The Dakota Cipher (11 page)

“But a tough negotiator?”

“Oh, yes. And that rarest of men: he knows what he wants.”

“Which is?”

“Glory. And power for its own sake.”

“The old tyrant dream. What I want is human happiness, which I believe comes from independence and self-reliance. Right, Lewis?”

The frontier officer smiled. “So you have told me.”

“Happiness comes from the land,” Jefferson lectured. “The independent yeoman farmer is the happiest of all men—and the need for land justifies our need for expansion. For democracy to work, Gage, men must be farmers. If Greece and Rome taught us anything, it is that. Once we cluster in cities we become slaves to a few, and the American experiment is finished. Land, land—that’s the key, isn’t it Lewis? Land!”

“There’s no shortage of that in the west,” the secretary said. “Of course, it’s occupied by Indians.”

“And now we have a Norwegian, Magnus Bloodhammer, who wants to explore it. Indians, bears, wolves—none of that daunts you, does it, Magnus? What is so fascinating that you take such risk?”

“That America’s social experiment in fact started with Norwegians,” my companion said. “My ancestors sought refuge here first.”

“You really think Vikings preceded us all on this continent?”

“Not just Vikings, but Norsemen. There’s evidence they came here in the fourteenth century, nearly one hundred fifty years before Columbus.”

“What evidence?”

Magnus shoved his china aside and took out his map from his cylinder. Once more I wondered what was in the compartment that
must be at the cylinder’s end. “You’ll see the significance immediately,” he said, unrolling the chart. “This was found in a knight’s tomb in a medieval church, meaning it was drawn about 1360. Is this coastline mere coincidence?”

Jefferson stood, peering. “By the soul of Mercator, it looks like Hudson Bay.”

Lewis came around the table to look and nodded. “Remarkable, if true.”

“Of course it’s true,” Magnus assured.

My mind was caught on the president’s comment of Indians, bears, and wolves. Yet instead of the mockery I’d half expected, the other three had formed a little triumvirate. “I’m surprised you’re not more surprised,” I said.

“At what?” Lewis asked.

I gestured to the map. “At what may be one of the most startling historical finds of all time. The Norse before Columbus? You believe it?”

Jefferson and Lewis looked at each other. “There have been rumors,” Lewis said.

“Rumors of what? Tigers as well as elephants?”

“Of blue-eyed Indians, Mr. Gage,” Jefferson said. “Pierre Gaultier de La Verendrye reported them when he explored the lower Missouri River in 1733. He came across a tribe called the Mandans, who live in communities reminiscent of northern European habitation in medieval times. A dry moat, stockade, and wooden houses. They farm instead of roam. And some of them are surprisingly fair in coloring, with their leaders sporting beards. Never heard of an Indian with a beard.”

“There’s also an old legend that a Prince Madoc of Wales set out from Britain to the west in 1170 with ten ships, never to return,” Lewis explained. “The names Mandan and Madoc are enough alike to make one wonder if the legend could somehow be true.”

“Wait. The
Welsh
got to the middle of America?”

Jefferson shrugged. “It’s a possibility. The Mississippi and Missouri, or the Saint Lawrence and the Great Lakes, or the Nelson and Red rivers from Hudson’s Bay—all could lead wanderers to the general area of the Mandan, the center of our continent.”

“I’ve seen fair-eyed Indians myself at Kaskaskia, in the Illinois country,’ Lewis said. “General George Rogers Clark has reported the same. Where did they come from?”

“Mr. President, I believe past men of power in your country wouldn’t have been entirely surprised at my information either,” Magnus interrupted. “Many, like Washington or Franklin, are or were Freemasons—true?”

“Yes. But not me, Bloodhammer.”

“Still, if these leaders were your friends, you know of Masonic ties to the persecuted Knights Templar,” he insisted.

I groaned inwardly. We were about to lose any credibility.

“Is it possible Templars fled to America?” Magnus went on. “And created a utopian idea that is being recreated, even here in your new capital? These are very grand buildings and avenues for a new nation. And your streets make intriguing patterns to anyone familiar with the sacred geometry of the east.”

“Simply modern planning.” The president looked guarded.

“No. The United States was created for a purpose, I’m certain of it. A secret purpose. I think it was to recreate a golden age long lost, an age of gods and magic.”

“But why would you think that?”

“This city, for one. When it was founded, when cornerstones were laid, its size. And because of that.” He pointed to the hammer symbol on his map.

“What is that, Magnus?”

“It’s a symbol for the hammer of the god Thor.”

“You think you’ll find Thor in America?”

“No, just his legacy.”

