The Dakota Cipher

CHAPTER NINE

A North Atlantic crossing in autumn is like a long-winded opera without a private box seat or a female companion to cuddle. You can endure it, but it’s tedious, cramped, and noisy, and there isn’t enough to do. I was sick the first three days, and then merely damp, cold, and bored the ten awful weeks it took us to beat into a succession of gales before making New York. Green water polished the decks, the planking writhed and groaned, and leaks sustained a tributary on the torture rack called my berth. When I popped my head topside one morning and saw the mast tops obscured by snow flurries, ice on the ratlines, I was so desperate for distraction that I volunteered to help the cook pick mould off the last of the vegetables.

‘Took a look at the sea, did you, Monsieur Gage?’

‘Yes. It looks exactly as it looked yesterday.’

‘Oui. This is why I am content to stay by my brick oven.’

Bloodhammer was in his element, circuiting the deck with his beard flapping like a sail and the gleam of a Viking berserker ready to stave in a few civilised heads. His slouch hat was pulled down against the weather and his cloak wrapped him like an Indian blanket. He was as impatient to get to America as I was, but he saw beauty in the great mountainous swells I never quite shared, though there were some days – sunlight glowing through their crests like emerald fire, great arcing rainbows on the black horizon – when I admitted the ocean had an odd charm, like the desert. Great seabirds sometimes hung over us without moving a wing, riding the wind, and once a seaman cried out and we saw the great grey back of some leviathan slide by our hull, its misty exhalation smelling of fish and the deep.

‘My ancestors believed the world was encircled by endless ocean, and in that sea lives a serpent so great that it encircled all, its head reaching to its tail,’ Magnus said. ‘When it constricted, it could cause the sea to rise in a deluge.’

‘If the ocean was endless, how could it be encircled?’ I’m becoming something of an amateur theologian, given all the gods and goddesses trampling through my life, and I take amusement in picking at the logical inconsistencies.

‘The world was made from the bones and teeth of a frost giant, and the lakes by his blood.’

So it went. In the long dark hours we were confined below, Magnus talked, and with talk so strange I felt I’d slipped the moorings of our modern century. He crammed the hours with names like Thor, Asgard, Loki, Boverk, Jarl, Sneg, Feima, and Snor. I couldn’t make heads or tails out of much of it, but I’ve a weakness for stories of the fabled past and he told them well, with a bass rumble and saga rhythm that seemed to match the pitch and yaw of the ship. The past always seems simpler than the complicated present, and Magnus was one of those dreamy men half-stranded there, a troll with the heart of a boy. His cyclopean blue eye would catch fire, he’d lean forward with urgency, and his hands would dance like swords.

Our captain had taken to calling our big shipmate Odin, and when I finally asked him why, the officer looked at me in surprise.

‘From his guise, of course. Surely you recognise the king of the gods.’

‘King of the gods?’

‘Odin the one-eyed, the Norse equivalent of Zeus, wandered the world disguised by his broad hat and flapping cape to add to his knowledge, the one thing he had an unquenchable thirst for. You were not aware of the resemblance?’

‘I just thought he had no taste for smart clothing.’

‘Your friend is very odd, monsieur. But odd in a significant way.’

So I listened to my replica of Odin tell his myths. The forest people of the north had feisty and lusty gods, it seems, carousing with dead heroes in a great hall called Valhalla when they weren’t making mischief for mortals below. Each day the Vikings would spend a jolly good time hacking each other to pieces, and then come dinnertime they’d all be resurrected for another drunken feast. Magnus summoned a time of sky gods and rainbow bridges, and the great Norse tree Yggdrasil, which held the nine worlds, an eagle at its top and the dragon Nidhogg gnawing below. It reminded me of the serpent Apophis in Egyptian legend. One of this tree’s roots was moored near a place called Hel, ruled over by a ghastly goddess of the same name who’d been banished there by Odin. Her hall of the dead, beyond the sheer rock Drop to Destruction, was named Eljudnir, and she lorded over corpses who hadn’t become battlefield heroes with a plate called Hunger and a knife called Famine.

