The Dakota Cipher

by William Dietrich

  But then the animal bellowed even louder, rearing up on its hind legs.

  Namida had snatched up Magnus’s axe and buried it in the grizzly bear’s back.

  The animal snarled, twisting to get at this instrument of torture, muscles rippling, claws flailing at what it couldn’t reach. Blood geysered.

  Little Frog was throwing rocks at the animal, sobbing.

  The bear dropped to all fours, shuffling to turn to these new tormentors, my own cringing form momentarily forgotten. Somehow I found fibre enough to begin crawling towards my rifle, wondering how I’d load it in time.

  Then Magnus charged back up the slope with a Viking wail, holding something huge and heavy over his head. He grunted, heaved, and with all his might brought a stone tablet down on the animal’s head. There was an audible crack of skull bone and the grizzly actually went down with a whoof, grunting, dazed by a blow that would have completely dashed the brains of any normal animal. I reached for my rifle and rolled upright, pulling out the ramrod to load it.

  Then Namida darted in like a squirrel, jerked out the axe, and threw it to Magnus. He caught the weapon with a shout, his face aflame from fury and exertion, heaved, aimed, and swung. It was as clean and beautiful a stroke as I ever saw, a full foot of broad steel sinking into the bear’s back and severing its spine. The creature’s massive legs went slack, as if cables had been cut, and it collapsed on its belly, looking at me with bewilderment and regret.

  I kept loading just to be sure, my arms shaking. A last growl rumbled in the beast’s throat and the fire in its eyes finally died. The stone tablet lay heavily on the bear’s skull and Bloodhammer’s axe jutted from its fur.

  ‘By the horns of the Minotaur,’ I wheezed. ‘Why weren’t you eviscerated in the cave?’

  ‘I’d grasped the tablet before it woke and blocked its initial swipe. Then it broke loose from something and knocked me back through the entrance. It had the strength of ten men, Ethan. It had the spirit of Thor!’

  ‘And Thor almost had us for dinner. That damned tablet of yours saved our lives.’ The slab lay on the bear’s skull like a gravestone. ‘Let’s have a look at what we found.’

  Magnus dragged the tablet off and flipped it over.

  ‘It’s the magic signs!’ Namida said. I made a mental note to give the girl the claws for a necklace. It’s always wise to make the best of bad situations, Ben used to tell me, and women love jewellery.

  Magnus meanwhile traced incised lines with his fingers, muttering, and then looked at me in triumph. ‘Norse runes!’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Using my rifle as a measuring stick, I estimated the tablet was thirty-one inches long, sixteen inches wide, and half a foot thick. It weighed at least two hundred pounds. No wonder it slowed the bear! Half of one side was smooth and covered in odd-looking letters of a type I’d never seen before: different from our own alphabet, Egyptian hieroglyphics, or the alien writing of the Book of Thoth. The script was crudely chiselled and not very deep. Had I encountered the artefact in a cow pasture I’d likely have passed by without noticing it.

  ‘What do you mean by Norse ruins?’ I asked.

  ‘Runes,’ Magnus explained, spelling it. ‘Norse lettering from the Viking and medieval days. This is what we call a rune stone. The Vikings and others carved these to commemorate an event, boast of deeds, enumerate marriages and offspring, declare a faith, or record a voyage or passage. There are thousands of them in Scandinavia. If these Indians have one, it proves my people were here.’ He glanced around grandly. ‘All this belongs to Norway!’

  I glanced at the dead bear. ‘You can have it. And this tells us where to go?’

  ‘Perhaps, if the men with Thor’s hammer carved it. Let me translate.’

  The women were already sawing into the bear, choosing to interpret our near-devouring as the opportunity for a windfall feast. Indians are the most sensibly practical people I know.

  ‘Don’t forget to keep the claws,’ I called to Namida. ‘They’ll lend a savage charm.’

  ‘Look, there’s more writing on the side of the stone,’ Magnus said.

  ‘Pretty long-winded if you have to chisel, weren’t they?’

