The Dakota Cipher

by William Dietrich

  A great cry went up and our pursuers slowed and stopped, demoralised by the dispatch of their leader. They drifted where he’d fallen, hands reaching down to seize him. And then there was a shriek, a female wail of grief that echoed across the water like the midnight cry of a flying witch, an awful keening that carried under it the breath of undying hatred.

  Aurora wasn’t dead.

  And if I’d killed her brother she would, I guessed, cling as remorsefully as a shadow until she killed me. Or I, her. We were bound now, joined with permanence far deeper than mere lust. Married by hatred.

  I put down my rifle, picked up a paddle, and stroked as if my life depended on it. Because it did.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The rest of the day was an exhausting blur. We were stunned and sore from the capture, gauntlet, escape, and chase. We’d gone from the promise of hell to the miracle of Pierre’s timely rescue in an instant, and it was as if we’d all been shocked by one of my electrical experiments. A lightning bolt would not have been more surprising.

  ‘How did you know to follow us?’ I panted.

  ‘I saw the Somersets running through camp in the deepest night, half-clothed and anxious, and became curious,’ the voyageur said. ‘They’re a couple always on stage, conscious of the impression they make, and yet here they dropped their illusion. Something momentous was occurring. I watched them march you to their canoes. There was no time to fetch help, so I followed alone in the biggest canoe I could manage.’

  ‘By the tonsure of Saint Bernard, good thing you did!’

  ‘It was the women who saved you. Namida saw me and started the argument on your fate, distracting the Indians. It gave me time to intervene. Give thanks to matrimony, my friend!’

  I glanced back to Namida, steadily paddling, her face streaked with dirt and the track of tears I hadn’t noticed before. But she smiled shyly.

  ‘Gage talked like a woman, too,’ Bloodhammer tattled. ‘Told them everything he could.’

  ‘I was buying Pierre time.’ Not the full truth, but I’d been expecting to have my eye sliced and yet here I was, bruised but not even bloodied. I’d have life figured out if it didn’t keep surprising me.

  ‘Yes, he manoeuvred that one Indian right into my sights.’ Pierre winked at me.

  Magnus scowled. ‘But now they know what we’re after!’

  ‘So we just have to get it first,’ I said blithely.

  ‘Bah. Try to lie next time.’

  ‘I am a paragon of candour.’

  ‘It helped that I had the wit to bring that extra keg of powder,’ Pierre went on, ‘but now it’s gone and all we have left is what’s in our horns. Two muskets, one rifle, and Magnus with his axe.’

  ‘I’m not sure he needs more.’ I said. The tool was crusted with blood. ‘Magnus, you belong in the eighth century.’

  ‘We just came from there,’ he replied.

  I looked behind us. ‘A single shot seems to have ended pursuit for now.’

  ‘They’re simply confident of eventually tracking us,’ Pierre said. ‘They have your map. When are you going to use your sorcery to save us?’

  ‘Pierre, if I truly had sorcery, wouldn’t I have used it by now? I’m a scholar, not a magician. I need equipment we don’t have to do anything at all with electricity, and I no longer have the secret book I once found.’

  ‘So you cannot properly sing, you cannot properly paddle, and you can do no real sorcery? Mon dieu, I did inherit a donkey.’

  ‘I can shoot. That seems to have served well enough.’

  ‘Oui, it was a good shot – maybe the first truly good thing you’ve done. But it will not stop them. They need to regroup, but will count on you to lead them to the treasure. One key will be whether the Somersets are alive or dead. Red Jacket, I think, was only wounded, which is bad. He will not rest until he has revenge.’

  ‘If he’d let us be, none of this would have happened.’

  ‘That’s not how he will see things.’

  ‘And who said anything to you about treasure?’

  ‘Do you think voyageurs fools? You two are not priests or company men, and you haven’t taken a note of your surroundings since we met you. You made no surveys, no maps, and asked no questions about routes or trails. Explorers gather information, but you hid it. The only explanation is treasure.’

  ‘Well, you just earned a share.’

  He grinned. ‘Is it Indian gold, as in Mexico and Peru?’

  ‘No, not gold.’

  ‘Emeralds then, as in the jungles of South America?’

  ‘No jungles or jewels here.’

  ‘What then? What are we all risking our lives for?’ He was cheerful as a birthday.

