The Dakota Cipher

It’s because I’m so tolerant and easygoing, I suppose, that I draw theorists of this sort. I made a resolution then and there to become stern and crabby, but it’s entirely contrary to my character. Besides, I half believed him.

‘So there was more than one Thoth?’

‘Probably. Or he was well-travelled, flying though the air to different places on Earth and leaving a different legend with each ancient people. He gave us gifts to start our civilisations, and we remember it dimly as myth.’

‘But where was this hammer after Thor disappeared?’

‘Ah. That we don’t know. There are legends of men in white tunics and red crosses going to mines far to the north, where in summer the sun never sets and in winter it never rises. However they did it, we of Forn Sior think the Templars found the hammer and stored it with the other amazing artefacts they were collecting, while using them to increase their power. That’s what the king of France and his ally, the pope, were hoping to seize! But the Templars hid their treasure, smuggled it to distant isles like Gotland, and when the church at last followed them there – when they were betrayed by doubting Cistercian monks, perhaps – they fled farther. To America!’

‘Suppose for a moment I concede they could have sailed that far. Why would they go so far inland?’

‘To hide the hammer, of course, in the remotest place they could find. A lost place. A mystical place. A central place. Perhaps they were going to found their own colony around it, and create a utopia based on Templar and Cistercian principles in the one place where no one would ever find them to persecute them.’

‘Except the Indians.’

‘Well, yes. We must assume the effort failed, since no one has heard of any such colony. And attacks by Red Indians could indeed have been the cause.’

‘So you want to go there? I mean here?’ I pointed to the hammer symbol on the map.

‘Yes, to look for the hammer. Do you realise the symbolic power it would have, regardless of whether it really spits lightning? It would reawaken Norse culture and pride. It would be our flag, our liberty tree. It would be the symbol for revolution against the Danes, and Forn Sior would lead the way to a new society!’

‘Which is why Danes are trying to kill us?’

‘Yes.’ He nodded encouragingly. ‘If we succeed, we tear their little empire apart! It’s flattering they’re after us.’

‘You keep saying “we”, Magnus. But I never signed on for all this. Certainly not to look for a mythical hammer in the middle of Indian country a thousand miles from any proper post, in hopes I can free a frozen backwater in Europe I’ve never been to!’ My voice was rising at the absurdity of it.

But his smile was impregnable. ‘Of course you’ll help. The hammer will be the greatest treasure on Earth, and if anyone understands its electrical and lightning powers, it will be you, Ethan Gage, heir to Franklin, the electrician of the age.’

‘No. No, no, no, no.’

‘It will make you rich. It will make you famous. And it will make you a hero to your own country.’

‘Why would it make me a hero to my country?’

‘Because no one needs the hammer found more than your own leaders, Ethan Gage. No one is depending on you more.’

‘What would the leaders of the United States know about this Thor’s hammer? It’s absurd.’

‘Not absurd. Awaited.’

‘What?’

‘Ethan. Don’t you know your own nation was founded, created, and guided by the descendants of the Knights Templar?’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The island of Manhattan, logged clear of trees by British desperate for firewood when confined during the American Revolution a generation before, was in winter a muddy, brushy, dreary place of second-growth wood lots, overgrazed dairy farms, fallow vegetable gardens, and leaden ponds. At its southern end, however, was my nation’s second-biggest city after Philadelphia, a commercial Gomorrah with fewer manners and more ambition than its rival. The number of merchants had quadrupled in just the past ten years, and its sixty thousand people were packed into a warren of tight streets, squeezed churches, and practical counting houses, their architects expressing a better eye for cost than art. Cobbled streets were combed by wagon wheels into lines of slush and manure, while poorer mud lanes were lined by two-story townhouses crammed with cobblers, wheelwrights, glassblowers, butchers, fishmongers, chandlers, coppersmiths, carpenters, clothiers, saddlers, bakers, green grocers, furriers, bookmakers, brewers, gunsmiths, jewellers, weavers, watchmakers, teahouses, and taverns. Like all cities, New York stank: of manure, wood smoke, human sewage, sawdust, beer, and the reek of tanneries and slaughterhouses that clustered around a polluted pond called the Collect.

It was a city of newcomers and strivers – not just the Dutch and English but New Englanders riding its commercial wave, French emigres escaping the revolution at home, thick and industrious Germans and Swedes, entrepreneurial Jews, Spanish grandees, Negroes both slave and free, and occasionally an Indian chief, Chinaman, or Hawaiian Kanaka who gaped and were gaped at in the crowded markets. Some five thousand refugees from the slave revolts in Haiti had recently debarked, including ‘mestizo ladies with complexions of the palest marble, jet black hair, and the eyes of the gazelle,’ in the words of one journal. Indeed, there were women aristocratic, wives buxom, maids slim, servants dusky, whores powdered, actresses late-rising, and Dutch girls scrubbing stoops, their energetic bottoms oscillating with a charm that made me happy to be back home.

Magnus was an unfashionable oddity himself, with burgeoning whiskers, a mane of rusty hair, a black eye patch, and hands like hams. I enjoyed notoriety, too, from reports that I was connected to the newly risen Bonaparte. My mission was the new capital of Washington, but a flurry of invitations persuaded me to pause and take rest.

Since it was winter, the mercantile frenzy of New York was largely confined indoors, businessmen laying ambitious plans next to warming fires while the wind whistled down the Hudson, freezing fast New York’s garbage until it could be used to extend landfills in the spring. Ice floes scudded by the village of Brooklyn, and bare yardarms made crosses of snow.

The city’s primary talk was politics. After a bitter election campaign between Adams’s Federalists and the upstart Republicans, the two candidates of the latter, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, had tied in the number of electoral votes, or so the rumour went. The ballots that were cast December 3^rd would not be officially counted until February 11^th of the New Year, but the results were about as secret as Admiral Nelson’s dalliance with Lady Hamilton, half a world away. The presidency would be decided in the House of Representatives, as the framers of the Constitution had anticipated, and everyone had an opinion of how the vote might go. While Jefferson was widely acknowledged as the intellectual leader of his party, speculation was that the defeated Federalists in Congress might deny the office to the sage of Monticello and give it instead to the more ferociously ambitious and recklessly high-living Burr, a New Yorker who’d gone back on his promise to be content with second place. The jockeying was, all agreed, unseemly, ruthless, naked, and irresistible.

‘The titan Washington is gone, and lesser men are scrambling for power!’ a barkeep at Fraunces Tavern declared. ‘The age of heroes is over, the present is corrupt, and the future promises disaster!’

‘Things are normal then,’ I toasted. ‘To democracy!’

Every candidate had been tarred. Jefferson was accused of shirking military duty during the Revolution and of being a Jacobin and atheist. Incumbent John Adams was portrayed as incompetent, power-mad, and a secret ally of the perfidious British. Burr was a tin-pot Napoleon. In other words, it was little different than the sniping and backstabbing one heard in the salons of Paris, and I discounted all of it, given what lies have been told about even earnest and likable types like me. There were tales of a Federalist plot to assassinate Jefferson, arm the slaves, or seize the arsenals. Some feared civil war! Yet none of the Americans thought the undignified tumult warranted a king. The ones I drank with were as proud of democracy’s chaos as gulls playing the winds of a tempest.

‘Our congressmen will have our say, by God!’ the barflies declared. ‘They are rogues every one, but they are our rogues.’