The Crusader's gold jh-2

by David Gibbins

  “Speaking of which.” Jeremy looked at Jack with a sudden burst of enthusiasm, and patted a package resting on his knees. “I had this flown in via Goose Bay in Labrador on the last helicopter shuttle. I wanted to see the real thing with my own eyes before telling you.”

  Jack smiled warmly. “I thought we hadn’t heard the last from you.”

  “You remember that afternoon with the old Inuit, when we talked about the disappearance of the Greenland Norse in the fourteenth century? That haunting final account, about how the Scraelings had taken the entire western settlement?”

  “Go on.”

  “The Hereford library has really come up trumps. Big time.” Jeremy clutched the package, his face flushed with excitement. “It’s what Norse scholars have dreamt of for years, a discovery as fabulous as any of Harald’s lost treasure. Found dumped with all the rest of the old stuff in that abandoned staircase.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Jack said.

  Jeremy stripped the bubble wrap from the package and revealed the hoary leather binding of an old book. “It’s phenomenal.” He turned to Maria. “The lost saga of the western Greenland settlement, Vestribyg?a Saga. Written down in the fourteenth century.”

  Maria drew in her breath with sudden excitement and peered over Jeremy’s shoulder as he carefully opened the medieval codex to the final page.

  “Does it give any details of what happened?” Costas asked.

  “It certainly does.” Maria had been scanning the lines while Jeremy was talking. “By now you should be pretty familiar with this.” She pointed at two words in the centre of the page, and Costas peered down. “Haraldi konungi, our true king,” Maria said. “Harald Sigurdsson.”

  Costas whistled. “Harald Hardrada! The Norse Greenlanders remembered, almost three centuries after he left!”

  “And check out the symbol after his name.”

  “Don’t tell me. The menorah.” Costas grinned as they all peered at the symbol like a rune among the Latin letters of the text. “We seem to have come full circle. Constantinople, Iona, the icefjord and Vinland, the Yucatan and now back to the musty old cathedral library that started it all.”

  “This closes one loop, but then leads off somewhere fantastic,” Jeremy said. “Wait till you hear what the text says.”

  Maria translated slowly as she traced her finger along the lines. “Anno Domini 1332. The leaders of the Vestribyg? determined to follow their true king Harald Sigurdsson to the Nor?rseta, and across the sea to the west.” She looked up. “They were fleeing Church oppression, like the Crusader tax imposed on them in the twelfth century. The Norse Greenlanders were pagans at heart. To them Harald Hardrada was their true king, not some distant pontiff in Rome.”

  “So where did they go?” Costas asked.

  Maria continued, her finger farther down the page. “North to the great icefjord where Halfdan the Fearless set forth in his ship to Valhalla.”

  “Good God,” Jack murmured. “It actually mentions Halfdan and the longship.” He glanced over at Costas. “The iceberg wasn’t just a dream after all.”

  “Nightmare, more like.”

  “They numbered one hundred and twenty people, men, women and children, and after packing their ships with provisions they set off northwest, never to be seen again. They were led by Erling Sighvatsson, Bjarni Thordarson and Endridi Oddsson.”

  “I know those names,” Maria said excitedly. “They’re on the Kingigtorssuaq runestone, found on an island north of the icefjord. The only other runestone found in Greenland until the longship discovery.”

  “Sometimes the pieces really do all fall together!” Jack murmured, shaking his head in wonder.

  “So you’re saying Bjarni and these characters led the refugees from Greenland towards the Northwest Passage?” Costas said.

  “That’s what the saga implies.”

  “Any chance they made it?”

  “No reason why not,” Jack said. “They were the hardiest seafarers ever. Look at where Harald and his depleted crew got to after Stamford Bridge. They almost circumnavigated the western hemisphere. If the passages through from Baffin Bay to the Beaufort Sea had been free of ice in the summer of 1333, then the Greenlanders could have made it.”

  “Vikings in the Pacific in the fourteenth century,” Jeremy mused. “So much for ancient Chinese voyages of discovery. The Vikings would have to take the cake.”

