The Dakota Cipher

by William Dietrich

  And now I fell forward not just to touch but to hug him, laughter and tears coursing down my cheeks at the same time. Alive!

  ‘But where is Little Frog?’

  So I told him how her courage had helped save his life.

  I left Pierre to grieve for the women and practise taking breath again – his back was a massive bruise – while I buried three other things.

  No, not the remains of Cecil or Red Jacket. I reflected that Aurora, for all her perverse love for her brother, had not stayed to do the job either. The girl wasn’t one for sentiment, was she? I left them for the coyotes and crows.

  These others, however, I didn’t want found.

  One was the stone tablet. It was too heavy to take back. I don’t know why it seemed important to keep the thing a secret, but if Aurora had been curious about the Latin cipher in a sheet of gold, why not Norse runes? I’m not sure she ever even realised we’d found it. So I dragged the rune stone to the travois that had escaped the worst of the flames, rolled it back on and, limping, dragged it a mile or more where its location would not be particularly obvious. I used the big axe to cut a hole in the turf of a grassy hillock, looking carefully out of fear she was watching, slipped the stone under the sod, and left it sleeping. Maybe some new tree will grow atop it someday.

  Then I went back for the curious holed stones the Norse had set around their tree and carried them in the travois to my new location, where I placed them so that lines drawn between would intersect where the rune stone was. It was the best I could think of in case there was some reason to find it again.

  I cast the double-bitted axe in a pond. The tool had been useful many times over, but there was a ding on its blade where Aurora had blocked my bullet, and I wanted no physical reminder of the price of that miss. The tool could rust away in peace.

  And Thor’s hammer? It seemed dead now, no more than a fused piece of slag, but it wasn’t something I felt the world needed. Nor did I want it within reach of lightning that might reanimate it. I found a granite boulder sitting lonely on a meadow, scooped out a small tunnel beneath it, and secreted the hammer there. There are other odd boulders in that country, and this one I didn’t mark. It can sleep until the real Ragnarok.

  I salvaged enough gold flakes, which just bore torn letters now, to roll into a ball the size of a grape. This would be my new stake when I found a decent game of cards.

  Then Pierre and I said our last prayers and goodbyes and set out east. Using the lance as a crutch, my rifle over my shoulder in a makeshift sling, I started limping. He hobbled bent like an old man, his torso a mass of bruises and pain. We made all of three miles that first day, but what a relief to have escaped the strange Eden of Magnus Bloodhammer! The swirling storm clouds had disappeared with the fall of the tree, but not the feeling of foreboding and loss.

  I felt like the gates of Eden were swinging shut behind us. I looked back once and saw only empty sky, stretching endlessly west.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t kill him with that first shot from the canoe,’ I told Pierre. ‘I’m always missing by inches.’

  ‘It was better that way because your first execution would have been too merciful,’ the Frenchman said grimly. ‘You took away his vanity and filled him with shame. What happened at the tree had to happen, Ethan. We brought things to a necessary end.’

  I began to spy game the second day and brought down first a raccoon and then a buck deer. The women had taught us to spot edibles, and we gathered what late-season roots and berries we could find. There was frost in the mornings now, the leaves falling faster. On the fourth day we trudged through a premature flurry of snow.

  I skinned out the deer and when I came to a river we made another Welsh coracle, or Mandan boat. The task consumed a full day and if Pierre had been any bigger we would have swamped the vessel, but it worked, just, in the gentle river. It allowed me to rest my sore leg as we floated downstream, steering with the stock of my rifle. If I was still ravaged by sorrow inside, I was beginning to heal on the outside.

  Pierre cut himself a paddle and began to talk of building a canoe.

  Was Aurora following? I saw no sign. Maybe she died of madness on the prairie.

  The river passed through lakes, gathering water as it went. On the third day we recognised this as the river we’d first ascended with our second canoe. So we slipped east and south, drifting finally to an Indian village, dazed to see children playing happily at the edge of the river, men fishing, women cooking and mending. The world was unchanged by our trauma. Whole villages were still normal and happy. Here beyond the frontier, white and red were not at each other’s throats.

  Why didn’t I just stop? This was the real Eden, wasn’t it?

