Crusader Gold

13

Jack sat enraptured in the book-lined room of the old abbey, amazed at what he was hearing. Thoughts crowded in on his mind, and he struggled to separate them out. He had known they were on the trail of Hardrada since the revelation of the map, that an extraordinary thread tied their discovery in the Golden Horn of Istanbul with the longship in the ice off Greenland, but he could never have guessed that the holy isle of Iona was another link in the chain. And now O’Connor was telling another story, one which moved beyond the thrill of discovery to a world of darkness and danger.

“With the end of the Crusades and the rise of the Ottoman Empire, any hope of finding the remaining treasure in Constantinople seemed lost,” O’Connor continued. “To the west, all contact with Greenland was severed, and the promised land discovered by the Vikings was forgotten. By the time of the European voyages of discovery in the late fifteenth century, the last of the Knights of the Blooded Hand was long dead. Yet the myth endured, passed from father to son in the greatest of secrecy, by descendants of the felag across Europe and eventually in America. By the nineteenth century, all who received the story thought it fantasy, no more historical than the stories of King Arthur and the Round Table, and held on to their pledge only to sustain a romantic legend. Then it somehow reached the ears of a mad Austrian inventor obsessed with World Ice Theory.”

“We’ve heard about him,” Costas broke in. “The reason why the Nazis went to Greenland.”

“So this character re-founded the felag?” Jack said.

“One of his collaborators, a Lithuanian entrepreneur named Piotr Reksnys. Father of Andrius. A nasty piece of work.”

Costas grimaced. “It runs in the family.”

“The timing was perfect,” O’Connor went on. “The first decades of the twentieth century saw a resurgence of interest in the Vikings and Nordic heritage in Germany and across northern Europe. After the insanity of the First World War, it became a movement to bolster the idea of racial supremacy among a people who had lost their way. Secret societies thrived, and began to attract the thugs and fantasists who dreamed of a new Reich in Europe. They led to the ugliest society of all, Himmler’s Schutzstaffel, the SS, complete with fabricated Norse ancestry and rituals. The idea of a reconstituted felag fitted this baleful world perfectly, only unlike these other organisations the felag had some historical resonance.”

“And a different goal,” Jack said.

“The menorah,” O’Connor said. “They had all the trappings of a supremacist society, but that was just for show. They were obsessed with finding the menorah.”

Costas picked up the ring. “So what about this?”

O’Connor waved his hand dismissively. “A sham. Reksnys made out that these rings were some ancient inheritance, forged from the gold in Harald’s treasure, but they were not. They’re typical fabrications of the period. Reksnys knew the Viking kings had been ring-givers, bequeathing gold and silver neck-rings and arm-rings to their faithful followers. Like the Nazis he was obsessed with the operas of Wagner, with the Ring Cycle, the Nibelungenlied, the legend of Ragnarok and the fall of the Norse gods. Reksnys revived the mantra of the old fellowship, hann til ragnaroks. They were fost-br?dralag, sworn brothers, and they called themselves thole-companions, the old Viking name for oarsmen. There were to be twelve of them, and he even refurbished a castle in Norway and persuaded his initiates that it had been an ancient meeting place of the felag, complete with fabricated Viking armour and axes, supposedly left by their Varangian precursors. He even reconstituted the most extreme form of punishment used by the Norse, reserving it for members of the felag who had strayed from their oath of loyalty.”

Maria looked aghast. “You don’t mean the blood eagle?”

O’Connor nodded. “Harald’s ship was the Eagle. The guardian of the felag was the great eagle giant Hr?svdg. The blood eagle was to be performed on his behalf, like a sacrificial rite.”

“It was the Norse equivalent of hanging, drawing and quartering,” Jeremy said. “Only without the hanging and quartering.”

“The outline of an eagle was carved on the back of the victim, while he was still alive,” Maria said quietly. “Then they cut away the ribs and ripped out the lungs.”

“God almighty.” Even Costas was at a loss for words.

