Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780989125307 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Future House Publishing |
| Publication date: | 05/02/2013 |
| Series: | Evertaster Series , #3 |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d) |
| Age Range: | 9 - 14 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1 Torbjorn and Storfjell Almost every historian you ever meet will tell you that there is nothing Vikings love more than blueberry muffins. Blueberry muffins with blueberries shining like gems atop the muffin’s golden crown. Blueberry muffins with little bubbles of succulent blue juice that burst in your mouth when you sever their skin with your teeth. Blueberry muffins for breakfast, blueberry muffins for lunch, blueberry muffins for supper next to your clan’s roaring fire in the longhouse. Most historians would tell you that’s what Vikings love most. Most historians would be wrong. “You boys sure seem to love muffins more than anything!” said Braxton. The old pilot had seen it all in his day – kangaroo rodeos, bees on bicycles, and even a fish who could shoot – but never ever in his whole life did he expect to be stranded on board a wooden ship in the middle of the sea with a pair of humongous Vikings. And now that pair had laid aside their horned helmets and were shoveling blueberry muffins into their mouths by the fistful. “Oh yah! ha ha!” laughed the larger of the two Vikings – his name was Storfjell – with a deep, rumbly laugh that shook his mountainous belly. Golden-brown muffin crumbs fell from Storfjell’s mouth into his silvery beard. He was at least eleven feet tall, with a pair of silver braids that must have been woven from moonbeams. “What you are saying is a common mistake! We are loving blueberry muffins very much! But you know what we are loving even more?” Storfjell said between mouthfuls. Braxton’s watery eyes twinkled. The cows mooed. “I could venture a guess,” he said. If it weren’t for these two Vikings, alive and thriving in the modern era, unknown to the rest of the world, Braxton might still be stuck on a remote island in the Norwegian Sea. Still, as strange as it all was, he had a feeling he knew what they were going to say. “Blueberry muffins are delicious to eat of course, but it is this, the Golden Fortune of our Herds – that is the best thing to taste in all of Midgard!” said the Viking named Torbjorn. Torbjorn was the smaller of the two – he was still ten feet tall and broad as an ox. He heaved a heavy wooden barrel upright and slid it across the deck of the ship to the mast where they sat. He pried off the lid with his battle axe and dipped the edge of the blade into the soft, golden butter inside. “It is butter that we Vikings love all the best!” Butter – creamy, rich and smooth. I wonder what the encyclopedias would say about that, thought Braxton. The way these boys drank down their butter, you’d think their butter was the treasure that launched the Viking Age itself. He watched their herd of cows pushing at the oars. A question began to form in Braxton’s mind. There was something he had to know. “I know you love your cows and treat them right. I know you feed them on fresh clover,” said Braxton. “But what is it that makes your butter so special?” Storfjell smiled, his long silver mustache turning upward with the corners of his mouth. He looked quite pleased that Braxton would ask. “This is a good thing you have wondered, but it is not my story to tell.” He pointed to his brother Torbjorn. “You must ask him, and he will tell you that and many things.” Torbjorn scooped out another mound of butter and smeared it all over the heap of muffins still left on the table, then pounded the lid back onto the barrel with the butt of his axe. He was usually the jollier of the two Buttersmiths, but now, all of a sudden, he grew quiet. “It is an ancient tale,” he said. “One that begins with our fathers and their fathers’ fathers, so many times ago, before the ships could cross the great sea, when there were fewer people on the land, and when kings were rare indeed.” Braxton took another bite of his muffin. The butter washed down his throat. He settled back against a barrel. It was a long way to land, and this was the tale he’d hoped would get told. “In those days, our clan churned the butter in wooden churns by hand. It was a very tiring work. “In those days, our clansmen did not live past 40 winters old. If he did not get a knife in his back, or a battle axe to his teeth, old age would surely find him. “My father’s father’s father, very many fathers ago, was also like me named Torbjorn. Also his brother, like mine, was called Storfjell,” said Torbjorn. His words went up and down in his sing-songy voice as he spoke. With the fresh muffin warming Braxton’s belly from the inside, and the creamy butter melting through him and coating all his nooks and crannies, Braxton began to hear Torbjorn’s words