The Dakota Cipher Read online

  ‘Enough, Magnus!’ I cried. ‘I’ve been assaulted in a wine cellar, nearly incinerated by fireworks, forced to flee to America in weather that could sink a continent, and am allied to a lunatic who babbles about a mysterious map. What is going on?’

  He looked about. ‘What lunatic?’

  ‘You!’

  ‘Me! The man who saved you at Mortefontaine?’

  ‘Magnus, you said those were your enemies, not mine. I have nothing against Denmark. I could barely find Norway on a globe. I don’t care what the numbers of a roulette wheel add up to, or coincidences in 1776, and I’m not entirely certain what we’re supposed to do when we reach the United States.’

  ‘Uncertain? You, the famous Freemason?’

  ‘I’m not a famous Freemason. My late friend Talma took me to a lodge meeting or two.’

  ‘Do you deny the significance of October 13th, 1309?’

  ‘The significance of what?’

  ‘Come, Ethan, don’t be coy. Let’s agree that the events of that black Friday the Thirteenth were momentous for world history.’

  Now I remembered. That was the night the French king Philip the Fair had arrested hundreds of Knights Templar, two centuries after the order’s founding in Jerusalem during the Crusades. My old jailer, Boniface, had told stories about it. Grand Master Jacques de Molay, unrepentant at the end, had gone to the stake in 1314, vowing correctly that both Philip and the pope behind him would follow him to the grave within a year. Philip had allegedly tried to plunder an organisation both mysteriously rich and annoyingly independent, and found frustratingly little to steal.

  ‘The Templars were crushed. Musty history.’

  ‘Not to true Masons, Ethan. While some Templars died or recanted their order, others fled to places like Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia … and perhaps America.’

  ‘America hadn’t even been discovered then.’

  ‘There are Viking legends of exploration, and rumours of just such a Templar escape. Legends tied up with stories about Thor and Odin. And then, eight months ago, in a secret crypt below the floor of a Cistercian abbey on the island of Gotland, exploring monks found a map and the legend became truth. That is what is going on.’

  ‘This map you claim to have.’

  ‘The Cistercian Order was founded by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, you may recall, nephew of André de Montbard, one of the Templar founders.’

  Now I felt a chill. I’d found the tomb of Montbard – or some Christian knight, anyway – in a subterranean chamber beneath a lost city in the Holy Land, and with it the Book of Thoth. Despite my best efforts, the villain Silano had used the book to help usher Napoleon Bonaparte to power. Now Napoleon called the Tuileries home, and I was on a ship to America. My lost love, Astiza, who had returned to the sun of Egypt, would agree with Bloodhammer that it was all foreordained. For a world in which everything is supposedly predestined, life seems awfully complicated.

  ‘You know what I’m talking about,’ Magnus went on, watching me. ‘Saint Bernard was a mystic who saw holiness in geometry and inspired the greatest of the Gothic cathedrals. His monasteries became some of the most prosperous and powerful in Europe, rising hand-in-hand with the secular power of the Templars. Was it coincidence that some of the persecuted knights fled to Gotland where the Cistercian Order was particularly strong? The monks succeeded in winning Norse pagans over by blending some of the old beliefs with the new, or rather in recognising a continuity of religious belief as old as time. Not so much one true God as that every god was, in its own way, a manifestation of the One. And not just God, but the Goddess.’

  Damnation. Pagans pop up on me like pimples on a youth. And if you get involved with one or two of them, as I have, the others seem to seek you out.

  ‘You’re saying Saint Bernard and the Cistercians weren’t Christians?’

  ‘I’m saying Christianity allows more freedom of thought than many denominations will admit, and that Bernard recognised that devotion can take many forms. Of course they were Christian! But both the knights and the monks recognised the many paths the holy have walked, and the many manifestations of their power. It’s rumoured the knights brought some secret back from Jerusalem. That’s why I wanted to meet you at Mortefontaine, to learn if it is true.’

  It was gone, so why not tell him? ‘Was true. It was a book.’

  I could hear his sharp intake of breath even over the roar of the sea. ‘Was a book?’

  ‘It burnt, Magnus. Lost forever, I’m afraid. I could hardly even read it.’

