The Dakota Cipher

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

For our journey west, Magnus chose a musket that could be used as a fowling piece and a huge double-bladed axe that he strapped to his back like a Norse marauder. ‘Jefferson gave me the idea!’ He spent happy hours shining it with file, oil, and cloth. ‘With this and that little tomahawk of yours, we’ll have no problem making a fire.’

‘Make a fire? That axe is big enough to heat hell, deforest half the Ohio Valley, or serve as a dining table.’

‘If I ever shaved it would make a good mirror, too.’ He held it up for inspection. ‘I wish I had a broadsword.’ He was as excited as I was dubious.

Our route was northwestward up the Potomac and across the Appalachians on the road first carved out by the British general Braddock before his disastrous defeat during the French and Indian War. Then we’d go down to Pittsburgh at the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, take the Ohio River to the Great Trail established by the Indians to Lake Erie, and board a boat to Fort Detroit, five hundred miles from Washington. From there, Lakes Huron and Superior would provide a water route of another five hundred miles to the edge of the blank wilderness on Bloodhammer’s map.

The first artefact of civilisation that disappeared as we rode up the Potomac was paint. As we ascended the mountains, farmhouses faded to weathered wood; milled lumber gave way to squared logs. Our road followed an undulating scar of vegetable plots, trampled pasture, and wounded hillsides of stumps and slash. No firmer than porridge, it curved and coiled tighter than a barrister’s argument and was worn to a trench by traffic that never paused to repair it. Always we smelt smoke, hardscrabble farmers trying to burn back the forest to make room for corn. And then, deep in the mountains, finally there were no farms at all. Winter-barren brown ridges, the tops still frosty most mornings, ran like multiple walls into haze. Hawks orbited by day, and wolves howled in the dark. When the wind blew, the brown carpet of last winter’s leaves rustled like tattered pages. It sounded like the forest was whispering.

We slept outdoors when the weather was fair, hardening ourselves to our new lives as frontiersmen and avoiding the stiff fees and biting fleas of Appalachian accommodation. We’d make a bed of boughs, have a simple dinner of ham, cornbread, and creek water, and listen to the night sounds. Through the lattice of slowly budding trees, we had a spangled canopy of a million dazzling stars. Magnus and I talked sometimes of the ancient belief that each was an ancestor, gone to reside in the sky for all eternity.

‘Maybe one is Signe,’ he said, wistful.

‘How long were you married?’

‘Just one year.’ He paused before going on. ‘The only time I’ve truly been happy. I loved her as a youth, but my family had filled my head with tales of gods and mysteries, so I sailed north to where the Templars might have been, so far north that the sun never set and the air barely warmed. I found mines so deep they might have been driven by dwarves, but no relics. By the time I came back she was married to someone else, and then I lost my eye, and pretty much put happiness aside. Bliss is reserved for the few.’

‘At least you had someone to haunt you.’ I thought of Astiza.

‘Then I inherited my ancestral farm, her husband drowned, and against all expectations she and her family accepted me for a second match. I thought myself mutilated, hideous, but she was Beauty to my Beast. When she told me she was with my child I was in a daze of happiness. I severed my connections with Forn Sior and dedicated myself to domesticity. Have you ever known contentment, Ethan?’

‘Now and again, for an hour or two. I don’t know if it is men’s lot to be content for very long. Franklin said, ‘Who is rich? He who is content. Who is that? Nobody.’’

‘Your mentor was wrong on that one. By his definition I was rich, fabulously so. What need had I of Norway or Templars when I had Signe? And then …’

‘She died?’

‘I killed her.’

He was haunted, I saw, and not just by dwarves and elves. His expression was suddenly withered as a garden in winter. I was stunned, not knowing what to say.

‘She died trying to give birth to my baby.’

I swallowed. ‘Magnus, that could happen to anyone.’

‘The neighbours had already made fun and called me Odin. But in my torrent of grief I saw destiny’s hand and realised I wasn’t done. I think the knights of old were seeking a grail that could mean the worst things could be undone, and that I’m doomed to search the world as the old god did, on a quest for my own kind of bitter knowledge. I’m on a search in my wife’s memory, Ethan. That’s why I can’t share your sport with women.’

‘Oh.’ Once again I felt shallow – but more easily healed, too. You can’t lose what you don’t risk, including your heart. ‘Surely she wouldn’t begrudge a remarriage. She did it herself.’

‘No, I gave up my quest and killed her by my selfishness in doing so. Now I must complete it, out here in the American West, as penance.’

‘Penance! And you bring the innocent me along?’

‘You need purpose, too. I could see it at Mortefontaine, where all you had were food, drink, cards, and women. I’ve saved you, though you’ll never appreciate it.’

‘But we’ve come to the edge of nothing,’ I said with exasperation, gesturing at the brown hollow below us, mist pooled like a puddle.

