Ethan Gage Collection # 1

by William Dietrich

  “So this is the one that runs to Hudson’s Bay?” Magnus asked.

  “Yes, eventually. If your Norse came from there they could have paddled right by where we’re now standing, exploring to the south. The Red flows to Lake Winnipeg, and the lake empties farther north yet through the Nelson to Hudson’s Bay. From where we are now standing, in the middle of North America, you can boat to Europe.”

  Magnus turned to face south. “So the hammer is upstream?”

  “Who knows? We need this stone cipher.”

  “How far?” Magnus asked Namida.

  She shrugged. “A week?”

  “Does a river lead there?” asked Pierre.

  “My village is on one, but I don’t know which way it goes.” She pointed southwest. “If we walk, we can find it.”

  “Walk again!” cried Pierre. “I don’t like this idea of wandering in the grass, like a fly on paper!”

  “But that’s the way we have to go,” Magnus said.

  “So let’s complete our rescue of these fair maidens,” I added.

  “Maidens! Thank God they are not!”

  We canoed across the Red, unloaded our meager belongings, and abandoned our boat. “I feel like a shipwrecked sailor,” Pierre mourned.

  “The prairie country should be like navigating the sea,” I countered. I looked at Namida. “We’ll be safe with her people, I hope.”

  There were trees in the valley but we climbed bare bluffs beyond. The Red was winding ochre, north and south. To the west we entered a rolling steppe that stretched to infinity, the grass dry, wildflowers mostly gone.

  With no wood for fuel, Little Frog had to show us how to use dried buffalo dung for fires. It burned surprisingly hot and smokeless.

  And so we traveled, Pierre groaning at the indignity of walking, leaving no mark on the emptiness we traversed. My mind had settled into the monotony of marching, idly watching another storm build in the west from which we had no shelter, when Namida—who was bringing up the rear as we ascended the brow of a hill gentle as an ocean swell—suddenly pitched herself flat and cried warning. Little Frog and Pierre immediately followed, pulling Magnus and me down with them.

  “Dakota!”

  I raised my head. In a little valley behind us, a party of a dozen Dakota warriors ambled on horseback. They were the first horsemen we’d seen among the Indians, and they sat their mounts like centaurs, torsos bare except for bone breastplates and paint. They had lances and bows, but only two guns that I could pick out. If it came to a fight, I could pick their gunmen off with my rifle before their trade muskets got within range. A couple of scalps fluttered from their lances. They hadn’t spied us.

  “Maybe they’ll just ride by,” I said.

  “Then why are they coming in our direction?” Magnus asked.

  “They’ve seen our sign and know we’re helpless,” Pierre said. “We’re on foot.”

  “Should we shoot or parley?”

  “Too many to fight.” He turned to Namida. “Can you deal with them?

  She shook her head. “They are enemies of the Mandan.”

  As if in reprieve the Dakota halted more than a mile away, one turning to call. More appeared, farther away, and for a moment I hoped this new group would draw the first band away. They rode toward each other. But then Pierre hissed and my heart sank. Even from a distance I could see the bright scarlet of Red Jacket’s coat. We were being hunted, not by canoeing Ojibway but mounted Dakota. He’d come west to recruit new followers!

  “They found our canoe and struck west to follow us,” the Frenchman guessed.

  I looked farther west. The sky was blackening again. But where was a hiding place on this endless, rolling prairie?

  And why had Red Jacket followed us so far? The hammer. Were the Somersets still alive, and driving him? I didn’t see them.

  “What’s your plan, sorcerer?”

  “Maybe I can pick off Red Jacket and the others will go away.”

  “Dakota do not go away.”

  Thunder rumbled across the prairie. I looked again at the approaching storm. “Then I’m going to enlist the lightning. Look!” Vast purple thunderheads were sweeping our way like charging castles, their topmost towers a brilliant white and their undersides a forbidding black. A gauzy curtain showed where rain or hail was falling. In the opposite direction it was still blue and bright, as if the sky held night and day at once.

  “We can’t reach that in time!” Namida said.