  ‘A hammer.’

  ‘A what?’ His paddle stopped.

  ‘A hammer of the gods with special powers. Right, Magnus?’

  ‘Aye, and the damned Somersets now know of it too. And there’s more than that, little man. I’m going to take you to the navel of the world.’

  ‘You mean its centre?’

  ‘Better than that. The Garden of Eden.’

  ‘The Garden of Eden? But we’ve been banished, no?’

  ‘Not the same Garden as in the Bible, necessarily, but a place of holiness or spiritual power. Or maybe exactly the same, since we don’t know where the biblical Garden was.’

  ‘You think you’ll find paradise in this wilderness? After that village?’

  ‘I think my Norse ancestors did.’ He patted the now-empty map case, which he stubbornly still carried. ‘And when we come to where they did, then all will be saved. The treasure isn’t jewels, little man. It’s life itself.’

  ‘But we already have that. Don’t we?’

  Magnus smiled grimly and dug in his paddle.

  * * *

  The Garden of Eden’s neighbourhood, I discovered, seemed to have more than its share of mosquitoes and blackflies, ready to take communion on our cuts and scrapes. We raced down the shore of Lake Superior, and at its southwestern end entered the marshy estuary of a river that Pierre identified as the Saint Louis, hundreds of miles north of the city of the same name. As dusk fell insects drew more blood than a platoon of doctors, but we dared not stop, despite our exhaustion. We paddled well into the evening, stomachs growling, until the river began to narrow and the current strengthened. ‘It’s time to hide,’ Pierre said.

  We detoured into a tiny slough, temporarily sank our canoe out of sight by weighting it with stones, and nested in the reeds of a muddy island like ducks. We had no food beyond a few bites of pemmican that Pierre had brought – awful stuff, unless you’re starving – and dared not light a fire. But we were so depleted that the cool, muddy ground seemed like a feather bed. I fell headlong into exhausted sleep, fleeing in my dreams from nameless terrors.

  Pierre awakened me in the middle of the night, fog on the river and frogs croaking from the marshes. ‘Now,’ he whispered. ‘They’re coming.’

  Cautiously I lifted my head. A flickering light hovered in the mist, gliding towards our hiding place. A torch! I shrank to hug the mud. A canoe was paddling slowly by, an Indian at the bow holding the light and one behind him kneeling with a long, light lance. Occasionally he’d thrust it into the reeds. I recognised the sleeves of Red Jacket, one hanging empty over his wounded arm. The naked, powerful shoulders of other braves gleamed with bear grease as they inserted paddles into the water as precisely as surgeons, the canoe silent in its passage. Heads swivelled, looking for some sign of us.

  I eased back farther into the reeds, but as I moved an animal started in response – a mink, perhaps – and with a plop went into the river.

  Red Jacket stiffened, and I could see his silhouette twist back to look. It was as if he was sniffing the very air for my presence. The paddling stopped for a moment, the canoe gauzy through the fog, its occupants peering. I shut my eyes lest they somehow reflect light. I could hear the cautionary cock of a musket hammer. Pierre had stopped breathing.

  Ther
e was a long silence. Finally the chief grunted, turned away, and the stroke began again. The canoe disappeared into the fog, but as it did another came, and another. It seemed an eternity before five of them had passed, manned by thirty warriors. If one of them had spied us, we had no chance – but they didn’t.

  I groaned, feeling as far from help as I’d ever felt in my life. Hostile Indians behind, now more Indians ahead, and somewhere beyond them the fearsome Ojibway gave way to the even more fearsome Dakota, called Sioux by the Ojibway, meaning ‘snakes in the grass.’ Like the snake cult of Apophis! I saw little chance of getting back to Grand Portage before Rendezvous ended, and wouldn’t trust the British if I did. Any lie the Somersets told would be believed, and for all I knew the Scot McTavish had authorised my kidnapping. How better to get rid of an American-French interloper? I felt like a fly at a convention of spiders. If only I hadn’t lusted after Pauline Bonaparte! And Aurora. And Namida.

  I’d be safer if I was senile.

  ‘We’re trapped!’ I said to Pierre. ‘Now they’re ahead of us too!’