  “I think you might want to get some of your anthropology colleagues out there to run a few DNA tests,” Costas murmured.

  “It’s a fantastic thought,” Jack said. “All along we’ve been seeking Harald himself, his treasure. But maybe his greatest legacy was the survival of these people, the people in all the Norse world who were closest to his ways. His brief passage through their land may have been the beacon of light that saved them from a miserable end all those years later.”

  “If that was his legacy, I can’t help thinking it would have satisfied him as much as any of his great victories,” Maria said, looking at Jack. “A way of ensuring that the best of his people lived heroic lives with honour to the end.”

  Jeremy closed the book and slipped it into its protective wrapping, and then he and Maria stood up between Jack and Costas. For a moment all four of them stared out over the stern to the east, where the rays of the afternoon sun were playing far out across the swell of the Atlantic. To Jack the distant horizon of the Old World seemed to beckon him back, heavy with the radiance of history, yet the shores of the New World and the seas beyond now had an allure he would never have dreamt possible only a few days before. His mind flashed back to the Golden Horn in Constantinople, and a surge of excitement coursed through him as he thought of all they had done.

  Costas was holding the jade pendant they had found with the skeleton under the cairn, and was peering at the two silver coins mounted in the eyes. After a moment he looked up at Jack, his expression slightly bemused. “So this is all we get of Harald Hardrada’s treasure?”

  “One Viking coin, one Roman.” Jack’s face creased in a smile. “I think that’s pretty good, don’t you? By themselves no more than dislocated fragments of history, but together they tell a fantastic story, something I never would have believed possible before all this. We found Harald’s treasure all right. Those coins are worth all the gold in the world.”

  “One final question,” Costas said. “The Byzantine princess, Harald’s other treasure from Constantinople. Maria’s namesake. Do you think she really was with him to the end? I fancy her surviving, becoming a fearsome queen of the Toltecs. That would certainly add some spice to history.”

  “As if we needed spice after all this,” Jeremy said.

  “You thought you saw a woman on the wall-painting, a Viking,” Costas said to Jeremy, who suddenly nodded as he remembered.

  “For me, it’s the legend of the Valkyries,” Maria said. “Female riders from the spirit world who chose the slain in battle for Valhalla and then served them in the great feasting hall. I think Maria stayed with Harald to the end, a warrior princess, his thole-companion. She would have accompanied him to the afterlife. It was the Viking way. I think she’s up there now, feasting alongside him with the rest of his noble fellowship, the true felag.”

  “Maria, Queen of the Valkyries,” Costas said, deadpan. “From what I’ve seen, it suits you.”

  Jack grinned. “Time we sent someone else to join them.”

  The ship had been slowing down and was now motionless in the water, the last tendrils of its wake sloughing off in the swell to the south. The captain came clattering down the gangway from the bridge and joined them on the deck. “We’re in position, Jack,” he said. “Any time.”

  Jack nodded, looked appraisingly out to sea and then turned to a blanket-wrapped shape on the deck behind him. He carefully unrolled it and a dazzling object came into view. It was the mighty Varangian war axe they had taken from the longship, Halfdan’s prized weapon that had saved Jack and Costas from certain death in the ice. It was the
first time Jack had held the axe since they had been winched away from their ordeal, and he felt a tingle down his spine as he clasped the oak haft and raised the gilded steel of the bit until it was level with his head. He slowly turned it from side to side, revealing the pendant shape of Thor’s hammer, Mjollnir, with the wolf’s head in the apex, and above it the double-headed eagle of Rome and Constantinople, all picked out in gold. On the other side he brought his hand against the runic symbols of Halfdan himself, marks made a thousand years ago when Halfdan had served his beloved leader in the glory days of the Varangian Guard, in the greatest city the world had ever seen.

  The others moved wordlessly towards Jack and clasped their hands around the shaft. “Battle-luck,” Costas said.

  “Battle-luck,” Jack repeated quietly.

  Jack’s mind flashed back to the Golden Horn, to the extraordinary adventure that had brought them here. He thought again of Father O’Connor, of all he had done to keep the dark side of history at bay, of the terrible price he had paid.

