Ethan Gage Collection # 1

by William Dietrich

  “What’s this mountain here?”

  “That’s not a mountain. It’s a Valknot, the knot of the slain.”

  I peered closer. The mountain was actually a cluster of overlapping triangles that intersected like a knot, as Magnus had said. It created an odd illusion, like an abstraction of a mountain range. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “It’s also called Odin’s triangle,” Bloodhammer explained. “It connects the battlefield dead to Valhalla, like a power lifting them up.”

  “So why is it on this map?”

  “Why indeed?” Now his eye was bright.

  Near the symbols were what appeared to be rivers leading away in the four cardinal directions, as if the symbol were near a central spring.

  “That tomb had not been opened since 1363,” Magnus said. “The crypt itself had apparently been closed at least since 1400—well before Columbus and the other explorers sailed. And yet what does that bite in the continent look like to you, my skeptical friend?”

  There was no denying it. “Hudson Bay. But the 1300s…”

  “Were two centuries and better after Vikings were rumored to have reached a mysterious Vinland to the west,” Bloodhammer said. “And two and half centuries before Henry Hudson found the bay that bears his name, and where he was marooned to die by his own mutinous crew.” He stabbed the parchment. “Norsemen were in the middle of North America a century and a half before Columbus sailed. How about that, eh?”

  “But what the devil has this to do with Knights Templar?”

  “Here we have speculation. The Templars are crushed, politically, beginning in 1309. Some flee to Gotland. This map is generated half a century later. We know that famine racked Europe in the 1320s, and that the Black Plague came next, reaching Norway about 1349. The church was continuing its persecutions, fearing the disease to be God’s judgment. Suppose descendants of the knights, sheltered by the Cistercians, who do not see eye-to-eye with Rome, decided to seek refuge in a New World first discovered by pagan Viking explorers a few centuries before? They would escape persecution, famine, and disease. In 1354, there is a record of one Paul Knutson setting out to check the colonies of Greenland, which had fallen silent. Suppose our medieval Norsemen went even farther, into this vast bay? And then inland? We know Hudson’s crew was trapped by ice for the winter, prompting their mutiny the next spring. What if Norsemen, more comfortable with winter, decided to strike south on the frozen rivers instead of waiting for the thaw? Or perhaps they did wait for spring, and ascended the rivers you see once they were free of ice. The rivers on my map correspond closely to the rivers today’s Hudson’s Bay Company uses to access the Canadian interior for furs. Might they have penetrated to the center of North America? Might they have seen sights and made claims hundreds of years before any European?”

  “But why?” I pondered the map. “Even if these Templars, or monks, or whatever they were, decided to go to the New World, why would they go north to a place like Hudson’s Bay? Why not the eastern coast of the United States? There’s a line for it right there.” I pointed. “No Viking is going to paddle or march to the middle of America.”

  “Not Viking. Medieval Norse who are descendants of the Knights Templar, or Templars themselves.”

  “Medieval Norse, then. It still makes no sense. What did they expect to find?”

  “Not just find. Hide.”

  “Hide? What?”

  “What they had to flee the church and the authorities to secrete away. One of the mysteries the Templars had uncovered in their un-tiring research into the old faiths. One of the grails itself.”

  “The grail?” I swallowed. Given my past adventures, I didn’t have good association with that word. I’d babbled it myself once to get out of being tortured and bitten by snakes, but that was just expediency.

  “Here!” He pointed, indicating the mysterious T symbol near Odin’s triangle. It looked a little like a fat Templar cross, but with the upright piece at the top missing. Bloodhammer’s gaze was fierce again. “Mjolnir. Thor’s hammer!”

  UNDERSTAND THAT AT THIS POINT, ANY NORMAL SAVANT WOULD have thrown up his hands and walked away, or at least walked as far as you can on a pitching ship. Thor’s hammer? I knew little of Norse mythology, but I’d heard of Thor, and of a weapon he carried, a hammer. It was fearsome, shot lightning, and came back to the god’s hand when he threw it. The trouble was, it’s all a myth. Thor’s hammer? Probably kept in a cubby with Neptune’s trident, Jason’s fleece, and the club of Hercules.

