driven by dwarves, but no relics. By the time I came back she was married to someone else, and then I lost my eye, and pretty much put happiness aside. Bliss is reserved for the few.’
‘At least you had someone to haunt you.’ I thought of Astiza.
‘Then I inherited my ancestral farm, her husband drowned, and against all expectations she and her family accepted me for a second match. I thought myself mutilated, hideous, but she was Beauty to my Beast. When she told me she was with my child I was in a daze of happiness. I severed my connections with Forn Sior and dedicated myself to domesticity. Have you ever known contentment, Ethan?’
‘Now and again, for an hour or two. I don’t know if it is men’s lot to be content for very long. Franklin said, ‘Who is rich? He who is content. Who is that? Nobody.’’
‘Your mentor was wrong on that one. By his definition I was rich, fabulously so. What need had I of Norway or Templars when I had Signe? And then …’
‘She died?’
‘I killed her.’
He was haunted, I saw, and not just by dwarves and elves. His expression was suddenly withered as a garden in winter. I was stunned, not knowing what to say.
‘She died trying to give birth to my baby.’
I swallowed. ‘Magnus, that could happen to anyone.’
‘The neighbours had already made fun and called me Odin. But in my torrent of grief I saw destiny’s hand and realised I wasn’t done. I think the knights of old were seeking a grail that could mean the worst things could be undone, and that I’m doomed to search the world as the old god did, on a quest for my own kind of bitter knowledge. I’m on a search in my wife’s memory, Ethan. That’s why I can’t share your sport with women.’
‘Oh.’ Once again I felt shallow – but more easily healed, too. You can’t lose what you don’t risk, including your heart. ‘Surely she wouldn’t begrudge a remarriage. She did it herself.’
‘No, I gave up my quest and killed her by my selfishness in doing so. Now I must complete it, out here in the American West, as penance.’
‘Penance! And you bring the innocent
‘You need purpose, too. I could see it at Mortefontaine, where all you had were food, drink, cards, and women. I’ve saved you, though you’ll never appreciate it.’
‘But we’ve come to the edge of nothing,’ I said with exasperation, gesturing at the brown hollow below us, mist pooled like a puddle.
‘No. This is the edge of Eden.’ His breath was a cloud in the chill.
I felt sour about my recruitment. ‘I always pictured Eden warmer.’ I pulled my blanket over my head, shivering despite myself at the sorrow of his tale. The eager boy suddenly seemed a thousand years old, and the empty woods watchful.
‘Have you ever wondered where Eden was, Ethan?’
‘Not really.’ I realised my partner was quite mad.
‘I mean it had to be somewhere. What if it could be rediscovered?’
‘If I remember the scriptures, Bloodhammer, the door to that particular inn slammed shut,’ I grumbled. ‘Eve, the apple, and all that.’
‘But what if it could be reopened?’
‘With a key?’
‘Thor’s hammer.’
I rolled over to go to sleep. ‘Then stay away from apple pie.’
By the next morning Magnus was cheerful again, as if our conversation had been a weird, bad dream. He made no mention of poor Signe, chattering instead about the open brownness of our forests that was apparently different from Norwegian woods. He was a madman who couldn’t remember his own fantasies. But just as we saddled our horses he called out, ‘Here!’ and impishly threw me something.
I looked. It was an apple, kept over from the harvest before and bought in Washington’s market.
‘Encouragement.’ His grin was wry.
‘Then I’m taking a bite.’ It was still firm enough to crunch, and I chewed. ‘I don’t feel any wiser.’
‘We just haven’t found the right tree yet.’
So off we rode. When I finished I threw the core into the spring woods, from where it might sprout.
When it rained we took shelter in crude public inns, the lodging invariably close, smoky, pungent, and loud. Men spat, swore, farted, and grumbled as they shared beds for warmth. Come dawn, all of us picked bugs off each other like monkeys and then paid exorbitant prices for a breakfast of salt pork, corn mush, and watered whiskey, the standard diet of frontier America. I didn’t find a clean cup or a pretty hostess between Georgetown and Pittsburgh.
Out of moody boredom, Magnus got in the habit of splitting hostel firewood with his heavy-bladed axe, earning us enough each time to buy a sixpence loaf of bread. I sometimes kept him company, watching the ripple of his great muscles with the same wary awe one watches a bull, calling out advice he usually ignored. I’d help stack the result, but declined to do the chopping.
‘For the hero of Acre and Marengo, you seem to have an aversion to a fighting man’s exercise,’ he’d finally tease good-naturedly.
‘And for a man expecting to control the world, you seem all too willing to do a peasant’s work for pennies. Hedging your bets, Magnus?’
After nine days of hard travel it was a relief to come down out of the steep, cold mountains, the country taking on a fuzz of spring green. Pittsburgh was a triangular city of three hundred houses and fifteen hundred souls, its apex pointing down the Ohio formed by the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela. The old British fort at the point was long gone, its brick pillaged for new construction and its earthen ramparts washed out by floods. The rest of the town was thriving under a pall of coal smoke, bustling with boatyards, lumber mills, and factories for rope, nails, glass, and iron. Its smell of hen coops and stables carried a good two miles, and the streets had as many pigs as people. Getting to a riverboat down the Ohio required a steep climb down the city’s bluffs and across boards laid on the mudflats to deep water.
A flatboat took us and our horses down the Ohio twenty miles to a landing at the Great Trail, now a crude road running north. What used to be dangerous Indian country just a decade before had become, thanks to the victory at Fallen Timbers, an immigrant highway. War, disease, and the collapse of the game population had reduced tribes like the Delaware and Wyandot to penury, and the dirty, emaciated survivors we saw bore little resemblance to the proud warriors I recalled from my trapping days. Were the Indians already finished, as doomed as the mastodon?
Magnus studied them with interest. ‘The descendants of Israel,’ he murmured.
‘I’ve been to Palestine, and I hardly think so.’
‘The lost tribes, Jefferson speculated.’
‘Magnus, they’re a dying race. Look at them! I’m sorry, but it’s true.’
‘If it’s true, then we’re about to lose more than we ever dreamt. These people know things we’ve forgotten, Ethan.’
‘Like what?’
‘The past. How to truly live. And how the world is alive with things we cannot see. Scholars say they know the spirit world. Thor could have walked with their manitou: perhaps they were similar spiritual beings! Franklin was inspired by the Iroquois government to help craft your Constitution. Johnson complimented their oratory.’
‘And yet at our last inn they were described as thieving, drunken, lazy scalp hunters. Pioneers hate Indians, Magnus. That whiskey trader had a tobacco pouch made from a warrior’s scrotum. Our word for their women, ‘squaw,’ means cunt. Europeans have been fighting them for three hundred years.’
‘Fear has made us blind, but that doesn’t mean the Indian can’t see.’
New settler trails branched off in all directions, forests were being toppled, and so many plumes of smoke rose that the entire Ohio Territory seemed a steaming stew. The meanest European peasant could come, girdle trees, plant his corn in the spaces between, set loose his pigs, and call himself a farmer. Their cabins were no bigger than a French bedroom, their yards mud, their children feral, and their wives so hard-used that their beauty was shot by twenty. But a man was free! He had land, black and loamy. Ohio seemed to be writhing with transformation as we rode, its skin twitching with change. I wondered if Jefferson’s prediction that this west would