  A sea mist had begun to swirl around them, cutting off the ship and the grey swell from the outside world, as if they had been caught in a time warp. Just over the horizon to the west lay Vinland, the farthest outpost of the Vikings. For a fleeting moment Jack thought he saw the ghostly stern of a longship slipping into the mist, its curving stern carved in the snarling form they had seen in the ice. It was as if they were poised at the place where reality became myth, where the Viking world ended and the spirit world began, a journey into darkness and terror more awful than Harald and his men could ever have imagined.

  Jack weighed the axe in his hands, then raised the cold steel and brushed it against his lips. Somewhere near here the last remnant of the iceberg would release Halfdan and his longship into the flow, the same stream that had taken his beloved king to the final showdown at the end of time. Halfdan would need to be girded well, fitted to stand proud alongside the companions of the battles he had fought when the Varangians had no equal in the world of men.

  Jack paced forward and with one graceful movement lowered the axe-head behind him and swung the haft high in the air, releasing it at the last moment as the weight pulled him forward. The axe arched high over the stern and began to tumble, catching a sunbeam through the mist and disappearing in a dazzling tumult of light. It was like a wayward bolt of lighting, a swirling flash of energy from the Age of Heroes. Then it sliced into the sea and was gone, leaving only the barest of ripples, soon lost in the swell. Jack felt strangely light-headed, as if a weight had been lifted from his soul, and he leaned against the stern railing and gazed at the grey surface of the sea as the others came up alongside. He found himself mouthing the hallowed words of Old Norse, words that had lost their sinister overtones and spoke of a history more extraordinary than he could ever have imagined.

  “Hann til ragnaroks.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Menorah.

  The magnificent gold lampstand from the jewish Temple in Jerusalem, looted by the Romans in AD 70, remains one of the greatest lost treasures of history, ranked alongside the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. The only known depiction of the Temple menorah is on the Arch of Titus in Rome. The triumphal procession shown on the arch is vividly described by Josephus, a Jewish eyewitness and confidant of the emperor Vespasian. Among the spoils of the Temple was a lampstand made of gold: “Affixed to a pedestal was a central shaft, from which there extended slender branches, arranged trident-fashion, a wrought lamp being attached to the extremity of each branch; of these there were seven, indicating the honour paid to that number by the Jews” (Jewish War VII, 149-50). Josephus says little about the fate of the Jewish prisoners-he only describes the execution of their leader, Simon-but he affirms that some of the spoils, at least, survived being melted down: in his new Temple of Peace, Vespasian “laid up the vessels of gold from the Temple of the Jews, on which he prided himself” (VII, 161-62). Other treasure provided bullion for the famous “Judaea Capta” coins, the obverse showing a vanquished female Judaea beneath a Roman standard, above the word IUDAEA.

  There are no further eyewitness descriptions of the Temple menorah. However, compelling evidence that it survived-perhaps removed to a secret chamber, such as one actually discovered in the Arch of Titus itself-is provided by the historian Procopius (ca. AD 500-62), in his firsthand account of the spoils taken by the Byzantine general Belisarius when he defeated the Vandals at Carthage in AD 534. They included objects looted by the Vandal king Giseric when he sacked Rome in AD 455, “the treasures of the Jews, which Titus, the son of Vespasian, together with certain others, had brought to Rome after the capture of Jerusalem” (History of the Wars IV, ix, 5-10). According to Procopius, Belisarius brought the treasures to Constantinople-present-day Istanbul-and displayed them in the Hippodrome for the emperor Justinian. Procopius then claims that a Jew persuaded Justinian to return them to “the sanctuaries of the Christians in Jerusalem.” The fact that Procopius describes the arrival of the treasures in Constantinople suggests that the account is authentic, as many of his intended readers would themselves have witnessed the triumph, but his story of their return to Jerusalem seems implausible and a typical embellishment to highlight Justinian’s Christian virtues. There is no credible evidence that the menorah was ever again in Jerusalem after AD 70-71.

  The Fourth Crusade.