as if they were a dream. This is the story that Torbjorn told.Chapter 2 Smordal Many centuries ago, young Torbjorn Trofastsonn of Smordal knew quite well that the tastiest thing in the whole world was butter. Creamy, rich and smooth. Butter was the reason his clan invented blueberry muffins in the first place – they’d needed something to smear it on. Butter was their lifeblood. Butter was the warmth in their hearts, the horns on their helmets, the tips of their mustaches. Butter was also their greatest secret. Torbjorn hoisted an oversized basket full of steaming hot muffins into his arms and tottered down the gangplank onto the sandy shore of Viksfjord, the merchants’ village. He and his clan had sailed from the open sea into the fjord this morning, where he and his brother Storfjell had helped Father and the bovines row the final twenty miles to the sand. He did not mind the work. He was large for only 13 winters old. Smaller than the biggest boulders, but larger than most respectable rocks, Torbjorn was already 8 feet tall. If five sheep stacked themselves on top of each other, he could stare the fourth one straight in the eye. He was from Smordal, and Smordaler were known for their tremendous size – not to mention their good humor. “The streets of Viksfjord are filled with much peril,” said Father. He stopped Torbjorn at the bottom of the gangplank and grasped him by both shoulders. “Go to find the money-clutching merchants in the village center. They will trade with you behind closed doors. Make your trade, then leave. Do not be seen. It’s the Buttersmith’s way.” It was the first time Torbjorn would bargain for himself, but Father didn’t need to tell Torbjorn what to do. He’d seen the men come and go on trading trips dozens of times. And Torbjorn was a Smordaler through and through – it was in his blood. “We don’t want to attract attention,” said Father, his yellow beard covering his belly like a thick blanket of hay. His mustache turned down at the corners – it meant that Father was frowning. “I won’t,” said Torbjorn. Torbjorn’s 9-foot-tall brother Storfjell shoved past him. “Good luck, my brother,” Storfjell said, punching Torbjorn in the arm. It nearly knocked Torbjorn off balance. “Do not settle for fish feet!”I laugh my belly off, thought Torbjorn, frowning to himself. Fish feet were what you got when you’d been bamboozled. Torbjorn was not about to get bamboozled. Torbjorn watched Storfjell chuckle as he ran up the beach into town. Storfjell was the only man 17 winters old who already had wrinkles growing out the corners of his eyes. His beard and mustache had turned silver early-on too. Father said it was because Storfjell had wisdom beyond his years. Sometimes Torbjorn wondered if that were really true. More like stuffy beyond his years, he thought. Father also said Storfjell was his most responsible son. He counted on Storfjell to make reliable trades. Nothing extravagant or extraordinary, but Storfjell always brought back something useful for the clan. He was consistent, and that made Father happy. When it came to Torbjorn, though, Father wasn’t so go lucky. He was always telling Torbjorn to be a man, but Torbjorn already felt like one. He was 13 winters old! He already had a full red beard. He could do at least as well as Storfjell. Today, he was determined to do better. Torbjorn threw his wool cloak over the basket of muffins. He paused as he passed a reddish bovine that had rowed alongside them. He patted her on the head – he so loved their bovines – then set out on the sand. He passed a few small fishing boats, rounded an outcropping of rock, and found the wooden walkway that led into the village. Viksfjord was big. Just from the shore, Torbjorn could see four separate, fortified enclosures, at least a few dozen lean-tos, a handful of ramshackle huts, and eleven wooden longhouses. There must have been a few hundred people living there, and even more stopping to trade. It was the biggest village Torbjorn had ever seen. Maybe the biggest village in all of the North. There was even a longhouse with carved dragon heads pointing out either end of its roof. And then there were the streets: they were bustling with shoppers and merchants. There were people shouting from their doorways, people pushing carts. Torbjorn made his way carefully up into the swarm. This was the first time he’d gone into Viksfjord alone. He shuffled between two barrels. The crowd made him nervous, especially when he had such important cargo. “Cookies for your sweet tooth?” cried a bent old woman. She called out from behind a cart piled chin-high with sand-colored cookies. Stiff dark worms poked out of the tops and sides of the cookies like dried noodles. Torbjorn wrinkled his nose. She must have baked the worms into the batter. He could only imagine how ghastly that would taste. Four boys half Torbjorn’s age shoved past Torbjorn and jumped in front of her, waving tin coins