The Dakota Cipher

by William Dietrich

  ‘We’ll be overturned and drowned!’ Namida warned.

  ‘We’ll be shot and tortured if we stay here! Go!’

  Now there were cries on all sides, warriors rising up from the concealing foliage to whoop and yip. A volley of arrows arced towards us and only the sudden surge as Magnus dug with his paddle kept us from being perforated. Several missiles clattered onto the stone tablet, two more stuck in the stern of our canoe, and the rest hissed into the water. Muskets went off, bullets kicking up spouts around us, and Little Frog gave a cry and clutched her shoulder, losing her paddle.

  She was grazed, the blood bright but not pulsing, so I thrust my own paddle at her. ‘Keep stroking!’ I fired our two muskets and two more Indians yelped and fell. Now we were flying down the shallow river as Magnus and the women thrashed, spray flying, aiming straight for the great herd as if we were anxious for a goring. Our sprint took the Dakotas by surprise and their shots went wild as the range grew. They began running from the river’s brush to the enclosing hills where they’d no doubt tethered their horses. They’d stampede the buffalo onto us.

  ‘Ethan, we can’t paddle through the herd!’ Magnus protested. ‘There must be ten thousand animals just in sight, and a hundred thousand behind them!’

  ‘Pass me your axe!’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Sorcery!’

  I glanced back. Dakota riders, bent low over their ponies, were galloping towards the bison. The animals, already rippling in confusion from the gunshots, represented our gravest danger and greatest hope. I reloaded our guns, threw them down until we needed them most, and gripped Magnus’s axe.

  ‘What’s your plan?’ Namida asked, looking fearfully at the wall of dark fur plunging into the river. Bison skidded down the bank and splashed with great sheets of water, waves rolling away from their bulk. In midriver, hundreds of horns jutted like menacing pickets. Great dark eyes rolled as the beasts saw us coming, hesitating between panic and charge.

  ‘Paddle faster!’

  ‘Ethan?’

  ‘Faster!’

  More shots, the buzz of balls passing like hornets. I shot one gun back, to keep them thinking.

  Then I squinted ahead. We were flying with the current straight at the rising sun, old bulls moving to the edge of the herd to eye us grumpily, horns lowered, hooves pawing, as cows and calves skittered from our approach.

  ‘They’re going to attack us!’

  ‘Keep going!’

  We could hear snorts and smell the rank, rich odour.

  ‘Ethan!’ Namida moaned.

  I raised the axe.

  Magnus had, as I’ve explained, polished it as if it were a piece of antique silver, giving more care to his hatchet than most men give to their horses or wives. It shone like a mirror, and he’d wiped it clean as china after the bear fight.

  Now it caught the sun.

  When it did, it flashed the morning’s rising light into the startled eyes of ten thousand hesitant buffalo. It was a winking flash, as if our canoe had exploded with pulsing light. The animals jerked, bawling, and then bolted. In an instant the entire plain surged into reactive motion, the ground quaking as thousands of tons of flesh and hoof began pounding in both directions away from us, across the grass. In the river, panicked bison were surging away from our midriver course, trying to flee the winking axe blade of light as we swept down on them like Valkyries. The river boiled as buffalo heaved out of it. I kept twitching the axe, catching the rays like a necklace of Marie Antoinette’s. We raced into the buffalo ford, parting the herd.

  I glanced back. Behind us the confused bison, pushed by unknown tens of thousands more in the hills, was wheeling back towards the river. As they did so they stampeded into the pursuing Indians. The Dakota fired to frighten the beasts towards us, but that only added to the milling confusion, some buffalo running one way and others the opposite. Dust pillared in the morning air. A horse screamed and went over, the rider gored.

  Our paddlers meanwhile were artfully threading the river between panicked buffalo trying to swim or wade away from our course. Horns and massive heads slid by, the animals bewildered by our boldness and our odd towed sled with its rune stone. One bull crashed into the shallows to charge us so I threw down the axe, snatched up a musket, and shot. The animal stumbled and crashed, setting off yet another current of stampeding animals. A tendril of blood curled into the water as we swept past.