Halfway up Yggdrasil’s trunk was Midgard, our human world, to which the gods sometimes descend and leave mischief and artefacts. Up near the top there was Asgard, a kind of Norse heaven.

‘Hel?’ I asked. ‘You mean like the Christian hell? The Vikings believed in the Bible?’

‘No, it is the Christians who believe in the old myths. The new faith borrows many ideas from the old. Did you know that one-eyed Odin, who gave half his sight to drink from the well of wisdom, had himself hung from Yggdrasil like Christ on the cross, to learn still more? He called out in agony and took a spear thrust in the side.’

‘Half his sight? You mean he wore an eye patch like you?’

‘Or just a hideous empty socket.’ He flicked his patch so I could glimpse his own ghastly scar, and then grinned. It was a crater I could stick my thumb into.

‘And what happened to your eye?’

‘I traded it for knowledge, too. I lost it when I was caught in the secret archives of Copenhagen, researching the history of my nation and old Knights Templar lore. A sword tip got past my guard and I had to fight my way out with a face full of blood. Fortunately the pain focused me when I leapt into the slushy harbour and swam deep to avoid their gunshots. You’d have done the same, of course, but perhaps with more skill at arms to avoid being wounded. You don’t seem to bear many scars.’

That’s because I would have surrendered to the first stern librarian, but no need to be absolutely candid. I decided to change the subject. ‘Asserting that the Christians took some of their best ideas from the pagans was the same kind of blasphemous claim a woman named Astiza used to make about the Egyptians. Contradicting this nonsense is like trying to stamp out a grass fire. You can’t believe hell is a Norwegian idea, Magnus. Especially since it’s supposed to be hot.’

‘Some hells are cold, like our Nilfheim. And no, it’s a universal idea – like so many stories in the Bible – echoed across time and culture. That’s why the biblical stories strike us as true. The Bible has the Flood, and the Norse have Ginunngigap, the periodic rising of the sea that swallows the world. The Bible has the Apocalypse, and the Norse have Ragnarok, the final war between gods and giants. Newer religions pass on the old. It’s no heresy to recognise the deep origins of religious belief, Ethan. By understanding the roots, we begin to comprehend the truth.’

‘How do you know all this? Are you some kind of Druid priest?’

‘I’m a patriot and a utopian, and as such an agent of the past because it was there, long in the past, that we lost the keys to a bright future.’

‘But now there’s science. Fifteen years ago, the French astronomer Comte de Corli proposed that fragments of a passing comet struck Earth and that is the cause of some of the disasters and miracles the Bible relates.’

‘Is that any likelier than Yggdrasil and Asgard? Your science is just the myth of our times, supplying a beginning. Aye, we’ve forgotten as much as we’ve learnt, almost as though we’ve had a blow to the head that obliterated vital memory. Then the Knights Templar began to rediscover the truth. I’m on that path, and you’ve appeared to help me.’

‘Appeared, or dragooned by you and your mad Danes?’

‘Our being here, on this pitching ship, was foreordained.’

‘By whom?’

‘That’s the mystery, isn’t it?’

All nonsense, of course, but I suppose it was just as well the voyage gave him time to jabber and me to rest. By the time we’d parted company with Pauline on the coast highway in France I was wrung out as a dishcloth, had a cramp in one leg, and was thoroughly unsettled by a visit from a squadron of French dragoons sent to look for me after the ambush of my carriage. They caught up with us just a few miles on our detour towards Brittany. I was frantically pulling on my boots, hoping to outrun what I assumed was General Leclerc’s vengeance, when a lieutenant saluted me through the coach door as if I wore epaulettes. He handed me an envelope. ‘Compliments of the First Consul, sir. You slipped away before orders could be issued.’ He carefully kept his eye off Pauline.

‘Orders?’ Was it back to Temple Prison as an unrepentant fornicator of the consul’s sister? Or simply a quick firing squad in the woods?

No, it was a directive, in Napoleon’s quick hand, ordering me to wait on the coast for final instructions before departing for America.

