The Dakota Cipher

that left ten men red with blood and death. Or disease, like we encountered in the village. It was an Eden that could be violated. An Eden that had the snake.’

‘Magnus, you’re reading an awful lot into a rather cryptic tablet.’

‘When they say the sea they don’t mean the ocean,’ my companion insisted. ‘No tribe of Indians is going to carry this heavy sledge of rock that far, and it doesn’t correspond to the hammer symbol on my map. No, our quest is nearby, fourteen days from two ‘seas’ close to where we already are.’

‘What seas?’ The man had gone barmy.

‘Lake Superior, for one. Namida!’ he called to the women tending the fire. ‘What is two weeks’ journey west from Lake Superior where we were captured?’

She shrugged. ‘It depends on the route and the canoe. Somewhere east.’ She pointed back the way we’d come.

‘Aye.’ His eyes gleamed as he stared at me. ‘And two weeks south of Lake Winnipeg, the huge lake to the north that the Red River runs into. That too is east of where we sit. We had to come this far west to get the tablet, Ethan, but my bet is that it was discovered back in that wood-and-prairie country dotted with lakes, that blank spot with Thor’s hammer on my medieval map. Draw a line two weeks’ journey west from Superior or south from Winnipeg and you come to where the map showed the hammer – and that’s where we’ll find it!’

‘The grail?’

‘A grail, one of the Templar treasures: the hammer.’ He nodded. ‘There’ll be a sign to guide us, because we’re destined to find Thor’s weapon the same way we were destined to find this slab. Why else would we have so much success?’

‘Success?’ Ever the optimist, wasn’t he? At least he wanted to head back east.

‘When Pierre disappeared I began to fear the gods had abandoned us. But here they are leading us as surely as the pillar of fire led Moses.’

‘Magnus, I don’t think either one of us qualifies as Moses. Nor do I think he had to contend with ravenous bears.’

‘That was just a test. The task now is to look for our own pillar of fire, Ethan. Somewhere there’s a sign that points to Thor’s hammer.’

Magnus insisted we take the stone slab with us.

‘It weighs more than Little Frog!’

‘There may be more secrets in its message. Didn’t you find and decipher an ancient book from clues chiselled on an old stone tablet? You of all people should recognise the value of this.’

He meant the Book of Thoth I’d decoded with the stone from Rosetta, but my only true innovation had been to blow the relevant portion up. It seemed necessary at the time.

‘I didn’t drag the stone with me,’ I pointed out. ‘I copied it onto the naked back of my lover.’ I eyed Namida speculatively, wondering how her skin would look painted with runes. That entire episode with Astiza had been somewhat erotic.

‘Well, this is rock-solid evidence that my people were here before the Spanish, French, or British, and we’re not copying anything. We’re going to show this to the world, once we have the hammer it points to. We’ll be as important as Columbus. Norway will claim North America and take its place as one of the world’s great powers.’

I doubted that. People hate it when you challenge their preconceptions, and don’t reward you for doing so. If you seek success, tell people what they already believe. Revolutionaries get crucified, or worse.

‘Magnus, we can’t carry this door stoop a thousand miles.’

‘We’re going to tow it,’ he said briskly, now all business. ‘This river looks to flow east and south, exactly the direction we need to go. There was a dugout cottonwood canoe back at the village, big enough for the four of us, and we can make a raft to tow the stone. We’ll find the hammer, go down the Mississippi, and unveil this in Oslo!’

‘Can’t we aim for someplace warmer, like Paris or Naples?’

But Magnus was already issuing directions. Little Frog began skinning the bear, Namida set off to cut willow swathes, and Magnus began unwinding the leather tether that had held the bear. ‘You go fetch the canoe,’ he told me.

I found the craft he’d spied, the dead settlement above more mournful than ever. It occurred to me that the timing of this plague was awfully coincidental with our mission, and that the Somersets would guess we might make for Namida’s home village. Had they somehow sent an infectious agent up the Missouri to where these Indians were apt to contract it through trade, to prevent us from seeking help? Were we inadvertently responsible for this holocaust?

Again I scanned the surrounding ridges with a feeling that we were being watched, but they were empty as a pub in Mecca. I paddled the canoe back down.

The filthy bearskin had been scraped of gore and bent over a circular frame of lashed willow branches. The result was a smelly saucer four feet across, like a very concave shield, its seams waterproofed with bear grease.

‘That’s like the coracle I paddled from the fireworks island at Mortefontaine!’

‘Aye,’ said Magnus. ‘It’s a Welsh craft, as crude a boat as was ever launched, and yet quick to make and plain to paddle. Curious, isn’t it, how these native women know a style in use thousands of miles away?’

‘You think the Welsh brought this idea with them?’

‘I know we’re not the first white men here. We’ve found our distant ancestors, Ethan Gage, and somewhere out there is the place they came for.’

‘Your so-called Eden.’

‘Navel of the world, sacred centre, core. Paradise to some, purgatory to others. It takes the form its seeker expects.’

‘As elusive as the end of the rainbow.’

‘Where gold awaits.’ He winked his one good eye and just for a moment I did see him as restless Odin, wandering the world for wisdom and adventure.

The coracle bobbed like a bubble until the weight of the rune stone steadied it, and then it floated like a frigate. Magnus used the remains of the tether for a towline and we cast off from the sad village, leaving the great bear in a butchered heap and the cottonwoods whispering in the prairie wind. The current carried us southeast.

I allowed myself a glimmer of hope.

We followed the river – Namida said some of the trappers called it the Sheyenne – as it curved and curled through low bottomlands that were a mix of timber, flood-washed islands, and marshy meadow. The enclosing ridges were bare grass. I feared Red Jacket, but the world had emptied. Our journey seemed less and less real to me, as if we were indeed drifting into mythic time, our valley roofed by deep blue sky and the turning leaves fluttering down to float on the water like the rose petals of Mortefontaine. Great arrows of geese winged overhead, heading south with a honking bray. I’d no idea what day or month it was anymore, and indeed felt unmoored from any century. The Orient at least had dusty ruins but here the world was newborn, without calendar or clock.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

It was the third morning, not long after dawn, that we encountered our most serious obstacle yet, a living river perpendicular to our own. The buffalo were migrating.

A great herd was moving south, black and shaggy against the plains, and their course took them across our river ahead like a wall of horns and humps. The majestic animals were backlit by the climbing sun, a shambling tide that seemed as powerful and inexorable as the lunar one. We drifted, wondering how to get around.

‘It will take them days to cross,’ Namida said. ‘More buffalo than stars.’

‘If we flip in the middle they’ll trample us under,’ I said.

‘We don’t have days,’ Magnus put in.

And as if to accelerate our thinking, an arrow arced out from the brush on the river’s northern bank and thunked into the wood of our canoe, quivering.