The Dakota Cipher

And as the sun dipped to the west and lit the storm, a rainbow appeared as bright and solid as a flying buttress.

‘Bifrost!’ Magnus roared. ‘The flaming bridge that linked Asgard, home of the gods, to Midgard, home of man! There it is, a welcoming gate!’

‘It’s just a rainbow, Magnus. A rainbow and some rain.’

‘A rainbow with treasure at its end, I wager! Come, if you don’t believe me!’

How could we turn back now? We paddled as near as we could in a mosaic of lakes and streams, portaging brief distances three times, dragging the rune stone through the mud, and then paddling again. Either the strange, stationary storm was farther than it looked, or it kept receding from us. Our progress seemed glacial. Then as our creek finally shelved into marsh and we could paddle no closer, we beached the Mandan canoe for a final time, pulled ashore the coracle, and lifted out the heavy rune stone.

‘I’m not going to leave it for anyone else to discover,’ Magnus said.

‘How are we going to carry it?’

‘We can build a travois,’ said Namida. ‘My people use them to pull things across the plains. The Dakota pull them with horses, but we use dogs.’

‘We don’t have a dog, either.’

‘We have a giant.’

We cut poles and lashed them to form a triangle, with the coracle’s bear hide tied to the centre to bear the stone. Absent the wheel it was the best we could do.

Then, as the setting sun lit the cylinder of cloud orange, we bedded for the night. A chill breeze wafted down and Little Frog couldn’t sleep, watching the pulse of lightning. At midnight I woke and she was still upright, her face resigned.

‘La mort,’ she whispered when I touched her. Death.

CHAPTER FORTY

The next morning dawned foggy and quiet. We couldn’t see the mysterious cloud, or anything else. Mist hung over our camping place, a fog that left a dripping like a cellar of ticking clocks. No birds sang. No wind blew. It was eerie: like being dead, I guessed. Little Frog had finally fallen asleep and came awake slowly, her forehead hot.

‘Why is it so quiet?’ Namida asked. We all looked at Magnus.

‘I don’t know.’

But I knew, or feared I knew. Send a man into the forest and sometimes nature falls silent, the animals holding their breath as the feared creature passes, waiting and watching to see what he’ll do. We should have heard morning bird call, but there was none. ‘We’re still being watched, I think. Red Jacket hasn’t given up and isn’t far away.’

And indeed, suddenly we heard one bird call from the marsh and an answer to it downstream. The women stiffened. Indian signals.

‘This is a good sign,’ Magnus tried to reassure. ‘They still aren’t killing us because they’ve decided to track us to see what treasures we lead to.’

‘And then?’

‘We find the hammer first and everything changes.’ Magnus used our tow rope to make a crude harness for his travois. ‘Let’s go find what the bastards want us to find.’ He began dragging at a trot, wending through trees, a ghost himself the way the mist shrouded him. Then he broke into a meadow, the track of his travois poles two lines across wet, late-season grass as he hurried with a sense of direction I didn’t share. We jogged to keep up.

‘Magnus, wouldn’t it be easier to leave the rock?’

‘This is proof my country was first.’

‘But what happened to your Norwegians if they learnt old powers?’

‘Who knows? A stone that records ten men red with blood and death says something. Maybe it was disease. Maybe they fought the Indians. Maybe each other. Or maybe they triggered something they couldn’t control, some malevolent force that was awakened.’

‘The Wendigo,’ Namida said.

‘Or they simply accomplished what they came for,’ Magnus went on, ignoring her. ‘At least one of them returned to Scandinavia, because he brought back a map. And some, perhaps, wound up living with the Indians.’ He stopped, turning his harness towards Namida. ‘Do you know your ancestor was a Templar?’

‘What’s a Templar?’

He shook his head, and on we trudged.

‘How do you know all this?’ I persisted.

‘I have Templar blood myself. We were penniless royalty, disenfranchised generations ago, but I grew up on stories in Norway about how my ancestors knew powers we had lost. And they were just stories – until we found the map. Then I heard rumours of new discoveries in Egypt and the Holy Land during the French expedition, and that an American savant could be found in the new Revolutionary court of Napoleon. I detected Odin’s hand! A medieval map is set in the American wilderness, and then I learn of an American nearby with the expertise to partner with? I admit that as a hero you are quite disappointing, Ethan Gage, but you do have certain persistence. Even your lust for the Indian girl has proved useful – it brought us to the rune stone. So work the ways of the gods.’

‘Do you ever use that pagan saying when things go wrong?’

‘Nothing has gone wrong yet.’

‘We’ve almost been clubbed, shot, burnt, and stampeded.’

‘Almost doesn’t count. Here we are, closer than ever.’

‘But they weren’t really gods, Magnus. Not supernatural beings. That’s myth.’

‘And what is your definition of supernatural? Suppose your Benjamin Franklin was transported to Solomon’s court and demonstrated electricity? Would not the Jews proclaim a miracle? We Christians have created a gulf – meagre man and extraordinary God – but what if the gap is not as great as we assume? Or what if there were beings between those extremes? What if history is deeper than we think, and goes back to times foggier than this mist, and that myth becomes, in its own way, fact?’ He pointed to the stone behind him. ‘What more proof do you need? Evidence that Norse were here is so tangible that we clobbered a bear with it.’

‘But this goes against all standard history!’

‘Exactly.’ The Norwegian stopped, reached out, and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Which is why you and I are here, on the verge of resurrection, and no one else is around.’

‘Resurrection?’

‘I haven’t told you everything. Not yet.’

‘Well, we’ll need resurrection if Red Jacket is out there. He’ll kill us all.’

‘Not if we have the hammer.’

The air grew colder suddenly, and I noticed we were walking on a carpet of crunching hail, perhaps laid down by the mysterious storm cloud of the evening before. The ice was still frozen, the ground a stony white. Our breath fogged.

We hesitated, as if something were holding us back.

Then Magnus grunted and forged ahead, pulling his heavy travois in a surge up a gentle slope, and we followed. It was as if we’d punched through an invisible barrier, like a sheet of transparent paper. The air warmed again. We entered a grove of birch, white and gold in the late year. The mist began to thin.

The trees were big as pillars. Here the hail had melted, but the first fallen leaves lay like golden coins. To left and right, late flowers made a purple ground cover among the white trunks, a carpeted temple that receded into lifting fog, tendrils lifted upward to heaven. Mossy boulders erupted like the old standing stones I’d seen in Europe. It was so beautiful that we fell silent, and even the scratch of the travois poles seemed like sacrilege. The ground rose gently and the light began to grow as the day gathered strength. Everything was lacquered with dew.

The rise finally crested at the edge of a low granite cliff, and as the sun burnt through and the mist retreated into the trees, we at last had a view.

I stopped breathing.