I expected Jefferson to have us packed off to a madhouse, but his bright eyes flashed with more understanding than I was comfortable with. “His legacy? How interesting. Well, I’m a scholar of the past myself, with quite the library. I’ve read of your Forn Sior, and more besides. We don’t know just
what
lies beyond, do we, or who walked there? Pale Indians. Prehistoric beasts. Rumors of violent weather unknown in Europe. Medicine men warning of baleful spirits. I am not certain of any of it, gentlemen. But I am curious. I’m curious.”

Magnus said nothing. I, meanwhile, was realizing why I was reluctant to leave New York. Baleful spirits?

“The Welsh are one possibility,” Jefferson said. “That you two have given us another just strengthens the possibility that Verendrye was not exaggerating. What if a lost colony of Welshmen, or Norsemen, interbred with the native population and persists as a tribe living in walled towns somewhere up the Missouri? Alternately, there are theories that some of the lost tribes of Israel might have somehow made their way to America and provided the ancestry of the American Indian. And tales that the Carthaginians defeated by Rome might have fled across the Atlantic to escape the sack of their city.”

“Yes!” said Magnus. He nodded at me.

“Plato wrote of a lost Atlantis, and the astronomer Corli has contemplated its location. Indians say tobacco grows where the hairs of a burning god fell from the sky. Is the bloodline of King David or Hannibal roaming the western desert? All these groups might have forgotten their origins. But if it could be proven, the stakes are significant.”

“How so?” I asked.

“European empires in the New World are based in part on claims of first arrival,” Lewis explained. “If it turns out the first arrivals from Europe were other groups entirely, it undermines the legitimacy of British, French, and Spanish claims to land ownership.”

“Which could improve the chances of United States’ claim or purchase,” Jefferson said. “Our expanding population gives us the possibility of ownership by occupation, but that can lead to wars we don’t want. A sale is preferable, from a party whose past claim is in historical doubt. If the Norse came first, it could shake world politics. The important thing is that we learn the truth, and ideally learn it before the French, Spanish, or British do. That, gentlemen, is why you can count on my support for your scouting expedition—but only if you confide to me. I trust your first loyalty is to your home country, Ethan?”

“Of course.” Actually, it was to self-preservation, but that seemed down the list of everyone else’s priorities.

“What you learn will, I hope, provide information that Captain Lewis will expand on, if I can persuade Congress to send a more ambitious quest.”

“How ambitious?”

Jefferson shrugged. “Perhaps twenty to forty men and several tons of supplies.”

“Impressive. And how many men will accompany my expedition?”

“Why, just one, I believe. Magnus Bloodhammer.”

The Norwegian beamed.

“One?”

“I want you two to go swiftly and silently, scouts before an army.”

“What supplies, then?”

“I’m prepared to furnish one hundred dollars and a letter of introduction to the newly acquired American forts at Detroit and Michilimackinac, asking for escort. I suggest you travel as far west as you can on the Great Lakes before starting overland. With luck, you can finish your exploration within the season and report back, and we can refine our strategy for both Lewis’s expedition and dealing with Napoleon. If you survive.”

I took a big swallow of wine. “I was hoping for more help.”

“I’ve just started in office and Adams left a mess. It’s the best America can do. Fortunately, Gage, you’re a patriot!”

“Meaning anything valuable you find is properly the property of the United States,” Lewis added.

“Not if it’s not on American soil,” Magnus countered. “And the Norse went farther than any American yet has. Which means it is Norwegian soil…
gentlemen.
” It was amazing how much force he packed into that last word.

Jefferson smiled. Magnus had taken the bait. “Then you
do
think you’ll find something valuable, even priceless, that is tangible
proof
of Norse exploration?”

“Yes, and such artifacts by right are mine and my country’s. And Ethan’s. Am I not correct, Gage?”

“Rusty trifles only,” I hastily assured. “Old spearheads. A rivet here, a stud there.” No need to talk about magical hammers that might be worth a king’s ransom.

“I want to back an explorer, not a treasure hunter, Gage.”

I pretended mild indignation. “It seems to me we’ve earned your trust. I’ve secretly carried word of the French-Spanish treaty on Louisiana. Magnus here has shared a map of incalculable value. We’ve confided in you, Mr. President, and only ask that you return our confidence.”

“Well said. We’re all partners here, gentlemen, in one of the greatest adventures in history. So I leave you to it. Your only competitors are the British in Canada, the French and Spanish in Louisiana, howling wilderness, gigantic animals, and hostile Indian tribes. Nothing more than what you’ve faced a dozen times before, eh?”

