Crusader Gold

7

An hour later the mighty form of the iceberg loomed before them, a jagged wall of white cut by bands of translucent blue and green. Jack zipped up his orange survival suit and adjusted his life jacket, glancing back at the sleek lines of Seaquest II receding in their wake. Beside him Maria tightened her grip on the safety line, and Macleod cast her a reassuring glance from the opposite pontoon.

“It’s a wee bit of a roller-coaster ride, but Henrik here’s an expert. He’s been playing in these waters all his life.”

The Danish crewman grinned and stood up in front of the Evinrude 120 outboard, holding the line of the painter taut in one hand and the throttle in the other. He began to drive the Zodiac like a chariot through the slew of brash that covered the sea, effortlessly swinging the big engine from side to side to avoid the growlers that lurked treacherously just below the surface. After five minutes of weaving through the ice debris they reached a pair of red buoys, the entrance to a floating boom that kept a large area in front of the berg free of ice. As they slowly drove the last few hundred metres, they watched a pair of men ascend the huge face in front of them using crampons and ice axes, their forms diminutive against the vast bulk of the berg. Already they could feel the cold radiating off the ice, a chill aura that sent a shiver through Maria. She had insisted on joining them on the trip to the berg, but now she felt unnerved, as if she had strayed too far into a world beyond her experience.

“It’s like a living thing,” she said. “Almost like it’s breathing.”

“The cold exhalation actually shows it’s melting, and fast,” Macleod said. “Soon even the calved face in front of us is going to be too dangerous to work.”

They drew up alongside a floating dock about twenty metres off the berg, the bobbing form of an Aquapod submersible visible on one side and two Zodiacs on the other. A twisted mass of cable was being lowered through the dock into the sea, and a group of men stood by wearing black IMU E-suits, all-environment dry suits that would prolong their survival even in these frigid waters should something go wrong. After a few moments the cable halted and a familiar form disengaged himself from the group with a wave.

“Good work, guys. I’ve done all I can here.”

With an agility belying his stout frame, Costas crossed the platform and on to the Zodiac, landing with a crash on the floorboards in front of Jack. He had preceded them to the berg by half an hour, and had clearly been on overdrive. He staggered up and stripped his E-suit down to the waist, sat down and cooled off for a moment, then slipped on the orange windbreaker and life jacket passed to him by the crewman.

“I’m good to go.”

The crewman pushed the Zodiac off and swung it back towards the line of the boom, driving slowly out to sea and then veering right once they had passed the buoys at the entrance. Five minutes later, the boom now out of sight and the northern edge of the berg behind them, Macleod motioned the crewman to drive a short way into the fjord and then ease back on the throttle and cut the engine. With the roar of the outboard gone everything suddenly seemed preternaturally still, an illusion of serenity, as if by crossing over the underwater threshold they had entered a fantasy world of ice, had become one with the towering crystal palaces that surrounded them.

“Don’t be deluded,” Macleod said. “There are titanic forces at work here.”

As if on cue the silence was rent by a tremendous bang, followed by a percussive shockwave through the air and an immense rushing sound as a wall of ice slid off the glacier far away on the edge of the ice cap. The noise seemed to resonate off all the bergs trapped in the fjord, an eerie chorus of competing echoes that seemed to pummel the Zodiac from every direction and then trailed off like a long sigh. In the unearthly silence that followed, the bergs around them seemed even more awesome, their own stature more puny and impotent.

“The sea’s often this placid in the summer,” the crewman said. “But it’s also the most active time for the glacier. And the warmer it gets down here, the more likely you are to get a clash with the cold air coming off the ice cap. It can happen very quickly.”

He pointed up the fjord to the eastern horizon, to a band of sky over the ice that could have been dark blue or dark grey, but their attention quickly shifted to a growler the size of a car just ahead of them. It had suddenly begun to rock from side to side, an alarming sight that seemed to defy reason on the glassy sea. Soon it rocked more and more aggressively and then tumbled over, revealing a surface sculpted smooth and sending a ripple coursing out into the fjord. The brash surged around them like a slurry of broken glass, and other growlers reared up uncomfortably close out of the depths.

