The Dakota Cipher

by William Dietrich

  ‘This turns botany on its head,’ I said. ‘No normal tree can grow this big.’

  ‘In the Age of Heroes they were all like this perhaps,’ Magnus speculated. ‘Everything was bigger, as Jefferson said of his prehistoric animals. This is the last one.’

  ‘If so, how did your Norse Templars know it was here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And where is your hammer?’

  ‘I don’t know that, either. Maybe up there somewhere.’ He pointed into the branches. ‘Or inside. It is told that when Ragnarok spells the end of this world, a man and woman who hide inside Yggdrasil, Lif and Lifthrasir, will survive the holocaust and flood and repopulate the world.’

  ‘Well, there’s a note of cheer.’

  Could the colossus be climbed? I walked away from its radiating web of roots to study the tree. Even as the fog was dissipating in the sun, an odd halo of cloud was forming around the crown as if the ash strangely attracted weather. The effect was to shield the tree from sight from any distance, I realised. I wondered if the dark thunderstorm we’d observed yesterday would be repeated.

  I also noticed the tree’s top seemed oddly truncated, as if the height had been clipped. While the summit was too high and hazy to see clearly, there was a blackened stub as if hit by lightning. Of course! This was the tallest object around, and would serve as a natural lightning rod. And yet why wasn’t the tree even more stunted by ceaseless lightning strikes in this stormy climate? There’d been enough bolts yesterday to set it afire. How had it ever succeeded in growing so tall in the first place?

  Nothing made sense.

  I walked back down to the others. ‘There’s something odd here. The tree seems to attract cloud, or weather, and yet it hasn’t been killed by lightning.’

  ‘I don’t like it here,’ said Little Frog. ‘Namida is right. This is a place for the Wendigo, eater of human flesh.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Magnus. ‘It’s a holy place.’

  ‘The Wendigo carries people off to places like this one.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as the Wendigo.’

  ‘But your fables are true?’ Namida challenged. ‘Little Frog is right. There is something wicked about this place.’

  ‘So we’ll look for the hammer and leave,’ I said. ‘Quickly, before Red Jacket finds us. I’m going to climb.’

  By jamming hand and feet in the crevices of the aged trunk, I managed to work myself up the first branch, hauling myself onto its log-like girth. It was broad as a parapet, and I waved more bravely than I felt to the trio below. Even at this modest start, the fall looked disconcertingly long.

  Better not to think about that and keep climbing. So I did.

  In some places the climb was a relatively simple process of hauling myself from one branch to another. In others I had to climb the main trunk like a spider to get to the next horizontal platform, using the deep corrugations. The trunk was so twisted, rent, and studded with bowls that I always had plenty of handholds; I was a human fly! I was the squirrel Ratatosk, carrying insults from the dragon Nidhogg to the sacred eagle at the topmost branches! Up, up, and up I went, the ground lost to the wicket of branches below and the sky equally invisible above. I was in a cocoon of leaves, the tree homey and snug in its own way. It was also wrenched and cracked, and when I came to a place where a branch had half broken but still hung, I was surprised at the width of the growth rings. They were half an inch wide, suggesting this giant was incredibly fast-growing.

  The further I went the slower I crept, the height dizzying and my muscles beginning to ache. Even hundreds of feet off the ground the trunk and branches were still thick and firm, but as more sky filtered in and my view improved, I saw just how terrifyingly high I was. The surrounding forest looked low as a lawn. My companions were entirely lost to view, and birds orbited below. The circle of clouds around the tree had thickened, like the rotating clouds of the day before, and their bulk was building high like a thunderhead. The wind was picking up, and this castle of an ash was beginning to sway. It was slightly sickening to ride it, like clinging to a rolling ship.

  I held tighter and kept going.

  Finally I broke clear of the primary globe of foliage and neared the tree’s dizzying top, a thousand feet or more above the ground. Through gaps in the clouds I could dimly see out across rolling prairie, an endless panorama of trees, meadows, and silvery lakes, but the day was growing greyer as the concealing overcast thickened. From a distance, was this Yggdrasil already hidden from view?