“They haven’t used it yet on one of their own,” O’Connor said. “But at the Einsatzgruppen trial one of the Jewish survivors spoke of a rumour that an SS officer had carried out something like this on a group of prisoners, using his ceremonial dagger.” O’Connor looked at the object on his desk with disgust. “Even among the horrors of the Holocaust it was too much to believe, and there was nobody left alive to confirm it. But it would have been in Andrius Reksnys’ area of operations.”

“I’m really beginning to love this guy,” Costas murmured.

“And there was one other feature, something that marked the felag out wherever they went.” O’Connor paused. “They slashed their hands across the palm, a sign of blood fealty. They believed they were the Knights of the Blooded Hand, born again.”

“The SS, the Ahnenerbe, the search for lost Aryan civilizations, for Atlantis,” Jack murmured. “It was all a perfect vehicle for the felag, a cover to reach their goal.”

O’Connor nodded. “Andrius Reksnys, the son, was a fanatical Nazi. The picture the old Inuit presented of him is typical. A real sadist and bully. But he was an even more fanatical member of the felag, steeped in the obsession since childhood.”

“Why?” said Jack.

“Because it wasn’t just mystical. There was a goal, a quest. They worked out that Harald Hardrada must have headed for Greenland. They studied the Greenlanders’ Saga and Eirik the Red’s Saga, which show that the nordrseta, the northern parts beginning around Disko Bay, would have been the staging post for voyages farther west. When they heard that the explorer Knud Rasmussen was planning an expedition to the Greenland ice cap at Ilulissat, they leapt on the chance. By then Himmler had become obsessed with World Ice Theory and a lost polar civilization, and there was no problem authorising an SS Ahnenerbe team to attach themselves to Rasmussen’s expedition.”

“And Rolf Kunzl? How does he fit in?”

“Totally innocent of the goals of the felag. He was the one who mapped out the voyage described in the sagas. He was the world expert on the Vikings in the West, the perfect companion for Reksnys. They used him. And when they knew he had found some clue in the ice, something he then concealed, he was doomed.”

“The runestone in the longship,” Costas said.

O’Connor nodded again. “Kunzl was quick-witted enough to know he had found something of momentous significance, and the fact that Reksnys was so desperate to get his hands on it was enough for him. Kunzl loathed Reksnys and the Nazis with equal fervour. So he decided to pass the runestone to the old Inuit for safekeeping. Kunzl had known nothing about the felag, but had begun to guess that he was dealing with more than just Nazi lunacy. He and Reksnys had fought in that crevasse, and from then on he must have known it was a blood feud, a duel to the death. That was always the weakness of the old felag. The murders of Thomas Becket and Richard of Holdingham meant that their secrets went with them to the grave. In the thirst for vengeance the killers lost sight of their goal. After the war began, Kunzl was safe as long as he was fighting with the Afrika Korps, but when he was arrested with the von Stauffenberg conspirators, Andrius Reksnys finally had his chance. He used his considerable expertise to try to extract what he could from Kunzl in the Gestapo torture chambers. He failed, and in his rage he let Kunzl be executed along with the others. He must have assumed that Kunzl, the great scholar, would have left some written record, but he discovered that Kunzl had destroyed all of his personal papers and that all records of the expedition had disappeared from the Ahnenerbe headquarters early on in the war.”

“One question,” Maria said quietly. “The menorah would have meant everything to the Nazis. The ultimate symbol of domination over a race they were determined to destroy. They would have wielded it as the Romans had done in their triumph over the Jews two thousand years ago. What would Reksnys have done if he had found the menorah?”

O’Connor got up again and gazed pensively at the map. “The search for the menorah was kept secret, even from Himmler. If Himmler had found out anything about the menorah and the felag, that the search was being concealed from him, then Reksnys would probably have suffered the same fate as Kunzl. To answer your question we need to move to the present day. We’re not dealing with neo-Nazis here. Nothing that banal. The felag is still with us, as strong as it ever was. And the menorah has even more potency today than it did in the dark days of the 1940s. They could hold the world to ransom for it. The Catholic Church, the Jewish state, the Arab states. Extremist groups of all persuasions.”

“Auction it to the highest bidder,” Costas murmured.

“So it’s really about greed, not ideology,” Maria said.