  ‘It wouldn’t take that long for a skilled rune mason, and some people want their words to last.’ He was scratching translations in the dirt. Finally Magnus began to recite. ‘“Eight Gotlanders and twenty-two Norwegians on a journey of acquisition from Vinland, very far west,”’ he read. He paused. ‘Vinland is a land they found on the east coast of Canada, so the writer must mean they’ve come very far west from that.’

  ‘As have we. Read on.’

  ‘“We had camp by two rocky islands one day’s journey north from this stone. We were out fishing one day. After we came home we found ten men red with blood and death. AVM save from evil.”’

  ‘The AVM is in Latin letters,’ I noted.

  ‘Ave Maria, I’d guess. Hail Mary. Remember, these were Christians, at least in part. Catholics, in those days. The old runes were giving way to the new letters.’

  ‘Well, there’re no rocky islands on this prairie. This stone was obviously moved from its original resting place. Captured from the Dakota, Namida said, who in turn got it from who knows who.’

  ‘They probably mean an island in a lake,’ Magnus agreed, ‘but that could be in any number of directions. Here’s what the side of the stone says: “Have ten men by the sea to look after our ships fourteen days’ journey from this island. Year 1362.”’

  ‘Year 1362? Isn’t that the time your Templar map dates from?’

  ‘Now do you believe me, Ethan?’

  It’s one thing to go charging off after treasure, but another entirely to think you might really have a chance of finding it. I was growing excited. ‘But why?’

  ‘I told you,’ he said patiently. ‘Thor’s hammer. Dwarven mastery of the forging arts in the lost Golden Age.’

  ‘Dwarven what?’

  ‘The dwarves Eitri and Brokk forged the hammer of Thor in the furnaces of their caverns, its only flaw a short handle caused when Loki, disguised as a fly, stung the eyelids of Brokk.’

  I was sorry I asked. ‘So how do we find it?’

  He sat down heavily, tired from his fight with the bear. ‘I don’t know. If the stone has been moved, fourteen days from the sea means little.’

  ‘It’s worse than that. It’s taken us months to get here. Fourteen days from the sea means a place a thousand miles back east or north, doesn’t it? We’re nowhere near your hammer if this was carved by the same Norsemen.’

  ‘Or Eden.’

  He suddenly looked so crushed that I felt sorry for him, and worse for me. A moment ago I’d soaring hope of Viking loot. Now it was dashed! ‘We tried, Magnus.’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘The Somersets, if they’re really alive, are on a wild goose chase, too.’

  He was staring sadly at his rune stone.

  ‘So.’ Here we were in unmapped wilderness, next to a dead bear and a plague-wracked village, possibly pursued by any number of red savages and a vengeful pair of English perverts, more than a thousand miles from any civilised comfort, and with little in the way of food, clothing, weapons, powder, or sense of direction. Our only allies were two Indian women greedily roasting bear liver and paying not a whit of attention to keeping watch. Our sole clue weighed two hundred pounds.

  In other words, it was the usual hash I made of things, in the usual dubious company. I walked down to wash in the river, wishing this particular group of Indians had adopted the horse so that I could gallop the devil out of here. The Mandan were sedentary farmers, alas. I wished I’d seen a volcano or mountain of salt, or something to bring back to anxious Tom Jefferson.

  And then Magnus shouted.

  I came running with my rifle, but he was pointing at the stone. ‘I have it, I have it, I have it!’ he cried, and danced a cloggish shambles that I guess in Norway passes for a jig. Well, nobody ever attributed ballet to the Vi
kings.

  ‘By Jupiter, have what?’

  ‘It’s a code, Ethan, a cipher, like you said!’ He began pointing at random numbers. ‘Some of these letters have odd extra markings, like dots and slashes. I didn’t understand why at first. But if you take the first seven letters so marked, do you know what they spell?’

  ‘Magnus, I can’t read runes at all.’

  ‘Gral thar!’ It was a cry jubilant enough to topple a tower. If Red Jacket was within a league, he could hardly miss us.

  ‘Don’t shout!’ I glanced warily at the bluffs. ‘Is that good?’

  ‘It means ‘grail.’ And the next are Cistercian symbols for wisdom and holy spirit. It means, ‘Their grail, wisdom, and holy spirit.’’

