The Dakota Cipher (21 page)

“The Rite said he was resourceful in Egypt and Palestine.”

“Then we tie him to the stake as we intended, drain what he knows, slake the Indians’ blood lust, and go looking at our leisure.” He licked his lips, thinking now. “Something like this hammer, if it exists, could put us above the North West Company, and Montreal, and even the prudes and hypocrites back in England. We could live as we should, married by our own law. We could blame his disappearance on this map. Give us an hour, Aurora, an hour at the stake, and we’ll know everything!” He grasped the double-bladed ax. “It’s astonishing what men will say just to keep their last fingers and toes.”

“Then get Red Jacket to silence those captive squaws!” The tumult Namida was causing was clearly flustering Aurora.

“To hell with Red Jacket,” her brother said. He snapped an order and two of the warriors guarding us yanked on our tethers to get us to our feet and pull us toward the stakes, even as Namida and Little Frog shrieked in protest. The tribe’s argument was growing fiercer, Red Jacket unable to quiet either side.

Cecil, Aurora, and our two guards had soon dragged us twenty yards from the main party of yelling Indians. Clearly we were going to be tied to the stake before clearer, more matrimonial heads could prevail. But these were the best odds we’d faced all morning, and I was becoming impatient. When, when? Aurora had the longrifle pointed at me, and Cecil his sword pointed at Magnus, the ax held loosely in his other hand and the map thrust into his belt. He gave
a curt command and the brave who’d dragged me by my tether cut away the cords at my wrist so he could bend my arms around the back of the upright post. Another took my neck leash to help drag me the last bitter feet to my doom. I certainly wasn’t going to make it easy by walking! I began to lift my arms and Aurora cocked my gun. “Don’t you dare,” she said. “I’ll shoot you in your knee and you’ll still be alive, but in agony before the fire even starts.”

“Through the heart, Aurora. It’s the least you can do for old times’ sake.”

“No. I like to make my lovers moan.”

Now the other Indians were beginning to come toward us, still arguing but less heatedly. Namida looked miserable, which was not a good sign.

And then the head of the warrior holding my left arm exploded.

It was about time!

O
NE MOMENT HE WAS PULLING ME TO THE STAKE, AND THE
next the top of his skull sprayed away in an arc of hair and blood, dropping him like a stone. For just one moment I was stunned, surprised when it finally happened. Then, more out of instinct than thought, I rotated my body and right arm to swing my other escort into the path of Aurora’s gun.

My rifle went off just as he rotated into her aim, and he dropped too.

Another shot and a cry from Red Jacket who spun, clutching his arm. The other warriors seemed paralyzed. I grabbed the muzzle of my empty longrifle and, with more ferocity than I knew I could summon against a woman, shoved Aurora Somerset straight back against the bark wall of a longhouse and through it. I knocked the wind out of her as the butt rammed her midsection and the wall shattered. Then I swung the stock at a charging Cecil and parried the arc of his swinging sword. The rapier sank into the wood with a thwack and stuck there, the aristocrat’s face livid with rage and fear,
and I twisted the rifle to snap it. Little Frog meanwhile snatched up Magnus’s ax, which the nobleman had dropped, and cut the Norwegian’s bonds. We were between the Somersets and the other Indians, so Cecil danced backward toward the waiting stakes, stumbling on firewood as he fumbled for the pistol in his belt. I yanked the broken sword clear.

Another shot, and a charging warrior went down, and then Magnus was free and swinging his ax in a great arc, howling like a Viking berserker of old. He waded into the stunned Indians like a maelstrom, the muscles under his torn shirt rippling, and the blades came up red, slain warriors toppling out of his way. They didn’t have their own guns or bows and his weapon whistled as he swung. He paused a moment to stoop and snatch up his map case in determined triumph.

Why did he care if it didn’t hold the map, which was still in Cecil’s belt?

I sprang over the prostrate Aurora and tore off the powder horn she’d draped across her chest. “Your whore is dead!” I lied to Cecil to draw a quick shot, and rolled as he fired. Now! Could I club him with my musket or stab him with his broken sword before he reloaded?

“This way, my friends! Hurry, my muskets are empty!”

