Crusader Gold

14

Thirty-six hours later, Jack lay in pitch blackness on an earthen floor on the other side of the Atlantic, cocooned in a sleeping bag and insulated from the damp ground by a Therm-a-Rest. He shifted his rolled-up clothes to make a more comfortable pillow and stared into the darkness. Beside him Costas was snoring loudly, and he could hear the occasional rustle from Jeremy beyond his feet. He had leapt at the chance to spend the night in a reconstructed Viking longhouse on the very spot where Leif Eiriksson and his band of Norse adventurers had built their first crude shelter on the shores of North America a thousand years before. But for Jack it had been a restless night, plagued by ill-defined dreams. His mind was still full of the extraordinary account O’Connor had given them on Iona two days before, of a secret brotherhood that had spanned the centuries and come to be associated with the worst horror of modern times. Every time Jack dozed off, the same images crowded his mind-snarling wolf-gods and swirling eagles, the seven-branched candlestick and the dreaded swastika, images that no longer seemed like dislocated fragments of history but meshed together to tell a story full of potency and danger.

Jack awoke with a start to a steaming mug of coffee thrust in his face. Costas gave him a gentle kick and leaned his stubbly face towards his friend. “Rise and shine,” he said cheerfully. “We’ve only got the site to ourselves for the morning. The Parks Canada people need to open it for a tour group at noon.”

Jack grunted and quickly raised himself, pulling on his jeans and blue fisherman’s sweater and lacing up his boots. He flinched as he rubbed against the wound in his thigh, his legacy from the iceberg. In the sunlight streaming through the low entrance he could see Jeremy rolling up his Therm-a-Rest and packing his sleeping bag. They had arrived in darkness the night before, and for the first time Jack could appreciate the dimensions of the longhouse. It was elongated and low-set, built entirely of turf on a timber frame with a stamped dirt floor and a pitched roof. He could see how it might have accommodated twenty or thirty people, several family groups, clustered around hearths evenly spaced along the chamber. It would have been a damp, dark place, fetid and rank during the long winter months. He could understand why the Vikings always yearned for the open air and the sea, for the summer months tending their flocks and embarking on long voyages of raiding and exploration.

Jack took his coffee and stooped through the entrance to the world outside, shielding his eyes against the glare of the morning sun. On the grass a short distance away was the red and white form of the Canadian Coast Guard Sikorsky S-61N Sea King helicopter that had brought them to the remote northern peninsula of Newfoundland from Goose Bay in Labrador, the nearest airfield where the IMU Embraer jet had been able to land. Jack turned from the helicopter and looked at the site around him. The longhouse was one of three sod buildings reconstructed on the edge of the original Viking settlement, only yards from the meadow where three dwellings and a primitive smithy had been excavated by the Norwegian archaeologists who had discovered the site in 1960. They had found only low ridges where there had once been turf walls, ghostly imprints of post holes and fire pits, and a meagre handful of artefacts, but it was enough to prove conclusively that the Vikings had been here. Jack looked across the lush grassland to the seashore and out to the rocky islets with their sparse vegetation framed against the northern horizon. The site had none of the splendour of an ancient tomb or a lost city, but it had been one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time, irrefutable proof that adventurers from the Old World had visited the Americas five hundred years before Christopher Columbus. It was the first known European settlement in North America beyond Greenland, the first place where iron was smelted in the New World. And now Jack knew they were poised to open a whole new chapter in the history of the site, an episode that could scarcely have been dreamt of before the Mappa Mundi find. As he finished his coffee he felt the darkness of the night lift from him, and he began to tingle with excitement.

“Hard to believe Iona lies more than two thousand miles to the east.” Jeremy’s tousled head appeared through the entranceway, and he stood beside Jack rubbing his eyes and cradling a coffee. “But it looks much the same, doesn’t it? This would have been familiar terrain to the Vikings.”

“This must be home turf for you too,” Jack said with a twinkle in his eye.

