The Dakota Cipher (25 page)

U
SING MY RIFLE AS A MEASURING STICK,
I
ESTIMATED THE
tablet was thirty-one inches long, sixteen inches wide, and half a foot thick. It weighed at least two hundred pounds. No wonder it slowed the bear! Half of one side was smooth and covered in odd-looking letters of a type I’d never seen before: different from our own alphabet, Egyptian hieroglyphics, or the alien writing of the Book of Thoth. The script was crudely chiseled and not very deep. Had I encountered the artifact in a cow pasture I’d likely have passed by without noticing it.

“What do you mean by Norse ruins?” I asked.

“Runes,”
Magnus explained, spelling it. “Norse lettering from the Viking and medieval days. This is what we call a rune stone. The Vikings and others carved these to commemorate an event, boast of deeds, enumerate marriages and offspring, declare a faith, or record a voyage or passage. There are thousands of them in Scandinavia. If these Indians have one, it proves my people were here.” He glanced around grandly. “All this belongs to Norway!”

I glanced at the dead bear. “You can have it. And this tells us where to go?”

“Perhaps, if the men with Thor’s hammer carved it. Let me translate.”

The women were already sawing into the bear, choosing to interpret our near-devouring as the opportunity for a windfall feast. Indians are the most sensibly practical people I know.

“Don’t forget to keep the claws,” I called to Namida. “They’ll lend a savage charm.”

“Look, there’s more writing on the side of the stone,” Magnus said.

“Pretty long-winded if you have to chisel, weren’t they?”

“It wouldn’t take that long for a skilled rune mason, and some people want their words to last.” He was scratching translations in the dirt. Finally Magnus began to recite. “‘Eight Gotlanders and twenty-two Norwegians on a journey of acquisition from Vinland, very far west,’” he read. He paused. “Vinland is a land they found on the east coast of Canada, so the writer must mean they’ve come very far west from that.”

“As have we. Read on.”

“‘We had camp by two rocky islands one day’s journey north from this stone. We were out fishing one day. After we came home we found ten men red with blood and death. AVM save from evil.’”

“The AVM is in Latin letters,” I noted.

“Ave Maria, I’d guess. Hail Mary. Remember, these were Christians, at least in part. Catholics, in those days. The old runes were giving way to the new letters.”

“Well, there’re no rocky islands on this prairie. This stone was obviously moved from its original resting place. Captured from the Dakota, Namida said, who in turn got it from who knows who.”

“They probably mean an island in a lake,” Magnus agreed, “but
that could be in any number of directions. Here’s what the side of the stone says: ‘Have ten men by the sea to look after our ships fourteen days’ journey from this island. Year 1362.’”

“Year 1362? Isn’t that the time your Templar map dates from?”

“Now do you believe me, Ethan?”

It’s one thing to go charging off after treasure, but another entirely to think you might really have a chance of finding it. I was growing excited. “But why?”

“I told you,” he said patiently. “Thor’s hammer. Dwarven mastery of the forging arts in the lost Golden Age.”

“Dwarven what?”

“The dwarves Eitri and Brokk forged the hammer of Thor in the furnaces of their caverns, its only flaw a short handle caused when Loki, disguised as a fly, stung the eyelids of Brokk.”

I was sorry I asked. “So how do we find it?”

He sat down heavily, tired from his fight with the bear. “I don’t know. If the stone has been moved, fourteen days from the sea means little.”

“It’s worse than that. It’s taken us months to get here. Fourteen days from the sea means a place a thousand miles back east or north, doesn’t it? We’re nowhere near your hammer if this was carved by the same Norsemen.”

“Or Eden.”

He suddenly looked so crushed that I felt sorry for him, and worse for me. A moment ago I’d soaring hope of Viking loot. Now it was dashed! “We tried, Magnus.”

He didn’t answer.

“The Somersets, if they’re really alive, are on a wild goose chase, too.”

He was staring sadly at his rune stone.

“So.” Here we were in unmapped wilderness, next to a dead bear
and a plague-wracked village, possibly pursued by any number of red savages and a vengeful pair of English perverts, more than a thousand miles from any civilized comfort, and with little in the way of food, clothing, weapons, powder, or sense of direction. Our only allies were two Indian women greedily roasting bear liver and paying not a whit of attention to keeping watch. Our sole clue weighed two hundred pounds.

In other words, it was the usual hash I made of things, in the usual dubious company. I walked down to wash in the river, wishing this particular group of Indians had adopted the horse so that I could gallop the devil out of here. The Mandan were sedentary farmers, alas. I wished I’d seen a volcano or mountain of salt, or
something
to bring back to anxious Tom Jefferson.