  Now we had a curtain of panicked buffalo between us and our pursuers, buying us time. Animals were spilling in all directions, sweeping the frustrated Dakota before them. I hoisted the axe again and again, sun flashing, and finally we were through the crossing. Dust from the stampede rose like a wall behind us, screening us from view. We stroked until we couldn’t see the herd anymore, or any pursuit. Finally we drifted to rest, the rune stone still trailing behind like a little dinghy.

  ‘That wasn’t sorcery,’ Magnus panted. ‘That was my axe.’

  ‘The sorcery was what I did with your axe. Magic is nothing but ideas.’

  At length our meandering river met the Red, flowing northward to Lake Winnipeg. Guessing from Magnus’s vague map, we turned south and paddled upstream until we came to a tributary leading east again. Then we went up that, towards Bloodhammer’s best guess of where the Norwegians and Gotlanders might have journeyed. Given that the rivers writhed and twisted like Italian noodles, I was unsure how close we were to anything, let alone a vague symbol on a medieval map we no longer had.

  The creek was slow and swampy, and as we went east the echoing emptiness of the plains was giving way to a more familiar landscape of wood, meadow, and pond. About half the land was forested, and periodically the river widened into a small lake.

  Then we saw our biblical pillar, our gate to Eden.

  At first I thought it was simply a black squall, streaked and sagging against an otherwise blue autumn sky. But as I watched, this squall didn’t move despite the breeze blowing across the prairie. Or rather it did move, we saw as we paddled closer, but in a slow gyre around some central point, like a viscous, heavy whirlpool. Its rotation reminded me of those eerie funnel-shaped clouds we’d fled towards on the plains, because this too was dark and hinted of power. But this cylinder of clouds was far wider, a lazily revolving curtain that hid whatever was behind it. Occasionally, lightning flickered and thunder tolled in dull warning as we approached.

  We studied the phenomenon uneasily.

  ‘I’ve heard of this place,’ Namida said. ‘The storm that never ends. No one comes here. Or if they do, they don’t come back.’

  ‘But we have a sorcerer,’ Magnus said.

  ‘Who thinks your destination looks like hell instead of paradise,’ I replied.

  ‘It’s just a home for Thor.’

  ‘I want go home,’ Little Frog said in halting French. Her shoulder was sore from the bullet, and she had a fever. ‘Go Mandan.’

  ‘No, there is home, the place from which we all started.’ The Norwegian’s eyes were gleaming. ‘There is the birthplace of gods and kings, of heroes and sirens, of life everlasting. There you will be cured, Little Frog!’

  Life everlasting? It looked like a poisonous thunderstorm, albeit a beautiful one. As lightning flashed, the clouds glowed green and purple. They roiled, climbed, and descended, as if bound like planets to something within. And as the sun dipped to the west and lit the storm, a rainbow appeared as bright and solid as a flying buttress.

  ‘Bifrost!’ Magnus roared. ‘The flaming bridge that linked Asgard, home of the gods, to Midgard, home of man! There it is, a welcoming gate!’

  ‘It’s just a rainbow, Magnus. A rainbow and some rain.’

  ‘A rainbow with treasure at its end, I wager! Come, if you don’t believe me!’

  How could we turn back now? We paddled as near as we could in a mosaic of lakes and streams, portaging brief distances three times, dragging the rune stone through the mud, and then paddling again. Either the strange, stationary storm was farther tha
n it looked, or it kept receding from us. Our progress seemed glacial. Then as our creek finally shelved into marsh and we could paddle no closer, we beached the Mandan canoe for a final time, pulled ashore the coracle, and lifted out the heavy rune stone.

  ‘I’m not going to leave it for anyone else to discover,’ Magnus said.

  ‘How are we going to carry it?’

  ‘We can build a travois,’ said Namida. ‘My people use them to pull things across the plains. The Dakota pull them with horses, but we use dogs.’

  ‘We don’t have a dog, either.’

  ‘We have a giant.’

  We cut poles and lashed them to form a triangle, with the coracle’s bear hide tied to the centre to bear the stone. Absent the wheel it was the best we could do.

  Then, as the setting sun lit the cylinder of cloud orange, we bedded for the night. A chill breeze wafted down and Little Frog couldn’t sleep, watching the pulse of lightning. At midnight I woke and she was still upright, her face resigned.

