The faded image of a drawing came into view. It was another landmass, an irregular image not much larger than the British Isles wedged into the corner of the parchment.
“It’s beyond the outer ocean surrounding the world, so it can’t be part of the map,” she said. “It must be Richard’s sketch for one of the continents. Look, you can see where he used his knife to scrape away the ink to try to erase it.”
Jeremy was craning his head over for a better view, his lank blond forelock hanging directly in front of Maria’s face.
“I’m not so sure,” he murmured. “It’s somehow vaguely familiar, but not from the Mappa Mundi. Perhaps if I saw it the right way up I might get a better…”
As his words trailed off they both looked up at each other in astonishment.
“The Vinland Map,” Maria whispered.
With her heart racing, she pulled out her magnifying glass and began scrutinising the lines. Only a few weeks earlier they had attended a conference at Yale University on the latest dating evidence for the famous Vinland Map, a drawing now thought to have been a forgery but based on a lost map that pre-dated Columbus by some fifty years, a map which showed a shoreline said to have been discovered by the Vikings centuries earlier to the west of Greenland.
“It’s incredible,” she exclaimed. “It’s exactly the same. There’s the river leading to the lake and the large inlet lower down. And the legend looks identical, in medieval Latin.”
With the magnifying glass the faint smudge at the top became legible: Vinlanda Insula a Byarno repa et Leipho socijs.
“Island of Vinland,” Jeremy murmured. “Discovered by Bjarni and Leif in company.”
“It proves the authenticity of the image on the Vinland Map beyond doubt!” Maria was flushed with excitement. “But if this is truly the hand of Richard of Holdingham, then it dates more than two centuries earlier than the Vinland Map. You can forget early English history for a while. You may just have discovered the oldest known depiction of North America.”
They stared at each other in amazement. The Mappa Mundi and this sketch dated from the thirteenth century, almost three centuries before the first European voyages of discovery to the New World, hundreds of years before the first maps of the American shoreline were thought to have been drawn.
“There’s more writing farther down.”
Maria had been focussed on the upper part of the depiction and had failed to register a second faint inscription beyond the drawing. She moved her magnifying glass a few inches lower.
“This definitely isn’t on the Vinland Map,” she said. “It’s in the Roman alphabet, but it isn’t Latin or French. It looks like Old Norse.”
She passed Jeremy the glass and took the map to hold it for him, tacitly acknowledging his greater expertise in the language of the Vikings.
“There’s a curious rune here,” he murmured. “It’s set at the beginning of the inscription like the illuminated letter of a medieval text. A single stem with branches on either side, angled up. It looks symmetrical. Five, maybe seven branches altogether, including the stem. Very odd.”
“Can you make out anything else?”
“Harald Sigurdsson.” He paused and looked up. “That’s Harald Hardrada, Harald Hard-Ruler, king of Norway. Killed at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in his attempt to take the English throne in 1066, only weeks before the Norman Conquest.”
“It’s not possible,” Maria whispered incredulously. “Go on.”
“Harald Sigurdsson our King with his thole-companions reached these parts with the treasure of Michelgard,” he slowly translated. “Here they feast with Thor in Valhalla and await the final battle of Ragnarok.”
He looked up and eyed Maria with disbelief.
“Isn’t Michelgard the Viking name for Constantinople?”
For a moment she was too stunned to speak. Then she let the scroll roll up and passed it over.
“Guard this with your life. Don’t breathe a word of it to anyone.” She picked up the Bede and scrambled hurriedly towards the wall, extracting her cellphone as she went. Just as she was about to crouch through, Jeremy called out excitedly.
“That rune,” he said. “I knew I’d seen it somewhere before. It’s not a rune at all. I can’t work out why on earth it should be here, but there’s only one thing it can be. It’s the symbol of the Jewish menorah.”
3
It’s incredible,” Jack Said. “I knew harald Hardrada and the Vikings had been in Constantinople, but I never dreamt he’d been across the Atlantic. It puts Christopher Columbus in the shade once and for all.”
“You’ve lost me already,” Costas replied. “Vikings in Constantinople?”
Jack took a gulp of his coffee and stood up. “Wait here.”
The two men had been in England for less than an hour, having taken a dawn flight from Turkey direct to the Royal Naval Air Station at Culdrose and transferring by Lynx helicopter to the campus of the International Maritime University nearby. Costas had scheduled his return to England several days before, knowing that once the sub- bottom excavator in the Golden Horn was fully operational, he would be needed to provide technical backup for another IMU field project off the coast of Greenland. For Jack the decision had come only the previous evening, following the extraordinary phone call from his friend Maria de Montijo in Hereford. He had summoned an emergency meeting of the excavation staff and had asked Maurice Hiebermeyer to take over the archaeological supervision on Sea Venture, knowing that his friend would be delighted to accept a role well beyond his usual remit in the deserts of Egypt.
“You’d better make it quick.” Costas extracted a cellphone from his oil-spattered overalls and checked a text message. “They’re due in any time now.”
Jack nodded and made his way from the patio where they had been sitting to the open door of his office. He paused to look back over the broad sweep of Carrick Roads, the sinuous estuary which led out from the tip of Cornwall towards the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. From here generations of his ancestors had set sail to shape the destiny of England and make their fortune. Howards had fought with Drake against the Spanish Armada and under Nelson at Trafalgar, had brought back the riches of the Indies and had mapped the farthest reaches of the oceans.
Jack felt a surge of certainty as he surveyed the scene, knowing that he was maintaining a family tradition that stretched back a thousand years to before the Norman conquest of England. It was Jack’s father who had decided to donate the Cornwall estate to the fledgling International Maritime University, but IMU had been Jack’s dream and he had seen it to fruition. With generous financial backing from Efram Jacobovich, an old friend who had become a software tycoon, the mansion and outbuildings had been transformed into a state-of-the-art research facility that rivalled the world’s best oceanographic institutes. Beside the estuary the old shipyard had been expanded into a sprawling engineering complex, complete with a dry dock facility for the IMU research vessels as well as an experimental tank for submersibles research. On a wooded hill adjoining the complex was the elegant neoclassical building of the Howard Gallery, one of the foremost private collections of art in the world and also a venue for travelling exhibits from the IMU Maritime Museum at Carthage in the Mediterranean. Only a few weeks earlier Jack had inaugurated one of their most stunning exhibits yet, a dazzling display of finds from the Bronze Age Minoan shipwreck they had excavated the previous year. A banner advertisement showing the golden disc and the magnificent bull’s-head sculpture from the wreck adorned the wall facing Jack as he entered his office, a former sixteenth-century drawing room which was now the hub of IMU research and exploration worldwide.
A few moments later he was back outside with a map of Europe which he unrolled and pinned down on the patio table using their coffee mugs. Costas drew his chair up as Jack swept his hand from Scandinavia to the Black Sea.
“The Byzantines called them Varangians,” Jack said. “Tall, blond, terrifying barbarians from the north who served as mercenaries in the Byzantine emperor’s legendary Varangian Guard, the successor of the Praetorian Guard of ancient Rome. In Hardrada’s day the Varangian Guard were mainly Vikings, Norse warriors from