at the woman. A tall man with a big mustache standing behind them chomped down on one of the cookies. Bits of gravel fell from behind his mustache. He made a face, picked a dried worm from between his teeth and spat. He looked like he might throw up. Torbjorn couldn’t blame him. It was times like this that reminded Torbjorn how lucky he was to have grown up in Smordal, where they’d perfected the art of muffin baking. Most clans were not known for making treats, and Torbjorn did not have to eat worms to know how rotten those clans’ baked goods were. Torbjorn squeezed his basket past the cookie cart. He dodged a man hauling a stack of wooden shields, turned around, and came face-to-face with two giant whale fins flopped over a pile of smoldering coals. The shiny black fins were still attached to a humongous whale’s tail. The coal bed was chest high to a sweaty man with a gap in his teeth who was fanning the flames with a dirty shirt. “Would you like a taste?” the sweaty man asked Torbjorn. He cut off a long, stringy slice and dangled it from his finger. It smelled like fish rotting in hot candle wax. “It’s meaty,” he panted through the gap in his teeth. He looked like he might faint. “Nay,” said Torbjorn. He batted away a fly and buried his nose in the fur on his shoulder to stifle the smell. He’d never seen anything so disgusting in his life. “I got lucky. Ran over it with my boat,” grinned the sweaty whale-roaster. “Fortune shines on you,” said Torbjorn, backing away as quickly as he could. He almost knocked over a man selling frozen bear paws on sticks, then turned around and sidestepped a boy with a muddy yellow toad clamped between two slices of brown bread. The boy held the toad sandwich up to his wide open mouth and chomped down on it. The toad wriggled out in the nick of time, its feet squirming as it plopped down into the mud. “My snack!” shouted the boy. He dove for the toad. Torbjorn tried to maneuver past the boy, but it was too late. He tripped over the boy’s leg, felt himself teeter, then scrambled to get his feet beneath him. His second foot caught behind his first and he toppled over onto the ground like a falling oak. He slammed down hard in the mud, holding his precious basket of blueberry muffins aloft and absorbing the brunt of the crash with his chest. He gasped for air and tightened his stomach. The cloak covering his basket flipped upward and a single blueberry muffin bounced out, rolled across the ground and stopped right in front of three hefty barbarians in muddy fur clothes. The crowd suddenly, as if time had frozen, went silent. Torbjorn could see puffs of their breath hang in the air. The tallest of the three barbarians looked down at the muffin and then back up at Torbjorn. He sniffed. Torbjorn could smell the buttery blueberry batter baked into bliss even from where he lay. Torbjorn had made a terrible mistake. “Er?” said the tall Viking, when his two companions, an old hag, a pair of children and a cat all dove onto the muffin at once. “A muffin trader!” someone shouted. “BATTLE!” cried another. Suddenly, the woman standing next to Torbjorn smashed her fist into the face of the man behind her. He fell to the ground in a heap. The resulting melee spread like an avalanche through the crowd. Knuckles crunching jaws, carts overturned, tunics torn asunder. The sweaty whale roaster dove, arms and legs spread, on his whale tail. “My sea princess!” he cried. The boys with the tin coins dodged backward. One of them hooked the cloak covering Torbjorn’s muffins on his boot. He kicked, and Torbjorn tried desperately to pin the cloak down before it tore free. He managed in part, and for one full second that seemed like an eon, the muffins were left bare for all to see. Torbjorn wrenched the cloak free and wrapped it tight around the basket. Had they seen? So far, he’d been lucky. He had to get away before anyone noticed that his basket was full of not just one, but a mound of blueberry muffins. There was a crunch and a cry, then a whack, and the people-pile immediately on top of the single loose muffin toppled over as mre Vikings dove to join it. Torbjorn picked himself up off the ground and clutched the basket close. He stepped over an old hag who was pulling the tail of a swine that had a skinny man’s foot in its mouth. The man’s arm was inside the pileup, no doubt feeling around for the escaped muffin. Torbjorn ducked a wooden bench heaved at his head and sidestepped a pair of Vikings yanking on each other’s horned helmets. The bench smashed into the whale tail and knocked over the sweaty whale-roaster and the pile of coals, scattering them across the ground. The brawlers leapt and danced, their feet burning hot every time they touched the ground. Torbjorn ducked around the corner of the nearest wooden house, shimmied his way into the narrow space between two buildings, and escaped out the other side, his basket of muffins still intact