  No, my eye caught movement. A party was approaching on horseback, one of them wearing a bright red coat, like a dot of blood on the prairie.

  The trunk now had shrunk to something I could wrap my arms around. There were no hammers up here that I could find. Yet the very top of the tree still seemed truncated in that odd way I’d spied from the ground. Why?

  I hauled myself up the last twenty feet, finally hitching myself up a gnarled extension of trunk no thicker than a maypole. When I looked again for Red Jacket the ground was already blotted from view. The prairie was walled off by a circular wall of cloud that seemed to be rotating slowly around the immense tree like a vast, gauzy cylinder. Its top was lit brilliantly silver by the sun, but the lower reaches were already dark. I heard a low growl of thunder. Hurry! There was something bright and odd glittering above, a golden thread, and it jutted from the very uppermost reach of the tree with a gleam like a promise.

  This highest point had clearly been struck by lightning, as one would expect of the tallest organism on the prairie. But why hadn’t the tree burnt or died from what must be a hundred strikes a season?

  I pulled myself the last inches, fearful the snag would break off or some new jolt of electricity would stab my perch. I was swaying a good twenty feet in the wind.

  And then I had the answer to what had puzzled me on the ground. The golden thread I’d spied was in fact a stiff wire, a twisted strand of metal that poked from the tree’s peak as if growing out of the wood. It looked more likely to be an alloy of copper and silver and iron. The topmost snag had extruded a shiny filament like a twig.

  If I’d not been an electrician, a Franklin man, I might have found the wire peculiar but not very illuminating. But I’d caught the lightning! What I was looking at, almost certainly, was a medieval lightning rod. Bloodhammer’s Templars, or Norse utopians, had wired this tree. The metal would draw lightning strikes and, if the wire was long enough, conduct them to discharge into the ground. Which meant this wire should lead all the way down through the tree.

  Something was under the roots of this behemoth.

  My skin prickled and I felt an uneasy energy in the air, the black clouds ever-darkening. More from instinct than prudence, I suddenly let myself slide down this uppermost stub to the first branch below, where I clung like an ape. As I squinted back up at the stub of wire, there was a flash and an almost instantaneous boom of thunder. My eyes squeezed shut as I went half-blind.

  A bolt hit the tip of the wire and the tree shuddered. A jolt punched through me, but the worst of the energy was shielded by the wood as lightning was drawn down through the wire. I gasped, shaken, but hung on.

  Then the tingle passed, the wire sizzling.

  Fat droplets of cold rain began to fall.

  I had to get off this tree.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  I descended as quickly as I could but a false step would mean a fatal fall, so I had to pick my way with care. It seemed an eternity until I came within hailing distance of my companions and could shout to Magnus. ‘There’s something under this tree!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A strip of metal runs from the top through the trunk! It draws lightning! And I think it must be to power something down below! We’ve got to find it, because Red Jacket is coming!’

  By the time I’d climbed to the lowest branch, swung by my arms, and then dropped to the carpet of leaves and soft earth below, Magnus had made another circuit of the trunk. ‘This Y
ggdrasil is planted as firmly as the Rock of Gibraltar,’ he said.

  ‘It’s been nearly four hundred and fifty years since your Norse were here.’ I didn’t say ‘might,’ or ‘maybe,’ I was accepting the presence of these long-lost Templar explorers as established fact. ‘The tree has undoubtedly grown a great deal, and maybe grown unusually fast because of the infusion of electricity, as the French scientist Bertholon theorised. But as it grew upward, it somehow carried a strip of wire skyward to serve as a lightning rod. I think the wire ran out, and lightning strikes keep the tree trimmed to the height it is now. That wire had to come from somewhere below.’

  He squinted up at the branches. ‘I don’t see a wire.’

