The Dakota Cipher

by William Dietrich

  The first artefact of civilisation that disappeared as we rode up the Potomac was paint. As we ascended the mountains, farmhouses faded to weathered wood; milled lumber gave way to squared logs. Our road followed an undulating scar of vegetable plots, trampled pasture, and wounded hillsides of stumps and slash. No firmer than porridge, it curved and coiled tighter than a barrister’s argument and was worn to a trench by traffic that never paused to repair it. Always we smelt smoke, hardscrabble farmers trying to burn back the forest to make room for corn. And then, deep in the mountains, finally there were no farms at all. Winter-barren brown ridges, the tops still frosty most mornings, ran like multiple walls into haze. Hawks orbited by day, and wolves howled in the dark. When the wind blew, the brown carpet of last winter’s leaves rustled like tattered pages. It sounded like the forest was whispering.

  We slept outdoors when the weather was fair, hardening ourselves to our new lives as frontiersmen and avoiding the stiff fees and biting fleas of Appalachian accommodation. We’d make a bed of boughs, have a simple dinner of ham, cornbread, and creek water, and listen to the night sounds. Through the lattice of slowly budding trees, we had a spangled canopy of a million dazzling stars. Magnus and I talked sometimes of the ancient belief that each was an ancestor, gone to reside in the sky for all eternity.

  ‘Maybe one is Signe,’ he said, wistful.

  ‘How long were you married?’

  ‘Just one year.’ He paused before going on. ‘The only time I’ve truly been happy. I loved her as a youth, but my family had filled my head with tales of gods and mysteries, so I sailed north to where the Templars might have been, so far north that the sun never set and the air barely warmed. I found mines so deep they might have been driven by dwarves, but no relics. By the time I came back she was married to someone else, and then I lost my eye, and pretty much put happiness aside. Bliss is reserved for the few.’

  ‘At least you had someone to haunt you.’ I thought of Astiza.

  ‘Then I inherited my ancestral farm, her husband drowned, and against all expectations she and her family accepted me for a second match. I thought myself mutilated, hideous, but she was Beauty to my Beast. When she told me she was with my child I was in a daze of happiness. I severed my connections with Forn Sior and dedicated myself to domesticity. Have you ever known contentment, Ethan?’

  ‘Now and again, for an hour or two. I don’t know if it is men’s lot to be content for very long. Franklin said, ‘Who is rich? He who is content. Who is that? Nobody.’’

  ‘Your mentor was wrong on that one. By his definition I was rich, fabulously so. What need had I of Norway or Templars when I had Signe? And then …’

  ‘She died?’

  ‘I killed her.’

  He was haunted, I saw, and not just by dwarves and elves. His expression was suddenly withered as a garden in winter. I was stunned, not knowing what to say.

  ‘She died trying to give birth to my baby.’

  I swallowed. ‘Magnus, that could happen to anyone.’

  ‘The neighbours had already made fun and called me Odin. But in my torrent of grief I saw destiny’s hand and realised I wasn’t done. I think the knights of old were seeking a grail that could mean the worst things could be undone, and that I’m doomed to search the world as the old god did, on a quest for my own kind of bitter knowledge. I’m on a search in my wife’s memory, Ethan. That’s why I can’t share your sport with women.’

  ‘Oh.’ Once again I felt shallow – but more easily healed, too. You can’t lose what you don’t risk, including your heart. ‘Surely she wouldn’t begrudge a remarriage. She did it herself.’

  ‘No, I gave up my quest and killed her by my selfishness in doing so. Now I must complete it, out here in the American West, as penance.’

  ‘Penance! And you bring the innocent me along?’

  ‘You need purpose, too. I could see it at Mortefontaine, where all you had were food, drink, cards, and women. I’ve saved you, though you’ll never appreciate it.’

  ‘But we’ve come to the edge of nothing,’ I said with exasperation, gesturing at the brown hollow below us, mist pooled like a puddle.

  ‘No. This is the edge of Eden.’ His breath was a cloud in the chill.