  Now I felt a shiver. I’d heard the word ‘grail’ before, too, in Egypt and the Holy Land, and like Saint Bernard it kept echoing through my life. Here it was on a rock in the middle of Dakota country? The longer I lived, the odder life seemed to be, signs and portents constantly butting into what had been a comfortably dull, pleasingly pointless existence. ‘But what does that mean?’

  ‘That these men planted, or found, the grail that was their holy mission. And if the map I brought from Gotland is true, that grail is the hammer, brought here to where rivers go north, south, east, and west.’

  I looked at the brown, eroding bluffs. ‘Magnus, we’re not in Eden.’

  ‘Not here, but where this rune stone came from. Where they deposited the hammer, and probably tried to found a colony. But demons already infested this country, foes that left ten men red with blood and death. Or disease, like we encountered in the village. It was an Eden that could be violated. An Eden that had the snake.’

  ‘Magnus, you’re reading an awful lot into a rather cryptic tablet.’

  ‘When they say the sea they don’t mean the ocean,’ my companion insisted. ‘No tribe of Indians is going to carry this heavy sledge of rock that far, and it doesn’t correspond to the hammer symbol on my map. No, our quest is nearby, fourteen days from two ‘seas’ close to where we already are.’

  ‘What seas?’ The man had gone barmy.

  ‘Lake Superior, for one. Namida!’ he called to the women tending the fire. ‘What is two weeks’ journey west from Lake Superior where we were captured?’

  She shrugged. ‘It depends on the route and the canoe. Somewhere east.’ She pointed back the way we’d come.

  ‘Aye.’ His eyes gleamed as he stared at me. ‘And two weeks south of Lake Winnipeg, the huge lake to the north that the Red River runs into. That too is east of where we sit. We had to come this far west to get the tablet, Ethan, but my bet is that it was discovered back in that wood-and-prairie country dotted with lakes, that blank spot with Thor’s hammer on my medieval map. Draw a line two weeks’ journey west from Superior or south from Winnipeg and you come to where the map showed the hammer – and that’s where we’ll find it!’

  ‘The grail?’

  ‘A grail, one of the Templar treasures: the hammer.’ He nodded. ‘There’ll be a sign to guide us, because we’re destined to find Thor’s weapon the same way we were destined to find this slab. Why else would we have so much success?’

  ‘Success?’ Ever the optimist, wasn’t he? At least he wanted to head back east.

  ‘When Pierre disappeared I began to fear the gods had abandoned us. But here they are leading us as surely as the pillar of fire led Moses.’

  ‘Magnus, I don’t think either one of us qualifies as Moses. Nor do I think he had to contend with ravenous bears.’

  ‘That was just a test. The task now is to look for our own pillar of fire, Ethan. Somewhere there’s a sign that points to Thor’s hammer.’

  Magnus insisted we take the stone slab with us.

  ‘It weighs more than Little Frog!’

  ‘There may be more secrets in its message. Didn’t you find and decipher an ancient book from clues chiselled on an old stone tablet? You of all people should recognise the value of this.’

  He meant the Book of Thoth I’d decoded with the stone from Rosetta, but my only true innovation had been to blow the relevant portion up. It seemed necessary at the time.

  ‘I didn’t drag the stone with me,’ I pointed out. ‘I copied it onto the naked back of my lover.’ I eyed Namida speculatively, wondering how her skin would look painted with runes. That entire episode with Astiza had been somewhat erotic.

  ‘Well, this is rock-solid evidence that my people were here before the Spanish, French, or British, and we’re not copying anything. We’re going to show this to the world, once we have the hammer it points to. We’ll be as important as Columbus. Norway will claim North America and take its place as one of the world’s great powers.’

  I doubted that. People hate it when you challenge their preconceptions, and don’t reward you for doing so. If you seek success, tell people what they already believe. Revolutionaries get crucified, or worse.

  ‘Magnus, we can’t carry this door stoop a thousand miles.’

  ‘We’re going to tow it,’ he said briskly, now all business. ‘This river looks to flow east and south, exactly the direction we need to go. There was a dugout cottonwood canoe back at the village, big enough for the four of us, and we can make a raft to tow the stone. We’ll find the hammer, go down the Mississippi, and unveil this in Oslo!’