“That was frightening,” Maria exclaimed.

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Macleod replied. “When a big berg rolls, you might not feel much out here, but a ten-metre tidal wave can hit the shore. You don’t want to go beachcombing around here.”

“Don’t speak too soon,” Costas said. “We want our berg to stay nice and quiet for at least the next twenty-four hours.”

Jack gazed back at the creaking mass of ice and then down the fjord towards the glacier. Outside the threshold the bergs seemed to glide majestically towards the open sea, but inside it was as if they were inchoate, shackled and straining to go, their jagged edges still raw and fresh from the violence of their birth. The power of the place was all the more awesome because so much of it was invisible, convulsions of energy that pulsed unseen through the depths each time a slab of ice fell into the sea, a steady unleashing of force seen like this nowhere else on earth. For Jack it was a new measure of human frailty in the face of nature, an envelope he seemed to be stretching farther and farther with each new project.

Macleod nodded at the crewman, who pulled the starter cord and fired up the engine. The Zodiac turned back in the direction of the open sea and then accelerated towards the shore, its wake rocking the brash that extended out from the fjord in long tendrils of white. The crewman found a patch of clear water and opened the throttle wide, planing the Zodiac in a wide arc towards the rocky promontory that marked the northern edge of the fjord. Jack held on to the safety line and leaned back from the pontoon where he was sitting near the front of the boat, letting the freezing spray lash his face and relishing the tang of salt in his mouth. It had been several months since he had dived and he had missed the taste of the sea. He saw Maria smile at him as she clung on beside him, and he watched as Macleod and Costas ducked down and held their hoods against the spray. He remembered his last dive with Costas, deep in the bowels of the volcano six months before, a dive that had reawakened his worst trauma. The dive they planned now was even more confining, and would be one of the most extraordinary they had ever undertaken. The fears were still there, but under control, and all he felt now was a sense of overwhelming elation. The Golden Horn project had reignited his passion for archaeology, but it had been directed from the bridge of a ship, one crucial step removed from revealing history with his own hands. He was itching to get underwater again, to be the first to see and touch fabulous treasures lost for centuries in the ocean depths.

As the engine powered down, the roar of the outboard was replaced by an eerie chorus of howling and yipping, and they realised that the valley ahead was dotted with dogs chained to posts, some of them baying with hunger and others gorging on hunks of meat left for them in their muddy pens.

“The Greenlanders still use dog sleds in winter,” Macleod said, his hood now pushed back. “Much of the terrain’s too rugged for snowmobiles, and the ice cap’s a long way from fuel. They keep the dogs chained up all summer long and shoot them when they get too old to work. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but then they’re not pets.”

“I seem to recall that when they excavated the last abandoned settlements of the Norse Greenlanders, they found dog bones with cut marks on them, their final meal,” Jack said. “Ancestors of these dogs.”

“Maybe that’s why they’re howling,” Costas said.

Maria stared apprehensively at the dogs after the others had scrambled over the bow on to the pebbly beach, and it took Jack proffering his hand to persuade her to join them. Macleod quickly led them to higher ground, above the danger zone from berg displacement, then responded to a call on his two-way radio and handed it to Maria. She stopped and spoke briefly into it, then passed it back to Macleod and resumed her place beside Jack.

“That was Jeremy,” she said. “He stayed on board to finish analysing the Mappa Mundi inscription. He thinks he’s got something else. It could be really exciting, but he needs a bit more time.”

“Should be just ready for us when we finish our dive,” Jack said. “We’ll need to sit down and work out where we go from here.”

“I still can’t believe you’re doing it,” she said, gazing at him with concern. “Sometimes I think you have a death wish.”