“That was what drove the schism in the felag almost a thousand years ago,” O’Connor replied grimly. “Greed and power.”

“So how do you know all this?” Costas blurted out. “I mean, if it’s all so secret, how does a Jesuit historian in the Vatican get access to this kind of information?”

“That was to be my last revelation.” O’Connor took a deep breath, pulled up the right sleeve of his cassock and held his hand towards them, palm outwards. There was a collective gasp of astonishment. Diagonally across the middle ran a jagged white scar.

“The blooded hand,” Maria whispered. “I thought that was just an old injury.”

“You can relax.” O’Connor let his sleeve down and slumped into his chair. “I am no longer one of them. My grandfather was an American inventor who was part of the World Ice Theory circle, no less eccentric than its founder but probably slightly less mad.”

“My God,” Maria exclaimed. “You never told me about this. I thought your family were all academics.”

“It was a strange period,” O’Connor said quietly, gazing at the floor. “The world started to go insane a few decades before the First World War, and we’re still not out of it.” He looked up and smiled thinly at Maria. “My grandfather was a scientist but dabbled in a lot of fringe stuff like many academics at the time, and eventually let this particular obsession consume him. Like my father before me I was sworn into the felag in my youth, went through the whole initation rite. I loathed it, hated the false rituals, and as soon as I found out about the Nazi connection I wanted out. I discovered my vocation as a Jesuit, and I could not reconcile it with membership of the felag. The felag has always professed to be pagan, to despise Christianity even while they worked within it. I believe they expected me to return to the fold, saw me as a useful future asset within the Church. They agreed to let me go with a vow of secrecy. It is a vow I have now broken.”

“But you are not bound by their absurd rituals,” Jack said.

“Indeed.” O’Connor looked down, and then gazed directly at Jack. “But I have stoked the fire of vengeance. Over the years I gathered all I could on Andrius Reksnys. I was merely contemptuous of the felag, but with Reksnys it was different. The more I found out about his murderous activities with the Einsatzgruppen, the more determined I was to bring him to justice, even if it meant breaking my vow of silence. The memory of Rolf Kunzl drove me on. I took my creed from the old Varangian Guard, from the earliest felag, that our fate is predetermined, that Ragnarok is inevitable, so what matters is our conduct in this world. It was my sole inheritance from the old ways. Somewhat at odds with my Jesuit calling, but it linked me to the nobility of the earliest felag and gave me strength.”

“You can’t have acted alone,” Jack said. “Someone else shot Reksnys.”

“Once I was in the Vatican, I brought a small group of trusted companions into my confidence. One is here in the abbey today. You may have seen him in the church. Jeremy was to be another. We came close to assembling enough evidence against Reksnys, but not close enough. We were determined that he should experience horror before death.”

“You reawakened the cycle of blood feud,” Maria murmured.

“Sometimes justice is best served by the old ways.”

“And the felag know who you are.”

“Earlier I told you that the Vatican had been penetrated by the felag in their heyday in the twelfth century. Today there is one again, one among my superiors who knows about the menorah, who has found out about your quest.”

“How?” Costas said.

“It could only have been an insider.”

Jack felt a sudden chill at the thought that one of the trusted members of their team might have betrayed them, but he put his shock aside as O’Connor shrugged bleakly and continued. “I knew the Holy See would do all in its power to prevent the location of the menorah from being revealed, but then I realized that there was more to it than that. The felag will do anything to know what we know, to thwart and destroy us and carry on the search themselves. And there is one we should fear most.”

“Who?” Jack asked.

“The grandson. Andrius Reksnys is dead and his son, Pieter, is holed up somewhere in Central America. But the grandson is still at large. I believe he is now a sworn member of the felag. He’s a thug. He inherited the family genes.”

“Like grandfather, like grandson,” Jack said quietly.

“The father, Pieter, is no better,” O’Connor said. “Remember his early education on the Russian front. But he seems to be fully preoccupied running his criminal organisation in Central America. The grandson’s the one to worry most about. He’s the warrior of the felag, the point man. He grew up steeped in all the rituals, and it has become his creed. He bought into what I rejected. He’s used many aliases, most recently Poellner, Anton Poellner. Among the felag he calls himself Loki, the name of a particularly nasty Norse god. His absurd warrior creed led him to train as a mercenary, and he gouged a trail of blood through the Balkan conflicts. He honed his skills at a terrorist training camp on the eastern Black Sea, in Abkhazia.”