  Because I’m a Franklin man, a savant, and a man of science with discovery to report. Because I’m Napoleon’s opportunistic minion, and Jefferson’s naturalist, and Sir Sidney Smith’s wayward spy and electrician. I was the hero of Mortefontaine! Because I was lover to Namida and Astiza, one dead and one lost back to Egypt, but perhaps not, in the end, irretrievable. Because I’m a man more of the Palais Royal and the President’s House than wigwam and prairie. And because Aurora Somerset thought I might still find something, somewhere, of even more importance than Thor’s hammer.

  If I found her again, I’d make her tell me what.

  So they gave us an old canoe, in the generous manner of poor people in wild country, and we continued on, portaging around some falls we encountered.

  Two weeks after we limped away from Yggdrasil we came upon a camp of four French trappers who were descending to Saint Louis to spend the winter behind logs and glass. The growing river we were on, they informed us, was indeed the infant Mississippi! We greeted them in French, and I told them I was a scout for Jefferson and Napoleon.

  ‘On this side of the river you are a scout for Napoleon, my friend,’ said one of the voyageurs. ‘The Spanish flag still flies over Saint Louis, but word is that we will soon have the tricolour. And on that side,’ he said, pointing to the eastern bank, ‘you are a scout for Jefferson. Here the empires meet!’

  ‘Actually he’s a donkey and a sorcerer,’ Pierre informed them.

  ‘A sorcerer! What use is that? But a donkey – ah, how we’ve wished for one sometimes in the backcountry!’

  We told them nothing of Norse hammers, but did interest them with our account of the upper Mississippi and reports of plentiful fur and game. But the country was also thick with Dakota, I cautioned, and at mention of those fierce warriors the trappers seemed to lose interest.

  Pierre said it was too late in the season to try to catch his North Men, so we swept south just ahead of winter. On October 13th – another anniversary of the betrayal of the Knights Templar – we paddled onto the shelving levee of Saint Louis, where riverboats could ground to unload cargo before being pushed off the stone ‘beach’ again. Like Detroit, this French settlement was a hundred years old, but unlike Detroit it was growing instead of shrinking. French refugees from the aggrandizements of Britain and the United States fetched up here to make a new life in Napoleon’s empire. The city is just a few miles south of the Mississippi’s junction with the Missouri River, and a more strategic spot can scarcely be imagined. If Bonaparte wants Louisiana, he’ll have to assert control from Saint Louis as well as New Orleans. If Jefferson wants to reach the Pacific, his Meriwether Lewis must come through Saint Louis.

  And so I ended my western sojourn. I was exhausted, heartsick, poor, had no proof that Jefferson’s elephants still lived – and couldn’t really reveal just what we did find since I had a hunch it might prove useful to an inveterate treasure hunter like me. Thira? Og? As always, the ciphers didn’t make a lick of sense. So I had my first hot bath in months, ate white bread light as a cloud, and slept on a bed above the floor.

  My new boots hurt my feet.

  Pierre said he’d never invite insane donkeys into his canoe again. It was awkward for a few days, because we were the closest of friends and yet he knew I w
as as anxious to go back to cities as he longed for the freedom of the voyageur. Both of us carried unspoken grief and guilt for the women who’d died, but it’s hard for men to talk of such things plainly. I wondered if I should persuade the little Frenchman to come back with me to Paris. But one morning, without word, he was gone. The only sign I had that this was his choice and not a kidnapping was that he left the mangled pyramid and bullet next to my bed.

  Would I ever see him again?

  It was in Saint Louis that I met a visiting Louisville squire named William Clark, a younger brother of the famed Revolutionary hero George Rogers Clark. This Clark’s own Indian fighting days had ended with nagging illnesses and a decision to settle down to domestic life in Kentucky, but he was a rugged-looking, congenial man who sought me out when he heard I’d been tramping through the northern Louisiana Territory.

  ‘I’m impressed, sir, very impressed indeed,’ Clark said, pumping my hand as if I were the president. ‘But perhaps not such a trick for the hero of Acre and Mortefontaine?’

  ‘Hardly a hero, Mr Clark,’ I said as I sipped a bottle of blessed French wine, bringing to mind past bliss in Paris. ‘Half the things I try seem to turn to ashes.’