  ‘And you think this is bad news? You’d rather we’d invited them to breakfast? Now it will be us following them, instead of the opposite. When they turn about we hide and let them pass again, and with luck Red Jacket will tire of the game and go home.’

  ‘Luck.’ Bittersweet word for a gambler. ‘This is your plan?’

  ‘There may be Indians ahead who won’t welcome Red Jacket’s band. He draws renegades and miscreants because the Ojibway think him Dakota, the Dakota think him Ojibway, and he hires out to any side like a whore, only taking his own counsel. All we can do is hope for time and circumstance to eventually lose him in the country west of here, while not losing our scalps in the process. We need something more before we face him – more allies or a terrible weapon.’

  ‘Magnus thinks he’s going to find that weapon.’

  ‘Yes, and paradise, too. Let’s hope that your giant is more than simply crazy.’

  It would help our spirits to eat. I found an alder sapling, cut a lance, and as the morning lightened spied a lazy sturgeon in the shallows and speared the monster through its scale armour, feeling tension release as I rammed it home. We gulped flesh raw like savages.

  It was ambrosia.

  We told the others about Red Jacket, and Namida broke in with French.

  ‘But my people are this way.’ She pointed upriver, west, the way Red Jacket had gone. Somewhere far to the west were her Awaxawi-Mandan cousins.

  ‘The Ojibway have been driving the Dakota out of this country with their trade muskets, and keeping the Fox and Sac pinned to the south,’ Pierre explained, drawing what he knew in the river sand. ‘All the territories are in turmoil since the beaver trade began and trade muskets sold. The Mandan are somewhere beyond, amid the Dakota, and the Dakota are the most dangerous of all. You may be looking for paradise, but you are pointed towards hell. So why that way?’

  ‘Magnus had a map he thinks drawn by Norse ancestors who preceded us.’

  ‘Vikings? In the middle of North America?’

  ‘Templars.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘A medieval order of knights interested in religious artefacts.’

  ‘Hmph.’ The voyageur looked at Magnus. ‘We are a long way from the Bible lands, my friend. Why do you think Eden is out here?’

  ‘When the first couple walked the earth it was empty, with no Bible lands or anything else,’ Magnus said. ‘Eden could be anywhere. But scripture says it is the source of four great rivers, and according to my map great rivers run from a spot marked with Thor’s hammer. If the Knights Templar found some ancient reference to this geography, it would explain why they came so far to escape persecution in Gotland.’

  ‘The land of our dead is in the west,’ put in Namida, who was following our conversation in French. ‘The spirits go where the sun sets.’

  ‘There. You see?’ said Magnus.

  ‘So now you’re looking for heaven, too?’ said Pierre. ‘If it exists, would it not draw every Indian like a magnet?’

  ‘Maybe there’s something forbidding about the place as well. Or hidden.’

  ‘Ah. Wonderful.’

  ‘No Indian would want to go to a white man’s heaven,’ Namida added. ‘That would be hell, not paradise.’

  ‘Here’s what I think,’ Pierre said to Magnus. ‘Eden is where you find it, giant. Paradise is all around.’ He gestured with his arm to the river and marshes, soft grey in the morning. ‘But we’re blind to it, as blind as a man in a pitch black room filled with jewels he can’t see. It’s the white man’s curse. The Spanish tramped for El Dorado, when they could have found it back in Segovia, at a friendly table by a warm hearth and a plump wife. The Indians sense paradise better than we do because they see in ways we’ve forgotten. They know that every rock and tree and lake is animated with the unseen world. They talk to them on their spirit quests. Trees give gifts. Rocks bow in greeting. Animals speak. But we white men blunder about, trapping furs, chopping trees, and claiming to look for heaven when we’re in its midst.’

  ‘Those Indians didn’t seem like an angelic host to me,’ I said.

  ‘But these women here are angels, no? This is my point. Good and evil are in every man, in constant war, and not in some far-off place you can paddle to. Do you want Eden, Magnus? Find it on this mud island.’

  The Norwegian doggedly shook his head. ‘You can’t convince me our raw breakfast is the stuff of paradise, Pierre. And it’s our very blindness that requires that we white men journey. We’re more distant from the golden past, and our penance is to walk farther. I think my map shows a real place, a spiritual El Dorado that my ancestors crossed an ocean to seek out.’

  ‘And there you’ll find hammers and weapons and life everlasting?’