“I think we can guess where that was,” Costas said.

“When his grandfather was assassinated he went on a particularly murderous rampage in Kosovo and let his guard down. He was arrested by the British SAS and convicted in The Hague as a war criminal. Five years ago he was sent to jail for life in Lithuania, the country he claimed as his homeland. They opened up a mothballed jail from the Gulag specially for him, a place where captured SS officers had been held for years after the war before being executed. Then about a month ago a new judge decided the evidence against him was insufficient, and he was released.” O’Connor’s lip quivered in disgust. “He was only a child when I left the felag, but I can still remember his face. His father had refused to cut his palm until the time was right, so Loki flew into a rage and slashed his own face with an axe. He would taunt me with it, pulling his finger hard down the scar until I cried. It used to give me nightmares. And now he’s back. He knows I’m the one who hunted down his grandfather. It’s the blood feud that drives him on. We have precious little time.”

Jack looked at O’Connor. “What will you do now?”

“I’m staying here. Rome is too risky.”

“What do you mean?”

“Something else has happened.” O’Connor looked grim, his eyes downcast. “I wanted to fill you in on the background before telling you. There’s been another murder. A modern one this time.”

“Where?”

“In the Vatican. Two days ago. The police think it was a mafia hit, because the victim was in the forefront of the battle against the antiquities black market.”

“Who was it?”

“The chief conservator.”

“You mean the man who saw the secret chamber in the Arch of Titus with you?”

“Alberto Bellini. One of the great modern scholars of Roman sculpture. A huge loss. And the only other man in the Holy See I could confide in.”

“Do you think…”

“I don’t think, I know. Alberto was a man who would put himself on the line again and again in the public war against the mafia, who needed armed guards every time he stepped outside the Vatican, but who had no inner strength when he was locked in a room with those who confronted him. He confessed to me the evening before his murder that they had forced it out of him, our midnight discovery at the arch and our interest in the menorah. That puts me in the firing line. And it means you too, I’m afraid.”

“Do you know who is behind all this in the Vatican?”

“There’s a kind of internal inquisition, run by one of the cardinals. It’s always been there. But this is more sinister, as bad as it can get. I’m not certain who it is, but I have a pretty good idea. The felag has changed since I left it more than forty years ago. I know who some of them are. The war crimes judge who released Loki, for one.” O’Connor again gripped his chair in anger. “All I can say now is he’s shockingly powerful within the Vatican. He could squash me on a whim. I’ve got nothing to pin on him for certain but enough to put his activities in the spotlight when I go public about this. What I am sure about is that the hit on Alberto was not the mafia. You can probably guess who I think it was, and he won’t be stopping there.”

“Is there anything you can do now?”

“I believe I’m safe here for the time being. The holy isle still has some sanctity, even among the new felag. But this has become too big for us to deal with alone. Blood feuds must be a thing of the past. We’re talking murder here, plain and simple. And if they somehow get their hands on the menorah, if it still exists, then the odd murder will seem a trivial matter. The Middle East would ignite like it never has before if the greatest symbol of the Jewish faith was thrown into it. Nobody would come out unscathed-Jews, Arabs, the Catholic Church.”

“Have you got any documentation?”

“It’s all here.” O’Connor patted the briefcase by his chair. “Hard copy. I can’t trust it to a computer. Loki is the key. He works alone, with horrifying speed. His masters are the great and the good, judges, senior churchmen, politicians. The days when the felag could all don helmets and wield battle-axes are long gone, however much they fantasise about it. There are no others like Loki. If we can stop him, then we buy the time we need.”

“Interpol?”

O’Connor nodded. “I can pull strings. We have some friends in higher places. An international arrest warrant, a global security alert. But I need time, two days at least to assemble a dossier. It would backfire horribly if the application were rejected but the story of the search for the menorah still leaked out.”