  “It’s going to reach us. Look how fast it is approaching.” Indeed, the speed of the tempest was disquieting. This storm was different.

  “It’s Thor, come to save us,” Magnus muttered.

  “No, it will kill! Look!” She pointed.

  Again, a curious funnel-shaped cloud had formed. It reached down like a probing finger, touched the ground, and a whirlwind of debris spun around its mesmerizing tip like shavings from a bit. Then it seemed to fly apart and disappear.

  “What was that?”

  “A killer wind, as bad as the cannibal Wendigo! We must run from it!”

  I looked at the Dakota. They’d spotted us but were pointing to the storm, too, horses milling. The wind was blowing hard now, grass thrashing, and the light was rapidly emptying from the day. In the wedge of blue sky still left to the east I saw the party of forty mounted warriors crest a rise and stop, silhouetted against the light and hesitating to close with us.

  “No! We must run toward it!”

  “Are you mad?” asked Pierre.

  “I’m a sorcerer! Come on, Magnus! Let’s go meet Thor!”

  We grasped the hands of the women to pull them and ran, linked, toward the wall of the storm. Yipping uncertainly, the Dakota saw our boldness and lashed their steeds in reluctant pursuit.

  Now the wind was roaring in our faces, grit and fat globs of water spattering us. It was cold and deafening. Another black funnel touched down, and then another. Thunder boomed, and for an instant the prairie flashed silver. All the bad weather of the world had gathered for an instant! Ice pellets began to fall, big enough to sting, and the wind climbed to a howl. I looked back, barely able to see Red Jacket exhorting the others to charge through a silver curtain. Our pursuers were losing cohesiveness as some fell back.

  Now a funnel formed directly in front of us. A more menacing phenomenon I’ve never seen. The wind was sucking upward in a whirling maelstrom of dirt and cloud, weaving toward us like a drunken thing. The sound rose to a shriek. Namida and Little Frog were crying.

  “It will kill us all!”

  It was the only thing I could think of to frighten Red Jacket. “We need to get it between us and the Indians!”

  “Donkey, it will suck us off the earth!”

  But we had no choice. I hauled our party into a dent in the prairie, a dry wash now filling with ice pellets and storm water, and splashed to a cleft in its dirt bank. “Hide here!” I looked up. Now the funnel seemed to reach as high as the stars, a vast, bellowing, devouring monster of a cloud—a god’s power made manifest. We squeezed together into our clay crevice just as the funnel achieved a siren’s scream.

  The black thing seemed to have scooped up the very air. I could barely breathe, and my ears ached and popped. The churning winds had a horrible grinding noise.

  “Crawl in! Hold on! Close your eyes! It’s Thor!”

  And there, at the edge of this dark funnel, on the crest of horizon between earth and sky where the prairie thrashed like something electrocuted, did I see the elephant?

  I have no proof. I don’t even have firm memory. But some huge animal seemed to flash for a moment on the horizon, trumpeting to the sky with long trunk and curved tusks, some great lumbering hairy tower of a beast, monarch of the plains, lord of creation, ancient memory of a greater age in the past. For one moment I saw the lightning flash on its ivory. Just for a moment! And then it was hidden by a curtain of rain and I had to cling against the ferocity I’d run toward.

  We held each other, shaking, and t
he world dissolved into spinning dust oscillating faster than any machine on earth. I felt it tug at our legs and we clawed at dirt and grass roots to stay pinned. I risked the turn of my head for a momentary peek. There—at the top of the whirling black wall—was that a glimpse of blue far above, of heaven or Valhalla?

  Then it was beyond us, lightning flashed, and rain fell in a deluge, hissing as it melted the ice. The little ravine was half flooded with water. We crawled higher, gasping, and at last dared lift our heads and look for the funnel.

  It was gone. The day was shifting again from black to gray. To the east, where the Indians had been, was a line of forked flashes.

  We were too drained to do anything but huddle. Slowly the day lightened back to something approaching normal, even as the sun in the west backlit the inky curtain that was now to our east.

  And of Red Jacket and his Indians? There was no sign.

  “They bolted, Ethan,” Pierre said with wonder. “They knew you were an electrician, and they ran for their lives.”

