The Dakota Cipher

steal.

‘The Templars were crushed. Musty history.’

‘Not to true Masons, Ethan. While some Templars died or recanted their order, others fled to places like Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia … and perhaps America.’

‘America hadn’t even been discovered then.’

‘There are Viking legends of exploration, and rumours of just such a Templar escape. Legends tied up with stories about Thor and Odin. And then, eight months ago, in a secret crypt below the floor of a Cistercian abbey on the island of Gotland, exploring monks found a map and the legend became truth. That is what is going on.’

‘This map you claim to have.’

‘The Cistercian Order was founded by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, you may recall, nephew of Andre de Montbard, one of the Templar founders.’

Now I felt a chill. I’d found the tomb of Montbard – or some Christian knight, anyway – in a subterranean chamber beneath a lost city in the Holy Land, and with it the Book of Thoth. Despite my best efforts, the villain Silano had used the book to help usher Napoleon Bonaparte to power. Now Napoleon called the Tuileries home, and I was on a ship to America. My lost love, Astiza, who had returned to the sun of Egypt, would agree with Bloodhammer that it was all foreordained. For a world in which everything is supposedly predestined, life seems awfully complicated.

‘You know what I’m talking about,’ Magnus went on, watching me. ‘Saint Bernard was a mystic who saw holiness in geometry and inspired the greatest of the Gothic cathedrals. His monasteries became some of the most prosperous and powerful in Europe, rising hand-in-hand with the secular power of the Templars. Was it coincidence that some of the persecuted knights fled to Gotland where the Cistercian Order was particularly strong? The monks succeeded in winning Norse pagans over by blending some of the old beliefs with the new, or rather in recognising a continuity of religious belief as old as time. Not so much one true God as that every god was, in its own way, a manifestation of the One. And not just God, but the Goddess.’

Damnation. Pagans pop up on me like pimples on a youth. And if you get involved with one or two of them, as I have, the others seem to seek you out.

‘You’re saying Saint Bernard and the Cistercians weren’t Christians?’

‘I’m saying Christianity allows more freedom of thought than many denominations will admit, and that Bernard recognised that devotion can take many forms. Of course they were Christian! But both the knights and the monks recognised the many paths the holy have walked, and the many manifestations of their power. It’s rumoured the knights brought some secret back from Jerusalem. That’s why I wanted to meet you at Mortefontaine, to learn if it is true.’

It was gone, so why not tell him? ‘Was true. It was a book.’

I could hear his sharp intake of breath even over the roar of the sea. ‘Was a book?’

‘It burnt, Magnus. Lost forever, I’m afraid. I could hardly even read it.’

‘This is a monstrous tragedy!’

‘Not really. The scroll caused nothing but trouble.’

‘But you believe me, then? If the Templars found and hid a sacred book, why not an important map? Correct?’

‘I suppose. The book was in a crypt, too.’

‘Aha!’

I sighed. ‘What led to the discovery of your map?’

‘Snow and thaw. It was a bad winter, water penetrated the foundations, and cracks developed in the masonry of the chapel floor. A bright young monk realised there was a cavity under what had been assumed to be a solid foundation, and when it was excavated for repair they found the tombs. Curiously, the entrance had been sealed so no one could spot it. In one sarcophagus of a monastery leader, dated 1363, a parchment map was encased.’

‘I don’t suppose it was in a golden cylinder?’

‘Gold?’ He looked surprised. ‘Now that would have got our attention. No, a leather tube, sealed quite effectively with wax. Why do you ask?’

‘My own book was encased in gold. Splendid piece, carved with figures and symbols.’

‘By the steed of Odin! Do you still have it? It could be of incalculable value in understanding the past!’

I felt sheepish. ‘Actually I gave it away to a metallurgist, probably to be melted down. I’d cost him his home, see. There was this woman, Miriam …’

He groaned. ‘Your brain is in your breeches!’

‘No, no, it wasn’t like that. I was going to marry her, but she was engaged, and her brother was laughing at me …’ It sounded puzzling even to me. ‘Anyway, it’s gone too.’

Magnus shook his head. ‘And to think you have a reputation as a savant. Are you an expert in anything beyond the female form?’

‘Don’t act superior to me! Don’t you like women?’

‘Aye, I like them, but they don’t like me. Look at me! I’m no dandy.’

‘You have a certain, umm, mutilated, bearlike charm. You just haven’t found the right one.’

Instantly, he was gloomy. ‘I did, once.’

‘Well, there you go then.’

‘And if she does like you, and then you lose her … well, there’s nothing more painful than that, is there?’

It was the kind of confession that makes you realise someone has the potential to be a friend. ‘It hurts, doesn’t it?’ Yes, I’d been in love, too, and with far better women than Pauline Bonaparte. ‘You’ve had your heart broken?’

‘Not in the way you think. I lost my wife.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry, Magnus.’

‘It’s not so bad, I think, never to know joy, never to see paradise. But to have it, to see it, and then lose it … After Signe’s death I dedicated myself to learning the truth of legends I’d first heard as a boy. I’ve searched libraries and archives, sailed to mines and hiked to dolmens, lost an eye and offered my soul. While Signe has gone on, I remain in our earthly purgatory, trying to get back in.’

‘Get back in what?’

‘Paradise.’

‘You mean another woman?’

‘No!’ He looked offended.

‘What, then?’

‘Suppose it didn’t have to hurt?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Imagine there was a place, a way, where bad things didn’t happen? Or where bad things could be reversed, corrected?’

‘What, heaven? Valhalla? Not in the world I’ve seen, Magnus, and believe me, I’ve looked.’

‘Suppose there was a better world we’ve lost? A real place, in a real time, not a legend.’

‘These myths you talk about aren’t real, man. They’re stories.’

‘Stories like Templars escaping to America, more than a century before Columbus. Stories about secret books, and underground tombs in lost cities.’

He had a point. The planet seemed fuller of inexplicable oddities than I’d ever imagined. I had, after all, scooped treasure beneath the pyramid, found a secret chamber beneath the Temple Mount, swum in a secret well to a Templar’s grave, and got help in the middle of a dire fight from a long-dead mummy. Who’s to say what’s impossible? ‘Let’s see your map, then.’

So he pulled it out of that tube he carried. I noticed the map case was longer than the scroll, and wondered what was at its hidden end.

‘There are stories of other maps. The Earl of Orkney, Prince Henry Saint Clair, is said to have taken thirteen