“This is your first time with IMU in the field.” Jack grinned. “As James said, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

Despite the warmth of the summer sun, they kept their survival suits zipped up against the insects, and followed Macleod from the beach escarpment up an eroded path towards a low saddle in the valley. No vegetation stood more than a few feet high, but the bleak rock of the surrounding ridges was offset by lush beds of moss and grass that carpeted the valley floor.

“The ruins ahead are ancient Sermermiut,” Macleod said. “A sacred place for the local Inuit. People have lived here for at least four thousand years, since the first Greenlanders made their way across the frozen sea from the Canadian Arctic. The town of Ilulissat is over the ridge to the north, but it was only founded in 1741 with the modern Danish occupation of Greenland. The Danes called it Jacobshavn, but the Greenlandic name is a little more appropriate.”

“What does Ilulissat mean?” Costas asked.

“Icebergs.”

Costas grunted, and they trudged off the path over a marshy depression towards the ancient site, waving away the clouds of midges that seemed to rise from the bog like mist. “What about the Vikings?”

“To the Norse this whole stretch of coast up to the polar ice cap was Nordrseta, the northern hunting grounds, a forbidding place where hardly any Viking remains have ever been found.” Macleod stopped, waiting for Costas to catch up. “The Norse only settled permanently where they could have some hope of a traditional Scandinavian way of life, stock-raising and basic agriculture. In Greenland that meant the fertile fjord valleys near the southern tip, where Eirik the Red arrived with his family in the early eleventh century. Most of the colonists came from Norway and Iceland. Eventually there were hundreds of homesteads, a population that peaked at several thousand, and they even built crude stone churches after they converted to Christianity.”

“What happened to them?” Costas asked.

“One of the most haunting mysteries of the past,” Macleod said. “They clung on for generations, trading walrus ivory and furs back to Europe, but the last known contact was in the fifteenth century. When the Catholic Church sent an expedition to Greenland in 1721 to check that they were still God-fearing Christians, they found no sign of them.”

“Believe it or not, the Crusades were probably a factor,” Maria said.

“Huh?” said Costas. “The Crusades?”

“In 1124 the Norwegian king Sigurd Jorsalfar established an episcopal see in Greenland. That meant the Church could impose taxes on the Norse settlers, adding greatly to their hardships. Sigurd was known as ‘The Crusader,’ one of a number of Scandinavians who joined the Crusaders in the twelfth century. He had the gall to exact a special tax for the Crusades from Greenland, of all places. They paid it in walrus tusks and polar bear hides.”

“That’d be handy in Jerusalem,” Costas muttered. “The Crusades really were a global madness.”

“The Church was undoubtedly an economic burden,” Macleod said. “But others think the Norse in Greenland were wiped out by the natives, or by English pirates, or even by the Black Death. I think environment was the biggest factor. The so-called Little Ice Age of the medieval period blocked off the sea routes that were their lifeline back home, with sea ice remaining all summer long round the coasts. The cold would also have ruined their agriculture, and maybe they were unable or unwilling to adapt to the native way of life and survive by hunting and fishing.”

“So the last of the Vikings were done in by climate change,” Costas said. “Not exactly a glorious end for a warrior elite, was it?”

“Let’s wait and see,” Jack murmured. “It could be that the real warriors among them got farther west than this.”

The ruins of the ancient site were barely recognisable, humps of turf and low circles of unworked rocks set close into the ground, some of them nearly swallowed up by the alluvial soil and others exposed in patches of peaty bog. On a slight platform on the seaward edge was a low, dome-shaped tent about fifteen feet across, its frame of whalebones covered with layers of sealskins and musk-ox hide. A thin wisp of smoke rose from a hole in the centre.

“Some of these stones are tent circles, used to batten down tents against the wind,” Macleod explained. “You see them all over the Arctic, the main evidence of ancient habitation. People haven’t lived in this place for generations, but it’s hallowed ground for the Inuit of Ilulissat. Sometimes the elders who remain close to the old ways come here to prepare for death. Their families erect traditional tents inside the sacred stone circles of their ancestors when they know the time is close.”

