusive artifacts."

Nigel winked, not sure of what to think of me, and unveiled the relics.

I knelt and let my legs fall into the shallow ditch where freshly uncovered relics resided. Nigel spoke as the sunlight illuminated the objects. "Lucky you were in Italy and it was a short trip, Doctor. Hey, what were you over there for?"

I smirked. "I was trying to talk the Cardinals into allowing me to see the Shroud of Turin."

"Really? What did you see?"

"They wouldn't let me touch it."

Nigel laughed at that idea and then focused in on the materials at hand. "We think these objects pre-date the inhabitants from the second millennium B.C."

"They look like materials from the Beaker folk," I said, staring at the stunning well intact piece of reddish pottery and drinking vessel. "That culture spread all over from Bohemia to Briton, ah!"

My eyes leered up at Nigel who grinned. "See the sharp stones, eh?" Quickly, Nigel frowned at my look and I turned back to the relics. My hands rested on my knees and my mind rippled with amazement. Gradually, he stated, "Your eyes are blue as ice, mate."

I never turned my head back as I replied. "So?"

"I never thought you Indians...um...native Americans...had blue eyes."

"Nigel Davison, I'm a mutt as are most folk in this world," I confessed. "Though Navajo in tribe, I know myself to be partially Natchez and Nordic. That is too long of a tale to tell here. These here relics are interesting because they seem older than any objects from the Beaker folk era. In this strata, well, how could they be anything else? 4000 or 5000 years old? Heh, probably 6000 if I'm a day old."

The British archeologist said, "Theory is they are long before the third millennium B.C. Can you tell us about them?"

"Perhaps," I gestured at the skeletal remains near the dry riverbed and said, "No skulls on those bodies? Why did you lay them all out that way?"

He laughed, his mood easing up some. "We didn't, mate! That is how we found them. Once we unearthed them it seemed all of their heads were like eggshells."

"Pardon?"

"Fragmented. Crushed. My assistant Ian, he's a right prat, he spewed breakfast when he thought of what we were looking at. All of them people lined up and - "

"Killed?" I asked and glanced at my watch.

"Could be."

With some hesitation, I reached down and took up the broken beaker in my left hand. Small, tan, but made of primitive human hands, the relic may hold the key for me. In my right, I took ahold of the jagged stone shaped like a triangle.

The rest was history.

My ears popped as the Earth changed around me. I was still looking toward the riverbed and the muddy plain, but greenery soon encroached on my view. Tall grasses and thick leaved trees framed my view of the scene. Water welled up, filled the expanse before me and the lake was as it appeared thousands of years ago. Weeds, insects, and fowl soon teamed on or in the lake's gentle current. My body felt heavy, but surging with heat. My forehead seemed to gain in bulk and hair overran my shoulders.

Suddenly, my people surrounded me, a folk forgotten and unnamed by any professor I ever knew. Tall, muscular, incredibly hirsute, but fully homo sapiens, not some pre-historic beasts, these people walked upright and shouted. I could even smell their musky odor or filthy familiarity. I felt the hair of a heavy beard on my face and looked to my hands. I still held the beaker in one hand and the sharp stone in the other. The beaker was complete, unbroken, and flawless. However, before me was a crude table made of tied up branches. As the bawdy tribe around me bellowed and hooted as if to show their defiance to someone, I glanced up and saw another group standing before us.

These natives were just like us. They were large people, sporting auburn hair and piercing eyes, no different that we. Some dressed in deer skins, but a few of their younger folk were naked. They all carried thick clubs, but they didn't raise one nor shout back at us. Behind them near the lake, I could see another crude table of branches but this one held the body of an enormous man. His hair was gray and his hands folded over his massive chest. Naked as the day he was born, the old man's chest never rose or fell. In the sunlight, I could see his throat was torn out leaving a crude scarlet wound.

I looked down into the beaker and comprehended that it was filled with a crimson fluid. Next to the beaker lay the sharp stone I released and a thin, but sturdy branch.

Though the dialect was foreign and crude, I could soon understand the literal meaning of the man who stepped forward from the group by the lake.

"Decide now, Javan!" the older man roared at me. "Take the life of your father and return to the olden ways! Drink and rejoin the tribe of Tiras!"

Looking at the clan before my eyes, an older group all holding sharpened wooden clubs or stone tools, my mind flooded with the conflict, and the reason why we stood across from them. My father, Aesir, was dead and now nothing held back factions of these left under his care to hunt us down. Aesir allowed us youths to scurry to the mountains, to find our own way and live free away from their customs. That life hardened us, but didn't break us as a folk.

"Your kind and their time is past, Tubal," I informed the older man as the sunlight shimmered on the lake. I blinked as the beams of light seemed to divide into columns in the mist off the lake. The air was fresh and very clean, but the mist quivered as if alive. "We no longer go your way."