“Actually, I think we might need two hundred dollars.”

“Come back alive, with useful information, and I’ll pay
three
hundred. But a hundred to start. I know a sharpshooter like you will want to live off the land!”

It was dark when we left, my head full of woolly elephants, lurking Indians, baleful spirits, mountains of salt, and the usual dubious state of my finances. Well, I was in it now. “You found a fellow visionary, Magnus,” I said as we stood outside looking at the candles in the President’s House. “I expected more skepticism.”

“Jefferson wants to use us, Ethan, just like Bonaparte uses us. As we use them! So we’ll see their Louisiana and let them fight over it if they wish.” There was a tone of hard realism in his voice, very different from my usual Norwegian dreamer. “As for you and me, if we find Thor’s hammer we’ll have a chance to change the entire world!” His eyes were dark and gleaming in the twilight.

“Change the world? I thought we just wanted to profit from it.”

“Restore it. There’s more at stake here than you think.”

“Restore what?”

He patted his map case. “The human heart.”

And I wondered again just who my new companion really was.

F
OR OUR JOURNEY WEST,
M
AGNUS CHOSE A MUSKET THAT
could be used as a fowling piece and a huge double-bladed ax that he strapped to his back like a Norse marauder. “Jefferson gave me the idea!” He spent happy hours shining it with file, oil, and cloth. “With this and that little tomahawk of yours, we’ll have no problem making a fire.”

“Make a fire? That ax is big enough to heat hell, deforest half the Ohio Valley, or serve as a dining table.”

“If I ever shaved it would make a good mirror, too.” He held it up for inspection. “I wish I had a broadsword.” He was as excited as I was dubious.

Our route was northwestward up the Potomac and across the Appalachians on the road first carved out by the British general Braddock before his disastrous defeat during the French and Indian War. Then we’d go down to Pittsburgh at the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, take the Ohio River to the Great Trail established by the Indians to Lake Erie, and board a boat to Fort
Detroit, five hundred miles from Washington. From there, Lakes Huron and Superior would provide a water route of another five hundred miles to the edge of the blank wilderness on Bloodhammer’s map.

The first artifact of civilization that disappeared as we rode up the Potomac was paint. As we ascended the mountains, farmhouses faded to weathered wood; milled lumber gave way to squared logs. Our road followed an undulating scar of vegetable plots, trampled pasture, and wounded hillsides of stumps and slash. No firmer than porridge, it curved and coiled tighter than a barrister’s argument and was worn to a trench by traffic that never paused to repair it. Always we smelled smoke, hardscrabble farmers trying to burn back the forest to make room for corn. And then, deep in the mountains, finally there were no farms at all. Winter-barren brown ridges, the tops still frosty most mornings, ran like multiple walls into haze. Hawks orbited by day, and wolves howled in the dark. When the wind blew, the brown carpet of last winter’s leaves rustled like tattered pages. It sounded like the forest was whispering.

We slept outdoors when the weather was fair, hardening ourselves to our new lives as frontiersmen and avoiding the stiff fees and biting fleas of Appalachian accommodation. We’d make a bed of boughs, have a simple dinner of ham, cornbread, and creek water, and listen to the night sounds. Through the lattice of slowly budding trees, we had a spangled canopy of a million dazzling stars. Magnus and I talked sometimes of the ancient belief that each was an ancestor, gone to reside in the sky for all eternity.

“Maybe one is Signe,” he said, wistful.

“How long were you married?”

“Just one year.” He paused before going on. “The only time I’ve truly been happy. I loved her as a youth, but my family had filled my head with tales of gods and mysteries, so I sailed north to where the Templars might have been, so far north that the sun never set and
the air barely warmed. I found mines so deep they might have been driven by dwarves, but no relics. By the time I came back she was married to someone else, and then I lost my eye, and pretty much put happiness aside. Bliss is reserved for the few.”

“At least you had someone to haunt you.” I thought of Astiza.

“Then I inherited my ancestral farm, her husband drowned, and against all expectations she and her family accepted me for a second match. I thought myself mutilated, hideous, but she was Beauty to my Beast. When she told me she was with my child I was in a daze of happiness. I severed my connections with Forn Sior and dedicated myself to domesticity. Have you ever known contentment, Ethan?”

“Now and again, for an hour or two. I don’t know if it is men’s lot to be content for very long. Franklin said, ‘Who is rich? He who is content. Who is that? Nobody.’”

“Your mentor was wrong on that one. By his definition I was rich, fabulously so. What need had I of Norway or Templars when I had Signe? And then…”

“She died?”