A team of lean white huskies had been chained to stakes surrounding the tent, and as Macleod led the others forward the dogs strained at their fetters and slavered menacingly at them. Maria held back uncertainly, but Jack led her on, careful to keep outside the radius of the chains. The growling had alerted the occupants of the tent, and a flap opened, revealing a Greenlander woman wearing a traditional sealskin parka, her dark hair tied back and embellished with beads. As she looked up they recognized Inuva, who had left Seaquest II by Zodiac an hour before them. She hushed the dogs and beckoned to Macleod, who knelt down and exchanged a few words with her before the flap closed again.

“Inuva’s the old man’s daughter.” Macleod turned back to the others and spoke quietly. “He knows Danish but will only speak Kalaallisut, the local Inuit dialect, so Inuva will translate for us. His name is Kangia, which is also their name for the icefjord. He’s well over eighty years old, a great age for these people. They have a tough life. In his youth he was one of the most renowned hunters of Ilulissat, venturing hundreds of miles along the edge of the ice cap with his dogs, paddling his umiak far beyond the last settlement to the north.”

They stooped under the flap as Macleod held it open, then he followed them in. Jack’s eyes smarted from the acrid smoke rising from the hearth, fed by slabs of dried musk-ox dung. Macleod motioned for them to sit down below the smoke on a ring of hides arranged around the fire. As their eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, they could see that the far side of the tent was occupied by a wooden sled, its rails dark with age but beautifully carved with flowing animal shapes. Sitting on the edge, draped in blankets, was an old Inuit man, his face leathery and gnarled and his long white hair flowing free over his shoulders. As he looked at them they could see that his eyes were dimmed by snow blindness, and his skin had the grey pallor of approaching death. With great effort he began to speak, and Inuva translated the soft clicking sounds of the native Greenlandic every time he paused.

“My father says that since time immemorial his people have lived here, and outsiders have come and gone,” she said softly. “Now it is nearly time for him to leave and join the dog sleds of his ancestors, as they speed across the ice cap for all eternity.” The old man extended a wizened hand out of the blankets and picked up a worn photograph on the sled beside him, nodding silently at Macleod as he passed it to him.

“This is why we’re here,” Macleod said. “Inuva told him about our research ship in the fjord, and it was she who summoned me to Kangia two days ago. Take a look at the picture.”

Macleod passed the photograph to Jack, and Maria and Costas shifted closer to get a better view. It was a faded black-and-white image of a group of men dressed in full polar gear, standing beside wooden sleds laden with equipment and surrounded by dogs.

“Some time before the Second World War, judging by the gear,” Jack said. “The 1920s, maybe 1930s.” He paused, then peered more closely. “That older man in the centre. Isn’t that Knud Rasmussen? I know he was born in Jakobshavn.”

“Kangia was one of his dog-handlers,” Macleod said. “He’s the boy on the left.”

“So Kangia knew Knud Rasmussen!” Jack looked in awe at the old Inuit, then glanced at Costas. “One of the most celebrated polar explorers, half Danish, half Inuit. The first person to make it all the way across the Greenland ice cap.”

“Rasmussen was a father figure to Kangia, and encouraged him to keep the old ways. Kangia revered him and admired his respect for native traditions. Which is more than can be said for these characters.” Macleod took a waterproof photograph sleeve out of his inner jacket pocket and passed it over. “Kangia also gave me this.”

“Ahnenerbe?” Jack’s expression suddenly became grim.

“Correct. I scanned the picture and did some research before you arrived. A German expedition came to Jakobshavn in 1938, a year before the war. They needed dog-handlers, and Kangia was an obvious choice.”