Tubal snorted and replied, "Tell me what gives you this new way? You young folks are mad to abandon the ways of the gods! You favor the dreams an odd Angel told you? Bah! You are fools to leave the ways of the gods who walk the Earth!"

The columns of golden light glistening behind the older tribe took on a humanoid quality...and they proceeded to dance. They were female in body, naked and perfect, but possessed eyes like embers. Ignoring these dancing beings of light, I pressed on, "It is you who have forgotten the olden way of the one God. He gave us the Earth for food, not each other. You hold council with liars from beyond."

Tubal laughed and raised his club. "You young folk have lived in the mountains too long! You forget the songs of the water sprites and how their tales are true. The knowledge of these goddesses that an elder's mind can be passed on through a feast is older than us." Many of the older ones nodded and the tribe of younger folk with me grew silent. Tubal's piercing brown eyes flared and he said, "You are so few, boy. Your father was our chief and wanted only the best for all. It isn't too late. Cast off this silliness and embrace the bygone ways. There aren't enough of you to take us on now."

I looked around us and indeed, we were surrounded. A hundred of Tubal's tribe had surrounded our few dozen who usually lived in the mountains of evergreens.

Skepticism clouded my mind as I doubted my mission in life. Was the Angelic being who visited me long ago a demon is disguise? Was that tall entity with four wings lying when he told me not to consume my brothers? It seemed to right to me. Was I listening only to my natural revulsion of the act of cannibalism? This Angelic being and his lessons were always beneficial when treating sickness and making weapons. There was one way to see so I put his other lessons to the test.

I set down the beaker full of my father's blood and picked up the sharp stone and the thin branch. From around my waist I removed a thin cord, a heavy piece of twine my father crafted eons ago. Swiftly, I started to wrap this cord around the jagged stone and the end of the branch. With a grunt, I pulled the knot closed. Looking up at Tubal, I read his arrogant face, all of his ambitions, and even detected a look of confusion as I raised an object he'd never seen in his life...an object that would equalize the numbers...and object the dancing she-demons from the lake even stopped to stare at...and object designed by an Angel.

It was an axe.

With a wild cry, I swung the axe down and broke the beaker, splattering my father's blood on the table of limbs that fragmented in turn. The rest of my young folk, who never wanted a part of the human flesh consuming society, raised their weapons, hidden in their deerskin cloaks. Each person, male or female, bore an axe as well and charged.

Unable to free myself from the vision, I experienced every swung, every broken bone and every shattered skull in the hideous fight. The axe in my hands sank deep into the chest of one fighter. The look of shock in his face was obliterated when another of my tribe planted his stone axe in his face. Like a melon breaking, his head split, spewing out the contents within in a grayish splatter. The older tribe of Tiras fought well with their clubs, but the youth, spurned on by the success and obvious effect of their battle-axes, won the frenzy of slaughter.

After the bloodbath was over, dozens of the olden Tiras were taken by us and assembled to face the lake. Tubal, arms broken, still lived, and spat at me from the ground where he was held, "They will never convert, Javan! There is no way to teach my clan a new way!"

I walked down the amassed survivors of the olden folk and then glimpsed at the lake. The spites were gone, but a white, cloudy corona formed around the sun. I ignored this as I agreed with Tubal. "You are correct. That is why it all must end today."

With the dropping of my axe on the skull of Tubal, an echo sounded out...dozens of other skulls popping like fruit under the axes of the young folk. The sterile banks were soon decorated with reddish gray smears, infested with brains. Headless and still, the olden ones ideas spread out on the grass and troubled me no more.

I faced the body of my father on the crude table and felt sadness in my breast. I sat on a rotted log near the table and felt the powerful melancholy of the moment. The bearded face and gray hair were much different than when I left the folk several winters ago. They planned to eat my father for this keen knowledge. Now, what was I to do with him? Bury him under the Earth? Let the worms and grubs do as these misguided fools? I refused to take the chance that any of the young ones in my tribe would secretly follow suit. They may just try to gain his wisdom through some dire ritual whispered by the sprites, so I had to devise another way.

Looking up to the sun, swathed in white clouds like wings, I found my answer.

Creating the watercraft took time and the body was very rigid as we placed it upon the dry timber. Striking the flints, we set my father ablaze and then adrift on the lake. The sun sunk by then, but the glow of my father's body lit the night and the faces of the new tribe of the Aesir.

Moreover, as quickly as it started, the vision was gone.

The British man still stared at me in the same position as he had before the vision began. "Anything, Eli?"

I glanced at my watch, seeing only moments had passed since I took ahold of the beaker and axe-head. Shaking my head from side to side, I muttered, "Nothing worth repeating today."

"I see. Why are you crying, mate?"

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