The Dakota Cipher

by William Dietrich

  The tree trunk was a horizontal wall as tall and long as the storied walls of Constantinople, but the fire and fall had shattered its abnormally fast-growing column into long, twisted pieces. Rain was already pouring into yawning gaps. It would rot fast, I guessed, and when it decayed would anything of like grandeur ever replace it? Not without the peculiar influence of electricity and hammer. The root hole would become a lake, the tree would moulder into the soil, and the burnt meadow would grow back. No trace would remain of Bloodhammer’s peculiar Eden. Or was it his Ragnarok? Did only the whim of chance separate the two?

  The rune stone was still there, forgotten in all the excitement. The fire had passed over it without harm. In a generation or two, when the tree was gone, it would be the only proof of my tale.

  Also abandoned was the axe of my Norwegian friend. Namida picked up its handle to drag it in a daze, like a child’s doll.

  And then, as we staggered in weariness around the wreck of the tree, we noticed another thing not immediately apparent in the tangle of roots exposed by Yggdrasil’s toppling.

  The tree’s heave out of the earth took with it not just tons of clinging dirt but granite boulders the size of hay wagons, clinging like nuts in a dough. The root pan was already streaming with rainwater, and it too would eventually break down. But there was something else we saw, something so strange that it made us shiver and wonder if this place was indeed cursed.

  Beside old mastodon tusks there were human skeletons caught in the web of roots, their bones as grey-brown as the tree parts that surrounded them. Flesh and hair was long gone, but buried armour showed these were not Indians. The red rust of shields was clearly visible. Also caught in the wheel of soil were remnants of old breastplates, swords, mail, and helmets. We’d found the Norse! Some at least had apparently been buried in a semicircle around what four and a half centuries ago must have been a sapling, tied to an electrical machine dug in a barrow deep into the earth.

  ‘Bodies,’ I said to Namida.

  ‘The red-haired strangers,’ she said, looking at the remnants of armour.

  ‘Yes. White men like me.’

  ‘So far from home.’

  ‘Magnus would say they thought they were going home.’

  ‘The white man is so strange, always searching for home. The world is the world, anyplace you are. Eden is where you make it. Why does the white man always travel so far, so restlessly, with such violence?’

  ‘To find peace.’

  ‘White men need to make peace where they are.’

  ‘The Templars were warriors. So were the Vikings. So are the Ojibway and the Dakota. It was who they were, and are. It’s who men are, different than women.’ But I wasn’t really trying to explain, I was staring upward at the suspended skeletons and rusting armour with sudden excitement. Was that gold?

  I’d found gold with the remains of the knight Montbard in the City of Ghosts, far away in the desert, so why not here? My heart began to beat faster, my body to recharge.

  ‘White men should find home where they are.’

  ‘I think we found treasure.’

  And before Namida could stop me, I grasped a root and began to climb the disk of earth, pulling myself up to the skeleton I’d seen with its glint of yellow metal. If it seems sacrilegious to disturb the dead, they are past caring, aren’t they? Was I finally to get some reward for this journey? But why entomb gold? Did refugee Templars bring gold to America? Or did they find it here, like the mysterious copper mines on Isle Royale? Was supple metal, not Eden, what drew them?

  ‘There’s something with these bones,’ I called down.

  Namida shook her head. ‘The bones are why this place is wicked!’

  ‘Just sacred, like a burial ground.’

  She began to moan. ‘No, this is an evil place! That hammer was evil, look what it did! Leave their things, Ethan! We must get away from here, quickly! This is a place of bad spirits!’

  ‘It’s time to salvage something from the wreckage.’

  ‘Nooo, we must go, I can feel it!’

  ‘Soon, I promise. I’m almost to it!’

  I reached the remains, the skull grinning in that disquieting way that the dead have – I was getting used to this macabre aspect of treasure hunting – and brushed some dirt aside next to the armour. A flake of gold came with it.

  I paused. Was the treasure that delicate? I picked at the dirt more carefully now, and realised there was indeed gold, but in a sheet far thinner and broader than I’d imagined. It was a disk of gold, as broad as an arm is long, but no thicker than paper.

  It was paper, of a sort.