  ‘This is a monstrous tragedy!’

  ‘Not really. The scroll caused nothing but trouble.’

  ‘But you believe me, then? If the Templars found and hid a sacred book, why not an important map? Correct?’

  ‘I suppose. The book was in a crypt, too.’

  ‘Aha!’

  I sighed. ‘What led to the discovery of your map?’

  ‘Snow and thaw. It was a bad winter, water penetrated the foundations, and cracks developed in the masonry of the chapel floor. A bright young monk realised there was a cavity under what had been assumed to be a solid foundation, and when it was excavated for repair they found the tombs. Curiously, the entrance had been sealed so no one could spot it. In one sarcophagus of a monastery leader, dated 1363, a parchment map was encased.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it was in a golden cylinder?’

  ‘Gold?’ He looked surprised. ‘Now that would have got our attention. No, a leather tube, sealed quite effectively with wax. Why do you ask?’

  ‘My own book was encased in gold. Splendid piece, carved with figures and symbols.’

  ‘By the steed of Odin! Do you still have it? It could be of incalculable value in understanding the past!’

  I felt sheepish. ‘Actually I gave it away to a metallurgist, probably to be melted down. I’d cost him his home, see. There was this woman, Miriam …’

  He groaned. ‘Your brain is in your breeches!’

  ‘No, no, it wasn’t like that. I was going to marry her, but she was engaged, and her brother was laughing at me …’ It sounded puzzling even to me. ‘Anyway, it’s gone too.’

  Magnus shook his head. ‘And to think you have a reputation as a savant. Are you an expert in anything beyond the female form?’

  ‘Don’t act superior to me! Don’t you like women?’

  ‘Aye, I like them, but they don’t like me. Look at me! I’m no dandy.’

  ‘You have a certain, umm, mutilated, bearlike charm. You just haven’t found the right one.’

  Instantly, he was gloomy. ‘I did, once.’

  ‘Well, there you go then.’

  ‘And if she does like you, and then you lose her … well, there’s nothing more painful than that, is there?’

  It was the kind of confession that makes you realise someone has the potential to be a friend. ‘It hurts, doesn’t it?’ Yes, I’d been in love, too, and with far better women than Pauline Bonaparte. ‘You’ve had your heart broken?’

  ‘Not in the way you think. I lost my wife.’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry, Magnus.’

  ‘It’s not so bad, I think, never to know joy, never to see paradise. But to have it, to see it, and then lose it … After Signe’s death I dedicated myself to learning the truth of legends I’d first heard as a boy. I’ve searched libraries and archives, sailed to mines and hiked to dolmens, lost an eye and offered my soul. While Signe has gone on, I remain in our earthly purgatory, trying to get back in.’

  ‘Get back in what?’

  ‘Paradise.’

  ‘You mean another woman?’

  ‘No!’ He looked offended.

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Suppose it didn’t have to hurt?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Imagine there was a place, a way, where bad things didn’t happen? Or where bad things could be reversed, corrected?’

  ‘What, heaven? Valhalla? Not in the world I’ve seen, Magnus, and believe me, I’ve looked.’<
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  ‘Suppose there was a better world we’ve lost? A real place, in a real time, not a legend.’

  ‘These myths you talk about aren’t real, man. They’re stories.’

  ‘Stories like Templars escaping to America, more than a century before Columbus. Stories about secret books, and underground tombs in lost cities.’

  He had a point. The planet seemed fuller of inexplicable oddities than I’d ever imagined. I had, after all, scooped treasure beneath the pyramid, found a secret chamber beneath the Temple Mount, swum in a secret well to a Templar’s grave, and got help in the middle of a dire fight from a long-dead mummy. Who’s to say what’s impossible? ‘Let’s see your map, then.’

  So he pulled it out of that tube he carried. I noticed the map case was longer than the scroll, and wondered what was at its hidden end.

  ‘There are stories of other maps. The Earl of Orkney, Prince Henry Saint Clair, is said to have taken thirteen ships west at the end of the fourteenth century, nearly one hundred years before Columbus, and come back with a map showing Nova Scotia and perhaps New England. But this one is earlier, and better.’

