The Dakota Cipher

ships west at the end of the fourteenth century, nearly one hundred years before Columbus, and come back with a map showing Nova Scotia and perhaps New England. But this one is earlier, and better.’

The chart was on some kind of skin parchment, not paper, with the coastline of Europe clearly visible and what appeared to be Iceland and Greenland at the top. There was a crude compass rose, which meant an origin no earlier than medieval times, and Latin inscription. But what drew the eye, of course, was the map’s left-hand side. It appeared to show the northeast coast of an unbounded land mass with a large, almost circular bay. From this, squiggly lines, like rivers, led south into a blank interior. In the middle of nowhere was a curious symbol, like a squat, fat T. Near it was a little peak.

‘What’s this mountain here?’

‘That’s not a mountain. It’s a Valknot, the knot of the slain.’

I peered closer. The mountain was actually a cluster of overlapping triangles that intersected like a knot, as Magnus had said. It created an odd illusion, like an abstraction of a mountain range. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘It’s also called Odin’s triangle,’ Bloodhammer explained. ‘It connects the battlefield dead to Valhalla, like a power lifting them up.’

‘So why is it on this map?’

‘Why indeed?’ Now his eye was bright.

Near the symbols were what appeared to be rivers leading away in the four cardinal directions, as if the symbol were near a central spring.

‘That tomb had not been opened since 1363,’ Magnus said. ‘The crypt itself had apparently been closed at least since 1400 – well before Columbus and the other explorers sailed. And yet what does that bite in the continent look like to you, my sceptical friend?’

There was no denying it. ‘Hudson Bay. But the 1300s …’

‘Were two centuries and better after Vikings were rumoured to have reached a mysterious Vinland to the west,’ Bloodhammer said. ‘And two and a half centuries before Henry Hudson found the bay that bears his name, and where he was marooned to die by his own mutinous crew.’ He stabbed the parchment. ‘Norsemen were in the middle of North America a century and a half before Columbus sailed. How about that, eh?’

‘But what the devil has this to do with Knights Templar?’

‘Here we have speculation. The Templars are crushed, politically, beginning in 1309. Some flee to Gotland. This map is generated half a century later. We know that famine racked Europe in the 1320s, and that the Black Plague came next, reaching Norway about 1349. The church was continuing its persecutions, fearing the disease to be God’s judgment. Suppose descendants of the knights, sheltered by the Cistercians, who do not see eye-to-eye with Rome, decided to seek refuge in a New World first discovered by pagan Viking explorers a few centuries before? They would escape persecution, famine, and disease. In 1354, there is a record of one Paul Knutson setting out to check the colonies of Greenland, which had fallen silent. Suppose our medieval Norsemen went even farther, into this vast bay? And then inland? We know Hudson’s crew was trapped by ice for the winter, prompting their mutiny the next spring. What if Norsemen, more comfortable with winter, decided to strike south on the frozen rivers instead of waiting for the thaw? Or perhaps they did wait for spring, and ascended the rivers you see once they were free of ice. The rivers on my map correspond closely to the rivers today’s Hudson’s Bay Company uses to access the Canadian interior for furs. Might they have penetrated to the centre of North America? Might they have seen sights and made claims hundreds of years before any European?’

‘But why?’ I pondered the map. ‘Even if these Templars, or monks, or whatever they were, decided to go to the New World, why would they go north to a place like Hudson’s Bay? Why not the eastern coast of the United States? There’s a line for it right there.’ I pointed. ‘No Viking is going to paddle or march to the middle of America.’

‘Not Viking. Medieval Norse who are descendants of the Knights Templar, or Templars themselves.’

‘Medieval Norse, then. It still makes no sense. What did they expect to find?’

‘Not just find. Hide.’

‘Hide? What?’

‘What they had to flee the church and the authorities to secrete away. One of the mysteries the Templars had uncovered in their untiring research into the old faiths. One of the grails itself.’

‘The grail?’ I swallowed. Given my past adventures, I didn’t have good association with that word. I’d babbled it myself once to get out of being tortured and bitten by snakes, but that was just expediency.

‘Here!’ He pointed, indicating the mysterious T symbol near Odin’s triangle. It looked a little like a fat Templar cross, but with the upright piece at the top missing. Bloodhammer’s gaze was fierce again. ‘Mjolnir. Thor’s hammer!’

Understand that at this point, any normal savant would have thrown up his hands and walked away, or at least walked as far as you can on a pitching ship. Thor’s hammer? I knew little of Norse mythology, but I’d heard of Thor, and of a weapon he carried, a hammer. It was fearsome, shot lightning, and came back to the god’s hand when he threw it. The trouble was, it’s all a myth. Thor’s hammer? Probably kept in a cubby with Neptune’s trident, Jason’s fleece, and the club of Hercules.

But I felt sympathy for Magnus because once I’d been in his exact position, explaining a story every bit as crazy as this one to my old confederates in Jerusalem and trying not to sound like a madman. So I sat where I was and asked the obvious:

‘Thor’s what?’

Magnus looked triumphant. ‘The hammer of the gods! It really existed!’

‘Thor really existed? A Norse god?’

He nodded excitedly. ‘Not God as we understand him. Not the Creator, or the Great Architect, as the Masons would say. Rather a superior being, a first ancestor, of a company of heroes we can never hope to emulate. They preceded our own race, in a golden age long lost. Thor taught things that humankind has since forgotten. And he put some of his power, some of this thought, into his hammer!’

‘You realise that you should be restrained.’

‘I know it sounds fantastic! How do you think we of the Forn Sior felt when we realised there might be artefacts of the hero’s age left on this earth? But the Templars took seriously the notion that ancient beings instructed primitive men.’

‘Wait. Forn Sior?’

‘“Old Custom.” That’s what we call ourselves.’

‘What who calls themselves?’

‘Those of us who are keepers of the past, who believe the old stories are as valid as the new, and that truth is a blending of all threads. We’re a secret fraternity, my friend, who seek out those like you who might help us. I was in despair when Signe initially married another, and they had recruited me. They gave me hope. Mankind has learnt much, Ethan: we live in a strange new modern age, the nineteenth century! And who knows what wonders are to come! But we’ve forgotten as much as we’ve learnt. There are powers in the forest, spirits in the stones, and magic secrets that have been forgotten for three thousand years. But the Templars began relearning them! They started in Jerusalem and searched the entire world!’

‘Secrets like my book?’

‘Yes, like your book. Written by whom, exactly? Or should I say what?’

‘Some kind of Egyptian being called Thoth. He looked like a bird in some representations. A baboon in others.’

‘Or a tree, a unicorn, a dragon, or an angel. Don’t you see, Ethan? It’s all the same, these mysterious forebears, the origin of our kind, and they’ve left clues about their history for us to rediscover.’

‘A Frenchman named Jomard told me the Great Pyramid incorporated fundamental truths, and that everything since has been a long forgetting.’

‘Yes! Exactly! Like your Book of Thoth or Mjolnir, Thor’s hammer. Eight hundred years after our conversion to Christianity its symbol still adorns many a necklace, because it’s perceived as a good-luck piece in my country!’

‘Let me get this straight. You think there really was a Thor. With a magic hammer. Which Knights Templar found. And which was taken to America centuries before Columbus?’

He nodded happily. ‘Isn’t it exciting?’