  ‘But that’s the experience of all men, is it not?’ Clark asked. ‘I’m convinced the difference between a successful man and a failure is that the former keep trying. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘You seem to have the wisdom of my mentor Franklin.’

  ‘You knew Franklin? Now there was a man! A titan, sir, a Solomon! And what would Franklin have said of Louisiana?’

  ‘That it’s cosier in Philadelphia.’

  Clark laughed. ‘Indeed, I bet it is! Philadelphia is no doubt cosier than Kentucky, too, but ah, Kentucky – such beauty! Such possibility!’

  ‘Louisiana has that as well, I suppose.’

  ‘But only for Americans, don’t you think? Look at these French. Bravest fellows in the world, but trappers, not farmers. They drift like the Indians. More Americans sweep down the Ohio in a week than all the French who live in Saint Louis! Yes, Americans are going to fill up the eastward bank here, and soon!’

  ‘Do you think so? I’m to report to both Jefferson and Napoleon.’

  ‘Then report the inevitable.’ He took a sip of wine. ‘Tell me. Did you like it out there?’

  I considered, and decided to be honest. ‘It frightened me.’

  ‘It pulls on me. I wish I had the chance to see that land of yours, Ethan Gage. I’ve heard our new president is intrigued, and I know his secretary, a captain named Lewis. It would be great to set off again, but then I’ve got a family and troublesome digestion. I don’t know. I don’t know.’ His fingers played a tattoo, looking westward at things I couldn’t see. ‘So what will you tell Napoleon?’

  That I needed to find Og, I thought. ‘That Louisiana is an opportunity, but of a different kind than he might think. I think I’ll tell him there’s money to be made.’ I was forming the report in my own mind. ‘I think I’ll tell Thomas Jefferson how to make a bargain.’

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  On November 8th, 1898, an immigrant farmer named Olaf Ohman was clearing land near the village of Kensington, Minnesota, when he unearthed a stone slab the size of a grave marker that was entangled in the roots of a poplar tree. Upon inspection he realised the stone was carved with Norse runes, or letters, eventually translated as:

  Eight Gotlanders and twenty-two Norwegians on a journey of acquisition from Vinland, very far west. We had camp by two rocky islands one day’s journey 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.

  And on the stone’s side:

  Have ten men by the sea to look after our ships fourteen days journey from this island. Year 1362.

  The authenticity of the Kensington rune stone, on display in a small museum in Alexandria, Minnesota, has been hotly debated for more than a century. Did Norse explorers really reach the upper Midwest some 130 years before the first voyage of Columbus? Or was the stone a clever forgery? The farmer never profited from his find and insisted to the day he died that he didn’t carve it. If a forgery, was it planted decades earlier, to give the tree time to grow around it? No white settlers lived there then. If real, was it moved from its original location? Why would medieval Scandinavians travel to a geographically nondescript place in western Minnesota?

  Scholars who once scoffed at the idea of any pre-Columbian contact between Europe, Asia, and the Americans have in recent decades been inundated with fragmentary evidence and imaginative theories suggesting that transatlantic and transpacific voyages in fact took place. The most compelling find is the 1960s discovery of the L’Anse aux Meadows Norse settlement site in Newfoundland, which proved that stories of medieval Viking explorers reaching America are indeed true. Rune stones, meanwhile, have been found in Maine, Oklahoma, Iowa, the Dakotas, and Minnesota. So have metal fragments of European weaponry and tools. Some two hundred boulders with mooring holes that are similar to the type medieval Scandinavians used to moor their boats have been discovered in North America.

  As this novel indicates, theories that other Europeans – or even Israelites! – preceded Columbus to America go back to Jefferson’s day and earlier. The lighter colouring of some Mandan Indians, and the fact that their agricultural settlements were more reminiscent of a medieval European village than a typical Plains Indian encampment, was commented on by French explorer Pierre de La Vérendrye in 1733 and artist George Catlin in 1832. Their women were reputed to be among the most beautiful on the continent and were generously shared – a reputation that influenced the decision by the Lewis and Clark expedition to winter over there. All this fuelled speculation that Norse or Welsh genes, at least, had made their way to the Missouri River. Unfortunately, the Mandan and their Awaxawi cousins were entirely wiped out by smallpox and Dakota raids by the 1840s before any systematic scientific inquiry could be done.