  The size and shape of a round shield.

  And there was raised writing on the metal. Not runes, but Latin script.

  The Templar trick reminded me of how I’d hid the Book of Thoth in plain sight in the Egyptian cotton of a sail on the Nile. In this case, a wood-and-metal medieval shield had become a sandwich sheathing a sheet of gold no thicker than foil, and used, I presumed, because it would not decay. The imprinted gold leaf had been hidden.

  Why?

  To keep its message secret until the right discoverer came along, I guessed.

  Somehow I doubted they had me in mind.

  I looked more closely. It was Latin, all right, but backward in my view as in a mirror: the shield had been buried with the writing facing the sky, and I was on the underside. I broke off a root stub and began digging around the edge of the shield, the covering rotting and the gold itself as delicate as a dried leaf.

  ‘Ethan, hurry!’

  ‘There’s writing, like a book!’

  ‘What’s a book?’

  ‘You can store a thought and then let it speak to someone who never heard it, miles or years away!’

  That, of course, made no sense to her and it reminded me of the gap between us, she of the prairie and me of the gambling salon. What would become of us now? Should I send her back to her people? Could I take her to the President’s House and Napoleon’s court like some Pocahontas? Or should I send her to the Mandan? At length I got most of the rotting shield free from the soil, cursing as flakes of gold floated away, and carefully crawled down, holding the ragged remnant from one hand like a friable sheet of newspaper. When I got back to the crater I peeled more rust and rotting wood away and tried to read.

  I’m not a scholar, spending more of my desultory time at Harvard peering through the panes at passing Cambridge damsels than paying attention to the lives of the Caesars. I could no more rattle off Latin than explain Newton’s Principia. But there were words I thought I recognised. Poseidon, for example, and Atlantic. No, wait. I peered closer. Was it Atlantic or Atlantis? And near it another word that oddly rang a bell, though I couldn’t remember having heard it before. Thira. And another: hasta. An old poem came to mind. Didn’t that mean spear in Latin? I recalled Silano had found a medieval Latin couplet that had helped point the way to the Book of Thoth. Could these Norse Templars, thousands of miles from their real home, have left behind another Latin clue to treasure or power? But why bury the clue where the hammer was? You don’t bury the treasure map where the treasure is. There were odd words, too, like Og.

  What the devil did that mean?

  It made no sense. Unless the treasure – Thor’s hammer – was not the true treasure, or at least the ultimate one. That this great tree was but a signpost.

  I remembered what Magnus had told me. The Templars had been crushed and scattered. Whatever artefacts, treasure, or books of power they’d accumulated had scattered with them. One I’d found cached in an underground sarcophagus in the City of Ghosts in the desert southeast of Jerusalem: the Book of Thoth. Another I’d come almost halfway around the world to find, here: Thor’s hammer. So if there were two, why not more? What had Cecil said about the Templars trying to assemble something? And if there were more, why not hide a key to their whereabouts in the one place the scattered Templars might be expected to find and re-gather at, the gigantic myth tree fuelled by ele
ctricity, Yggdrasil?

  I groaned, inwardly. Somehow I knew I wasn’t done.

  The trouble with being called is that you don’t get to quit.

  And then something sang and banged past my head, and there was the report of a gunshot. A hole appeared in the rusting shield, the delicate gold parting like tissue paper.

  ‘Wait!’ I cried.

  But Aurora Somerset was galloping towards us like a woman possessed, hair flying, teeth bared, her green eyes afire with the madness of grief. She was on an Indian pony, tossing aside her empty musket and drawing instead her brother’s broken rapier with her free arm and shaking an Indian lance in the other. The sword’s jagged edge glinted like the shard of a broken ale bottle. She wanted vengeance!

  I looked for my rifle. I’d propped it against a shattered root, too far away. I dashed, just as her pony pitched down into the tree crater.

  And then I felt sharp pain stab my calf. I stumbled, sprawling.

  The thrown lance, with flint tip, had speared through my leg.

  I braced to be ridden down, the dangling spear hobbling me.

  But Aurora wasn’t galloping for me. She was aimed at the parchment of gold, leaning down like a Cossack to snatch it. Did she know what it was?