  ‘Can’t we aim for someplace warmer, like Paris or Naples?’

  But Magnus was already issuing directions. Little Frog began skinning the bear, Namida set off to cut willow swathes, and Magnus began unwinding the leather tether that had held the bear. ‘You go fetch the canoe,’ he told me.

  I found the craft he’d spied, the dead settlement above more mournful than ever. It occurred to me that the timing of this plague was awfully coincidental with our mission, and that the Somersets would guess we might make for Namida’s home village. Had they somehow sent an infectious agent up the Missouri to where these Indians were apt to contract it through trade, to prevent us from seeking help? Were we inadvertently responsible for this holocaust?

  Again I scanned the surrounding ridges with a feeling that we were being watched, but they were empty as a pub in Mecca. I paddled the canoe back down.

  The filthy bearskin had been scraped of gore and bent over a circular frame of lashed willow branches. The result was a smelly saucer four feet across, like a very concave shield, its seams waterproofed with bear grease.

  ‘That’s like the coracle I paddled from the fireworks island at Mortefontaine!’

  ‘Aye,’ said Magnus. ‘It’s a Welsh craft, as crude a boat as was ever launched, and yet quick to make and plain to paddle. Curious, isn’t it, how these native women know a style in use thousands of miles away?’

  ‘You think the Welsh brought this idea with them?’

  ‘I know we’re not the first white men here. We’ve found our distant ancestors, Ethan Gage, and somewhere out there is the place they came for.’

  ‘Your so-called Eden.’

  ‘Navel of the world, sacred centre, core. Paradise to some, purgatory to others. It takes the form its seeker expects.’

  ‘As elusive as the end of the rainbow.’

  ‘Where gold awaits.’ He winked his one good eye and just for a moment I did see him as restless Odin, wandering the world for wisdom and adventure.

  The coracle bobbed like a bubble until the weight of the rune stone steadied it, and then it floated like a frigate. Magnus used the remains of the tether for a towline and we cast off from the sad village, leaving the great bear in a butchered heap and the cottonwoods whispering in the prairie wind. The current carried us southeast.

  I allowed myself a glimmer of hope.

  We followed the river – Namida said some of the trappers called it the Sheyenne – as it curved and curled through low bottomlands that were a mix of timber, flood-washed islands, and marshy meadow. The enclosing ridges were bare grass. I feared Red Jacket, but the world had emptied. Our journey seemed less and less real to me, as if w
e were indeed drifting into mythic time, our valley roofed by deep blue sky and the turning leaves fluttering down to float on the water like the rose petals of Mortefontaine. Great arrows of geese winged overhead, heading south with a honking bray. I’d no idea what day or month it was anymore, and indeed felt unmoored from any century. The Orient at least had dusty ruins but here the world was newborn, without calendar or clock.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  It was the third morning, not long after dawn, that we encountered our most serious obstacle yet, a living river perpendicular to our own. The buffalo were migrating.

  A great herd was moving south, black and shaggy against the plains, and their course took them across our river ahead like a wall of horns and humps. The majestic animals were backlit by the climbing sun, a shambling tide that seemed as powerful and inexorable as the lunar one. We drifted, wondering how to get around.

  ‘It will take them days to cross,’ Namida said. ‘More buffalo than stars.’

  ‘If we flip in the middle they’ll trample us under,’ I said.

  ‘We don’t have days,’ Magnus put in.

  And as if to accelerate our thinking, an arrow arced out from the brush on the river’s northern bank and thunked into the wood of our canoe, quivering.

  Ambush!

  It was a neat trap. Our enemies had trailed us by horseback, waited until we had the rune stone, scouted ahead to spot the vast buffalo herd, and set up a riverside assault where we’d have to stop. Smart – which meant we had to be smarter.

  So when an Indian rose from some reeds with bow in hand, arrogant as a duke of Spain, I lifted my rifle, shot him, and pounded Magnus on the back.

  ‘Paddle!’ I cried. ‘Towards the bison!’