And then Magnus shouted.

I came running with my rifle, but he was pointing at the stone. “I have it, I have it, I have it!” he cried, and danced a cloggish shambles that I guess in Norway passes for a jig. Well, nobody ever attributed ballet to the Vikings.

“By Jupiter, have what?”

“It’s a code, Ethan, a cipher, like you said!” He began pointing at random numbers. “Some of these letters have odd extra markings, like dots and slashes. I didn’t understand why at first. But if you take the first seven letters so marked, do you know what they spell?”

“Magnus, I can’t read runes at all.”

“Gral thar!”
It was a cry jubilant enough to topple a tower. If Red Jacket was within a league, he could hardly miss us.

“Don’t shout!” I glanced warily at the bluffs. “Is that good?”

“It means ‘grail.’ And the next are Cistercian symbols for wisdom and holy spirit. It means, ‘Their grail, wisdom, and holy spirit.’”

Now I felt a shiver. I’d heard the word “grail” before, too, in Egypt and the Holy Land, and like Saint Bernard it kept echoing through
my life. Here it was on a rock in the middle of Dakota country? The longer I lived, the odder life seemed to be, signs and portents constantly butting into what had been a comfortably dull, pleasingly pointless existence. “But what does that mean?”

“That these men planted, or found, the grail that was their holy mission. And if the map I brought from Gotland is true, that grail is the hammer, brought here to where rivers go north, south, east, and west.”

I looked at the brown, eroding bluffs. “Magnus, we’re not in Eden.”

“Not
here
, but where this rune stone
came
from. Where they deposited the hammer, and probably tried to found a colony. But demons already infested this country, foes 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 balmy.

“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.”

M
AGNUS 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 chiseled on an old stone tablet? You of all people should recognize 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 center, 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.

I
T 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.

Ambush!

It was a neat trap. Our enemies had trailed us by horseback, waited
until we had the rune stone, scouted ahead to spot the vast buffalo herd, and set up a riverside assault where we’d have to stop. Smart—which meant we had to be smarter.

So when an Indian rose from some reeds with bow in hand, arrogant as a duke of Spain, I lifted my rifle, shot him, and pounded Magnus on the back.

“Paddle!” I cried. “Toward the bison!”

“We’ll be overturned and drowned!” Namida warned.

“We’ll be shot and tortured if we stay here! Go!”

Now there were cries on all sides, warriors rising up from the concealing foliage to whoop and yip. A volley of arrows arced toward us and only the sudden surge as Magnus dug with his paddle kept us from being perforated. Several missiles clattered onto the stone tablet, two more stuck in the stern of our canoe, and the rest hissed into the water. Muskets went off, bullets kicking up spouts around us, and Little Frog gave a cry and clutched her shoulder, losing her paddle.

She was grazed, the blood bright but not pulsing, so I thrust my own paddle at her. “Keep stroking!” I fired our two muskets and two more Indians yelped and fell. Now we were flying down the shallow river as Magnus and the women thrashed, spray flying, aiming straight for the great herd as if we were anxious for a goring. Our sprint took the Dakotas by surprise and their shots went wild as the range grew. They began running from the river’s brush to the enclosing hills where they’d no doubt tethered their horses. They’d stampede the buffalo onto us.

“Ethan, we can’t paddle through the herd!” Magnus protested. “There must be ten thousand animals just in sight, and a hundred thousand behind them!”

“Pass me your ax!”

“What? Why?”

“Sorcery!”

I glanced back. Dakota riders, bent low over their ponies, were
galloping toward the bison. The animals, already rippling in confusion from the gunshots, represented our gravest danger and greatest hope. I reloaded our guns, threw them down until we needed them most, and gripped Magnus’s ax.

“What’s your plan?” Namida asked, looking fearfully at the wall of dark fur plunging into the river. Bison skidded down the bank and splashed with great sheets of water, waves rolling away from their bulk. In midriver, hundreds of horns jutted like menacing pickets. Great dark eyes rolled as the beasts saw us coming, hesitating between panic and charge.

“Paddle faster!”

“Ethan?”

“Faster!”

More shots, the buzz of balls passing like hornets. I shot one gun back, to keep them thinking.

Then I squinted ahead. We were flying with the current straight at the rising sun, old bulls moving to the edge of the herd to eye us grumpily, horns lowered, hooves pawing, as cows and calves skittered from our approach.