It was the voice of Pierre Radisson, calling from the stockade wall. Namida and I had seen him from the corner of our eyes.

“Get them!” Cecil was yelling to the confused Indians even as he retreated farther, struggling to reload his pistol. He kept glancing at the prostrate form of his sister, face twisted.

Time to retreat! I hurled the haft of his sword at him, making him duck, and then Magnus, Namida, Little Frog, and I ran to the other side of the longhouse I’d shoved Aurora through. Pierre had pried an opening in the crude palisade of saplings, and we scrambled through, hauling on Magnus to get his bulk through the tight entry.

“Praise Odin, what are you doing here?” the one-eye asked.

“Saving donkeys!” Pierre thrust a musket into my arms. “Here, until you can reload yours! Norseman, help me plant this keg!”

The Indians were finally shooting back, but the stockade was between us and provided some shelter from the bullets. I fired into the crowd and another warrior went down, making them scatter. I saw Red Jacket sitting, cradling the arm wounded by Pierre’s earlier shot and wished I’d spent the bullet on him. Then there was a flare, and a fuse was sizzling toward the keg.

“Run, run as if the devil himself is behind you, because he is!” Pierre cried. Angry braves were darting toward the mouse hole we’d just crawled through, so we sprinted away through a stand of birch, adrenalin coursing. There was a roar.

I looked behind. The powder keg had blown up, turning the Indian stockade into a penumbra of flying splinters. Timbers flew up like spears and tumbled. I heard screams and confused yelling as the debris sprayed our tormentors. Others would dash out the main gate and come around to chase us, I knew, but now we had a lead of a good hundred yards to reach the lakeshore.

The stockade and longhouse began to burn.

We ran to the canoe Pierre had snuck ashore and skidded into the water, the women tumbling in first and then me.

“Magnus! Where are you going?” The Norwegian was running away from us with his ax, back toward the town, but I soon realized his target was the nearest canoes. One chop, two, and they were wrecked for the moment. There were more down the shore but his sabotage had gained us precious moments.

Bloodhammer came sprinting back, arms pumping, ax head bobbing up and down. He crashed through the shallows, water flying, and threw himself over the rim of our canoe, nearly tipping it. We hauled him in and then we were paddling madly, trying to put distance between us and a village boiling like a disturbed hive. Bullets whined.

The Indians rushed to the canoes, found them wrecked, and set up an even greater clamor. Then they dashed back down the shore, smoke roiling over their home.

For an optimistic mile I hoped we’d thrown them into such confusion that they wouldn’t follow.

But no, here came one, two, three, four canoes on Lake Superior, crowded with warriors, paddles flashing in the sun. I didn’t see a red jacket, but a coatless Cecil was standing in one bow, urging them on.

“There’s a river to the south that will take us inland,” Pierre panted, “but we need distance to make it work. Norwegian, get up and paddle one side while we three do the other. Gage, load your rifle!”

I had ball in the patchbox in the stock. It was reassuring to have the familiar weapon in my hands again, out of the clutches of Aurora Somerset, but annoying that my acacia wood stock was once more marred, this time by Cecil’s sword blade. I poured powder from the horn I’d yanked off Aurora. As I loaded and looked back I could see Lord Somerset, no doubt furious at my treatment of his sister, pointing with his pistol as if will enough could bring us within range.

The distance was one hundred and fifty yards, far too great for a handgun. The occasional shot from the trade muskets of our pursuers went wide. But I had a rifle, crafted for accuracy, and even as we rocked with every paddle stroke I aimed. His white shirt was a tiny flake in my sight. I held my breath and squeezed, my enemy silhouetted against the sky.

Hammer hit pan, a flash, the kick of the butt against my shoulder and then a long second to judge my accuracy.

Cecil Somerset jerked and then pitched neatly over the side, falling into the lake with a splash.

A great cry went up and our pursuers slowed and stopped, demoralized by the dispatch of their leader. They drifted where he’d fallen, hands reaching down to seize him. And then there was a shriek, a female wail of grief that echoed across the water like the midnight cry
of a flying witch, an awful keening that carried under it the breath of undying hatred.

Aurora wasn’t dead.