  Everlasting life, the recurring dream, even though the life we had seemed damned difficult to me! The French had spoken of it on the way to Egypt. The Templars had no doubt made it part of their quest. Alessandro Silano had found the edge of it and been stretched, distorted, by what he found. And for each, longevity had receded like the end of a rainbow.

  I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to find the thread between man and heaven, but it was too late now. We had nowhere else to go.

  The voyageur shook his head at Magnus and turned to me. ‘And you, Ethan Gage? What is your El Dorado?’

  I thought. ‘People keep telling me there was an earlier, better age and secrets long forgotten. If we knew where we came from, we might know where we’re going.’

  ‘And what use is it to know where we’re going?’

  ‘To decide if we want to get there.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Seeing no sign of the enemy, we set out again, hoping we could follow without stumbling into an ambush. As the river narrowed and its banks grew rockier, we towed our canoe by foot through light rapids. Trees overhung each bank, almost meeting overhead, and side creeks were dammed by beaver. Half this wilderness, in fact, seemed water. I spied a yearling buck but I dared not risk a shot because of the noise. We went on hungry, warily watching.

  It was drawing towards evening when Namida reached from behind and lightly touched me on the shoulder. ‘They’re nearby,’ she whispered.

  I looked around. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Birds flew up. Someone is on the river ahead.’ The women, I had noticed, could see things we couldn’t, hear things we were deaf to.

  I glanced nervously at the trees, worried that birds would announce us.

  ‘We must get off the river,’ Pierre said. ‘There – that tributary! We’ll hide and scout.’ We turned into a creek, a green tunnel in the trees. The woods seemed deathly silent and I tensed for an arrow, but none came. After a quarter mile we came to a beaver dam, its quiet pond beyond. The beaver lodge was a wattle mound of sticks and mud in the pond’s middle.

  We got out to lift our canoe over. ‘Treat the dam like glass, or they’ll see our sign,’ the voya
geur instructed. ‘Do not bend a blade of grass or crack a twig! We must be silent as the wind and light as the butterfly!’

  So of course the structure cracked under Magnus like a flute of champagne. He slipped, cursing, and fell into mud and water. Sticks gave way, water pouring out.

  ‘Yes, just like that, giant,’ the Frenchman said. ‘Let’s light a signal fire, too, just in case they can’t spot this sign.’

  ‘Sorry,’ the Norwegian mumbled.

  ‘Should we go back downstream?’ I asked.

  Little Frog shook her head and spoke to Namida. The woman nodded and turned to us. ‘Go to the edge of the pond and hide, then break the dam and eat the beaver.’

  Pierre brightened. ‘But of course! Out of clumsiness, grace! We’ll use the beaver pond to get farther upstream, then empty it to deter canoes from following. Gage, go with the women and camouflage the canoe. Giant and I will follow after we break the rest of this dam.’

  ‘I thought we had to treat it like glass.’

  ‘That was before I remembered I was hungry.’

  The women and I paddled another mile to a grassy bank where we hoped no pursuit would find us and pulled our craft into a thicket. Then we hunkered down and waited.

  ‘How will we know the Indians missed us?’

  ‘If we are not dead,’ Namida said logically.

  The water began to recede, evidence the dam was being dismantled. Night fell, but we dared not light a fire. Nor did we hear anything but frogs. I slept restlessly, and then at dawn we heard men coming on foot, slogging in the mud of what was now an emptied lake. I readied my rifle.

  It was our companions. Each had a dead beaver in both their hands.

  ‘We broke the dam, drained the swamp and clubbed these beaver as they came out of the lodge,’ Pierre said. ‘It’s good the giant is so clumsy because I’m starving for beaver tail! If we find the driest, most smokeless wood, I think we’re far enough from the river to risk a fire.’

  I escorted Namida and Little Frog into the forest and watched while they turned a wilderness into a green grocer. Where I would have starved, they found leaves for tea, roots for medicine, and cranberries and wild plum to dress our beaver. Little Frog briskly stitched a bark pot with birch and spruce root so we could boil a stew. The tail was a fatty godsend to our depleted bodies, and the beaver’s flesh dark red and fine-textured, tasting like corned beef. We satiated ourselves, Pierre lamenting that we had no easy way to carry and sell the skins.