  ‘It’s inside the wood, going all the way to the ground. And what was the point unless the ground end of the wire is attached to something important? And if it was important, wouldn’t you want a way to get back to it? So there was a way under once, a tunnel or door.’ I was glancing about myself, impatient because the Indians were coming. ‘Where that root arches at the butt of the tree, perhaps.’ I pointed. ‘Imagine the wood growing over and around it. I know the tree looks solid, but …’

  Magnus eyed the bark speculatively. ‘So there’ll be a door again. Forgive me, Yggdrasil.’ He took his huge axe and went to a concave cavity at the base of the tree near an enormous root. ‘It is odd how it grew here. The tree is indented.’ He aimed, and swung. There was a crack, and the tree groaned. ‘If there’s a tunnel, we’ll need torches.’

  ‘Little Frog and I will gather branches,’ Namida said.

  ‘How could your Norse Templars know to come here of all places, in the middle of an unexplored continent?’ I asked as my companion chopped.

  ‘They didn’t,’ Magnus said. ‘They knew the continent was here, from the Vikings, and after Black Friday of 1309 they scattered for survival and took their artefacts with them.’ He swung and chopped, swung and chopped, his breath catching as he talked. ‘From the Indians they hear of a rich hunting ground with rivers running north, south, east, west … Is it the ancestral site of paradise? They’re far beyond the reach of their persecutors, with superior technology amid primitive Indians. They had steel, and the natives didn’t. They dreamt of establishing a utopia centred around the energy of whatever artefact they’d brought.’ Chips were flying.

  ‘Thor’s hammer.’

  He nodded, swinging the great axe again. ‘Perhaps they fought the Indians with it. Perhaps they reburied it when it became apparent their small numbers couldn’t prevail. And perhaps, with no time to build a pyramid or tower or other way to mark its place where they could find it again, they used ancient secrets to tie it to a living tree that could be a beacon to future Templars, while terrifying the Indians to stay away.’

  ‘A beacon hidden by its own storms.’

  ‘Yes, and the storm itself a beacon. So this tree, if not Yggdrasil, is a machine, to sustain what we’ve come to fetch.’

  ‘Sustain how?’

  He nodded upward at the sky.

  The day kept turning darker as the clouds built, and I heard a rumble of thunder. The tree’s energy somehow created its own storms each day as the sun climbed higher, and its own winter each night. Lightning flickered high above like that wielded by Thor’s hammer. Or did I have it backward – did the lightning feed the tool?

  ‘Men are coming!’ Namida warned.

  And yes, in the murk up the slope from which we’d descended there was movement in the trees. Red Jacket and his Dakota would be as bewildered as we were by the botanical giant and its cone of weather. They’d hesitate, I guessed, and then crawl closer through the high grass to watch and investigate. A bullet or two would make them slow down even more.

  I readied the load on my rifle.

  ‘Hurry!’ Little Frog begged.

  Now the axe was swinging as steadily as a metronome, the Norwegian’s aim precise, chips flying like confetti and spraying old leaves like new snow. The heavy axe was little more than a pinprick to the gargantuan tree and yet it seemed the monarch shuddered each time Magnus chopped, as if it hadn’t endured such indignity in all the centuries of its existence. Who else would dare attack? The idea of tunnelling into the massive bole was insane – except as the axe work went on, the wood was changing.

  ‘It’s punk past the bark and outer core,’ Magnus said, breathing heavily as he swung. ‘It’s starting to come apart in chunks. This tree isn’t as strong as it appears.’

  Another rumble from above and that curious prickling that I remembered from the City of Ghosts south of Jerusalem. The air felt alive, and crackling.

  The meadow grass swayed as Red Jacket’s renegades crawled through it. I aimed at one such ripple, fired, and the movement stopped. Crouching behind a root, I reloaded. ‘Chop faster, Magnus!’

  Now there were puffs of answering smoke from the high grass, the crack of gunfire, and bullets whapped into the trunk around us. Bloodhammer cursed as if they were annoying insects. The women dragged their bundles of twigs and wove them to make crude torches, using flint and steel to start a small fire in the leaves. I kept up a covering fire. Our persistent pursuers lay flat and invisible.

  ‘There’s a hole!’ Magnus cried.