And if I’d killed her brother she would, I guessed, cling as remorsefully as a shadow until she killed me. Or I, her. We were bound now, joined with permanence far deeper than mere lust. Married by hatred.

I put down my rifle, picked up a paddle, and stroked as if my life depended on it. Because it did.

T
HE REST OF THE DAY WAS AN EXHAUSTING BLUR.
W
E WERE
stunned and sore from the capture, gauntlet, escape, and chase. We’d gone from the promise of hell to the miracle of Pierre’s timely rescue in an instant, and it was as if we’d all been shocked by one of my electrical experiments. A lightning bolt would not have been more surprising.

“How did you know to follow us?” I panted.

“I saw the Somersets running through camp in the deepest night, half-clothed and anxious, and became curious,” the voyageur said. “They’re a couple always on stage, conscious of the impression they make, and yet here they dropped their illusion. Something momentous was occurring. I watched them march you to their canoes. There was no time to fetch help, so I followed alone in the biggest canoe I could manage.”

“By the tonsure of Saint Bernard, good thing you did!”

“It was the women who saved you. Namida saw me and started the argument on your fate, distracting the Indians. It gave me time to intervene. Give thanks to matrimony, my friend!”

I glanced back to Namida, steadily paddling, her face streaked with dirt and the track of tears I hadn’t noticed before. But she smiled shyly.

“Gage talked like a woman, too,” Bloodhammer tattled. “Told them everything he could.”

“I was buying Pierre time.” Not the full truth, but I’d been expecting to have my eye sliced and yet here I was, bruised but not even bloodied. I’d have life figured out if it didn’t keep surprising me.

“Yes, he maneuvered that one Indian right into my sights.” Pierre winked at me.

Magnus scowled. “But now they know what we’re after!”

“So we just have to get it first,” I said blithely.

“Bah. Try to lie next time.”

“I am a paragon of candor.”

“It helped that I had the wit to bring that extra keg of powder,” Pierre went on, “but now it’s gone and all we have left is what’s in our horns. Two muskets, one rifle, and Magnus with his ax.”

“I’m not sure he needs more.” I said. The tool was crusted with blood. “Magnus, you belong in the eighth century.”

“We just came from there,” he replied.

I looked behind us. “A single shot seems to have ended pursuit for now.”

“They’re simply confident of eventually tracking us,” Pierre said. “They have your map. When are you going to use your sorcery to save us?”

“Pierre, if I truly had sorcery, wouldn’t I have used it by now? I’m a scholar, not a magician. I need equipment we don’t have to do anything at all with electricity, and I no longer have the secret book I once found.”

“So you cannot properly sing, you cannot properly paddle, and you can do no real sorcery?
Mon dieu
, I did inherit a donkey.”

“I can shoot. That seems to have served well enough.”

“
Oui
, it was a good shot—maybe the first truly good thing you’ve done. But it will not stop them. They need to regroup, but will count on you to lead them to the treasure. One key will be whether the Somersets are alive or dead. Red Jacket, I think, was only wounded, which is bad. He will not rest until he has revenge.”

“If he’d let us be, none of this would have happened.”

“That’s not how he will see things.”

“And who said anything to you about treasure?”

“Do you think voyageurs fools? You two are not priests or company men, and you haven’t taken a note of your surroundings since we met you. You made no surveys, no maps, and asked no questions about routes or trails. Explorers gather information, but you hid it. The only explanation is treasure.”

“Well, you just earned a share.”

He grinned. “Is it Indian gold, as in Mexico and Peru?”

“No, not gold.”

“Emeralds then, as in the jungles of South America?”

“No jungles or jewels here.”

“What then? What are we all risking our lives for?” He was cheerful as a birthday.

“A hammer.”

“A what?” His paddle stopped.

“A hammer of the gods with special powers. Right, Magnus?”

“Aye, and the damned Somersets now know of it too. And there’s more than that, little man. I’m going to take you to the navel of the world.”

“You mean its center?”

“Better than that. The Garden of Eden.”

“The Garden of Eden? But we’ve been banished, no?”

“Not the same Garden as in the Bible, necessarily, but a place of holiness or spiritual power. Or maybe exactly the same, since we don’t know where the biblical Garden was.”

