The Dakota Cipher (30 page)

But she didn’t. She didn’t look back, and said nothing more. She just kept walking away from the tree and out its crater, a swing to her hips, as if something satisfying had at last been settled. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d whistled.

She wanted me alive.

She wanted me to follow what I’d read.

And by the time I crawled back to my rifle and reloaded it, Aurora Somerset had disappeared into the trees.

W
HAT CAME NEXT
I
RECALL ONLY DIMLY.
I
WAS IN SHOCK FROM
blood loss, electrical discharge, grief, the plague that had ravaged the Indian village, amazement that the hammer had existed at all, and confusion. What message had I come away with? A Latin script kicked into oblivion by the hooves of a dying pony. What did it mean? I hadn’t the faintest idea. What did Aurora think I knew? I had even less notion of that. Where had she gone? She’d passed into the trees like mist, as if she’d never existed.

I was utterly alone. I saw no Indians, no buffalo, no smoke.

I bound up my wounded leg as best I could and drank some dirty water from one of the puddles. Rain continued to fall.

Then I knelt and dug three places in the mud to bury my Pierre, Little Frog, and Namida, using Magnus’s ax as a crude hoe. Good farmland, I noted as I scraped. Good land for Jefferson’s yeoman farmers. A good place for democracy.

What a price my friends and I paid for that geographical information.

And Napoleon? This was a place that could swallow armies.

I think I had an idea what should become of Louisiana.

So did my thoughts blessedly wander. Then it was done, three holes together. Namida first, laid as gently as I could, pushing her eyes closed. Then brave and burnt Little Frog, who’d seized the god’s fire to avenge Little Pierre. And then Pierre himself, his clothes slightly scorched, his skin raw from the cruel lashings of the accursed Cecil Somerset. I’d failed to protect any of them.

As the rain came down I mounded dirt on the first and the second and began on the third, scooping handfuls to hurl on the body.

Suddenly Pierre coughed and spat.

“What are you doing, donkey?”

I reeled back from his grave as if the devil himself had spoken. By Franklin’s lightning! And then the Frenchman blinked, squinted against the rain falling into his face, and grimaced. “Why am I in a hole?”

“Because you’re dead! Aurora killed you!” Had Magnus’s dreams of resurrection somehow come true? What weird magic was this?

The voyageur slowly sat up where I’d been about to entomb him, staring in dull disbelief at the crater, the dead Indian pony, the lattice of roots, and the gargantuan trunk of Yggdrasil, stretched out across the prairie. “
Mon dieu
, what disaster have you made this time, American?”

I feared to touch him, lest my hand go through his ghostly breast. Was I hallucinating? “She shot you! Didn’t she?”

He began turning his head as if to look at his back wound himself when he winced, groaning. “I think she shot
it
, my friend, and left me unconscious.”

“It?”

“Hurts like the very devil.” And so he carefully reached into his ragged shirt, still sitting in the mud, and painfully drew out a cotton string and something…

Bent around a bullet.

“I took it from shattered Cecil one night when the fool was wrestling me down to beat me, the maniac blind in one eye and enraged in the other, and after I stole it I tied it to the inside of my shirt to torment him. You can imagine how frantic he was when he missed it: his distress kept me amused while he tortured me. Who knew it would be useful? I’m bruised and bloody, but it kept the bullet from penetrating.”

And he held up a very warped symbol I’d seen on Somerset’s neck when he coupled with his sister, a pyramid and a snake that had flattened and held the lead ball Aurora had fired, cupping it like a pancake. “It turned out to be my luck and not his, no? And yours, because you’d be lost in the wilderness in an instant without the great Pierre to look after you.” He coughed, and winced.

And now I fell forward not just to touch but to hug him, laughter and tears coursing down my cheeks at the same time. Alive!

“But where is Little Frog?”

So I told him how her courage had helped save his life.

I
LEFT
P
IERRE TO GRIEVE FOR THE WOMEN AND PRACTICE
taking breath again—his back was a massive bruise—while I buried three other things.

No, not the remains of Cecil or Red Jacket. I reflected that Aurora, for all her perverse love for her brother, had not stayed to do the job either. The girl wasn’t one for sentiment, was she? I left them for the coyotes and crows.

These others, however, I didn’t want found.