“That gives us a deadline,” Jack said pensively. “Two days or all hell breaks loose. It’s a pretty tall order.”

“Something gives me faith in you.”

“Let me help you, Patrick.” Maria leaned forward on her chair, looking at O’Connor and then at Jack. “I think I’ve done all I can for you on Seaquest II, Jack. I was thinking of staying here anyway and having another go at that runestone, to see if there’s anything we missed. But this is way more important. Father O’Connor needs all the help he can get.”

“I could do with it,” O’Connor said. “We’ve worked well together in the past.”

“You’re welcome to stay with us, Maria,” Jack said. “More than welcome. I should have made that clearer.”

“Jeremy can take over as expedition expert,” Maria replied. “If there’s anything more to do with Vikings and the New World, he’s your man.”

“Okay,” Jack said, a flicker of anxiety crossing his face. “Just make sure you look after yourself.”

O’Connor had one last thing to show them. He ushered Jack and Maria through the cloister and out into the grassy precinct in front of the abbey, leaving Costas and Jeremy behind to reformat a new scan of the Hereford map that had just arrived. Through the early-evening mist that now shrouded the island, Jack glimpsed the rocky outcrops that rose beyond the precinct, an image unchanged since the days of the Vikings. O’Connor led them along the cobbled track of Sraid nam Marbh, the Street of the Dead, past Reilig Odhrain, the hallowed burial ground of kings. On the way Jack paused beside the great stone cross of St. Martin, its weathered form still standing where it had been erected more than a thousand years before. He put his hand on the stone and felt the writhing serpents that had been carved into the granite almost two centuries before the Battle of Stamford Bridge, when the sea raiders of the north were still no more than a distant rumour to the monks on the island. He felt a frisson of immediacy, the same excitement he had felt on seeing the longship in the ice. Harald Hardrada had passed this way, had seen this cross. Jack suddenly had an image of the stricken king being carried on a bier towards the abbey, his wounded followers straggling up from the longships beached in the channel below. He felt he had been shadowing Hardrada all along, in the Golden Horn, in the icefjord, but he had never seemed so close, so certain that the trail ahead was drawing them on to follow the great king into the unknown.

The three colleagues walked in silence, lost in their own thoughts, digesting what had gone before. Half an hour later they reached the western side of the island, a wide bay fringed with golden beaches. O’Connor led them over a dune and found a place to sit, with Jack and Maria on either side. The mist had lifted to reveal a long vista off to the west, the deep orange rays of the setting sun searing their way towards the horizon. O’Connor lit a pipe, drawing on it a few times, then began to talk quietly.

“This is Camus Cul an t-Saimh, the Bay at the Back of the Ocean,” he said. “After days on the brink of death they brought Harald to this spot, fearful that word of his survival would leak out to the Normans. They brought his longships, the Eagle and the Wolf, and pulled them up on the beach. They filled them with provisions and placed Harald on his litter in the centre of the Wolf. Halfdan the Fearless, his oldest companion, lay grievously wounded at his feet, ready to die if his king began to wane.”

“Wergild,” Maria murmured. “A man could forfeit his life to Odin to save the life of his master.”

“The monks helped them haul the ships into the shallows. Those of Harald’s band who were still fit and able manned the thwarts, drawing the long oars through the tholes. The masts were set and the sails unfurled. From here Harald and his thole-companions sailed into history, watched by the monks of Iona and the small band of the faithful he had left behind to keep the fire burning.”

“Where did the ships go?” Maria asked.

O’Connor paused, took out his pipe and jabbed it towards the western horizon, then recited quietly from memory.

But now farewell. I am going a long way

With these thou seest-if indeed I go-

(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)

To the island-valley of Avilion;

Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,

Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies

Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard-lawns

And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea

Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.

So said he, and the barge with oar and sail

Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan

That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,

Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood

With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere

Revolving many memories, till the hull

Looked one black dot against the verge of dawn,

And on the mere the wailing died away.

“Tennyson, Morte d’Arthur,” Jack exclaimed, shaking his head in wonder. “A pretty Victorian view of it, but if what you say is true, the romantic version of the Arthur legend goes right back to this spot.”