The photograph showed two European men standing against a backdrop of rock and ice. From the shape of the promontory the setting was clearly Sermermiut, near where they were now, but the line of the icebergs formed a continuous wall along the threshold of the fjord, as it had done more than fifty years ago before the glacier began to recede. Both men were dressed in the standard expedition gear of the day, thick sweaters, heavy woollen jackets and plus-four trousers tucked into knee-high socks. The man on the right was tall and handsome, perhaps in his mid-thirties, with a shock of blond hair, but was standing slightly apart as if reluctant to be photographed. The other man was small, dark-haired, with pinched features, with one leg bent and his right hand on his knee, staring imperiously into the camera. With his left hand he was holding a pair of measuring calipers over the head of a young Inuit man sitting awkwardly on a rock in front of him, easily recognisable from the previous picture as Kangia. It was like a hunter posing with his trophy, only it was far more chilling than that. On his left arm the European man was wearing a red band bearing the black symbol of the swastika.

Jack glanced at Costas. “Ahnenerbe meant ‘Ancestral Heritage.’ It was a department of the SS set up before the war by Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s deputy. Devoted to the investigation of the ancestral origins of the Aryan race.”

“What on earth were they doing here?”

“Believe it or not, probably searching for Atlantis.” Jack gave Costas a wry look. “The Nazis thought the Atlanteans were the original Aryans. In the late 1930s the Ahnenerbe sent expeditions all over the world-to Tibet, to the depths of Mesoamerica, to the Arctic. They believed they could find the purest descendants of the Atlanteans in the remotest regions, in areas cut off from the rest of humanity. One of their techniques was phrenology, measuring heads for so-called Aryan features. That’s what this moron is doing in the picture. The science was medieval, but the genuine anthropologists conscripted by the Ahnenerbe had to bow to the Reichsfuhrer’s demented obsessions. They even called it Himmler’s crusade.”

Macleod nodded. “Yes,” he said. “And the expedition to Greenland was doubly bizarre. The Nazis were also obsessed with Welteislehre, World Ice Theory, a cosmological fantasy cooked up by an insane Austrian at the turn of the century. It was one of the many weird theories that gained adherents after the First World War, that seemed to offer order and explanation in a world gone mad. According to the theory, everything about the universe was a perpetual struggle between ice and fire. The Aryan master race was born in a realm of ice, and had been scattered across the globe by floods and earthquakes. Where better to find evidence of the original Aryans than the Greenland ice cap, the last great remnant of the Ice Age.”

“It would be laughable if it wasn’t for the poisonous racism underlying everything the Ahnenerbe did,” Jack said. “Because they only told Himmler what he wanted to know, their activities helped to solidify his views about Aryan superiority. Remember he was the chief architect of the Final Solution, the liquidation of the Jews.”

“So these two guys were Nazis.” Costas had picked up the photograph and was scrutinising it with Maria.

“According to Kangia, the greasy-haired one with the armband was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, constantly ranting on about Hitler and treating the Greenlanders like dogs,” Macleod said. “But the other guy seems to have been more reasonable, apparently attempting to befriend Kangia and pulling his weight on the expedition. He was fascinated by the oral traditions of the Greenlanders and promised to visit them one day by himself to record them. Apparently he became a decent dog-sledder and earned the Greenlanders’ respect. The two Germans loathed each other and hardly spoke.”

“Do you have any idea who they were?” Inuva spoke quietly from the bedside where she had been listening, her hand on her father’s brow.

Macleod turned to her. “Records of the expedition disappeared mysteriously from the Ahnenerbe headquarters at the outbreak of war, so this picture and Kangia’s memory are all we’ve got to go on. I emailed the scan back to the IMU library yesterday. They couldn’t identify the smaller man with any certainty, a face that blurs with a thousand other thugs, but the other guy has quite a history.”

“Of course. Now I recognise him,” Maria suddenly exclaimed. “The blond one. Surely it’s Rolf Kunzl, the renowned archaeologist?”

“Correct.”

“One of the founders of Viking archaeology,” Maria enthused. “His doctoral thesis on the Norse settlement of Greenland remains a benchmark for the subject. A precocious career cut short by war.”