  ‘La mort,’ she whispered when I touched her. Death.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The next morning dawned foggy and quiet. We couldn’t see the mysterious cloud, or anything else. Mist hung over our camping place, a fog that left a dripping like a cellar of ticking clocks. No birds sang. No wind blew. It was eerie: like being dead, I guessed. Little Frog had finally fallen asleep and came awake slowly, her forehead hot.

  ‘Why is it so quiet?’ Namida asked. We all looked at Magnus.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  But I knew, or feared I knew. Send a man into the forest and sometimes nature falls silent, the animals holding their breath as the feared creature passes, waiting and watching to see what he’ll do. We should have heard morning bird call, but there was none. ‘We’re still being watched, I think. Red Jacket hasn’t given up and isn’t far away.’

  And indeed, suddenly we heard one bird call from the marsh and an answer to it downstream. The women stiffened. Indian signals.

  ‘This is a good sign,’ Magnus tried to reassure. ‘They still aren’t killing us because they’ve decided to track us to see what treasures we lead to.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘We find the hammer first and everything changes.’ Magnus used our tow rope to make a crude harness for his travois. ‘Let’s go find what the bastards want us to find.’ He began dragging at a trot, wending through trees, a ghost himself the way the mist shrouded him. Then he broke into a meadow, the track of his travois poles two lines across wet, late-season grass as he hurried with a sense of direction I didn’t share. We jogged to keep up.

  ‘Magnus, wouldn’t it be easier to leave the rock?’

  ‘This is proof my country was first.’

  ‘But what happened to your Norwegians if they learnt old powers?’

  ‘Who knows? A stone that records ten men red with blood and death says something. Maybe it was disease. Maybe they fought the Indians. Maybe each other. Or maybe they triggered something they couldn’t control, some malevolent force that was awakened.’

  ‘The Wendigo,’ Namida said.

  ‘Or they simply accomplished what they came for,’ Magnus went on, ignoring her. ‘At least one of them returned to Scandinavia, because he brought back a map. And some, perhaps, wound up living with the Indians.’ He stopped, turning his harness towards Namida. ‘Do you know your ancestor was a Templar?’

  ‘What’s a Templar?’

  He shook his head, and on we trudged.

  ‘How do you know all this?’ I persisted.

  ‘I have Templar blood myself. We were penniless royalty, disenfranchised generations ago, but I grew up on stories in Norway about how my ancestors knew powers we had lost. And they were just stories – until we found the map. Then I heard rumours of new discoveries in Egypt and the Holy Land during the French expedition, and that an American savant could be found in the new Revolutionary court of Napoleon. I detected Odin’s hand! A medieval map is set in the American wilderness, and then I learn of an American nearby with the expertise to partner with? I admit that as a hero you are quite disappointing, Ethan Gage, but you do have certain persistence. Even your lust for the Indian girl has proved useful – it brought us to the rune stone. So work the ways of the gods.’

  ‘Do you ever use that pagan saying when things go wrong?’

  ‘Nothing has gone wrong yet.’

  ‘We’ve almost been clubbed, shot, burnt, and stampeded.’

  ‘Almost doesn’t count. Here we are, closer than ever.’

  ‘But they weren’t really gods, Magnus. Not supernatural beings. That’s myth.’

  ‘And what is your definition of supernatural? Suppose your Benjamin Franklin was transported to Solomon’s court and demonstrated electricity? Would not the Jews proclaim a miracle? We Christians have created a gulf – meagre man and extraordinary God – but what if the gap is not as great as we assume? Or what if there were beings between those extremes? What if history is deeper than we think, and goes back to times foggier than this mist, and that myth becomes, in its own way, fact?’ He pointed to the stone behind him. ‘What more proof do you need? Evidence that Norse were here is so tangible that we clobbered a bear with it.’

  ‘But this goes against all standard history!’

  ‘Exactly.’ The Norwegian stopped, reached out, and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Which is why you and I are here, on the verge of resurrection, and no one else is around.’

  ‘Resurrection?’

  ‘I haven’t told you everything. Not yet.’

  ‘Well, we’ll need resurrection if Red Jacket is out there. He’ll kill us all.’

  ‘Not if we have the hammer.’

  The air grew colder suddenly, and I noticed we were walking on a carpet of crunching hail, perhaps laid down by the mysterious storm cloud of the evening before. The ice was still frozen, the ground a stony white. Our breath fogged.