  The chart was on some kind of skin parchment, not paper, with the coastline of Europe clearly visible and what appeared to be Iceland and Greenland at the top. There was a crude compass rose, which meant an origin no earlier than medieval times, and Latin inscription. But what drew the eye, of course, was the map’s left-hand side. It appeared to show the northeast coast of an unbounded land mass with a large, almost circular bay. From this, squiggly lines, like rivers, led south into a blank interior. In the middle of nowhere was a curious symbol, like a squat, fat T. Near it was a little peak.

  ‘What’s this mountain here?’

  ‘That’s not a mountain. It’s a Valknot, the knot of the slain.’

  I peered closer. The mountain was actually a cluster of overlapping triangles that intersected like a knot, as Magnus had said. It created an odd illusion, like an abstraction of a mountain range. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘It’s also called Odin’s triangle,’ Bloodhammer explained. ‘It connects the battlefield dead to Valhalla, like a power lifting them up.’

  ‘So why is it on this map?’

  ‘Why indeed?’ Now his eye was bright.

  Near the symbols were what appeared to be rivers leading away in the four cardinal directions, as if the symbol were near a central spring.

  ‘That tomb had not been opened since 1363,’ Magnus said. ‘The crypt itself had apparently been closed at least since 1400 – well before Columbus and the other explorers sailed. And yet what does that bite in the continent look like to you, my sceptical friend?’

  There was no denying it. ‘Hudson Bay. But the 1300s …’

  ‘Were two centuries and better after Vikings were rumoured to have reached a mysterious Vinland to the west,’ Bloodhammer said. ‘And two and a half centuries before Henry Hudson found the bay that bears his name, and where he was marooned to die by his own mutinous crew.’ He stabbed the parchment. ‘Norsemen were in the middle of North America a century and a half before Columbus sailed. How about that, eh?’

  ‘But what the devil has this to do with Knights Templar?’

  ‘Here we have speculation. The Templars are crushed, politically, beginning in 1309. Some flee to Gotland. This map is generated half a century later. We know that famine racked Europe in the 1320s, and that the Black Plague came next, reaching Norway about 1349. The church was continuing its persecutions, fearing the disease to be God’s judgment. Suppose descendants of the knights, sheltered by the Cistercians, who do not see eye-to-eye with Rome, decided to seek refuge in a New World first discovered by pagan Viking explorers a few centuries before? They would escape persecution, famine, and disease. In 1354, there is a record of one Paul Knutson setting out to check the colonies of Greenland, which had fallen silent. Suppose our medieval Norsemen went even farther, into this vast bay? And then inland? We know Hudson’s crew was trapped by ice for the winter, prompting their mutiny the next spring. What if Norsemen, more comfortable with winter, decided to strike south on the frozen rivers instead of waiting for the thaw? Or perhaps they did wait for spring, and ascended the rivers you see once they were free of ice. The rivers on my map correspond closely to the rivers today’s Hudson’s Bay Company uses to access the Canadian interior for furs. Might they have penetrated to the centre of North America? Might they have seen sights and made claims hundreds of years before any European?’

  ‘But why?’ I pondered the map. ‘Even if these Templars, or monks, or whatever they were, decided to go to the New World, why would they go north to a place like Hudson’s Bay? Why not the eastern coast of the United States? There’s a line for it right there.’ I pointed. ‘No Viking is going to paddle or march to the middle of America.’

  ‘Not Viking. Medieval Norse who are descendants of the Knights Templar, or Templars themselves.’

  ‘Medieval Norse, then. It still makes no sense. What did they expect to find?’

  ‘Not just find. Hide.’

  ‘Hide? What?’

  ‘What they had to flee the church and the authorities to secrete away. One of the mysteries the Templars had uncovered in their untiring research into the old faiths. One of the grails itself.’

  ‘The grail?’ I swallowed. Given my past adventures, I didn’t have good association with that word. I’d babbled it myself once to get out of being tortured and bitten by snakes, but that was just expediency.

  ‘Here!’ He pointed, indicating the mysterious T symbol near Odin’s triangle. It looked a little like a fat Templar cross, but with the upright piece at the top missing. Bloodhammer’s gaze was fierce again. ‘Mjolnir. Thor’s hammer!’