“Then you know what happened to him.”

“The von Stauffenberg conspiracy,” Maria replied.

Macleod nodded. “One of a raft of genuine scholars forcibly recruited into the Ahnenerbe to shore up Nazi fantasies about a Norse master race. Kunzl had little choice but to play the game, even though he was openly contemptuous of the lunatic fringe who ran the Ahnenerbe, mostly crackpots and failed scholars who owed their careers to the Nazis.”

“The lunatics were running the asylum,” Costas murmured.

Macleod nodded again. “But Kunzl was never inducted into the SS because he was from an old Prussian military family, a reserve officer in the Wehrmacht, and managed to wheedle his way out of Himmler’s tentacles when the war began. He fought for two years under Rommel in the desert, reaching the rank of colonel and winning the Knight’s Cross, but then was recalled to Berlin and given a menial job. Himmler seems to have singled him out for special bullying, repeatedly accusing him of having stolen records of the Greenland expedition and concealing what they’d found. But Himmler must have given up on him by September 1944, when Kunzl was arrested and strung up with piano wire alongside von Stauffenberg for attempting to assassinate Hitler.”

“One of the good guys,” Costas murmured.

“None of the conspirators was a saint,” Macleod replied. “Kunzl had been one of the most effective Panzer commanders in the Afrika Korps and had plenty of Allied blood on his hands. He knew about the racial policies of the Nazis from his Ahnenerbe days and had apparently done nothing. But he detested Hitler and wanted the war finished before it destroyed Germany. If you look at the other man in that picture you can see where Kunzl’s loathing for the Nazis came from.”

Kangia suddenly began to speak, the soft clicking tones filling the tent as if a gentle wind were ruffling the sealskins. He reached out for the photograph and Costas handed it to him, and they watched as he jabbed his finger at the image of the taller man. Inuva leaned over intently as the old man spoke and then looked back at the others.

“Three days into the expedition they’d reached the edge of the ice cap, due east from here, and found a way up the ice to the top. After a day of hauling the sledges across the ice they were suddenly pinned down by a piteraq, a windstorm.”

Kangia heard his daughter repeat the Greenlandic word and suddenly became animated, the shadows of his arms arching high against the tent wall as he gesticulated in the flickering firelight.

“It was a ferocious storm, the worst my father had ever seen,” Inuva said. “The expedition was at the northern edge of the glacier, where a tributary ice stream begins to flow towards the fjord. The two Germans insisted on crossing on to the glacier and seeking shelter behind an ice ridge, one of the undulations where the glacier had buckled. But the Greenlanders refused, knowing it was too dangerous, and braved it out with their dogs on the exposed ice cap, huddled behind their sleds.”

The old man put his fists together, pulled them apart while making a cracking sound and then spoke again to his daughter. “There was a mighty noise,” she translated. “The glacier had pulled apart and the Germans had disappeared into it. I, Kangia, was the only one courageous enough to crawl through the wind to the edge of the crevasse, where I looked down through the swirling snow and saw an incredible sight.”

The old man had been following his daughter’s intonations and nodding emphatically, but suddenly he coughed painfully and lay back on the pile of furs, his face grey and drawn.

“He has not got long now.” Inuva gently caressed her father’s arm and then looked up apologetically at Macleod. “I think it might be time for you to go.”

Macleod nodded slowly and began to get up, but the old man held out a wavering arm and spoke once more, his words almost inaudible. His daughter leaned close and then translated again.

“It was far below, as deep as the icebergs in the fjord are high.” Macleod sat back down as she spoke. “At the bottom of the crevasse was the prow of a ship, curving up to a fearsome face, its timbers blackened and old. I, Kangia, knew what it was as soon as I saw it. Legend passed down told of giants sheathed in steel, Kablunat, who arrived from across the sea and set one of their great ships alight on the ice. I, Kangia, heard the story as a boy from my grandfather, inside this very tent circle.” The old man stopped and coughed, and Inuva looked at the others. “Our Inuit ancestors, the Thule, arrived here from the Canadian Arctic to settle about eight hundred years ago, after the native people who lived here before had died out. But Thule hunters had already been coming here before that and had encountered the bearded giants who lived in stone houses in the south of Greenland. My ancestors called them Kablunat.”