“My mother was Canadian, from Nova Scotia,” Jeremy replied. “Visiting this place as a kid was what inspired me to study Norse archaeology. It’s amazing how few people come here, even thought it’s a UNESCO World Heritage site. Read some history books and you’d still think the European involvement with North America began with John Cabot in 1497.”

“But the Vikings didn’t stick around.” Costas had caught Jeremy’s words as he stacked their bedding outside the longhouse, and he came over to join them. “I thought L’Anse aux Meadows was more an outpost, a seasonal camp.”

Jeremy nodded. “If we go by the archaeology alone, this place was occupied for a few seasons at most, then maybe visited sporadically for a few years after that. The three longhouses could have accommodated upwards of a hundred people, so maybe there was an attempt to establish a permanent settlement. There were women here too, and livestock. But it didn’t last. We’re talking around AD 1000, maybe a little later. Iceland had been colonised from Norway about the end of the ninth century, Greenland by Eirik the Red about a century later, so that’s probably where the settlers here came from. The style of turf house is typical of Iceland and Greenland at that period. Leif Eiriksson was the son of Eirik the Red, as the name implies.”

“They were probably testing the boundaries of their world,” Jack reflected. “The Phoenicians did the same. The farthest Phoenician outposts date from the earliest period of exploration, and were all short-lived. Mogador in west Africa, Cornwall in Britain. Attractive trading potential, but too far away and vulnerable to last for long. It looks like the same story here.”

“That’s a good model,” Jeremy said, ruffling his hair. “Excavations here in the 1970s revealed lots of evidence for woodworking, for preparing logs and planks suitable for shipbuilding. It’s a little difficult to envisage now, but there were dense forests of deciduous trees reaching right up to these meadows. It would have seemed like a gold mine to the Icelanders and Greenlanders, who had no forests of their own and had to import large timbers from Scandinavia. They repaired their ships here and may even have built new vessels, but most of the timber was probably shipped back to Greenland and Iceland.”

“I’m baffled,” Costas said. “With all that wood, plus great pasturage and fishing, why didn’t they establish a permanent colony?”

“Scraelings,” Jack said.

“Who?”

“The Norse name for the native peoples, the Indians,” Jeremy replied. “It means wretches, which says it all for the Viking attitude. There was quite a large population in Newfoundland at that time, and their war canoes and bows made them more than a match for the Vikings. The archaeology doesn’t give us much to go on, but the sagas tell an ugly story. When Leif Eiriksson first arrived, relations with the natives were tense from the outset. Soon there were confrontations, violent clashes. The occasional murder by one side or the other may have turned to outright war, with more distant bands joining in and the Vikings soon being overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers. They probably had to direct all their energy to stockading this place, to building a wooden palisade around their dwellings. It would have been impossible to tend livestock or hunt and fish, and in their weakened state illness would have been rife. They would have been unable to fell trees and prepare timber for shipment back home, their main reason for being here. The sagas tell us that Leif’s brother Thorvold was killed by an arrow, and that may have been the death knell for the settlement.”

“Sounds like the Pilgrim fathers in America, at Jamestown,” Jack said. “Hemmed in by hostile natives, plagued by starvation and disease.”

“There’s an even darker story.” Jeremy took out a battered paperback from his pocket. “These are the Vinland Sagas, passed down by word of mouth and written down in Iceland in the thirteenth century. They’re difficult to read as history, sometimes contradictory and confused, but the discovery of this site proves they’re based on real voyages. According to the Greenlanders’ Saga, another of Eirik the Red’s offspring, his daughter Freydis, organized an expedition to Leifsbu?ir, ‘Leif’s Houses,’ their name for the Vinland settlement. There were two ships, one with about thirty Greenlanders, the other with about the same number of Icelanders. Once they’d disembarked there was some kind of dispute, maybe involving women, some deep-rooted animosity, that led Freydis and the Greenlanders to run berserk and murder all of the Icelanders in one awful rampage. Freydis herself murdered the five Icelandic women, and probably their children as well. If it truly happened, the dark deed would probably have taken place at night inside one of these longhouses.”