and his ribs still aching from his fall. He was pretty sure no one had seen him, so he paused to catch his breath. The second street was quiet, almost solemn by comparison. Grey mists rose up out of the ground, so that the colors in the village almost seemed quiet too. Most towns had only one main street going down the middle. Viksfjord had several. It was the largest village Torbjorn had ever been to. To the right, the street extended the length of more than a dozen longboats. To the left it was twice as far to the end of the village, and Torbjorn could see the smoke rising gently beyond the wall made of pointed timbers in the distance. He wondered if Storfjell and the rest of his clansmen had fared better than he had on the first street – they’d probably slipped past the brawlers unnoticed and gotten their goods into the hands of the seafaring merchants who could pay for them. Once those merchants had gotten a basketful, they would sell the muffins in the market there. Others would set sail for far-off places, following trade routes south in either direction to other merchant towns where the muffins would fetch a higher price as exotic baked goods. Some would even make it as far as the lands where the sun stayed out in the winter. There the muffins would be honored in the banquet halls of kings. In return, the merchants would pay generously, and Torbjorn’s clan would sail back to Smordal, their ship laden with grain, cloth, and metal and wooden tools. It would take several trips to Viksfjord during the bright summer to gather enough food and supplies for Smordal to survive the coming cold. Torbjorn was just lucky that he’d made it through the brawl with the muffins intact. He could only imagine what Father would say if he had lost the basket. “You were clever to flee,” said a man over Torbjorn’s shoulder into his ear. Torbjorn turned. He’d thought he was alone. The top of the man’s head came to Torbjorn’s chest. He was dressed in a grey cape, with a silver clasp pinned to his shoulder to fasten it in place. He wore leather shoes, something that few people back in Smordal could afford. He wore a long tunic underneath that hung down to his knees, much like Torbjorn’s own. But his was woven of cloth the color of the setting sun or blood, something Torbjorn had never seen before. It was plain to Torbjorn that this man had money. “A mouse does not like to stay when the dogs are hungry,” said Torbjorn. The man nodded. “Well spoken. I am Rotte the Righteous,” said the man, bowing his head slightly and lifting one edge of his cape outward. His face was older and pleasant, his nose large, with a wide, warm smile underneath it – a face that seemed clever in its own right. Torbjorn returned the greeting with a slight bow. There was a shout from the crowd at the other side of the houses. “Come,” said Rotte, and beckoned Torbjorn down the lane. “They will be looking for the owner of the muffins. I have a place you can come indoors,” he said. Torbjorn followed Rotte. He was probably right. It was best to lie low for a few moments until the village settled down and Torbjorn could go out again. Besides, if he were as wealthy as he looked, Rotte might be able to pay handsomely for the muffins himself. Rotte led Torbjorn to a wooden lodge that was smaller than the rest and stopped at the door. Torbjorn hadn’t seen this lodge before. It was made of planks fitted closely together, with a sloping wooden roof covered in dying grass. But it was not the lodge itself that caught Torbjorn’s eye. In the center of a flat door carved with looping branches was a single, hideous, curled stone finger. The finger was as large as Torbjorn’s hand, gnarled and bony, with a thick, split fingernail that had grown to a claw on the end. There was a wart on the third knuckle, and fine wrinkles carved across the skin. Torbjorn had never seen a carving so intricate or lifelike. It was almost as if it were a real finger covered in stone. “Troll’s finger,” said Rotte. “Very fine workmanship,” said Torbjorn. “A carving of course. Everyone knows trolls died out hundreds of years ago,” Rotte chuckled warmly. “Is it true, that they could not cross water?” asked Torbjorn. He’d heard the lore told around the fire. “That’s what has been said, but I cannot say,” smiled Rotte. There was something in the way that Rotte’s lips curled inward that made Torbjorn wonder if he wasn’t telling the whole story. “I see it interests you,” said Rotte, opening the door. “There are more of such things inside, if that is your wish,” Rotte said. Torbjorn did want to see what was inside. The troll’s finger was a treasure in itself. And Rotte did seem so kind. “Come,” said Rotte, and pushed the door inward. He beckoned to Torbjorn. “I have untold wonders for the curious.” Torbjorn could not resist. He stepped down into the lodge, squeezing his basket of muffins between the door posts. He absolutely had to know what was inside.