“My God,” Jack whispered. “A ship in the ice. It couldn’t be.”

“Wait. There’s more.” Inuva held her hand up and listened again as the old man spoke. “The ice began to move beneath me,” she translated. “I, Kangia, threw down a rope and hauled up the two men. The crevasse closed with a crash just as they came out. The ship had disappeared in the ice. The piteraq continued for many days and we returned to Ilulissat. That was the end of the expedition. The Germans sailed away and we never saw them again.”

The old man reached under the blankets Inuva had laid over him and pulled out a package wrapped in white sealskin. With trembling hands he held it out. Macleod took it from him, bowing his head gravely as he did so. In full view of the old man he passed it on to Jack, who cradled the soft leather in his hands and looked questioningly at Macleod.

“This is why you had to come in person,” Macleod said. “When I spoke to Kangia two days ago he said he had an object he wished to pass on. I told him you were our boss, and he said only you could receive it from him.”

Jack looked at the old man and bowed his head solemnly, then carefully began to unwrap the package. Maria and Costas shifted closer for a better view as the folds of sealskin fell away.

Maria gasped, her face pale with excitement. “It’s a runestone!”

The object was a polished slab of dark green a little longer than Jack’s hand, roughly squared at the corners and with a flat upper surface. Crudely inscribed on it were three lines of runes, several of the symbols immediately recognisable to Jack as he angled it towards the light.

“It’s fantastic,” Maria murmured. “The runes are Old Norse, no doubt about it. There are some odd symbols and I don’t recognize the words, but Jeremy should be able to help.”

“My father told me the story but never showed this to me,” Inuva murmured. “There’s one just like this in the museum at Upernavik, about a hundred miles north of here, found on a remote burial cairn at a place called Kingigtorssuaq. It’s the most famous Viking find in Greenland, the most northerly runestone ever discovered in the Arctic.”

“Wait till you hear where this one came from,” Macleod said. “When Kangia rescued Kunzl and the other German from the crevasse they were struggling over something, but the smaller man slipped and nearly lost his hold. Kangia had seen him slash at the other man with a knife but drop it into the crevasse. He was in a fury about something else he’d lost, but with the storm raging it became a matter of life and death to get them out and the struggle was forgotten. Before they left the ice cap Kunzl gave this stone to Kangia for safekeeping. He said it came from the ship in the ice. Kunzl apparently told the Nazi he’d dropped it in the crevasse, but the smaller man suspected he still had it and was rifling through his belongings in the night. Kunzl told Kangia it was a sacred stone, that he must never let the other man know he had it. Kangia loathed the Nazi and was only too happy to oblige.”

“Kunzl must have translated it,” Maria murmured. “He was the best runologist of his day, an expert in all the Norse scripts. In those few desperate moments in the crevasse he must have read something that made him determined never to let it fall into the hands of his despised SS colleagues in the Ahnenerbe.”

“Kunzl told Kangia that if he was unable to return to Greenland Kangia must keep the stone secret for the rest of his life, and only pass it on to another who in his heart he could trust. The war sealed Kunzl’s fate, and now you are that man.”

While the others were talking, Kangia’s arm had fallen back over his chest and he had begun to breathe in shallow rasps, his eyes half closed and staring at the ceiling. Inuva turned and looked at them with urgency in her expression. “Now it is truly time.”

Macleod nodded and they all got up to leave, ducking in single file under the flap at the entrance to the tent. Jack remained to the last, and before going he turned back and knelt down beside the old man, talking quietly to him and then saying a few words to his daughter. He touched Kangia’s hand before getting up and following Maria out into the bleak ruins of the old settlement.