“I killed her.”

He was haunted, I saw, and not just by dwarves and elves. His expression was suddenly withered as a garden in winter. I was stunned, not knowing what to say.

“She died trying to give birth to my baby.”

I swallowed. “Magnus, that could happen to anyone.”

“The neighbors had already made fun and called me Odin. But in my torrent of grief I saw destiny’s hand and realized I wasn’t done. I think the knights of old were seeking a grail that could mean the worst things could be undone, and that I’m doomed to search the world as the old god did, on a quest for my own kind of bitter knowledge. I’m on a search in my wife’s memory, Ethan. That’s why I can’t share your sport with women.”

“Oh.” Once again I felt shallow—but more easily healed, too.
You can’t lose what you don’t risk, including your heart. “Surely she wouldn’t begrudge a remarriage. She did it herself.”

“No, I gave up my quest and killed her by my selfishness in doing so. Now I must complete it, out here in the American west, as penance.”

“Penance! And you bring the innocent
me
along?”

“You need purpose, too. I could see it at Mortefontaine, where all you had were food, drink, cards, and women. I’ve saved you, though you’ll never appreciate it.”

“But we’ve come to the edge of nothing,” I said with exasperation, gesturing at the brown hollow below us, mist pooled like a puddle.

“No. This is the edge of Eden.” His breath was a cloud in the chill.

I felt sour about my recruitment. “I always pictured Eden warmer.” I pulled my blanket over my head, shivering despite myself at the sorrow of his tale. The eager boy suddenly seemed a thousand years old, and the empty woods watchful.

“Have you ever wondered where Eden was, Ethan?”

“Not really.” I realized my partner was quite mad.

“I mean it had to be somewhere. What if it could be rediscovered?”

“If I remember the scriptures, Bloodhammer, the door to that particular inn slammed shut,” I grumbled. “Eve, the apple, and all that.”

“But what if it could be reopened?”

“With a key?”

“Thor’s hammer.”

I rolled over to go to sleep. “Then stay away from apple pie.”

By the next morning Magnus was cheerful again, as if our conversation had been a weird, bad dream. He made no mention of poor Signe, chattering instead about the open brownness of our forests that was apparently different from Norwegian woods. He was a madman
who couldn’t remember his own fantasies. But just as we saddled our horses he called out, “Here!” and impishly threw me something.

I looked. It was an apple, kept over from the harvest before and bought in Washington’s market.

“Encouragement.” His grin was wry.

“Then I’m taking a bite.” It was still firm enough to crunch, and I chewed. “I don’t feel any wiser.”

“We just haven’t found the right tree yet.”

So off we rode. When I finished I threw the core into the spring woods, from where it might sprout.

W
HEN IT RAINED WE TOOK SHELTER IN CRUDE PUBLIC INNS,
the lodging invariably close, smoky, pungent, and loud. Men spat, swore, farted, and grumbled as they shared beds for warmth. Come dawn, all of us picked bugs off each other like monkeys and then paid exorbitant prices for a breakfast of salt pork, corn mush, and watered whiskey, the standard diet of frontier America. I didn’t find a clean cup or a pretty hostess between Georgetown and Pittsburgh.

Out of moody boredom, Magnus got in the habit of splitting hostel firewood with his heavy-bladed ax, earning us enough each time to buy a sixpence loaf of bread. I sometimes kept him company, watching the ripple of his great muscles with the same wary awe one watches a bull, calling out advice he usually ignored. I’d help stack the result, but declined to do the chopping.

“For the hero of Acre and Marengo, you seem to have an aversion to a fighting man’s exercise,” he’d finally tease good-naturedly.

“And for a man expecting to control the world, you seem all too willing to do a peasant’s work for pennies. Hedging your bets, Magnus?”

After nine days of hard travel it was a relief to come down out of the steep, cold mountains, the country taking on a fuzz of spring green. Pittsburgh was a triangular city of three hundred houses and
fifteen hundred souls, its apex pointing down the Ohio formed by the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela. The old British fort at the point was long gone, its brick pillaged for new construction and its earthen ramparts washed out by floods. The rest of the town was thriving under a pall of coal smoke, bustling with boatyards, lumber mills, and factories for rope, nails, glass, and iron. Its smell of hen coops and stables carried a good two miles, and the streets had as many pigs as people. Getting to a riverboat down the Ohio required a steep climb down the city’s bluffs and across boards laid on the mudflats to deep water.