“Substitute Vinland for Avalon and you’ve got the promised land, the earthly paradise,” O’Connor said. “The story of Leif Eiriksson’s discovery of the New World would have trickled back to Harald’s court well before his decision to invade England, and it would have intrigued such a well-travelled man. He’d been pretty sedentary for years, apart from the occasional war parties to Denmark and Sweden, and he must have had wanderlust. Maybe he’d been planning an expedition across the western ocean even before Stamford Bridge. He wanted one last adventure, one last great voyage of discovery, something to take him back to the glory days of his youth with the Varangian Guard. With his defeat at Stamford Bridge the voyage became an imperative. The reports would have suggested a land of great abundance, of lush meadows for pasturage and endless forests for shipbuilding, the two things the Vikings coveted above all else. And there was nothing to go back to Norway for. His prestige would have been shattered if he’d returned alive, whereas death assured his place amongst the heroes. The Heimskringla even records that his remaining army in Norway swore eternal allegiance to him after news of the defeat had reached them, even after they thought he was dead.”

“And he had his treasure,” Jack said.

“Chests of it,” O’Connor said. “They certainly weren’t going to the New World in search of gold. They already had so much they didn’t need any extra ballast. Silver coins, tens of thousands of them, Arab dirhams, English pennies of Cnut and Aethelred, coins from Harald’s empire and beyond. Gold and silver neck-torques, arm-rings, precious heirlooms of his ancestors. And all of Harald’s booty from his days with the Varangians in the Mediterranean, some of it melted down, some still intact. Priceless religious reliquaries and ancient jewellery. And to cap it all, the greatest treasure of Harald’s reign, the treasure which had been ennobled by his exploit in escaping Constantinople, which had come to mean far more than its weight in gold.”

“The menorah,” Jack murmured.

“If Vinland is the site of L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, then it’s pretty well due west from here, over more than two thousand miles of open ocean,” Maria said. “So what’s our longship doing way up in Baffin Bay at Ilulissat?”

“It’s in the sagas,” Jack replied. “Leif Eiriksson found Vinland by sailing first up the west coast of Greenland, then across to Helluland and Markland. These places correspond to Baffin Island and Labrador, and the staging point in Greenland must have been Disko Bay, at the narrowest point of the Davis Strait. Harald was following the best available navigational advice.”

“That’s what Kunzl must have worked out in the 1930s,” O’Connor said.

“So they overwintered at Ilulissat?” Maria asked.

“They were probably forced to stay by the pack-ice clogging up the sea,” Jack replied. “It would have been autumn when they arrived. The light gets poor, and ships get iced up by spray. Macleod said the slush ice begins to form in October, and when it hardens it can cut timbers like a saw. Overwintering would have been tough, but these were tough men used to hardship. They probably had some of the local Greenlander Vikings with them from the southern settlements, as guides and hunters. I wouldn’t be surprised if they camped in the same bay beside the icefjord where we saw Kangia, among the ancient tent circles.”

“It would have been especially tough on the wounded,” Maria said.

“Many must have perished on the voyage, and in the camp,” O’Connor replied. “By the time Halfdan died my guess is the number was so depleted they were easily able to spare one of the ships for the burial, the Wolf, the ship you saw in the ice. There weren’t enough hands left to man two ships.”

“So how did word get back?” Maria asked. “Two centuries later Richard of Holdingham knew they had reached Vinland, was confident enough to sketch it on his map. The archaeology indicates that the settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows was pretty short-lived, abandoned well before 1066, so it’s not as if there were regular supply trips that could pass on reports.”

“Jack was right about the Greenlanders,” O’Connor replied. “They were sympathetic to Harald, a fellow Norwegian, especially when they saw he had no intention of subjugating them and staying there. He swore them to secrecy, and the silver he gave them kept their trade with the Old World prosperous for generations to come. We know this because the felag sent out an expedition in search of Harald several generations later. Eirik Gnupsson, Bishop of Greenland and one of the felag, convinced his flock that he was a loyal follower of Harald, and learned what I have just recounted. He was told that Harald promised to leave a way-marker in Vinland if he and his companions decided to sail farther south. Richard must have been told this in the greatest secrecy, but nothing more. Eirik Gnupsson sailed for Vinland but was never heard of again. There was never another expedition, and the location of Vinland was lost to history. Even to the Greenlanders it became a kind of Avalon, a mythical promised land, ruled by the once and future king.”