One was the stone tablet. It was too heavy to take back. I don’t know why it seemed important to keep the thing a secret, but if Aurora had been curious about the Latin cipher in a sheet of gold, why not Norse runes? I’m not sure she ever even realized we’d found it. So I dragged the rune stone to the travois that had escaped the
worst of the flames, rolled it back on and, limping, dragged it a mile or more where its location would not be particularly obvious. I used the big ax to cut a hole in the turf of a grassy hillock, looking carefully out of fear she was watching, slipped the stone under the sod, and left it sleeping. Maybe some new tree will grow atop it someday.

Then I went back for the curious holed stones the Norse had set around their tree and carried them in the travois to my new location, where I placed them so that lines drawn between would intersect where the rune stone was. It was the best I could think of in case there was some reason to find it again.

I cast the double-bitted ax in a pond. The tool had been useful many times over, but there was a ding on its blade where Aurora had blocked my bullet, and I wanted no physical reminder of the price of that miss. The tool could rust away in peace.

And Thor’s hammer? It seemed dead now, no more than a fused piece of slag, but it wasn’t something I felt the world needed. Nor did I want it within reach of lightning that might reanimate it. I found a granite boulder sitting lonely on a meadow, scooped out a small tunnel beneath it, and secreted the hammer there. There are other odd boulders in that country, and this one I didn’t mark. It can sleep until the real Ragnarok.

I salvaged enough gold flakes, which just bore torn letters now, to roll into a ball the size of a grape. This would be my new stake when I found a decent game of cards.

Then Pierre and I said our last prayers and good-byes and set out east. Using the lance as a crutch, my rifle over my shoulder in a makeshift sling, I started limping. He hobbled bent like an old man, his torso a mass of bruises and pain. We made all of three miles that first day, but what a relief to have escaped the strange Eden of Magnus Bloodhammer! The swirling storm clouds had disappeared with the fall of the tree, but not the feeling of foreboding and loss.

I felt like the gates of Eden were swinging shut behind us. I looked back once and saw only empty sky, stretching endlessly west.

“I’m sorry I didn’t kill him with that first shot from the canoe,” I told Pierre. “I’m always missing by inches.”

“It was better that way because your first execution would have been too merciful,” the Frenchman said grimly. “You took away his vanity and filled him with shame. What happened at the tree had to happen, Ethan. We brought things to a necessary end.”

I began to spy game the second day and brought down first a raccoon and then a buck deer. The women had taught us to spot edibles, and we gathered what late-season roots and berries we could find. There was frost in the mornings now, the leaves falling faster. On the fourth day we trudged through a premature flurry of snow.

I skinned out the deer and when I came to a river we made another Welsh coracle, or Mandan boat. The task consumed a full day and if Pierre had been any bigger we would have swamped the vessel, but it worked, just, in the gentle river. It allowed me to rest my sore leg as we floated downstream, steering with the stock of my rifle. If I was still ravaged by sorrow inside, I was beginning to heal on the outside.

Pierre cut himself a paddle and began to talk of building a canoe.

Was Aurora following? I saw no sign. Maybe she died of madness on the prairie.

The river passed through lakes, gathering water as it went. On the third day we recognized this as the river we’d first ascended with our second canoe. So we slipped east and south, drifting finally to an Indian village, dazed to see children playing happily at the edge of the river, men fishing, women cooking and mending. The world was unchanged by our trauma. Whole villages were still normal and happy. Here beyond the frontier, white and red were not at each other’s throats.

Why didn’t I just stop? This was the real Eden, wasn’t it?

Because I’m a Franklin man, a savant, and a man of science with discovery to report. Because I’m Napoleon’s opportunistic minion, and Jefferson’s naturalist, and Sir Sidney Smith’s wayward spy and electrician. I was the hero of Mortefontaine! Because I was lover to Namida and Astiza, one dead and one lost back to Egypt but perhaps not, in the end, irretrievable. Because I’m a man more of the Palais Royal and the President’s House than wigwam and prairie. And because Aurora Somerset thought I might still find something, somewhere, of even more importance than Thor’s hammer.

If I found
her
again, I’d make her tell me what.

So they gave us an old canoe, in the generous manner of poor people in wild country, and we continued on, portaging around some falls we encountered.