  I felt sour about my recruitment. ‘I always pictured Eden warmer.’ I pulled my blanket over my head, shivering despite myself at the sorrow of his tale. The eager boy suddenly seemed a thousand years old, and the empty woods watchful.

  ‘Have you ever wondered where Eden was, Ethan?’

  ‘Not really.’ I realised my partner was quite mad.

  ‘I mean it had to be somewhere. What if it could be rediscovered?’

  ‘If I remember the scriptures, Bloodhammer, the door to that particular inn slammed shut,’ I grumbled. ‘Eve, the apple, and all that.’

  ‘But what if it could be reopened?’

  ‘With a key?’

  ‘Thor’s hammer.’

  I rolled over to go to sleep. ‘Then stay away from apple pie.’

  By the next morning Magnus was cheerful again, as if our conversation had been a weird, bad dream. He made no mention of poor Signe, chattering instead about the open brownness of our forests that was apparently different from Norwegian woods. He was a madman who couldn’t remember his own fantasies. But just as we saddled our horses he called out, ‘Here!’ and impishly threw me something.

  I looked. It was an apple, kept over from the harvest before and bought in Washington’s market.

  ‘Encouragement.’ His grin was wry.

  ‘Then I’m taking a bite.’ It was still firm enough to crunch, and I chewed. ‘I don’t feel any wiser.’

  ‘We just haven’t found the right tree yet.’

  So off we rode. When I finished I threw the core into the spring woods, from where it might sprout.

  When it rained we took shelter in crude public inns, the lodging invariably close, smoky, pungent, and loud. Men spat, swore, farted, and grumbled as they shared beds for warmth. Come dawn, all of us picked bugs off each other like monkeys and then paid exorbitant prices for a breakfast of salt pork, corn mush, and watered whiskey, the standard diet of frontier America. I didn’t find a clean cup or a pretty hostess between Georgetown and Pittsburgh.

  Out of moody boredom, Magnus got in the habit of splitting hostel firewood with his heavy-bladed axe, earning us enough each time to buy a sixpence loaf of bread. I sometimes kept him company, watching the ripple of his great muscles with the same wary awe one watches a bull, calling out advice he usually ignored. I’d help stack the result, but declined to do the chopping.

  ‘For the hero of Acre and Marengo, you seem to have an aversion to a fighting man’s exercise,’ he’d finally tease good-naturedly.

  ‘And for a man expecting to control the world, you seem all too willing to do a peasant’s work for pennies. Hedging your bets, Magnus?’

  After nine days of hard travel it was a relief to come down out of the steep, cold mountains, the country taking on a fuzz of spring green. Pittsburgh was a triangular city of three hundred houses and fifteen hundred souls, its apex pointing down the Ohio formed by the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela. The old British fort at the point was long gone, its brick pillaged for new construction and its earthen ramparts washed out by floods. The rest of the town was thriving under a pall of coal smoke, bustling with boatyards, lumber mills, and factories for rope, nails, glass, and iron. Its smell of hen coops and stables carried a good two miles, and the streets had as many pigs as people. Getting to a riverboat down the Ohio required a steep climb down the city’s bluffs and across boards laid on the mudflats to deep water.

  A flatboat took us and our horses down the Ohio twenty miles to a landing at the Great Trail, now a crude road running north. What used to be dangerous Indian country just a decade before had become, thanks to the victory at Fallen Timbers, an immigrant highway. War, disease, and the collapse of the game population had reduced tribes like the Delaware and Wyandot to pen
ury, and the dirty, emaciated survivors we saw bore little resemblance to the proud warriors I recalled from my trapping days. Were the Indians already finished, as doomed as the mastodon?

  Magnus studied them with interest. ‘The descendants of Israel,’ he murmured.

  ‘I’ve been to Palestine, and I hardly think so.’

  ‘The lost tribes, Jefferson speculated.’

  ‘Magnus, they’re a dying race. Look at them! I’m sorry, but it’s true.’

  ‘If it’s true, then we’re about to lose more than we ever dreamt. These people know things we’ve forgotten, Ethan.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘The past. How to truly live. And how the world is alive with things we cannot see. Scholars say they know the spirit world. Thor could have walked with their manitou: perhaps they were similar spiritual beings! Franklin was inspired by the Iroquois government to help craft your Constitution. Johnson complimented their oratory.’