  There are legends that a Prince Madoc of Wales set out for the New World with ten ships in 1170, and that Saint Brendan sailed west from Ireland to the ‘Isle of the Blessed’ in 512. There has been debate that the volume of prehistoric copper mining in the Great Lakes is too great to be attributed to aboriginal use.

  Anthropologists have also considered theories that America could originally have been populated not just by Asians crossing the Bering Sea land bridge during the Ice Age but by European ancestors island-hopping across the North Atlantic. Meanwhile, the date at which humans first appeared in the Western Hemisphere continues to be pushed back as new finds are made.

  The odd notion that the Norse (or Welsh) made their way to the middle of the continent is at least possible because of the North American river system. Kensington is between the headwaters of the Red-Nelson river system, which runs north to Hudson’s Bay, and the Mississippi, which eventually drains into the Gulf of Mexico. The Saint Lawrence–Great Lakes system provides another route from the Atlantic, with short portages making it possible to paddle across Minnesota in the manner described in this story. Possibility does not make probability, of course, but the exploration theories of Magnus Bloodhammer are not as completely fantastic as they first might seem. There are widespread legends among Native American people from Peru to Canada of white-skinned visitors in the distant past and global legends of a lost golden age in which mythic figures bequeathed knowledge to humankind. Does myth have a kernel of historical truth?

  I owe the idea that the Minnesota Norse could have been Templars escaping from Scandinavia – and a possible translation of curiously marked letters that make a cipher within the stone – to Kensington rune stone investigators Scott Wolter, a geologist, his wife Jan Wolter, and engineer Richard Nielsen. The Kensington Rune Stone: Compelling New Evidence, provides an analysis of the stone’s geology, script, and history. They’ve done extensive research on the island of Gotland to attempt to establish the medieval authenticity of the particular runes Olaf Ohman found. A br
iefer and balanced introduction to the controversy is The Kensington Runestone by Alice Beck Kehoe.

  The intriguing correlations between Freemasonry, the origins of the United States, and the design of Washington D.C., have been explored in a number of books and documentary films. Jefferson’s curiosity about woolly elephants, Missouri volcanoes, and mountains of salt is taken from history.

  The White House did not earn that name until the British burnt it during the War of 1812 and its repaired shell was repainted.

  Norway would not regain its independence until 1814, during the tumult of the Napoleonic wars.

  The references to Norse myth are taken from the actual legends. But what of the botanical freak found by Magnus and Ethan? There have been a number of experiments in ‘electroculture,’ or the study of the effect of electrical fields on plants, including Bertholon’s electrovegetoma machine of 1783. Later experiments allegedly show roots growing in water turn towards electric current, or seeds germinating more quickly in an electric field. My ‘electric’ Yggdrasil is obviously fiction, but since the height of trees is limited by the difficulty of lifting water and nutrients up the trunk against the pull of gravity, I had fun imagining a ‘lightning-powered’ tree that has excess energy to overcome the obstacle.

  Finally, while many Indians in this story are menacing in accord with the history of the time, I should note that contemporary accounts of Native Americans indicate they were every bit as varied, complex, and capable of good and evil as the Europeans writing about them. White captives portray a native world of astonishing freedom, humour, vigour, and gentleness, combined with a constant threat of famine, exposure, war, and torture. We have only fragmentary ideas of the ‘natural’ state of Native American societies because they were so rapidly affected – and infected – by the European invasion. The seeming emptiness of the west was the result of epidemics of germs that destroyed Indian populations before most explorers even got there. Firearms revolutionised tribal warfare, and all the tribes were in motion as they fled west from the European assault. The Dakota (or Sioux) became high plains horsemen only after being pushed out of the eastern woodlands by other tribes such as the Ojibway (or Chippewa), who got guns first. The horse came from the Spanish. Ethan Gage travels west of the Mississippi three years before Lewis and Clark, but even his unexplored west is profoundly changed from whatever it was before Columbus. If there ever was an Eden in America, its door had been closing for three centuries before Ethan Gage got there.