A flatboat took us and our horses down the Ohio twenty miles to a landing at the Great Trail, now a crude road running north. What used to be dangerous Indian country just a decade before had become, thanks to the victory at Fallen Timbers, an immigrant highway. War, disease, and the collapse of the game population had reduced tribes like the Delaware and Wyandot to penury, and the dirty, emaciated survivors we saw bore little resemblance to the proud warriors I recalled from my trapping days. Were the Indians already finished, as doomed at the mastodon?

Magnus studied them with interest. “The descendants of Israel,” he murmured.

“I’ve been to Palestine, and I hardly think so.”

“The lost tribes, Jefferson speculated.”

“Magnus, they’re a dying race. Look at them! I’m sorry, but it’s true.”

“If it’s true, then we’re about to lose more than we ever dreamed. These people know things we’ve forgotten, Ethan.”

“Like what?”

“The past. How to truly live. And how the world is alive with things we cannot see. Scholars say they know the spirit world. Thor could have walked with their manitou: perhaps they were similar spiritual beings! Franklin was inspired by the Iroquois government to
help craft your Constitution. Johnson complimented their oratory.”

“And yet at our last inn they were described as thieving, drunken, lazy scalp hunters. Pioneers hate Indians, Magnus. That whiskey trader had a tobacco pouch made from a warrior’s scrotum. Our word for their women, ‘squaw,’ means cunt. Europeans have been fighting them for three hundred years.”

“Fear has made us blind, but that doesn’t mean the Indian can’t see.”

New settler trails branched off in all directions, forests were being toppled, and so many plumes of smoke rose that the entire Ohio Territory seemed a steaming stew. The meanest European peasant could come, girdle trees, plant his corn in the spaces between, set loose his pigs, and call himself a farmer. Their cabins were no bigger than a French bedroom, their yards mud, their children feral, and their wives so hard-used that their beauty was shot by twenty. But a man was free! He had land, black and loamy. Ohio seemed to be writhing with transformation as we rode, its skin twitching with change. I wondered if Jefferson’s prediction that this west would take a thousand years to fill had been too pessimistic. There were already fifty thousand people in the territory, and when we stopped at a tavern or bought a night in a farmer’s barn, all the talk was of statehood.

“This dirt makes New England look like a rock pile!”

While the Ohio Territory was pockmarked with new clearings, it retained vast tracts of virgin forest where the world remained primeval. Oak, beech, hickory, chestnut, and elm, budding now with spring green, reared up to one hundred and fifty feet in height. Tree trunks were so thick that Magnus and I couldn’t encompass them with linked arms. Limbs were fat enough to dance on, and bark so wrinkled that you could lose a silver dollar in the corrugations of an oak. The arcing lattice of branches met neighbors like the peak of a cathedral, and above that great flocks of birds would sometimes fly, so thick and endless that they blocked out the sun, their cries a raspy
cawing. The trees seemed not just older than us but older than the Indians, older than woolly elephants. They made me think of Jefferson’s baleful spirits.

“You could build a grand house out of a single tree,” Magnus marveled.

“I’ve seen families camp in hollow ones while they work on their cabin,” I agreed. “These trees are as old as your Norse explorers, Magnus.”

“From the time of Yggdrasil, perhaps. These are the kinds of trees the gods knew. Maybe that’s why the Templars came here, Ethan. They recognized this land
was
the old paradise, where men could live with nature.”

I was less certain. I knew my race, and couldn’t imagine any white men coming to America and not doing what these settlers were doing right now, converting these forest patriarchs to corn. It’s what civilization does.

“Why do you think the trees here grow so big?” Magnus asked.

“Electricity, perhaps.”

“Electricity?”

“The French scientist Bertholon constructed what he called an electrovegetoma machine in 1783 to collect lightning’s energy and transfer it to plants in the field, and said it radically enhanced their growth. While we know lightning can damage trees, could electrical storms also make them grow? Perhaps the atmosphere of the Ohio country is different than that of Europe.”

At last we ferried the Sandusky and, at its outlet to Lake Erie, a clearing finally gave a view.

“It’s not a lake, it’s a sea!”

“Three hundred miles long, and there are bigger ones than this, Magnus. The farther west we go, the bigger everything gets.”

“And you ask why the Norse went that way? Mine were a people fit for big things.”

He made a point of cupping his hand to drink, confirming this vastness wasn’t salt. We could see the lake bottom to forty feet. As planned, we sold our horses and took passage on a schooner called
Gullwing
for Detroit, since the land route from here led into the nearly impassable Black Swamp that divided the Northwest Territory from Ohio. We sailed across Lake Erie, breasted the current of the Detroit River, and came at last to the famed fort. There I found us an easier way west—by flirting with a woman.