  ‘And yet at our last inn they were described as thieving, drunken, lazy scalp hunters. Pioneers hate Indians, Magnus. That whiskey trader had a tobacco pouch made from a warrior’s scrotum. Our word for their women, ‘squaw,’ means cunt. Europeans have been fighting them for three hundred years.’

  ‘Fear has made us blind, but that doesn’t mean the Indian can’t see.’

  New settler trails branched off in all directions, forests were being toppled, and so many plumes of smoke rose that the entire Ohio Territory seemed a steaming stew. The meanest European peasant could come, girdle trees, plant his corn in the spaces between, set loose his pigs, and call himself a farmer. Their cabins were no bigger than a French bedroom, their yards mud, their children feral, and their wives so hard-used that their beauty was shot by twenty. But a man was free! He had land, black and loamy. Ohio seemed to be writhing with transformation as we rode, its skin twitching with change. I wondered if Jefferson’s prediction that this west would take a thousand years to fill had been too pessimistic. There were already fifty thousand people in the territory, and when we stopped at a tavern or bought a night in a farmer’s barn, all the talk was of statehood.

  ‘This dirt makes New England look like a rock pile!’

  While the Ohio Territory was pockmarked with new clearings, it retained vast tracts of virgin forest where the world remained primeval. Oak, beech, hickory, chestnut, and elm, budding now with spring green, reared up to one hundred and fifty feet in height. Tree trunks were so thick that Magnus and I couldn’t encompass them with linked arms. Limbs were fat enough to dance on, and bark so wrinkled that you could lose a silver dollar in the corrugations of an oak. The arcing lattice of branches met neighbours like the peak of a cathedral, and above that great flocks of birds would sometimes fly, so thick and endless that they blocked out the sun, their cries a raspy cawing. The trees seemed not just older than us but older than the Indians, older than woolly elephants. They made me think of Jefferson’s baleful spirits.

  ‘You could build a grand house out of a single tree,’ Magnus marvelled.

  ‘I’ve seen families camp in hollow ones while they work on their cabin,’ I agreed. ‘These trees are as old as your Norse explorers, Magnus.’

  ‘From the time of Yggdrasil, perhaps. These are the kinds of trees the gods knew. Maybe that’s why the Templars came here, Ethan. They recognised this land was the old paradise, where men could live with nature.’

  I was less certain. I knew my race, and couldn’t imagine any white men coming to America and not doing what these settlers were doing right now, converting these forest patriarchs to corn. It’s what civilisation does.

  ‘Why do you think the trees here grow so big?’ Magnus asked.

  ‘Electricity, perhaps.’

  ‘Electricity?’

  ‘The French scientist Bertholon constructed what he called an electrovegetoma machine in 1783 to collect lightning’s energy and transfer it to plants in the field, and said it radically enhanced their growth. While we know lightning can damage trees, could electrical storms also make them grow? Perhaps the atmosphere of the Ohio country is different than that of Europe.’

  At last we ferried the Sandusky and, at its outlet to Lake Erie, a clearing finally gave a view.

  ‘It’s not a lake, it’s a sea!’

  ‘Three hundred miles long, and there are bigger ones than this, Magnus. The farther west we go, the bigger everything gets.’

  ‘And you ask why the Norse went that way? Mine were a people fit for big things.’

  He made a point of cupping his hand to drink, confirming this vastness wasn’t salt. We could see the lake bottom to forty feet. As planned, we sold our horses and took passage on a schooner called Gullwing for Detroit, since the land route from here led into the nearly impassable Black Swamp that divided the Northwest Territory from Ohio. We sailed across Lake Erie, breasted the current of the Detroit River, and came at last to the famed fort. There I found us an easier way west – by flirting with a woman.