“You think you’ll find paradise in this wilderness? After that village?”

“I think my Norse ancestors did.” He patted the now-empty map case, which he stubbornly still carried. “And when we come to where they did, then all will be saved. The treasure isn’t jewels, little man. It’s life itself.”

“But we already have that. Don’t we?”

Magnus smiled grimly and dug in his paddle.

T
HE
G
ARDEN OF
E
DEN’S NEIGHBORHOOD,
I
DISCOVERED,
seemed to have more than its share of mosquitoes and blackflies, ready to take communion on our cuts and scrapes. We raced down the shore of Lake Superior, and at its southwestern end entered the marshy estuary of a river that Pierre identified as the Saint Louis, hundreds of miles north of the city of the same name. As dusk fell insects drew more blood than a platoon of doctors, but we dared not stop, despite our exhaustion. We paddled well into the evening, stomachs growling, until the river began to narrow and the current strengthened. “It’s time to hide,” Pierre said.

We detoured into a tiny slough, temporarily sank our canoe out of sight by weighting it with stones, and nested in the reeds of a muddy island like ducks. We had no food beyond a few bites of pemmican that Pierre had brought—awful stuff, unless you’re starving—and dared not light a fire. But we were so depleted that the cool, muddy ground seemed like a feather bed. I fell headlong into exhausted sleep, fleeing in my dreams from nameless terrors.

Pierre awakened me in the middle of the night, fog on the river and frogs croaking from the marshes. “Now,” he whispered. “They’re coming.”

Cautiously I lifted my head. A flickering light hovered in the mist, gliding toward our hiding place. A torch! I shrank to hug the mud. A canoe was paddling slowly by, an Indian at the bow holding the
light and one behind him kneeling with a long, light lance. Occasionally he’d thrust it into the reeds. I recognized the sleeves of Red Jacket, one hanging empty over his wounded arm. The naked, powerful shoulders of other braves gleamed with bear grease as they inserted paddles into the water as precisely as surgeons, the canoe silent in its passage. Heads swiveled, looking for some sign of us.

I eased back farther into the reeds, but as I moved an animal started in response—a mink, perhaps—and with a plop went into the river.

Red Jacket stiffened, and I could see his silhouette twist back to look. It was as if he was sniffing the very air for my presence. The paddling stopped for a moment, the canoe gauzy through the fog, its occupants peering. I shut my eyes lest they somehow reflect light. I could hear the cautionary cock of a musket hammer. Pierre had stopped breathing.

There was a long silence. Finally the chief grunted, turned away, and the stroke began again. The canoe disappeared into the fog, but as it did another came, and another. It seemed an eternity before five of them had passed, manned by thirty warriors. If one of them had spied us, we had no chance—but they didn’t.

I groaned, feeling as far from help as I’d ever felt in my life. Hostile Indians behind, now more Indians ahead, and somewhere beyond
them
the fearsome Ojibway gave way to the even more fearsome Dakota, called Sioux by the Ojibway, meaning “snakes in the grass.” Like the snake cult of Apophis! I saw little chance of getting back to Grand Portage before Rendezvous ended, and wouldn’t trust the British if I did. Any lie the Somersets told would be believed, and for all I knew the Scot McTavish had authorized my kidnapping. How better to get rid of an American-French interloper? I felt like a fly at a convention of spiders. If only I hadn’t lusted after Pauline Bonaparte! And Aurora. And Namida.

I’d be safer if I was senile.

“We’re trapped!” I said to Pierre. “Now they’re ahead of us too!”

“And you think this is bad news? You’d rather we’d invited them to breakfast? Now it will be us following them, instead of the opposite. When they turn about we hide and let them pass again, and with luck Red Jacket will tire of the game and go home.”

“Luck.” Bittersweet word for a gambler. “This is your plan?”

“There may be Indians ahead who won’t welcome Red Jacket’s band. He draws renegades and miscreants because the Ojibway think him Dakota, the Dakota think him Ojibway, and he hires out to any side like a whore, only taking his own counsel. All we can do is hope for time and circumstance to eventually lose him in the country west of here, while not losing our scalps in the process. We need something more before we face him—more allies or a terrible weapon.”