  But I felt sympathy for Magnus because once I’d been in his exact position, explaining a story every bit as crazy as this one to my old confederates in Jerusalem and trying not to sound like a madman. So I sat where I was and asked the obvious:

  “Thor’s what?”

  Magnus looked triumphant. “The hammer of the gods! It really existed!”

  “Thor really existed? A Norse god?”

  He nodded excitedly. “Not God as we understand him. Not the Creator, or the Great Architect, as the Masons would say. Rather a superior being, a first ancestor, of a company of heroes we can never hope to emulate. They preceded our own race, in a golden age long lost. Thor taught things that humankind has since forgotten. And he put some of his power, some of this thought, into his hammer!”

  “You realize that you should be restrained.”

  “I know it sounds fantastic! How do you think we of the Forn Sior felt when we realized there might be artifacts of the hero’s age left on this earth? But the Templars took seriously the notion that ancient beings instructed primitive men.”

  “Wait. Forn Sior?”

  “‘Old Custom.’ That’s what we call ourselves.”

  “What who calls themselves?”

  “Those of us who are keepers of the past, who believe the old stories are as valid as the new, and that truth is a blending of all threads. We’re a secret fraternity, my friend, who seek out those like you who might help us. I was in despair when Signe died, suicidal, when they appeared to recruit me. They gave me hope. Mankind has learned much, Ethan: we live in a strange new modern age, the nineteenth century! And who knows what wonders are to come! But we’ve forgotten as much as we’ve learned. There are powers in the forest, spirits in the stones, and magic secrets that have been forgotten for three thousand years. But the Templars began relearning them! They started in Jerusalem and searched the entire world!”

  “Secrets like my book?”

  “Yes, like your book. Written by whom, exactly? Or should I say what?”

  “Some kind of Egyptian being called Thoth. He looked like a bird in some representations. A baboon in others.”

  “Or a tree, a unicorn, a dragon, or an angel. Don’t you see, Ethan? It’s all the same, these mysterious forebears, the origin of our kind, and they’ve left clues about their history for us to rediscover.”

  “A Frenchman named Jomard told me the Great Pyramid incorporated fundamental truths, and that everything since has been a long forgetting.”

  “Yes! Exactly! Like your Book of Thoth or Mjolnir, Thor’s hammer. Eight hundred years after our conversion to Christianity its symbol still adorns many a necklace, because it’s perceived as a good-luck piece in my country!”

  “Let me get this straight. You think there really was a Thor. With a magic hammer. Which Knights Templar found. And which was taken to America centuries before Columbus?”

  He nodded happily. “Isn’t it exciting?”

  It’s because I’m so tolerant and easygoing, I suppose, that I draw theorists of this sort. I made a resolution then and there to become stern and crabby, but it’s entirely contrary to my character. Besides, I half believed him.

  “So there was more than one Thoth?”

  “Probably. Or he was well-traveled, flying though the air to different places on Earth and leaving a different legend with each ancient people. He gave us gifts to start our civilizations, and we remember it dimly as myth.”

  “But where was this h
ammer after Thor disappeared?”

  “Ah. That we don’t know. There are legends of men in white tunics and red crosses going to mines far to the north, where in summer the sun never sets and in winter it never rises. However they did it, we of Forn Sior think the Templars found the hammer and stored it with the other amazing artifacts they were collecting, while using them to increase their power. That’s what the king of France and his ally, the pope, were hoping to seize! But the Templars hid their treasure, smuggled it to distant isles like Gotland, and when the church at last followed them there—when they were betrayed by doubting Cistercian monks, perhaps—they fled farther. To America!”

  “Suppose for a moment I concede they could have sailed that far. Why would they go so far inland?’

  “To hide the hammer, of course, in the remotest place they could find. A lost place. A mystical place. A central place. Perhaps they were going to found their own colony around it, and create a utopia based on Templar and Cistercian principles in the one place where no one would ever find them to persecute them.”

  “Except the Indians.”

  “Well, yes. We must assume the effort failed, since no one has heard of any such colony. And attacks by Red Indians could indeed have been the cause.”

  “So you want to go there? I mean here?” I pointed to the hammer symbol on the map.