  I have a knack for agreeable company.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Detroit was one hundred years old when I arrived, but had been under the American flag for only the past five. What had first been a French post and then a British one – finally surrendered under the terms that ended the American Revolution almost two decades before – now sat atop a twenty-foot-high bluff along the short, broad Detroit River connecting Lakes Erie and Saint Clair. The establishment consisted of approximately a thousand people and three hundred houses behind a twelve-foot log stockade. Canada was on the opposite shore, the Union Jack flapping there as a reminder of former rule.

  Despite the political division, trade across the river was ample. Detroit’s economy was governed by furs and farming, with Norman-style French farmsteads spread up and down the American and Canadian sides for twenty miles.

  ‘It’s a mongrel town,’ described Jack Woodcock, our schooner’s skipper. ‘You’ve got the Frenchies, who have been there nearly as long as the Indians and do all the real work. The Scots, who run the fur trade. The American garrison, made up mostly of frontier misfits who can’t find a job anywhere else. Then there’s the Christian Indians, the tribes who come to trade, the black servants and freemen, and across the river the British waiting to take it all back again.’

  ‘Surely there’s new pride in being a part of the United States.’

  ‘The French like us even less than the British. They’re hiving for Saint Louis. Town’s lost half its population.’

  The land and waterscape was flat, the sky vast, and the April sun bright. The most curious sight was the scattering of windmills, their arms turning lazily against the scudding white clouds of spring.

  ‘The land’s such a pancake there ain’t no rapids for water power,’ our captain explained. ‘We’s like a bunch of damn Dutchmen.’

  Near the walls were clusters of domed bark wigwams and crude lean-tos used by the deposed Indians who clung near the post. Our craft tied to a long wooden dock at the base of the bluff, gulls wheeling and crows hopping in hunt of spilt corn or grain. Sloops, canoes, flatboats, and barges were tied along the pier’s length, and the boards rang and rumbled from stomping boots and rolling kegs. The language was a babble of English, French, and Algonquin.

  ‘We’re not even halfway to the symbol of the hammer,’ Magnus said with wonder, consulting the charts he’d bought in New York City.

  ‘If we can continue by water it will be faster and easier,’ I said. ‘We’ll show Jefferson’s letter of support to the commander here and ask for military transport to Grand Portage. We have, after all, the backing of the American government.’

  There was a dirt ramp leading from the dock to the stockade gate, split logs bridging puddles. A steady stream of inhabitants moved up and down like a train of ants, not just transporting goods to and from ships and canoes but dipping water. The wells had been spoilt by the town’s privies, said Woodcock.

  Three-quarters of the inhabitants looked to be either French or Indian. The fo
rmer had long dark hair and skin burnt almost as brown as the tribes. They wore shirts, sashes, and buckskin leggings, with scarves at their neck, and they were crowned with headbands or bright caps of scarlet. Clad in moccasins, they had a jaunty gaiety that reminded me, however remotely, of Paris. The Indians, in contrast, stood or sat wrapped in blankets and watched the frantic industry of the whites with passive, resigned curiosity. They were refugees in their own country.

  ‘The drunk and diseased fetch up here,’ the captain said. ‘Be careful of the squaw pox.’

  ‘Not much of a temptation,’ I said, eying the squat and squalid ones.

  ‘Wait till you been out here for six months.’

  Inside the stockade was crowded with whitewashed log houses and dominated at its centre by a large stone catholic church. ‘Headquarters is that way,’ Woodcock said, pointing. ‘Me, I’m stoppin’ at the tavern.’ He disappeared into a cabin rather more populated than the others.

  The western headquarters of the United States Army, governing three hundred unruly soldiers, was a sturdy command building of squared logs and multipaned windows of wavy glass, its official purpose marked by a flagstaff with stars and stripes. There was no guard, so we walked unannounced into a small anteroom, where a grizzled sergeant sat hunched over a ledger book. We inquired about Samuel Stone, the man Lewis had told us was the commanding officer.

  ‘The colonel’s out at the graveyard again,’ said the sergeant, mumbling through a bristle of grey whisker while he held a quill pen like a dart, as if uncertain where to point it. He had none of Meriwether Lewis’s military bearing and squinted at a ledger sheet as if looking at the alphabet for the first time. Finally he scratched through a name.