  I stood, wishing Franklin had taught me some milder form of expertise.

  Chapter 36

  WE NOW WALKED WHERE NO WHITE MEN HAD EVER GONE, except perhaps grizzled Norsemen centuries ago. Ever since the Ohio country and its gargantuan trees, the west had been opening up, every vista broader, every sky bigger. Now the sensation of endless, empty, uncomplicated space was complete, the world reduced to its simplest elements of earth and sky. The horizon seemed to curve and distant clouds to dip. This was our planet before the Garden. The few trees we saw were hunched in winding coulees to hide from the ceaseless wind, and the grass rolled in waves like the ocean. Yet the more lost we three white men felt, the more Namida and Little Frog were encouraged. They must be near home!

  They hoped, and I doubted. America unrolled to complete nothingness, somewhere ahead.

  Napoleon was to do something with this? I kicked at the soil, black and endlessly deep. Maybe Jefferson’s yeoman farmers could make something of it, but for French imperialists, this would be like the sands of Egypt. There was not even fur.

  I saw no more elephants, no mountains of salt, no belching volcanoes, and no pursuing Dakota. The prairie had been swept clean. Each night our low coals were the only light on the empty plain. The true illumination was overhead, stars brilliantly silver and the air cold. Whereas before Namida and I, and Pierre and Little Frog, had lain as couples—Magnus once or twice looking at us with wistful envy—we now all lay huddled like sheep. I didn’t want to be out here when the first snow blew.

  “How long before winter?” I asked Pierre.

  “We must hurry. The question will be if we have time to get back to wherever you wish to go. Where is that, sorcerer?”

  “Norway for Magnus. Washington and Paris for me.”

  “And poor Pierre? I am a thousand miles from my paddling companions, a marooned pilgrim with no winter post.”

  “You can come back with us.”

  “Can I? And Namida? And Little Frog? It’s not easy to go between two worlds.”

  WE’D BEEN WALKING SEVERAL DAYS, DEEPER AND DEEPER INTO the plains, me longing for a horse, when we woke one morning and found our voyageur had disappeared.

  It took a moment in the predawn stillness to realize Pierre was gone. Little Frog said something in her native tongue to Namida, and the women began running up and down the swale of land where we’d camped, growing increasingly anxious.

  Magnus and I stood, uneasy. Our companion could have crept off to relieve himself, or perhaps he saw some game. But the three guns were stacked as we’d left them and his water skin remained behind.

  We could see no sign of him, and we could see a very long way.

  “Pierre!” Our cries were feeble against the immensity of the prairie.

  Silence.

  “Pi-eeeerrrre!”

  The wind was our answer.

  “He went back to his canoe,” Magnus said without conviction. “He hated walking.”

  “With no gun? And no word?”

  The four of us fanned out at the points of the compass, going to the limit of where we could keep each other in sight.

  “Pierre!” The shouts were swallowed.

  We came back together to eat a cold breakfast. Little Frog looked miserable.

  “Perhaps he’s scouting,” Magnus tried again.

  No one replied.

  “He slept with us last night. He just vanishes?”

  I began to examine our campsite. I’m not a tracker or a frontiersman, and we had trampled our little hillock gathering buffalo chips and water from a nearby pothole of a lake. Yet there—were there trails in the grass where someone might have crept toward us? And there? And there? The grass was bent in snakelike undulations toward our camping place.

  I shivered. Men had been among us, I realized—men with scalping knives, men the Ojibway condemned as snakes—and had carried one of us off without a sound or sign. I touched my throat. Why wasn’t it slit? Why weren’t they on us right now?

  “Somebody took him,” I told the others. “Dakota.”

  “We’d be dead if it were just Dakota,” Namida said. For the first time since I’d met her, she looked truly fearful. “Something’s changed. The evil English couple can’t be killed, and have come and told them to take just one.”

  “Why? Why not capture or kill us all?”

  “Because they want to follow where we lead,” Magnus said heavily. “They’ll torment Pierre for information, and use him to trade for the hammer. They are snakes who want into our Garden. And when they come, Ethan, when they enter the secret of my ancestors, then, my friend—then there will be Ragnarok.”