“That reminds me,” Maria said. “The story of King Arthur. What about his queen, Guinevere? The menorah wasn’t the only thing Harald stole from Constantinople.”

“Ah. I was wondering when you were going to ask that.” O’Connor tapped out his pipe on the sand and smiled at her, their eyes meeting. “Legend has it that Harald was tended by a woman, her hair cropped short, dressed in the tunic and trousers of a man. History tells us that years earlier Harald had released the princess and returned her to Constantinople after he escaped. But we know your namesake was never kidnapped at all, that she was a willing participant. It was Maria who released Harald and his Varangian guardsmen from prison the night before their escape. She stuck with him through thick and thin, through his marriage of convenience to the Kievan princess Elizabeth, through all he needed to do on his road to kingship. She tamed him, became the true guiding light of his life. And in his ultimate bid for power, to conquer England in 1066, she accompanied him, to a kingdom where she would at last have been able to assume her birthright as a princess. Harald planned to install her as his consort, to crown her Queen of England.”

“Harald was fifty-one in 1066; she was maybe ten years younger,” Maria said. “Were there any other women in the two longships, when they set off to Vinland?”

“Maria was the only one.”

“Not the best advance planning for a new colony.”

“The Viking mentality.” Jack smiled. “Steal what you need when you get there. And remember, they were probably half crazed with exhaustion and pain, unable to think straight. Most of them probably thought they were going to Valhalla.”

The orb of the sun began to sink into the sea in the west, casting an orange glow over the eroded folds of bedrock that protruded from the slopes on either side of the bay. They looked silently out to sea, absorbing the muted radiance of the evening. “They say the holy isle is bathed in the bright light of angels,” O’Connor said. “It’s a light you see in places like this, where heaven and earth seem to meet, and in places where the crust of human endeavour has been peeled away to the bare rock beneath. The heart of the Forum in Rome, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.”

“Both places where the menorah has been,” Maria said.

“I’ve thought that,” O’Connor murmured.

Jack leaned forward, his eyes suddenly ablaze as he stared at the horizon. “The menorah was here, with Harald, at this very spot,” he said. “Ever since I saw Halfdan in the ice I’ve known we were on the trail, almost as if something were willing us on. All we need now is some clue, something more concrete about where they went after leaving the icefjord.”

O’Connor looked at Jack penetratingly, lighting his pipe again. “Halfdan gave you battle-luck, remember? He passed on the flame. Somehow I think there’s more ahead for you.”

They were beginning to get up when Jeremy came bounding along the sand, and they could see the burly figure of Costas straggling some distance behind. Jeremy came to a halt in front of them, flushed and excited, his ebullience back in full force.

“Well, what is it?” Jack said amiably. “Something else you’ve been concealing?”

“Not exactly.” Jeremy was struggling to regain his breath. “The Mappa Mundi. While you were in the berg. I knew it.”

“Slow down,” Jack said. “Take your time.”

Jeremy sank to his knees and extracted a rolled sheet from his carrying case, then took a few deep breaths and began to regain his composure. “Sorry. But this has got to be the most exciting thing yet.”

“Well?”

“Those hours I spent in my cabin. Avoiding you all,” Jeremy said apologetically. “Well, I was poring over a digital version of the map we found in Hereford, Richard’s exemplar, twelve hundred dpi resolution. Something was nagging me, something I thought I saw when Maria and I first unrolled the map in the cathedral chamber.”

“Go on.”

“I had our imagery lab in Oxford do a multi-spectral scan. Take a look.”

Jack took the sheet and unrolled it on his lap. It was a blown-up image of the lower left corner of the Mappa Mundi exemplar, showing the extraordinary image of Vinland and the New World they had first examined in Cornwall a few days previously, with the one inscription referring to Leif Eiriksson and the other to Harald Hardrada and the treasure of Michelgard. Jack suddenly saw what Jeremy meant. “There’s another drawing underneath!”