“What did you say to him?” Maria asked.

“I wished him and his dogs godspeed across the ice, wherever their journey should take them. I told him that he had been right to pass on his treasure to us, that we would hold his trust sacred.”

Inuva appeared at the tent flap to bid them farewell.

“What will happen to him?” Maria asked, her voice soft.

“After the shaman comes we will help him to the high cliff overlooking the fjord, to the place we call K?llingekloften. We will leave him there, and tomorrow he will be gone.”

“You mean suicide?” Maria said in a hushed voice.

“At K?llingekloften we gather every year to watch the sun appear for the first time over the glacier after the weeks of winter darkness, and at that same place those who are tired of life leap into the icy depths of the fjord to join the spirit world. It is the traditional way. My father has finished here now and is eager to go on his next journey.”

She lowered her eyes and backed into the tent, closing the flap behind her. High up on a crag a dog raised its head to the west and howled, and then strained on its chain as it saw them, flattening its head like a hyena and baring its teeth in a snarl. Maria shuddered and pulled her coat around her, drawing closer to Jack as they made their way down the rocky path towards the sea.

“What is it?” he asked.

“An ancient Norse legend.” She paused as they negotiated a boggy patch. “The dread wolf Fenrir, one of a monstrous brood produced by a giantess, brother of the world-serpent Jormungard and the creature Hel, guardian of the dead. Odin heard a prophecy that the wolf and his kin would one day destroy the gods, so he chained Fenrir to a rock. Thar liggr hann til ragnaroks, there he waits till Ragnarok, till the final showdown at the end of the world, when he will wreak his vengeance on the gods.”

“It’s a sled dog, not a wolf,” Jack said.

“I know. It’s irrational.” Maria glanced back at the distant figure of the dog and turned quickly back to the path. “But I feel as if we’ve reached the edge of that world of myth, a threshold between the world the Vikings knew and a world that even their gods couldn’t control. The Vikings who came here must have felt the same, a sense of foreboding as they looked over the icy sea to the west, wondering whether the horizon held riches and a new life or the nightmare of Ragnarok. It’s as if we’re being warned, that others have been this way before us and not returned.”

Jack put his arm around Maria and gave her a reassuring hug. “I take it as a good sign. If Fenrir is here, then we must be on the right track.” He smiled and passed her the swaddled package he had been given by the old man. “Anyway, ancient legends will have to wait for a while. You’ve got your work cut out for you. The sooner we can have a translation of these runes, the better.”

“The Greenland Norse saw those storms, you know, the piteraqs,” Maria said. “There’s a haunting fragment from a poem called Nor?rsetudrapa about these northern hunting lands. It goes something like: Strong blasts from the white mountain walls wove the waters, and the daughters of the waves, frost-nurtured, tore the fabric asunder, rejoicing in the storm. It’s virtually the only writing to survive from Norse Greenland, preserved in an Icelandic saga.”

“Don’t worry,” Jack said. “We’ll be careful.”

A few minutes later they reached the shoreline and clambered into the waiting Zodiac. It was early evening now, but in the perpetual sunlight of the Arctic summer it was impossible to gauge the time of day, an effect Jack found vaguely disorientating. After he had helped Maria over the bow and they were all settled again on the inflatable pontoons, Macleod gave the crewman a signal and the Evinrude roared into life. They zipped up their survival suits and donned their life jackets as the crewman reversed out and then swung round the bay in a wide arc, the propeller churning up the brash as he searched for a passage between the floating slabs of ice. As they rounded the promontory at the head of the fjord the iceberg came dramatically into view, dwarfing the flotilla of Zodiacs that were drawn up alongside it laden with equipment and technicians. Costas anxiously scanned the scene as they sped towards Seaquest II, then visibly relaxed and looked over at Jack. He gave a thumbs-up signal and then shouted against the engine and the wind, his words lost but the excited refrain familiar to Jack over the years: “Time to kit up.”