  The lost treasures of the Jewish Temple may therefore have survived hidden away in Constantinople into the medieval period. The survival of many other antiquities in the city is attested by the list of objects destroyed or looted by the Crusaders in 1204, including the famous quadriga, shipped to Venice to become the Horses of St. Mark’s. Some of the Crusaders would already have been on pilgrimages to Rome, and it is possible that their leader, Baldwin of Flanders, had seen the extraordinary image on the Arch of Titus and had read Procopius. Contemporary accounts of the sack of Constantinople are overlain by pious justifications, but the truth may be that the allure of loot proved too great, and Baldwin desperately needed to find a way to pay the Venetians for shipping his Crusaders towards the Holy Land.

  Harald Hardrada.

  Whether the Jewish treasures survived in Constantinople as late as 1204 is an open question. A century and a half before the Fourth Crusade, the fabled Varangian bodyguard of the Byzantine emperor had been led by the towering figure of Harald Sigurdsson, known to history as Hardrada, “hard-ruler,” “the ruthless.” Harald was a Viking mercenary, the exiled son of a king of Norway who would return to claim the throne and become the most feared of all the Norse warlords. During his years with the Varangians he became a latter-day Belisarius, campaigning for the emperor in Sicily and North Africa and amassing a huge personal fortune. To the Saracens he was “Thunderbolt from the North,” and he succeeded where the Fourth Crusade would not: he entered Jerusalem, pacified the Holy Land, bathed in the river Jordan and gave treasure to the shrine at Christ’s grave. The expedition to Jerusalem probably took place in 1036 or 1037, making Harald Hardrada the first and most successful of all the Crusaders, albeit on behalf of the Byzantine emperor rather than the Church in the West.

  Back in Constantinople, Harald was allowed to take part in palace-plunder, helping himself to treasure as a reward for his endeavours. One night in 1042 he kidnapped the empress Zoe’s niece Maria-whom he had wished to marry, but been refused by her aunt-and escaped with his Varangian companions in two ships over the great chain that bound the entrance to the Golden Horn, the harbour of Constantinople. The sole account of this escapade has Maria being returned to the city once they were safely out, but perhaps she did accompany Harald back to Norway and through the rest of his extraordinary life, including his marriage to the Kievan princess Elizabeth and his relationship with at least one other woman, Thora, which produced his son and heir, Olaf. According to his biography, Harald had a “daughter,” oddly enough called Maria, who accompanied him on his last voyage and supposedly died suddenly “on the very day and at the very hour th
at her father had been killed” (King Harald’s Saga, Heimskringla 98).

  Almost everything we know about Harald Hardrada comes from the Heimskringla, an account of the Norse kings written in the early thirteenth century by the Icelandic poet and historian Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241). Eagle and wolf imagery abound in the passages of verse included in the text. The Heimskringla and a few sentences in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provide virtually all we know of the Battle of Stamford Bridge near York, where a Norwegian army under Harald was defeated on 25 September 1066 by the English King Harold Godwinsson, who in turn was defeated a few weeks later by the Normans. Stamford Bridge was a catastrophe for the Norse and to many signalled the end of the Viking Age; of some three hundred ships that had sailed to England, only twenty-four are said to have returned. The last description of Harald Hardrada alive is of him fighting “two-handed” in the thick of the battle, perhaps wielding a great battle-axe of the Varangians, surrounded by his loyal bodyguard.

  Two of Harald’s Varangian companions who escaped with him from Constantinople were Halldor and Ulf, both Icelanders. Another may have been Halfdan-perhaps even Harald’s brother of this name-whose runic graffito can be seen on a balustrade inside the church of Hagia Sofia in Istanbul. Fragments of the chain that crossed the Golden Horn still exist. Elsewhere evidence for Harald’s exploits is elusive, but there is enough to give substance to the life recounted in the Heimskringla. In Jerusalem, near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I have seen a cross carved in the rock that seemed to have the shape of Mjollnir, Thor’s hammer, a symbol that remained potent for the Norse under Christian domination as far away as Iceland and Greenland, kept alive along with all the legends of Loki and Fenrir and Valhalla.

  The Mappa Mundi.