Two weeks after we limped away from Yggdrasil we came upon a camp of four French trappers who were descending to Saint Louis to spend the winter behind logs and glass. The growing river we were on, they informed us, was indeed the infant Mississippi! We greeted them in French, and I told them I was a scout for Jefferson and Napoleon.

“On this side of the river you are a scout for Napoleon, my friend,” said one of the voyageurs. “The Spanish flag still flies over Saint Louis, but word is that we will soon have the tricolor. And on that side,” he said, pointing to the eastern bank, “you are a scout for Jefferson. Here the empires meet!”

“Actually he’s a donkey and a sorcerer,” Pierre informed them.

“A sorcerer! What use is that? But a donkey—ah, how we’ve wished for one sometimes in the backcountry!”

We told them nothing of Norse hammers, but did interest them with our account of the upper Mississippi and reports of plentiful fur and game. But the country was also thick with Dakota, I cautioned, and at mention of those fierce warriors the trappers seemed to lose interest.

Pierre said it was too late in the season to try to catch his North Men, so we swept south just ahead of winter. On October 13—another anniversary of the betrayal of the Knights Templar—we paddled onto the shelving levee of Saint Louis, where riverboats could ground to unload cargo before being pushed off the stone “beach” again. Like Detroit, this French settlement was a hundred years old, but unlike Detroit it was growing instead of shrinking. French refugees from the aggrandizements of Britain and the United States fetched up here to make a new life in Napoleon’s empire. The city is just a few miles south of the Mississippi’s junction with the Missouri River, and a more strategic spot can scarcely be imagined. If Bonaparte wants Louisiana, he’ll have to assert control from Saint Louis as well as New Orleans. If Jefferson wants to reach the Pacific, his Meriwether Lewis must come through Saint Louis.

And so I ended my western sojourn. I was exhausted, heartsick, poor, had no proof that Jefferson’s elephants still lived—and couldn’t really reveal just what we
did
find since I had a hunch it might prove useful to an inveterate treasure hunter like me. Thira? Og? As always, the ciphers didn’t make a lick of sense. So I had my first hot bath in months, ate white bread light as a cloud, and slept on a bed above the floor.

My new boots hurt my feet.

Pierre said he’d never invite insane donkeys into his canoe again. It was awkward for a few days, because we were the closest of friends and yet he knew I was as anxious to go back to cities as he longed for the freedom of the voyageur. Both of us carried unspoken grief and guilt for the women who’d died, but it’s hard for men to talk of such things plainly. I wondered if I should persuade the little Frenchman to come back with me to Paris. But one morning, without word, he was gone. The only sign I had that this was his choice and not a kidnapping was that he left the mangled pyramid and bullet next to my bed.

Would I ever see him again?

It was in Saint Louis that I met a visiting Louisville squire named William Clark, a younger brother of the famed revolutionary hero George Rogers Clark. This Clark’s own Indian fighting days had ended with nagging illnesses and a decision to settle down to domestic life in Kentucky, but he was a rugged-looking, congenial man who sought me out when he heard I’d been tramping through the northern Louisiana Territory.

“I’m impressed, sir, very impressed indeed,” Clark said, pumping my hand as if I were the president. “But perhaps not such a trick for the hero of Acre and Mortefontaine?”

“Hardly a hero, Mr. Clark,” I said as I sipped a bottle of blessed French wine, bringing to mind past bliss in Paris. “Half the things I try seem to turn to ashes.”

“But that’s the experience of all men, is it not?” Clark asked. “I’m convinced the difference between a successful man and a failure is that the former keep trying. Don’t you agree?”

“You seem to have the wisdom of my mentor Franklin.”

“You knew Franklin? Now there was a man! A titan, sir, a Solomon! And what would Franklin have said of Louisiana?”

“That it’s cozier in Philadelphia.”

Clark laughed. “Indeed, I bet it is! Philadelphia is no doubt cozier than Kentucky, too, but ah, Kentucky—such beauty! Such possibility!”

“Louisiana has that as well, I suppose.”

“But only for Americans, don’t you think? Look at these French. Bravest fellows in the world, but trappers, not farmers. They drift like the Indians. More Americans sweep down the Ohio in a week than all the French who live in Saint Louis! Yes, Americans are going to fill up the eastward bank here, and soon!”

“Do you think so? I’m to report to both Jefferson and Napoleon.”

“Then report the inevitable.” He took a sip of wine. “Tell me. Did you like it out there?”