“They’re going to attack us!”

“Keep going!”

We could hear snorts and smell the rank, rich odor.

“Ethan!” Namida moaned.

I raised the ax.

Magnus had, as I’ve explained, polished it as if it were a piece of antique silver, giving more care to his hatchet than most men give to their horses or wives. It shone like a mirror, and he’d wiped it clean as china after the bear fight.

Now it caught the sun.

When it did, it flashed the morning’s rising light into the startled eyes of ten thousand hesitant buffalo. It was a winking flash, as if our canoe had exploded with pulsing light. The animals jerked, bawling,
and then bolted. In an instant the entire plain surged into reactive motion, the ground quaking as thousands of tons of flesh and hoof began pounding in both directions away from us, across the grass. In the river, panicked bison were surging away from our midriver course, trying to flee the winking ax blade of light as we swept down on them like Valkyries. The river boiled as buffalo heaved out of it. I kept twitching the ax, catching the rays like a necklace of Marie Antoinette’s. We raced into the buffalo ford, parting the herd.

I glanced back. Behind us the confused bison, pushed by unknown tens of thousands more in the hills, was wheeling back toward the river. As they did so they stampeded into the pursuing Indians. The Dakota fired to frighten the beasts toward us, but that only added to the milling confusion, some buffalo running one way and others the opposite. Dust pillared in the morning air. A horse screamed and went over, the rider gored.

Our paddlers meanwhile were artfully threading the river between panicked buffalo trying to swim or wade away from our course. Horns and massive heads slid by, the animals bewildered by our boldness and our odd towed sled with its rune stone. One bull crashed into the shallows to charge us so I threw down the ax, snatched up a musket, and shot. The animal stumbled and crashed, setting off yet another current of stampeding animals. A tendril of blood curled into the water as we swept past.

Now we had a curtain of panicked buffalo between us and our pursuers, buying us time. Animals were spilling in all directions, sweeping the frustrated Dakota before them. I hoisted the ax again and again, sun flashing, and finally we were through the crossing. Dust from the stampede rose like a wall behind us, screening us from view. We stroked until we couldn’t see the herd anymore, or any pursuit. Finally we drifted to rest, the rune stone still trailing behind like a little dinghy.

“That wasn’t sorcery,” Magnus panted. “That was my ax.”

“The sorcery was what I
did
with your ax. Magic is nothing but ideas.”

A
T LENGTH OUR MEANDERING RIVER MET THE
R
ED, FLOWING
northward to Lake Winnipeg. Guessing from Magnus’s vague map, we turned south and paddled upstream until we came to a tributary leading east again. Then we went up
that
, toward Bloodhammer’s best guess of where the Norwegians and Gotlanders might have journeyed. Given that the rivers writhed and twisted like Italian noodles, I was unsure how close we were to anything, let alone a vague symbol on a medieval map we no longer had.

The creek was slow and swampy, and as we went east the echoing emptiness of the plains was giving way to a more familiar landscape of wood, meadow, and pond. About half the land was forested, and periodically the river widened into a small lake.

Then we saw our biblical pillar, our gate to Eden.

At first I thought it was simply a black squall, streaked and sagging against an otherwise blue autumn sky. But as I watched, this squall didn’t move despite the breeze blowing across the prairie. Or rather it
did
move, we saw as we paddled closer, but in a slow gyre around some central point, like a viscous, heavy whirlpool. Its rotation reminded me of those eerie funnel-shaped clouds we’d fled toward on the plains, because this too was dark and hinted of power. But this cylinder of clouds was far wider, a lazily revolving curtain that hid whatever was behind it. Occasionally, lightning flickered and thunder tolled in dull warning as we approached.

We studied the phenomenon uneasily.

“I’ve heard of this place,” Namida said. “The storm that never ends. No one comes here. Or if they do, they don’t come back.”

“But we have a sorcerer,” Magnus said.

“Who thinks your destination looks like hell instead of paradise,” I replied.

“It’s just a home for Thor.”

“I want
go
home,” Little Frog said in halting French. Her shoulder was sore from the bullet, and she had a fever. “Go Mandan.”

“No,
there
is home, the place from which we all started.” The Norwegian’s eyes were gleaming. “There is the birthplace of gods and kings, of heroes and sirens, of life everlasting. There you will be cured, Little Frog!”

Life everlasting? It looked like a poisonous thunderstorm, albeit a beautiful one. As lightning flashed, the clouds glowed green and purple. They roiled, climbed, and descended, as if bound like planets to something within. 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 center 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.