  We hesitated, as if something were holding us back.

  Then Magnus grunted and forged ahead, pulling his heavy travois in a surge up a gentle slope, and we followed. It was as if we’d punched through an invisible barrier, like a sheet of transparent paper. The air warmed again. We entered a grove of birch, white and gold in the late year. The mist began to thin.

  The trees were big as pillars. Here the hail had melted, but the first fallen leaves lay like golden coins. To left and right, late flowers made a purple ground cover among the white trunks, a carpeted temple that receded into lifting fog, tendrils lifted upward to heaven. Mossy boulders erupted like the old standing stones I’d seen in Europe. It was so beautiful that we fell silent, and even the scratch of the travois poles seemed like sacrilege. The ground rose gently and the light began to grow as the day gathered strength. Everything was lacquered with dew.

  The rise finally crested at the edge of a low granite cliff, and as the sun burnt through and the mist retreated into the trees, we at last had a view.

  I stopped breathing.

  The panorama was lovely enough. We overlooked a vale of pond, meadow, birch, and aspen, a lush natural depression in the prairie that seemed hidden from the rest of the world. But that wasn’t what stunned us. On a low hill in the middle of this dell grew a tree of a size I’d never seen before, and never dreamt of. We stared, confused.

  The tree was so immense that our heads tilted back, and back, and back, to follow its climb into the sky. It was a tree that dwarfed not just all others in this forest, but all others in this world, a green tower of ash with a top lost in the haze that persisted overhead. I’ve no idea exactly how high the patriarch was but we should have seen it from twenty miles. Yet we hadn’t because of cloud and mist. It was a tree far taller than a cathedral steeple, a tree with branches longer than a street, a tree of a scale never painted, suspected, or dreamt of – except, perhaps, by the ancient Norse. The butt of its trunk was wider than the biggest fortress tower and its branches could shade an army. It was as if we’d been shrunken to the scale of ants, or the as
h tree had been inflated like a hot-air balloon.

  ‘Yggdrasil,’ Magnus murmured.

  It couldn’t be! The mythical Norse tree that held the nine worlds, including Midgard, the world of men? This behemoth wasn’t that big. And yet it wasn’t normal, either, it was a tree that towered over the forest the way an ordinary tree towers over shrubs. Why? The ash is one of the noblest of trees, its wood supple and strong, a favourite for bows, arrows, staves, and axe handles – but while tall, it is not supernaturally large. Here we had a freak colossus.

  ‘There’s enough wood there to build a navy,’ I said, ‘but not to hold up the world. This isn’t Yggdrasil.’

  ‘Enough to mark Thor’s hammer,’ Magnus replied. ‘Enough to serve as a gate to power. Do you doubt me now, Ethan?’

  ‘Your hammer is there?’

  ‘What more likely place? What better landmark?’

  ‘Why is the tree so big?’ asked Namida.

  ‘That’s the mystery, isn’t it?’ His one eye gleamed.

  ‘And what is this here?’ I gestured at a small boulder nearby. Curiously, it had a hole the diameter of a flagstaff bored through it.

  ‘Ha! More evidence yet! A mooring stone!’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Vikings would tether their boats to shore at night by pounding a peg with line into a hole drilled like this. They’re common in Norway.’

  ‘This isn’t the seashore, Magnus.’

  ‘Exactly, so why is it here? A marker, I’m guessing, to find Thor’s hammer if the tree somehow didn’t work. I’d wager there’s another mooring stone on the far side of the tree, and another and another. Draw lines between them and you’ll find what you’re looking for where the lines intersect.’

  ‘Clever.’

  ‘Proof.’ He set off along the brow of the low cliff to find its end, dragging the rune stone with him. We followed, and eventually came down into the vale, across a clearing, and under the goliath’s shadow.

  By any measure the tree was old. I don’t know if its girth has been seen on this world before or since; but I do know I counted a hundred paces just to round its circumference. Great roots sprawled out from its trunk like low walls. There were folds and furrows in the bark deep enough to slide into, and burls as big as hogsheads. One could climb the plant’s crevices like cracks in a cliff to the first branches. These were thirty feet overhead and wide as a footbridge. The foliage was greenish yellow, heralding the turn of the year, and the tiers of branches were so numerous that it was impossible to see the top from the base.