  But just as she strained to snatch it, Aurora’s horse screamed and pitched forward, launching her over the animal’s neck. Horse and rider crashed into the artefact I’d found with a spray of mud, golden script shattered into golden confetti. Antique wood and flakes of wisdom went flying in yellow destruction, Aurora wailing in outrage as she slid in a scrim of ruin. The horse was on its back, writhing in agony, filaments of gold on its hooves. And then Namida reared up on the other side, heaving Magnus’s axe over her head, and brought it down on the pony’s throat, killing it.

  She’d used the abandoned weapon to bring the horse down.

  Aurora, scrabbling on her hands and knees, went for the other woman with a shriek of outrage, the broken rapier still in hand, slashing. Namida’s grip slipped as the sword scraped on the axe handle and both weapons slid away.

  My rifle!

  I yanked the spearhead from my calf, roaring at the pain, and crawled across loose gravel and mud to get my weapon. The two women were wrestling in the dirt, grappling for Aurora’s broken sword.

  ‘Namida, get clear so I can take a shot!’ I hollered.

  The Indian woman shifted her grip to Aurora’s forearms, grunted, and heaved, throwing Lady Somerset and the broken rapier to one side and then bending to the other to give me a clear line of fire. Sprawled awkwardly, I raised my rifle and aimed. Aurora was prone on the ground too, not the best target, and I had but one shot. Careful! Sight, stock to shoulder, breathe, hold, squeeze …

  I fired.

  And something came up in my aiming point just as I did so. The bullet pinged and ricocheted harmlessly.

  Aurora Somerset had lifted Magnus’s bloody axe as a desperate shield, and by the worst luck I’d hit it. The noblewoman flashed a smile of wild triumph.

  And then she leapt on Namida like a tigress before the Indian woman could react, hauling my lover’s head back by the hair and holding the rapier to her breast.

  ‘No!’ My cry was utter desperation. I was too crippled to rush them in time, my rifle would take a full painful minute to reload, and I was too far to throw the lance. I was helpless, and my enemy knew it.

  ‘I want you to grieve as I’ll grieve,’ Aurora spat. ‘I want you to remember your squaw as I remember poor Cecil.’ And then she rammed the sword stub home, screeching in victory like a banshee as she sawed into the poor girl’s chest.

  I’ve seen more than my share of horror, but Aurora was right, this one seared into me. Namida’s eyes were as wide as a frightened calf’s as the metal bit, her heart exploded and gushed, and the blood ran over Aurora’s hands to make her some kind of monstrous Lady Macbeth. Namida’s high cry was choked off by the stabbing, her mouth open in final surprise, and then the blood poured down her deerskin blouse and her eyes rolled and glazed.

  I remembered her first words.

  ‘Save me.’

  My heart fell through the earth.

  ‘You monster!’ I roared. I grabbed the lance and began crawling towards this witch whom I’d somehow been enamored with, this wicked harridan who’d help cause the death of all my friends. Magnus was right, there is emotional pain that is worse than death, and I wanted to either finish Aurora or have her finish me. ‘Come on me, then! Let’s end this, now!’

  She reared upward, pitching Namida’s dead body aside like a sack of potatoes, and smiled the grin of the devil herself. ‘What did you read?’

  ‘What?’ The question was so unexpected that I stopped crawling towards her for a moment, the leak from my leg an undulating scarlet snake behind me. I could feel the slow throb of my wound.

  ‘How much of it did you see?’

  She was talking about the golden sheet and its message, I realised. Somehow she knew it – and the Templar bodies – might be there.

  ‘You … knew?’

  ‘What did it say, Ethan?’ she asked again, her broken sword dripping with my lover’s blood. ‘What was the message?’

  ‘You think I’d tell you?’

  She laughed then, the laugh of the insane, and kicked at the fragments that her horse’s tumble had scattered. ‘You will. You will because I will follow you.’ And grinning now, sly, eyes shimmering with hatred and a lust for something I did not yet grasp, she saluted me with the broken rapier and, turning, began to saunter away.

  ‘Wait! Come back, damn it! End this!’