  We turned. A dirt tunnel like a burrow had appeared under the massive root, bigger than the opening into the bear cave. The tree had grown around the entrance. ‘Take the women and go look,’ I ordered. ‘I’ll hold Red Jacket’s band off!’

  I sighted, squeezed, and felt the reassuring buck against my shoulder, smelling the burnt powder. The sniping actually relaxed me. The familiar motions of cock, squeeze, ram, and prime were something to do, and I could keep our tormentors out of effective range. Bullets whacked back, my attackers invisible except for the puffs of musket smoke. They were smart enough to move after firing.

  Finally I heard Magnus shout.

  ‘We need an electrician!’

  ‘Then come keep guard!’

  Magnus crawled out and took the rifle with one hand, shaking the other as if burnt. ‘It’s very strange,’ he said, wiping dirt from his mouth.

  So I dropped down into the tunnel. The soil was held back by what at first I thought were roots, but then I realised the subterranean part of the tree had grown along the form of a tunnel made by a different support entirely: ivory. The Norse had lined the roof of their passageway with fossil mastodon tusks. Had they found the elephants? Found a boneyard? Or done in the last mammoths themselves?

  The passage was drier than expected, and ahead was a scent of something scorched. I felt my way to the torchlight where the women were waiting. Namida and Little Frog were crouched in a womblike room too low for us to stand in, somewhere under the heart of the tree’s trunk, transfixed by an odd contraption. Ribs of root extended from tree trunk above to ground below, forming a cage of wood the size of a ship’s trunk. Above this cage, a glittering wire as thick as a feather’s quill descended from the cave roof to a wooden cylinder the size of a small keg. The wire took just one turn around the drum, so I guessed it had once held a thousand feet or more of costly wire that had unreeled as the tree grew upward over the centuries. When the drum was finally empty, the growth stopped, stunted by lightning because the rod could go no higher.

  But that wasn’t what fascinated the women.

  Instead, after its single turn around the drum, the wire also led downward to the thick, heavy head of …

  An upright hammer.

  The weapon was bigger than a carpenter’s tool but smaller than a sledge, and from the butt of its short handle to the massive head was about as long as my forearm. The hammerhead was fat and blunt, made of some kind of silvery ore that glowed, and looked to weigh at least fifteen pounds. More wires curved among the web of roots, and the hammer was balanced on the end of its metal handle as if kept from toppling by electrical force.

  ‘It’s Thor’s hammer,’ I said in disbelief. Or someone’s hammer, connected to the lightning rod of this monster tree the same way I�
��d connected my Leyden jars of batteries to my hand-cranked generator at the siege of Acre in Israel. Mesmerised, I reached out to grab it, but Namida stopped my arm.

  ‘No! Watch what happens.’

  Suddenly there was a blinding flash and sparks flew like that fireworks display at Mortefontaine. The chamber shuddered and there was a low, distant boom, the far-off report of thunder. Then the sparks fell away, the hammer now blazing with electric fire that had been fed to it by the wire. It hummed. Slowly, its glow began to fade.

  ‘It feeds on the lightning,’ Namida said. ‘The tree does too, I think. Magnus tried to touch the hammer, and it burnt him.’

  So the hammer was being charged and kept ready, in much the same way I’d charged an electrical sword I’d used in a duel with Big Ned during the siege of Acre. Yes, the fundamental force that animates nature! Here was a weapon of some kind, yet what could we use to snare the thing without harming ourselves? I tried to think of what old Ben would have done, but was too distracted by the pop of gunshots from outside the tree. ‘We have to go help Magnus.’

  We crawled back out. Magnus was crouched behind one of the enormous roots as I’d been and the three of us joined him.

  ‘Did you get the hammer?’

  ‘I don’t know how to seize it.’

  Our assailants had crawled closer, taking less pain to hide themselves.

  ‘We need it!’

  ‘Magnus, we’re not gods.’ I took my rifle back and handed him a musket. I shot, there was a yelp, their movement went still again, and then I heard an odd, nasal version of Cecil’s voice.