The Dakota Cipher

‘By the horns of the Minotaur,’ I wheezed. ‘Why weren’t you eviscerated in the cave?’

‘I’d grasped the tablet before it woke and blocked its initial swipe. Then it broke loose from something and knocked me back through the entrance. It had the strength of ten men, Ethan. It had the spirit of Thor!’

‘And Thor almost had us for dinner. That damned tablet of yours saved our lives.’ The slab lay on the bear’s skull like a gravestone. ‘Let’s have a look at what we found.’

Magnus dragged the tablet off and flipped it over.

‘It’s the magic signs!’ Namida said. I made a mental note to give the girl the claws for a necklace. It’s always wise to make the best of bad situations, Ben used to tell me, and women love jewellery.

Magnus meanwhile traced incised lines with his fingers, muttering, and then looked at me in triumph. ‘Norse runes!’

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Using my rifle as a measuring stick, I estimated the tablet was thirty-one inches long, sixteen inches wide, and half a foot thick. It weighed at least two hundred pounds. No wonder it slowed the bear! Half of one side was smooth and covered in odd-looking letters of a type I’d never seen before: different from our own alphabet, Egyptian hieroglyphics, or the alien writing of the Book of Thoth. The script was crudely chiselled and not very deep. Had I encountered the artefact in a cow pasture I’d likely have passed by without noticing it.

‘What do you mean by Norse ruins?’ I asked.

‘Runes,’ Magnus explained, spelling it. ‘Norse lettering from the Viking and medieval days. This is what we call a rune stone. The Vikings and others carved these to commemorate an event, boast of deeds, enumerate marriages and offspring, declare a faith, or record a voyage or passage. There are thousands of them in Scandinavia. If these Indians have one, it proves my people were here.’ He glanced around grandly. ‘All this belongs to Norway!’

I glanced at the dead bear. ‘You can have it. And this tells us where to go?’

‘Perhaps, if the men with Thor’s hammer carved it. Let me translate.’

The women were already sawing into the bear, choosing to interpret our near-devouring as the opportunity for a windfall feast. Indians are the most sensibly practical people I know.

‘Don’t forget to keep the claws,’ I called to Namida. ‘They’ll lend a savage charm.’

‘Look, there’s more writing on the side of the stone,’ Magnus said.

‘Pretty long-winded if you have to chisel, weren’t they?’

‘It wouldn’t take that long for a skilled rune mason, and some people want their words to last.’ He was scratching translations in the dirt. Finally Magnus began to recite. ‘“Eight Gotlanders and twenty-two Norwegians on a journey of acquisition from Vinland, very far west,”’ he read. He paused. ‘Vinland is a land they found on the east coast of Canada, so the writer must mean they’ve come very far west from that.’

‘As have we. Read on.’

‘“We had camp by two rocky islands one day’s journey north from this stone. We were out fishing one day. After we came home we found ten men red with blood and death. AVM save from evil.”’

‘The AVM is in Latin letters,’ I noted.

‘Ave Maria, I’d guess. Hail Mary. Remember, these were Christians, at least in part. Catholics, in those days. The old runes were giving way to the new letters.’

‘Well, there’re no rocky islands on this prairie. This stone was obviously moved from its original resting place. Captured from the Dakota, Namida said, who in turn got it from who knows who.’

‘They probably mean an island in a lake,’ Magnus agreed, ‘but that could be in any number of directions. Here’s what the side of the stone says: “Have ten men by the sea to look after our ships fourteen days’ journey from this island. Year 1362.”’

‘Year 1362? Isn’t that the time your Templar map dates from?’

‘Now do you believe me, Ethan?’

It’s one thing to go charging off after treasure, but another entirely to think you might really have a chance of finding it. I was growing excited. ‘But why?’

‘I told you,’ he said patiently. ‘Thor’s hammer. Dwarven mastery of the forging arts in the lost Golden Age.’

‘Dwarven what?’

‘The dwarves Eitri and Brokk forged the hammer of Thor in the furnaces of their caverns, its only flaw a short handle caused when Loki, disguised as a fly, stung the eyelids of Brokk.’

I was sorry I asked. ‘So how do we find it?’

He sat down heavily, tired from his fight with the bear. ‘I don’t know. If the stone has been moved, fourteen days from the sea means little.’

‘It’s worse than that. It’s taken us months to get here. Fourteen days from the sea means a place a thousand miles back east or north, doesn’t it? We’re nowhere near your hammer if this was carved by the same Norsemen.’

‘Or Eden.’

He suddenly looked so crushed that I felt sorry for him, and worse for me. A moment ago I’d soaring hope of Viking loot. Now it was dashed! ‘We tried, Magnus.’

He didn’t answer.

‘The Somersets, if they’re really alive, are on a wild goose chase, too.’

He was staring sadly at his rune stone.

‘So.’ Here we were in unmapped wilderness, next to a dead bear and a plague-wracked village, possibly pursued by any number of red savages and a vengeful pair of English perverts, more than a thousand miles from any civilised comfort, and with little in the way of food, clothing, weapons, powder, or sense of direction. Our only allies were two Indian women greedily roasting bear liver and paying not a whit of attention to keeping watch. Our sole clue weighed two hundred pounds.

In other words, it was the usual hash I made of things, in the usual dubious company. I walked down to wash in the river, wishing this particular group of Indians had adopted the horse so that I could gallop the devil out of here. The Mandan were sedentary farmers, alas. I wished I’d seen a volcano or mountain of salt, or something to bring back to anxious Tom Jefferson.

And then Magnus shouted.

I came running with my rifle, but he was pointing at the stone. ‘I have it, I have it, I have it!’ he cried, and danced a cloggish shambles that I guess in Norway passes for a jig. Well, nobody ever attributed ballet to the Vikings.

‘By Jupiter, have what?’

‘It’s a code, Ethan, a cipher, like you said!’ He began pointing at random numbers. ‘Some of these letters have odd extra markings, like dots and slashes. I didn’t understand why at first. But if you take the first seven letters so marked, do you know what they spell?’

‘Magnus, I can’t read runes at all.’

‘Gral thar!’ It was a cry jubilant enough to topple a tower. If Red Jacket was within a league, he could hardly miss us.

‘Don’t shout!’ I glanced warily at the bluffs. ‘Is that good?’

‘It means ‘grail.’ And the next are Cistercian symbols for wisdom and holy spirit. It means, ‘Their grail, wisdom, and holy spirit.’’

Now I felt a shiver. I’d heard the word ‘grail’ before, too, in Egypt and the Holy Land, and like Saint Bernard it kept echoing through my life. Here it was on a rock in the middle of Dakota country? The longer I lived, the odder life seemed to be, signs and portents constantly butting into what had been a comfortably dull, pleasingly pointless existence. ‘But what does that mean?’

‘That these men planted, or found, the grail that was their holy mission. And if the map I brought from Gotland is true, that grail is the hammer, brought here to where rivers go north, south, east, and west.’

I looked at the brown, eroding bluffs. ‘Magnus, we’re not in Eden.’

‘Not here, but where this rune stone came from. Where they deposited the hammer, and probably tried to found a colony. But demons already infested this country, foes