  A laugh again. ‘Oh, Ethan, we are nowhere near the end. Once we saw the map, the old texts began to make sense. What we’d whispered about in the Rite.’

  ‘Aurora!’

  She twirled the haft of the rapier like her parasol.

  So I hurled the lance. It fell well short, halfway between her and me, and she could have turned and rushed me then before I crawled to retrieve it. She could have tormented me like a wounded bull, darting in to deliver wound after wound, until, exhausted and depleted, I bled into the mud and expired.

  But she didn’t. She didn’t look back, and said nothing more. She just kept walking away from the tree and out of its crater, a swing to her hips, as if something satisfying had at last been settled. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d whistled.

  She wanted me alive.

  She wanted me to follow what I’d read.

  And by the time I crawled back to my rifle and reloaded it, Aurora Somerset had disappeared into the trees.

  CHAPTER FOURTY-FOUR

  What came next I recall only dimly. I was in shock from blood loss, electrical discharge, grief, the plague that had ravaged the Indian village, amazement that the hammer had existed at all, and confusion. What message had I come away with? A Latin script kicked into oblivion by the hooves of a dying pony. What did it mean? I hadn’t the faintest idea. What did Aurora think I knew? I had even less notion of that. Where had she gone? She’d passed into the trees like mist, as if she’d never existed.

  I was utterly alone. I saw no Indians, no buffalo, no smoke.

  I bound up my wounded leg as best I could and drank some dirty water from one of the puddles. Rain continued to fall.

  Then I knelt and dug three places in the mud to bury my Pierre, Little Frog, and Namida, using Magnus’s axe as a crude hoe. Good farmland, I noted as I scraped. Good land for Jefferson’s yeoman farmers. A good place for democracy.

  What a price my friends and I paid for that geographical information.

  And Napoleon? This was a place that could swallow armies.

  I think I had an idea what should become of Louisiana.

  So did my thoughts blessedly wander. Then it was done, three holes together. Namida first, laid as gently as I could, pushing her eyes closed. Then brave and burnt Little Frog, who’d seized the god’s fire to avenge little Pierre. And then Pierre himself, his clothes slightly scorched, his skin r
aw from the cruel lashings of the accursed Cecil Somerset. I’d failed to protect any of them.

  As the rain came down I mounded dirt on the first and the second and began on the third, scooping handfuls to hurl on the body.

  Suddenly Pierre coughed and spat.

  ‘What are you doing, donkey?’

  I reeled back from his grave as if the devil himself had spoken. By Franklin’s lightning! And then the Frenchman blinked, squinted against the rain falling into his face, and grimaced. ‘Why am I in a hole?’

  ‘Because you’re dead! Aurora killed you!’ Had Magnus’s dreams of resurrection somehow come true? What weird magic was this?

  The voyageur slowly sat up where I’d been about to entomb him, staring in dull disbelief at the crater, the dead Indian pony, the lattice of roots, and the gargantuan trunk of Yggdrasil, stretched out across the prairie. ‘Mon dieu, what disaster have you made this time, American?’

  I feared to touch him, lest my hand go through his ghostly breast. Was I hallucinating? ‘She shot you! Didn’t she?’

  He began turning his head as if to look at his back wound himself when he winced, groaning. ‘I think she shot it, my friend, and left me unconscious.’

  ‘It?’

  ‘Hurts like the very devil.’ And so he carefully reached into his ragged shirt, still sitting in the mud, and painfully drew out a cotton string and something …

  Bent around a bullet.

  ‘I took it from shattered Cecil one night when the fool was wrestling me down to beat me, the maniac blind in one eye and enraged in the other, and after I stole it I tied it to the inside of my shirt to torment him. You can imagine how frantic he was when he missed it: his distress kept me amused while he tortured me. Who knew it would be useful? I’m bruised and bloody, but it kept the bullet from penetrating.’

  And he held up a very warped symbol I’d seen on Somerset’s neck when he coupled with his sister, a pyramid and a snake that had flattened and held the lead ball Aurora had fired, cupping it like a pancake. ‘It turned out to be my luck and not his, no? And yours, because you’d be lost in the wilderness in an instant without the great Pierre to look after you.’ He coughed, and winced.