“Blood feud,” Jack murmured, remembering his troubled sleep. “I hope that’s not our most enduring legacy from the Vikings.”

“Do we have firm dates for any of this?” Costas asked.

“The radiocarbon dates look about right for the foundation of the settlement, around AD 1000, with the other expeditions recounted in the sagas taking place over the next fifteen years or so. Freydis’ expedition may have been the last.”

“Until Harald Hardrada.”

“That’s what we’re here to find out.” Jack rubbed his hands in anticipation and eyed the compact chart case that Jeremy had placed alongside their bags. “It’s time we looked at that map again.”

Twenty minutes later they stood on the foreshore a few hundred metres from the archaeological site. Behind them lay the gently undulating meadows that surrounded the Viking settlement, and on either side the low-lying coast swept round the tidal flats of the bay. Beside them two Canadian Coast Guard crewmen were readying a lightweight Zodiac inflatable boat they had carried down from the helicopter. Jack shielded his eyes and looked out to sea. The light was pellucid, with the clarity they had seen in the icefjord, and the breeze carried with it a vestige of the chill air that flowed off the ice to the north even in June. For a moment Jack found himself thinking of the iceberg far away in the fjord, wondering whether it would finally melt somewhere near these shores and put Halfdan to rest on the trail of his companions. He brushed the thought aside and focussed on the low rocky mass visible a few kilometres offshore.

“Great Sacred Isle,” he murmured. “That’s what we came here for.”

“There’s no doubt about the identification.” Jeremy was holding a copy of Richard of Holdingham’s sketch and comparing it to a photocopy from the local Admiralty Chart. “According to Maria, Richard was a painstaking scholar and would have transcribed the map as accurately as he could, probably copying from an original sketch which somehow made its way to him from Greenland.” He suddenly put down the sketch and rushed over to a nearby hummock, where a cloud of steam was rising from a small camping stove.

“So what exactly are we looking for?” Costas asked. “Pottery, coins, the odd rusty battle-axe?”

Jack smiled at his friend. “Not a chance. Eight years of excavation at L’Anse aux Meadows in the 1960s produced exactly four Norse artefacts: a bronze pin, a stone oil lamp, a spindle whorl and a gilded brass fragment. And that was for a community that may have numbered over a hundred, and was here for several years. The Norse picked up what they dropped and didn’t throw away anything. If Harald Hardrada chose to leave something, we may find it. If not, we probably won’t find anything.”

Jeremy came tottering over the grass carrying two wooden bowls and spoons, and thrust them at Jack and Costas. “Carved them myself when I was a kid,” he said proudly. “Exact copies of Norse bowls from Greenland. And the stuff inside’s authentic too.”

Costas peered suspiciously at the congealed mass in his bowl and patted it with his spoon. “Looks old enough,” he said. “And smells like a resin factory. I take it this isn’t food?”

“My own recipe.” Jeremy affected to ignore him. “Based on the analysis of Norse refuse sites. Coarse barley flour, ground peas and pine bark. A kind of gruel. Quite good really.”

“Where’s yours?”

“Couldn’t wait. Ate it already.”

“Right.” Costas sniffed his spoon and took an experimental lick. “God almighty. Refuse is about right.”

“It’s all you’re getting. The total Viking experience. No modern food allowed at L’Anse aux Meadows.”

Costas grumbled, and Jeremy turned to Jack, who had quickly polished off his bowl and was staring again at the map.

“This was the place of no return,” Jack said. “If they really got this far, none of Harald’s men ever made it back home alive. They were on a one-way ticket to the end of the world.”

“What about their guides?” Costas spoke through a sticky mouthful, his eyes fixed balefully on Jeremy.