  “Yes, to look for the hammer. Do you realize the symbolic power it would have, regardless of whether it really spits lightning? It would reawaken Norse culture and pride. It would be our flag, our liberty tree. It would be the symbol for revolution against the Danes, and Forn Sior would lead the way to a new society!”

  “Which is why Danes are trying to kill us?”

  “Yes.” He nodded encouragingly. “If we succeed, we tear their little empire apart! It’s flattering they’re after us.”

  “You keep saying ‘we,’ Magnus. But I never signed on for all this. Certainly not to look for a mythical hammer in the middle of Indian country a thousand miles from any proper post, in hopes I can free a frozen backwater in Europe I’ve never been to!” My voice was rising at the absurdity of it.

  But his smile was impregnable. “Of course you’ll help. The hammer will be the greatest treasure on Earth, and if anyone understands its electrical and lightning powers, it will be you, Ethan Gage, heir to Franklin, the electrician of the age.”

  “No. No, no, no, no.”

  “It will make you rich. It will make you famous. And it will make you a hero to your own country.”

  “Why would it make me a hero to my country?”

  “Because no one needs the hammer found more than your own leaders, Ethan Gage. No one is depending on you more.”

  “What would the leaders of the United States know about this Thor’s hammer? It’s absurd.”

  “Not absurd. Awaited.”

  “What?”

  “Ethan. Don’t you know your own nation was founded, created, and guided by the descendants of the Knights Templar?”

  Chapter 11

  THE ISLAND OF MANHATTAN, LOGGED CLEAR OF TREES BY British desperate for firewood when confined during the American Revolution a generation before, was in winter a muddy, brushy, dreary place of second-growth wood lots, overgrazed dairy farms, fallow vegetable gardens, and leaden ponds. At its southern end, however, was my nation’s second-biggest city after Philadelphia, a commercial Gomorrah with fewer manners and more ambition than its rival. The number of merchants had quadrupled in just the past ten years, and its sixty thousand people were packed into a warren of tight streets, squeezed churches, and practical counting houses, their architects expressing a better eye for cost than art. Cobbled streets were combed by wagon wheels into lines of slush and manure, while poorer mud lanes were lined by two-story townhouses crammed with cobblers, wheelwrights, glassblowers, butchers, fishmongers, chandlers, coppersmiths, carpenters, clothiers, saddlers, bakers, green grocers, furriers, bookmakers, brewers, gunsmiths, jewelers, weavers, watchmakers, teahouses, and taverns. Like all cities New York stank: of manure, wood smoke, human sewage, sawdust, beer, and the reek of tanneries and slaughterhouses that clustered around a polluted pond called the Collect.

  It was a city of newcomers and strivers—not just the Dutch and English but New Englanders riding its commercial wave, French émigrés escaping the revolution at home, thick and industrious Germans and Swedes, entrepreneurial Jews, Spanish grandees, Negroes both slave and free, and occasionally an Indian chief, Chinaman, or Hawaiian Kanaka who gaped and were gaped at in the crowded markets. Some five thousand refugees from the slave revolts in Haiti had recently debarked, including “mestizo ladies with complexions of the palest marble, jet black hair, and the eyes of the gazelle,” in the words of one journal. Indeed, there were women aristocratic, wives buxom, maids slim, servants dusky, whores powdered, actresses late-rising, and Dutch girls scrubbing stoops, their energetic bottoms oscillating with a charm that made me happy to be back home.

  Magnus was an unfashionable oddity himself, with burgeoning whiskers, a mane of rusty hair, a black eye patch, and hands like hams. I enjoyed notoriety, too, from reports that I was connected to the newly risen Bonaparte. My mission was the new capital of Washington, but a flurry of invitations persuaded me to pause and take rest.

  Since it was winter, the mercantile frenzy of New York was largely confined indoors, businessmen laying ambitious plans next to warming fires while the wind whistled down the Hudson, freezing fast New York’s garbage until it could be used to extend landfills in the spring. Ice floes scudded by the village of Brooklyn, and bare yard-arms made crosses of snow.

