The Dakota Cipher

Beside old mastodon tusks there were human skeletons caught in the web of roots, their bones as grey- brown as the tree parts that surrounded them. Flesh and hair was long gone, but buried armour showed these were not Indians. The red rust of shields was clearly visible. Also caught in the wheel of soil were remnants of old breastplates, swords, mail, and helmets. We’d found the Norse! Some at least had apparently been buried in a semicircle around what four and a half centuries ago must have been a sapling, tied to an electrical machine dug in a barrow deep into the earth.

‘Bodies,’ I said to Namida.

‘The red-haired strangers,’ she said, looking at the remnants of armour.

‘Yes. White men like me.’

‘So far from home.’

‘Magnus would say they thought they were going home.’

‘The white man is so strange, always searching for home. The world is the world, anyplace you are. Eden is where you make it. Why does the white man always travel so far, so restlessly, with such violence?’

‘To find peace.’

‘White men need to make peace where they are.’

‘The Templars were warriors. So were the Vikings. So are the Ojibway and the Dakota. It was who they were, and are. It’s who men are, different than women.’ But I wasn’t really trying to explain, I was staring upward at the suspended skeletons and rusting armour with sudden excitement. Was that gold?

I’d found gold with the remains of the knight Montbard in the City of Ghosts, far away in the desert, so why not here? My heart began to beat faster, my body to recharge.

‘White men should find home where they are.’

‘I think we found treasure.’

And before Namida could stop me, I grasped a root and began to climb the disk of earth, pulling myself up to the skeleton I’d seen with its glint of yellow metal. If it seems sacrilegious to disturb the dead, they are past caring, aren’t they? Was I finally to get some reward for this journey? But why entomb gold? Did refugee Templars bring gold to America? Or did they find it here, like the mysterious copper mines on Isle Royale? Was supple metal, not Eden, what drew them?

‘There’s something with these bones,’ I called down.

Namida shook her head. ‘The bones are why this place is wicked!’

‘Just sacred, like a burial ground.’

She began to moan. ‘No, this is an evil place! That hammer was evil, look what it did! Leave their things, Ethan! We must get away from here, quickly! This is a place of bad spirits!’

‘It’s time to salvage something from the wreckage.’

‘Nooo, we must go, I can feel it!’

‘Soon, I promise. I’m almost to it!’

I reached the remains, the skull grinning in that disquieting way that the dead have – I was getting used to this macabre aspect of treasure hunting – and brushed some dirt aside next to the armour. A flake of gold came with it.

I paused. Was the treasure that delicate? I picked at the dirt more carefully now, and realised there was indeed gold, but in a sheet far thinner and broader than I’d imagined. It was a disk of gold, as broad as an arm is long, but no thicker than paper.

It was paper, of a sort.

The size and shape of a round shield.

And there was raised writing on the metal. Not runes, but Latin script.

The Templar trick reminded me of how I’d hid the Book of Thoth in plain sight in the Egyptian cotton of a sail on the Nile. In this case, a wood-and-metal medieval shield had become a sandwich sheathing a sheet of gold no thicker than foil, and used, I presumed, because it would not decay. The imprinted gold leaf had been hidden.

Why?

To keep its message secret until the right discoverer came along, I guessed.

Somehow I doubted they had me in mind.

I looked more closely. It was Latin, all right, but backward in my view as in a mirror: the shield had been buried with the writing facing the sky, and I was on the underside. I broke off a root stub and began digging around the edge of the shield, the covering rotting and the gold itself as delicate as a dried leaf.

‘Ethan, hurry!’

‘There’s writing, like a book!’

‘What’s a book?’

‘You can store a thought and then let it speak to someone who never heard it, miles or years away!’

That, of course, made no sense to her and it reminded me of the gap between us, she of the prairie and me of the gambling salon. What would become of us now? Should I send her back to her people? Could I take her to the President’s House and Napoleon’s court like some Pocahontas? Or should I send her to the Mandan? At length I got most of the rotting shield free from the soil, cursing as flakes of gold floated away, and carefully crawled down, holding the ragged remnant from one hand like a friable sheet of newspaper. When I got back to the crater I peeled more rust and rotting wood away and tried to read.

I’m not a scholar, spending more of my desultory time at Harvard peering through the panes at passing Cambridge damsels than paying attention to the lives of the Caesars. I could no more rattle off Latin than explain Newton’s Principia. But there were words I thought I recognised. Poseidon, for example, and Atlantic. No, wait. I peered closer. Was it Atlantic or Atlantis? And near it another word that oddly rang a bell, though I couldn’t remember having heard it before. Thira. And another: hasta. An old poem came to mind. Didn’t that mean spear in Latin? I recalled Silano had found a medieval Latin couplet that had helped point the way to the Book of Thoth. Could these Norse Templars, thousands of miles from their real home, have left behind another Latin clue to treasure or power? But why bury the clue where the hammer was? You don’t bury the treasure map where the treasure is. There were odd words, too, like Og.

What the devil did that mean?

It made no sense. Unless the treasure – Thor’s hammer – was not the true treasure, or at least the ultimate one. That this great tree was but a signpost.

I remembered what Magnus had told me. The Templars had been crushed and scattered. Whatever artefacts, treasure, or books of power they’d accumulated had scattered with them. One I’d found cached in an underground sarcophagus in the City of Ghosts in the desert southeast of Jerusalem: the Book of Thoth. Another I’d come almost halfway around the world to find, here: Thor’s hammer. So if there were two, why not more? What had Cecil said about the Templars trying to assemble something? And if there were more, why not hide a key to their whereabouts in the one place the scattered Templars might be expected to find and re-gather at, the gigantic myth tree fuelled by electricity, Yggdrasil?

I groaned, inwardly. Somehow I knew I wasn’t done.

The trouble with being called is that you don’t get to quit.

And then something sang and banged past my head, and there was the report of a gunshot. A hole appeared in the rusting shield, the delicate gold parting like tissue paper.

‘Wait!’ I cried.

But Aurora Somerset was galloping towards us like a woman possessed, hair flying, teeth bared, her green eyes afire with the madness of grief. She was on an Indian pony, tossing aside her empty musket and drawing instead her brother’s broken rapier with her free arm and shaking an Indian lance in the other. The sword’s jagged edge glinted like the shard of a broken ale bottle. She wanted vengeance!

I looked for my rifle. I’d propped it against a shattered root, too far away. I dashed, just as her pony pitched down into the tree crater.

And then I felt sharp pain stab my calf. I stumbled, sprawling.

The thrown lance, with flint tip, had speared through my leg.

I braced to be ridden down, the dangling spear hobbling me.

But Aurora wasn’t galloping for me. She was aimed at the parchment of gold, leaning down like a Cossack to