“Here it is, isolated and enhanced. Costas helped me do it.” Jeremy handed him another sheet, and Maria and O’Connor craned over to look. It was a simple linear tracing, a deep U-shape with the line bending back down on either side and trailing off, and two irregular circles in front.

“It’s Vinland!” Maria exclaimed. “It’s exactly the same as the image of Vinland on the map that superimposed it, only on a bigger scale. The U-shape is the bay, and Vinland is marked at the head of the bay on the superimposed map. I was at the Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland last year. The archaeological site is at the head of the bay, exactly where Vinland is marked here, and these are the promontories on either side that extend out into the Strait of Belle Isle. Those circles are the islets off the coast, Little Sacred Island and Great Sacred Island. They would have been crucial navigational waymarkers for the Vikings.”

“That’s what’s so fantastic,” Jeremy said.

“What do you mean?” Jack asked.

“Take a close look at the larger one.” Jeremy passed him a magnifying glass. “There, where there seems to be a smudge.”

Jack slid the tracing aside and looked again at the imaging scan. “I can see a cross mark on it, a definite cross,” he murmured. “And that smudge on the side. Are those letters?”

“Runes.”

Jack’s excitement mounted. “Translation?”

“There are two lines,” Jeremy said. “Even with the image intensifier I can barely read them, but I’m pretty sure of it. The first line says Haraldi konungi, Harald the king. The second line has two words, gold and Michelgard, the gold of Michelgard. That’s Constantinople, of course.”

“Good God.”

“Richard of Holdingham must have done this sketch to begin with, but then had second thoughts. It’s too exact, it gives too much away. So he erased it and drew the more generalized map showing Vinland, with the Leif Eiriksson inscription. Then he thought again and decided to add a reference to Harald Hardrada after all, that he had been in these parts with the treasure of Michelgard.”

“The first sketch is telling us something,” Jack murmured. “It’s telling us something incredibly precise.”

“X marks the spot.” O’Connor smiled broadly, for the first time since they had seen him. “This suddenly makes it all worth while.”

Costas suddenly appeared over the head of the dune, looking slightly flustered after his route march over the island. “The chopper’s returned,” he panted as he joined them. “Macleod wants to know whether you’ll be returning to Seaquest II or going back to Istanbul. They’re standing by in Disko Bay awaiting instructions. They’re scheduled to sail north to carry out research on the edge of the polar ice cap, and some of the scientists are getting distinctly itchy feet.” He leaned over and spoke his next words quietly, directly into Jack’s ear. “I also called Tom York on Sea Venture to check on their progress in the Golden Horn. We’ve got a problem. One of the crew went AWOL two days ago, the ship’s second officer, the Estonian we recently appointed.”

Jack nodded once, grimly. “I remember him. It’s been niggling me since O’Connor suggested a traitor. The Estonian was listening in from the bridge when we first discussed the menorah with Hubermeyer in the navigation room.”

The two men glanced at each other, tacitly agreeing that there was nothing that could be done about the Estonian at the moment. Costas straightened, then suddenly noticed the sheet of paper on Jack’s lap and knelt for a closer look.

“A treasure map,” he exclaimed at his normal volume. “My favourite. Where is it?”

Jack gazed at Costas with a familiar gleam in his eye, and then pointed his finger at the glowing orb of orange on the horizon.

“Due west, about twenty-three hundred miles. You can tell Macleod to dig out the copy of the Viking sagas I left him. It tells you how to lay on a course for Vinland.”

O’Connor stood up. “It’s time for you to go, it seems?” He shook Jack by the hand. “I don’t know where my path will lead me. Just do one thing for me, will you, Jack?”

“You name it.”

“Find out what happened to the menorah.”

Jack flashed a smile and put his other hand on O’Connor’s shoulder. “We’ll do our best. Things have gone pretty well since Halfdan lent me his axe. I think there might just be a little battle-luck left.” He suddenly looked deadly serious. “And you must take the greatest care.”