geography, it would explain why they came so far to escape persecution in Gotland.’
‘The land of our dead is in the west,’ put in Namida, who was following our conversation in French. ‘The spirits go where the sun sets.’
‘There. You see?’ said Magnus.
‘So now you’re looking for heaven, too?’ said Pierre. ‘If it exists, would it not draw every Indian like a magnet?’
‘Maybe there’s something forbidding about the place as well. Or hidden.’
‘Ah. Wonderful.’
‘No Indian would want to go to a white man’s heaven,’ Namida added. ‘That would be hell, not paradise.’
‘Here’s what I think,’ Pierre said to Magnus. ‘Eden is where you find it, giant. Paradise is all around.’ He gestured with his arm to the river and marshes, soft grey in the morning. ‘But we’re blind to it, as blind as a man in a pitch black room filled with jewels he can’t see. It’s the white man’s curse. The Spanish tramped for El Dorado, when they could have found it back in Segovia, at a friendly table by a warm hearth and a plump wife. The Indians sense paradise better than we do because they see in ways we’ve forgotten. They know that every rock and tree and lake is animated with the unseen world. They talk to them on their spirit quests. Trees give gifts. Rocks bow in greeting. Animals speak. But we white men blunder about, trapping furs, chopping trees, and claiming to look for heaven when we’re in its midst.’
‘Those Indians didn’t seem like an angelic host to me,’ I said.
‘But these women here are angels, no? This is my point. Good and evil are in every man, in constant war, and not in some far-off place you can paddle to. Do you want Eden, Magnus? Find it on this mud island.’
The Norwegian doggedly shook his head. ‘You can’t convince me our raw breakfast is the stuff of paradise, Pierre. And it’s our very blindness that requires that we white men journey. We’re more distant from the golden past, and our penance is to walk farther. I think my map shows a real place, a spiritual El Dorado that my ancestors crossed an ocean to seek out.’
‘And there you’ll find hammers and weapons and life everlasting?’
Everlasting life, the recurring dream, even though the life we had seemed damned difficult to me! The French had spoken of it on the way to Egypt. The Templars had no doubt made it part of their quest. Alessandro Silano had found the edge of it and been stretched, distorted, by what he found. And for each, longevity had receded like the end of a rainbow.
I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to find the thread between man and heaven, but it was too late now. We had nowhere else to go.
The voyageur shook his head at Magnus and turned to me. ‘And you, Ethan Gage? What is your El Dorado?’
I thought. ‘People keep telling me there was an earlier, better age and secrets long forgotten. If we knew where we came from, we might know where we’re going.’
‘And what use is it to know where we’re going?’
‘To decide if we want to get there.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Seeing no sign of the enemy, we set out again, hoping we could follow without stumbling into an ambush. As the river narrowed and its banks grew rockier, we towed our canoe by foot through light rapids. Trees overhung each bank, almost meeting overhead, and side creeks were dammed by beaver. Half this wilderness, in fact, seemed water. I spied a yearling buck but I dared not risk a shot because of the noise. We went on hungry, warily watching.
It was drawing towards evening when Namida reached from behind and lightly touched me on the shoulder. ‘They’re nearby,’ she whispered.
I looked around. ‘How do you know?’
‘Birds flew up. Someone is on the river ahead.’ The women, I had noticed, could see things we couldn’t, hear things we were deaf to.
I glanced nervously at the trees, worried that birds would announce us.
‘We must get off the river,’ Pierre said. ‘There – that tributary! We’ll hide and scout.’ We turned into a creek, a green tunnel in the trees. The woods seemed deathly silent and I tensed for an arrow, but none came. After a quarter mile we came to a beaver dam, its quiet pond beyond. The beaver lodge was a wattle mound of sticks and mud in the pond’s middle.
We got out to lift our canoe over. ‘Treat the dam like glass, or they’ll see our sign,’ the voyageur instructed. ‘Do not bend a blade of grass or crack a twig! We must be silent as the wind and light as the butterfly!’
So of course the structure cracked under Magnus like a flute of champagne. He slipped, cursing, and fell into mud and water. Sticks gave way, water pouring out.
‘Yes, just like that, giant,’ the Frenchman said. ‘Let’s light a signal fire, too, just in case they can’t spot this sign.’
‘Sorry,’ the Norwegian mumbled.
‘Should we go back downstream?’ I asked.
Little Frog shook her head and spoke to Namida. The woman nodded and turned to us. ‘Go to the edge of the pond and hide, then break the dam and eat the beaver.’
Pierre brightened. ‘But of course! Out of clumsiness, grace! We’ll use the beaver pond to get farther upstream, then empty it to deter canoes from following. Gage, go with the women and camouflage the canoe. Giant and I will follow after we break the rest of this dam.’
‘I thought we had to treat it like glass.’
‘That was before I remembered I was hungry.’
The women and I paddled another mile to a grassy bank where we hoped no pursuit would find us and pulled our craft into a thicket. Then we hunkered down and waited.
‘How will we know the Indians missed us?’
‘If we are not dead,’ Namida said logically.
The water began to recede, evidence the dam was being dismantled. Night fell, but we dared not light a fire. Nor did we hear anything but frogs. I slept restlessly, and then at dawn we heard men coming on foot, slogging in the mud of what was now an emptied lake. I readied my rifle.
It was our companions. Each had a dead beaver in both their hands.
‘We broke the dam, drained the swamp and clubbed these beaver as they came out of the lodge,’ Pierre said. ‘It’s good the giant is so clumsy because I’m starving for beaver tail! If we find the driest, most smokeless wood, I think we’re far enough from the river to risk a fire.’
I escorted Namida and Little Frog into the forest and watched while they turned a wilderness into a green grocer. Where I would have starved, they found leaves for tea, roots for medicine, and cranberries and wild plum to dress our beaver. Little Frog briskly stitched a bark pot with birch and spruce root so we could boil a stew. The tail was a fatty godsend to our depleted bodies, and the beaver’s flesh dark red and fine-textured, tasting like corned beef. We satiated ourselves, Pierre lamenting that we had no easy way to carry and sell the skins.
‘But then why do I need money?’ he went on, arguing with himself. ‘The Indians have none and are happier for it. See, here we have all men need – a camp, food, women, the sky. But then treasure – well, that would be nice, too.’
I sympathised with his reasoning. No man is consistent.
If we were hidden, we were also blind, with little idea if Red Jacket still lay in wait. So it was almost reassuring that we heard, like a murmur in the wind, far-distant gunshots. We might not have noticed, but the noise persisted. Someone was fighting. Pierre, lithe as a monkey, shimmied up a tree to a branch from where he could see some of the sky. He stayed there for some minutes, then quickly came down.
‘Smoke,’ he reported.
‘What does it mean?’
‘I don’t know. We may be in luck – we need to watch the river. Let the American go – he’s done nothing useful for a while.’