  Understand that at this point, any normal savant would have thrown up his hands and walked away, or at least walked as far as you can on a pitching ship. Thor’s hammer? I knew little of Norse mythology, but I’d heard of Thor, and of a weapon he carried, a hammer. It was fearsome, shot lightning, and came back to the god’s hand when he threw it. The trouble was, it’s all a myth. Thor’s hammer? Probably kept in a cubby with Neptune’s trident, Jason’s fleece, and the club of Hercules.

  But I felt sympathy for Magnus because once I’d been in his exact position, explaining a story every bit as crazy as this one to my old confederates in Jerusalem and trying not to sound like a madman. So I sat where I was and asked the obvious:

  ‘Thor’s what?’

  Magnus looked triumphant. ‘The hammer of the gods! It really existed!’

  ‘Thor really existed? A Norse god?’

  He nodded excitedly. ‘Not God as we understand him. Not the Creator, or the Great Architect, as the Masons would say. Rather a superior being, a first ancestor, of a company of heroes we can never hope to emulate. They preceded our own race, in a golden age long lost. Thor taught things that humankind has since forgotten. And he put some of his power, some of this thought, into his hammer!’

  ‘You realise that you should be restrained.’

  ‘I know it sounds fantastic! How do you think we of the Forn Sior felt when we realised there might be artefacts of the hero’s age left on this earth? But the Templars took seriously the notion that ancient beings instructed primitive men.’

  ‘Wait. Forn Sior?’

  ‘“Old Custom.” That’s what we call ourselves.’

  ‘What who calls themselves?’

  ‘Those of us who are keepers of the past, who believe the old stories are as valid as the new, and that truth is a blending of all threads. We’re a secret fraternity, my friend, who seek out those like you who might help us. I was in despair when Signe initially married another, and they had recruited me. They gave me hope. Mankind has learnt much, Ethan: we live in a strange new modern age, the nineteenth century! And who knows what wonders are to come! But we’ve forgotten as much as we’ve learnt. There are powers in the forest, spirits in the stones, and magic secrets that have been forgotten for three thou
sand years. But the Templars began relearning them! They started in Jerusalem and searched the entire world!’

  ‘Secrets like my book?’

  ‘Yes, like your book. Written by whom, exactly? Or should I say what?’

  ‘Some kind of Egyptian being called Thoth. He looked like a bird in some representations. A baboon in others.’

  ‘Or a tree, a unicorn, a dragon, or an angel. Don’t you see, Ethan? It’s all the same, these mysterious forebears, the origin of our kind, and they’ve left clues about their history for us to rediscover.’

  ‘A Frenchman named Jomard told me the Great Pyramid incorporated fundamental truths, and that everything since has been a long forgetting.’

  ‘Yes! Exactly! Like your Book of Thoth or Mjolnir, Thor’s hammer. Eight hundred years after our conversion to Christianity its symbol still adorns many a necklace, because it’s perceived as a good-luck piece in my country!’

  ‘Let me get this straight. You think there really was a Thor. With a magic hammer. Which Knights Templar found. And which was taken to America centuries before Columbus?’

  He nodded happily. ‘Isn’t it exciting?’

  It’s because I’m so tolerant and easygoing, I suppose, that I draw theorists of this sort. I made a resolution then and there to become stern and crabby, but it’s entirely contrary to my character. Besides, I half believed him.

  ‘So there was more than one Thoth?’

  ‘Probably. Or he was well-travelled, flying though the air to different places on Earth and leaving a different legend with each ancient people. He gave us gifts to start our civilisations, and we remember it dimly as myth.’

  ‘But where was this hammer after Thor disappeared?’

  ‘Ah. That we don’t know. There are legends of men in white tunics and red crosses going to mines far to the north, where in summer the sun never sets and in winter it never rises. However they did it, we of Forn Sior think the Templars found the hammer and stored it with the other amazing artefacts they were collecting, while using them to increase their power. That’s what the king of France and his ally, the pope, were hoping to seize! But the Templars hid their treasure, smuggled it to distant isles like Gotland, and when the church at last followed them there – when they were betrayed by doubting Cistercian monks, perhaps – they fled farther. To America!’