“I doubt whether any of the Greenlanders accompanied Harald this far,” Jack replied. “With only the one longship remaining after Halfdan’s burial they would have had no way of returning, and even at Ilulissat they would have had to await rescue by the Norse hunters and fishermen who made their way up to Nor?rseta in the summer.”

“Remind me,” Costas said. “We’re here because of the map, the depiction of Vinland with the reference to Harald Hardrada on the Mappa Mundi. How did the information that Harald had been here get back to England, to the felag and Richard of Holdingham all those years later?”

“From what O’Connor was telling us, that bishop who arrived in Greenland in the early twelfth century, the one who was a member of the felag, managed to coax an account of Harald’s expedition out of the local Norse. The guides who had returned from the icefjord to the western settlement in Greenland must have told of Harald’s departure for Vinland, and the story would have passed down through the generations. If the history of Iceland is anything to go by, the Greenlanders must have had a rich tradition of sagas, some of them passed on secretively. None of the sagas survived the mysterious disappearance of the Greenlanders a few centuries later.”

“What about that cross on the map, X marks the spot?” Costas said. “If that really does mark something out there, how could the Greenlanders possibly have known?”

“Easy,” Jeremy said. “The Norse left way-markers, navigational signposts. They would have been essential to retrace voyages in such a huge area that was hardly explored. Some of the stone cairns around Baffin Bay attributed to the Inuit may in fact have been raised by the Norse. The Greenlanders’ Saga even tells us how Thorvold, the one who was shot down by the Indians, raised a ship’s keel as a marker on a cape somewhere to the north-east of here. It became known as Kjalarnes, Keel Cape.”

“So you’re suggesting Great Sacred Isle was a known way-marker.”

“I think there was more to it than that,” Jack said. “For the island to be singled out so precisely on the map suggests something more, something closely associated with Harald’s progress. It’s just a guess, but I wonder whether Harald promised his Greenlander guides before leaving Ilulissat that he would leave some mark of his progress. An obvious place for the Greenlanders to suggest was their own navigational way-marker for Leifsbu?ir at Great Sacred Isle, a place Harald could easily find. The Greenlanders may never have ventured here to find out whether he made it, but the memory of Harald’s promise lived on.”

“Let’s see if it’s waiting for us then.” Costas handed Jeremy his empty bowl, then gestured towards his rucksack. “Got any mead or beer to wash that down with?”

“Out of luck there, I’m afraid. But what I have got is just as authentic. It’s a kind of sour runny yoghurt, made from cow’s whey left in an open vat for a few weeks. Best served warm. If you’ll just give me a minute with the stove…” Costas was already halfway to the beach, backing off with his hands held up defensively. Jack grinned at Jeremy and jerked his head towards the Zodiac. “I think breakfast is over.” A few moments later they were zipping up the survival suits and life jackets lent to them by the Coast Guard for the trip. They helped push the boat out into the shallows and then hopped aboard, sitting on the pontoons while one of the crewmen cranked up the outboard. As they chugged slowly out through the bay they turned and watched the low coastline receding in their wake.

“The tide’s in,” Jeremy shouted over the engine. “When it’s out, this whole bay is dry land. The Vikings caught salmon by laying traps at low tide, then returning on the next low tide. Harald’s men would have had no trouble stocking up with food.”

The crewman opened the throttle as they left the bay, and they moved from the clear shallows to the greenish black sheen of the open sea. Ahead of them the island was suddenly lit by a brilliant shaft of sunlight, shining through a gap in the clouds that were beginning to fill the sky.

“A shard from Mjollnir,” Jeremy shouted.

“What?”

“The Norse believed that lightning and shafts of light were shards struck off Mjollnir, Thor’s hammer,” Jeremy shouted. “It’s usually a good sign.”

“Not another Norse omen,” Costas replied. “I’m beginning to dream wolf-dogs and blood-eagles.”

“Don’t worry.” Jack grinned at Costas through the spray. “You’ll get over it. And you’ll soon have your feet back firmly on the ground.”