“Magnus thinks he’s going to find that weapon.”

“Yes, and paradise, too. Let’s hope that your giant is more than simply crazy.”

It would help our spirits to eat. I found an alder sapling, cut a lance, and as the morning lightened spied a lazy sturgeon in the shallows and speared the monster through its scale armor, feeling tension release as I rammed it home. We gulped flesh raw like savages.

It was ambrosia.

We told the others about Red Jacket, and Namida broke in with French.

“But
my
people are this way.” She pointed upriver, west, the way Red Jacket had gone. Somewhere far to the west were her Awaxawi-Mandan cousins.

“The Ojibway have been driving the Dakota out of this country with their trade muskets, and keeping the Fox and Sac pinned to the south,” Pierre explained, drawing what he knew in the river sand. “All the territories are in turmoil since the beaver trade began and trade muskets sold. The Mandan are somewhere beyond, amid
the Dakota, and the Dakota are the most dangerous of all. You may be looking for paradise, but you are pointed toward hell. So why that way?”

“Magnus had a map he thinks drawn by Norse ancestors who preceded us.”

“Vikings? In the middle of North America?”

“Templars.”

“What are they?”

“A medieval order of knights interested in religious artifacts.”

“Hmph.” The voyageur looked at Magnus. “We are a long way from the Bible lands, my friend. Why do you think Eden is out here?”

“When the first couple walked the earth it was empty, with no Bible lands or anything else,” Magnus said. “Eden could be anywhere. But scripture says it is the source of four great rivers, and according to my map great rivers run from a spot marked with Thor’s hammer. If the Knights Templar found some ancient reference to this geography, it would explain why they came so far to escape persecution in Gotland.”

“The land of our dead is in the west,” put in Namida, who was following our conversation in French. “The spirits go where the sun sets.”

“There. You see?” said Magnus.

“So now you’re looking for heaven, too?” said Pierre. “If it exists, would it not draw every Indian like a magnet?”

“Maybe there’s something forbidding about the place as well. Or hidden.”

“Ah. Wonderful.”

“No Indian would want to go to a white man’s heaven,” Namida added. “That would be hell, not paradise.”

“Here’s what I think,” Pierre said to Magnus. “Eden is where you find it, giant. Paradise is all around.” He gestured with his arm to the river and marshes, soft gray in the morning. “But we’re blind to
it, as blind as a man in a pitch black room filled with jewels he can’t see. It’s the white man’s curse. The Spanish tramped for El Dorado, when they could have found it back in Segovia, at a friendly table by a warm hearth and a plump wife. The Indians sense paradise better than we do because they see in ways we’ve forgotten. They know that every rock and tree and lake is animated with the unseen world. They talk to them on their spirit quests. Trees give gifts. Rocks bow in greeting. Animals speak. But we white men blunder about, trapping furs, chopping trees, and claiming to look for heaven when we’re in its midst.”

“Those Indians didn’t seem like an angelic host to me,” I said.

“But these women here are angels, no? This is my point. Good and evil are in every man, in constant war, and not in some far-off place you can paddle to. Do you want Eden, Magnus? Find it on this mud island.”

The Norwegian doggedly shook his head. “You can’t convince me our raw breakfast is the stuff of paradise, Pierre. And it’s our very blindness that requires that we white men journey. We’re more distant from the golden past, and our penance is to walk farther. I think my map shows a real place, a spiritual El Dorado that my ancestors crossed an ocean to seek out.”

“And there you’ll find hammers and weapons and life everlasting?”

Everlasting life, the recurring dream, even though the life we had seemed damned difficult to me! The French had spoken of it on the way to Egypt. The Templars had no doubt made it part of their quest. Alessandro Silano had found the edge of it and been stretched, distorted, by what he found. And for each, longevity had receded like the end of a rainbow.

I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to find the thread between man and heaven, but it was too late now. We had nowhere else to go.

The voyageur shook his head at Magnus and turned to me. “And you, Ethan Gage? What is your El Dorado?”

I thought. “People keep telling me there was an earlier, better age and secrets long forgotten. If we knew where we came from, we might know where we’re going.”

“And what use is it to know where we’re going?”

“To decide if we want to get there.”