‘You’re not here to arrest me?’ I sounded incriminating, but I’m not used to such luck.

‘Our orders are to see you to a public coach and escort Pauline Bonaparte back to Paris,’ the man said, his face a careful mask. ‘We are to ensure that everyone is on their correct path.’

‘So gallant is your concern, Lieutenant,’ said Pauline, who at least had the decency to redden.

‘The concern is your brother’s.’

Once again Napoleon was demonstrating his command of the situation. I was to be hurried off to America, and Pauline back to her home. Frankly, it was time to get distance from the girl. Nor, once I was spent, did I feel entirely moral about my performance. Conquering a Bonaparte was not as satisfying a revenge for my rough treatment as I’d imagined. Once again I wondered if I’d learnt anything from my tumultuous adventures; if I was, in fact, impregnable to sense and good fibre. ‘He is a governor that governs his passions, and he a servant that serves them,’ old Ben had lectured. Bonaparte thought too much about the future, I of the moment, and Bloodhammer of the past.

So Magnus and I, tired and reprieved, climbed down from the stage and gave fumbled salutes to the dragoons. My new companion was tipsy from having warmed himself with a bottle of aquavit he’d smuggled from Mortefontaine with more sly initiative than I’d have given him credit for. We waved Pauline off to Paris, caught a public stage at first light, and eventually arrived at the coast like two vagabonds. With my rifle and tomahawk and Magnus’s map case our only luggage, we were about as inconspicuous as a gypsy circus – but seaports draw odd men, so no one questioned us too closely when we showed enough francs. The Breton rebel Georges Cadoudal was rumoured to have returned to France from England to conspire against Napoleon, and we could have been anything from Bourbon sympathisers to the secret police. Accordingly, we were left alone.

We found a brig for New York that was waiting for a break in the weather and the British blockade. The foul season was the ideal time to slip out.

In Le Havre, my decision to take a break from France was reinforced when I received further instructions and one hundred silver American dollars, minted in Mexico, from the French foreign minister, Talleyrand himself. He informed me that the American commissioners were writing to my government to alert them of my coming. He added that France itself had a particular interest in my mission. Talleyrand wrote:

It is in the utmost confidence and secrecy that I must inform you that agreement has been reached with Spain to return to France her rightful possession of Louisiana, a territory four times the size of my nation that, as you know, was lost in the Seven Years’ War. Announcement of this accord will probably be made early next year. The government of France has the keenest interest about conditions in Louisiana, and expects that your investigations with the Norwegian Magnus Bloodhammer may lead you to that territory. I must also advise that rumours of an amatory nature make it advisable for you to be at some distance from Paris, out of the sight of Pauline Bonaparte’s husband and brothers, for a while.

It’s about as easy to keep a secret about a tryst in France as it is a sea profit in Boston, and no doubt my absence with Pauline rivalled my fireworks performance as theatre gossip. Best to set sail.

As a confederate of the First Consul, I hope you will be able to (1) ascertain if the Norwegian’s theories are at all true, (2) inform us and your own country of Britain’s designs on the northwest frontier, and (3) explore the possibility of new alliances between the Indian tribes of that region and France, so as to secure the sovereignty of both French holdings and the border integrity of your own United States. Our two nations, I trust, will always live in harmony along the boundary of the Mississippi River. In return, I enclose a preliminary payment for expenses, and a letter and seal to gain you the assistance of any French representatives you may encounter in your travels. Make no mistake: France’s enemy, England, is the enemy of your young nation as well. Treat all British representatives with the utmost caution and suspicion, and work towards the rebuilding of the natural alliance between our two republics.

– Talleyrand

Louisiana back to France? I dimly remembered, from my reading of aged American newspapers, about Spanish threats of closing New Orleans to American shipping down the Mississippi, choking off the west’s only access to the sea. If Napoleon had somehow bamboozled the Spanish into giving New Orleans back, the United States and France might find themselves in commercial partnership, with me neatly in the middle. Surely there was money to be made!

All I had to do was stay friends with all sides.