  The city’s primary talk was politics. After a bitter election campaign between Adams’s Federalists and the upstart Republicans, the two candidates of the latter, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, had tied in the number of electoral votes, or so the rumor went. The ballots that were cast December 3 would not be officially counted until February 11 of the New Year, but the results were about as secret as Admiral Nelson’s dalliance with Lady Hamilton, half a world away. The presidency would be decided in the House of Representatives, as the framers of the constitution had anticipated, and everyone had an opinion of how the vote might go. While Jefferson was widely acknowledged as the intellectual leader of his party, speculation was that the defeated Federalists in Congress might deny the office to the sage of Monticello and give it instead to the more ferociously ambitious and recklessly high-living Burr, a New Yorker who’d gone back on his promise to be content with second place. The jockeying was, all agreed, unseemly, ruthless, naked, and irresistible.

  “The titan Washington is gone, and lesser men are scrambling for power!” a barkeep at Fraunces Tavern declared. “The age of heroes is over, the present is corrupt, and the future promises disaster!”

  “Things are normal then,” I toasted. “To democracy!”

  Every candidate had been tarred. Jefferson was accused of shirking military duty during the revolution and of being a Jacobin and atheist. Incumbent John Adams was portrayed as incompetent, power-mad, and a secret ally of the perfidious British. Burr was a tin-pot Napoleon. In other words, it was little different than the sniping and backstabbing one heard in the salons of Paris, and I discounted all of it, given what lies have been told about even earnest and likable types like me. There were tales of a Federalist plot to assassinate Jefferson, arm the slaves, or seize the arsenals. Some feared civil war! Yet none of the Americans thought the undignified tumult warranted a king. The ones I drank with were as proud of democracy’s chaos as gulls playing the winds of a tempest.

  “Our congressmen will have our say, by God!” the barflies declared. “They are rogues every one, but they are our rogues.”

  “Speaking as an expert on roguery, America has an above-average set,” I seconded.

  I found myself a minor Republican celebrity. Jefferson liked the French, and my peacemaking in Paris had made me the “hero of Mortefontaine.” The naval war with France had sent insurance rates on a vess
el as high as 40 percent of the value of ship and cargo, and word of permanent peace had been received with celebration. Somehow the tale of my fireworks escape had preceded me across the Atlantic, and I was agreeably toasted as having held aloft the “torch of liberty.” Someone even suggested it would make a model for a good statue, though of course nothing ever came of that idea.

  I was determined to enjoy my moment of renown, since reputations turn soon enough. Being a celebrity, however, buys you little more than supper, often with dull company who expect the famed to provide the entertainment. I found my supply of silver dollars dwindling and had to take to the gaming tables to staunch the leak.

  My modest fame did provide the chance for liaisons with American merchant daughters curious to know how diplomacy was waged in storied France, lessons I was happy to take to their bed. I taught them to cry “Mon dieu!” at full gallop, the hypnotic bounce of their breasts providing ample testimony to the healthy diet of meat and cream in the New World. French girls, while prettier, tend toward the bony.

  Magnus was disinclined to join me. “I told you, I had a love and lost her. I don’t want to dishonor her memory or suffer the pain of lost love again.” The man was a monk, and just as tiresome.

  “This isn’t love, it’s exercise.”

  “Signe’s memory is enough for me.”

  “You’ll dry up!”

  “You exercise, with all the risks that go with it, and I’ll explore the map shops.” Magnus, impatient to be going despite the inclement season, prowled New York in his cloak and broad slouch hat, looking for Freemason symbolism, Viking relics, and Indian legends. The amount of nonsense he received was directly proportional to the amount he was willing to spend for ale on those he interviewed.

  I left him to it, scouting instead the holy ground the whores occupied adjacent to Saint Paul’s Chapel. But when I’d come in at three hours after midnight I’d catch Magnus reading the tomes he’d collected from the fourteen bookstores on Maiden Lane and Pearl Street, lips moving to the nonnative English like a bull practicing Thucydides. He collected piles of speculative literature on the biblical origins of Indians, Masonic conspiracies, and odd pamphlets like William Cobbet’s contention that the new century started in 1800, not 1801, a theory that had set off impressive brawls near the Battery.