  “What is Ragnarok?” Namida asked.

  “The last battle of gods and men,” Magnus said. “The end of the world.”

  The prairie wind was getting colder.

  “Pi-eeerrre!”

  We gathered our things and hurried on, imagining eyes on us in the emptiness.

  BEFORE EDEN, PURGATORY. BEFORE VALHALLA, THE HELL OF Nilfheim.

  So it was when we actually found, against all expectation, the Awaxawi village of Namida and Little Frog, clustered on the bend of an unnamed river lazily winding across the western prairie. We were so far from obvious landmarks or trails that I would have needed a sextant and chronometer to fix our place on earth, assuming I knew how to use them. But Namida recognized subtle curls and lumps on the prairie invisible to my eyes, and grew steadily more excited as we neared her childhood village. “See! There is the coulee! Look! A seed from a cottonwood! Listen! A call from the river bird!”

  From a bluff above, the village indeed looked more medieval than American. The huts were earth-covered domes of sod, surrounded by a palisade and a dry moat spanned by an earth causeway. Its valley was an oasis, fields of corn and beans interspersed with groves of trees along the river. But no sound greeted us as we approached, not even the barking of dogs. Namida and Little Frog’s joy turned to disquiet when nothing moved.

  “Something’s happened,” Namida whispered.

  A man was sprawled by the gate.

  We walked down cautiously and halted a careful distance to study him. His belly was extended by bloat and his skin had erupted in small pustules, some red and leaking pus. His mouth was open, his eyes blind.

  “Smallpox,” Magnus muttered.

  The women burst into tears.

  We could see that beyond this first victim were others inside the palisade, lying exposed on the hard-packed earth. A mother lay dead, breasts bare and pocked, with her expired toddler, not yet weaned, atop where he’d cried for milk that no longer came. An old man sat upright, eyes squeezed shut against the horror. A warrior lay curled into a ball.

  Smallpox was ghastly enough in Europe, carrying off kings and commoners, but in America it was the absolute scourge of the tribes.

  “So die the Mandan,” I said heavily.

  First the village massacre caused by Red Jacket’s pursuit back in the forest country.
Now this. The red race seemed to be dissolving before my eyes.

  Namida and Little Frog were staring in shock and fear, choking back sobs for relatives that had to be dead. They seemed rooted, as if an invisible wall kept them from daring to open the gate, and that was good. To go inside was a sentence of death.

  “Magnus, keep the women away. This disease will kill them in hours or days if they’re infected. I’ll go see if anyone is left alive or if I can find the tablet.”

  “It’s my quest we’re on,” he said, his face ashen. “I’ll take the risk.”

  “No, I’ve been inoculated.”

  “You’ve been what?”

  “Given a mild form of the disease so I can’t catch this.” I gestured at the dead gatekeeper. “An Englishman named Jenner has been giving people cowpox with great success, and the treatment came to France the year I was in the Holy Land. Having seen smallpox do its work in Egypt and Italy, I decided to try it last year after the Marengo campaign. And, inoculated, here I am.”

  “Inoculated how?”

  “A prick on the skin.” I pulled my tattered shirt off my shoulder. “See the bump?”

  The Norwegian made some kind of sign against my scar and retreated on the causeway, pulling the women with him. “Finally, you show some sorcery.”

  I was not entirely certain that inoculation worked, but I’d seen smallpox before and not contracted the disease. If Red Jacket’s Indians were truly still after us, and the women’s relatives dead, all hope of help was gone. It was imperative that we complete our mission as quickly as possible, which meant finding that tablet of stone. We needed either a clue to Thor’s hammer or an excuse to abandon the quest.

  Entering the village was grisly. Smallpox strikes Indians swiftly, dropping people where they stand. Women had keeled over near smoking racks and weaving circles. Two men had fallen at their palisade, as if insanely trying to climb the walls to escape. A girl had fainted while carrying a water jug, shattering it. The place reeked of excrement and corruption, the sweet stink of triumphant death. There was a sound, I realized—the horrid buzzing of flies.