‘No. This is the edge of Eden.’ His breath was a cloud in the chill.

I felt sour about my recruitment. ‘I always pictured Eden warmer.’ I pulled my blanket over my head, shivering despite myself at the sorrow of his tale. The eager boy suddenly seemed a thousand years old, and the empty woods watchful.

‘Have you ever wondered where Eden was, Ethan?’

‘Not really.’ I realised my partner was quite mad.

‘I mean it had to be somewhere. What if it could be rediscovered?’

‘If I remember the scriptures, Bloodhammer, the door to that particular inn slammed shut,’ I grumbled. ‘Eve, the apple, and all that.’

‘But what if it could be reopened?’

‘With a key?’

‘Thor’s hammer.’

I rolled over to go to sleep. ‘Then stay away from apple pie.’

By the next morning Magnus was cheerful again, as if our conversation had been a weird, bad dream. He made no mention of poor Signe, chattering instead about the open brownness of our forests that was apparently different from Norwegian woods. He was a madman who couldn’t remember his own fantasies. But just as we saddled our horses he called out, ‘Here!’ and impishly threw me something.

I looked. It was an apple, kept over from the harvest before and bought in Washington’s market.

‘Encouragement.’ His grin was wry.

‘Then I’m taking a bite.’ It was still firm enough to crunch, and I chewed. ‘I don’t feel any wiser.’

‘We just haven’t found the right tree yet.’

So off we rode. When I finished I threw the core into the spring woods, from where it might sprout.

When it rained we took shelter in crude public inns, the lodging invariably close, smoky, pungent, and loud. Men spat, swore, farted, and grumbled as they shared beds for warmth. Come dawn, all of us picked bugs off each other like monkeys and then paid exorbitant prices for a breakfast of salt pork, corn mush, and watered whiskey, the standard diet of frontier America. I didn’t find a clean cup or a pretty hostess between Georgetown and Pittsburgh.

Out of moody boredom, Magnus got in the habit of splitting hostel firewood with his heavy-bladed axe, earning us enough each time to buy a sixpence loaf of bread. I sometimes kept him company, watching the ripple of his great muscles with the same wary awe one watches a bull, calling out advice he usually ignored. I’d help stack the result, but declined to do the chopping.

‘For the hero of Acre and Marengo, you seem to have an aversion to a fighting man’s exercise,’ he’d finally tease good-naturedly.

‘And for a man expecting to control the world, you seem all too willing to do a peasant’s work for pennies. Hedging your bets, Magnus?’

After nine days of hard travel it was a relief to come down out of the steep, cold mountains, the country taking on a fuzz of spring green. Pittsburgh was a triangular city of three hundred houses and fifteen hundred souls, its apex pointing down the Ohio formed by the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela. The old British fort at the point was long gone, its brick pillaged for new construction and its earthen ramparts washed out by floods. The rest of the town was thriving under a pall of coal smoke, bustling with boatyards, lumber mills, and factories for rope, nails, glass, and iron. Its smell of hen coops and stables carried a good two miles, and the streets had as many pigs as people. Getting to a riverboat down the Ohio required a steep climb down the city’s bluffs and across boards laid on the mudflats to deep water.

A flatboat took us and our horses down the Ohio twenty miles to a landing at the Great Trail, now a crude road running north. What used to be dangerous Indian country just a decade before had become, thanks to the victory at Fallen Timbers, an immigrant highway. War, disease, and the collapse of the game population had reduced tribes like the Delaware and Wyandot to penury, and the dirty, emaciated survivors we saw bore little resemblance to the proud warriors I recalled from my trapping days. Were the Indians already finished, as doomed as the mastodon?

Magnus studied them with interest. ‘The descendants of Israel,’ he murmured.

‘I’ve been to Palestine, and I hardly think so.’

‘The lost tribes, Jefferson speculated.’

‘Magnus, they’re a dying race. Look at them! I’m sorry, but it’s true.’

‘If it’s true, then we’re about to lose more than we ever dreamt. These people know things we’ve forgotten, Ethan.’

‘Like what?’

‘The past. How to truly live. And how the world is alive with things we cannot see. Scholars say they know the spirit world. Thor could have walked with their manitou: perhaps they were similar spiritual beings! Franklin was inspired by the Iroquois government to help craft your Constitution. Johnson complimented their oratory.’

‘And yet at our last inn they were described as thieving, drunken, lazy scalp hunters. Pioneers hate Indians, Magnus. That whiskey trader had a tobacco pouch made from a warrior’s scrotum. Our word for their women, ‘squaw,’ means cunt. Europeans have been fighting them for three hundred years.’

‘Fear has made us blind, but that doesn’t mean the Indian can’t see.’

New settler trails branched off in all directions, forests were being toppled, and so many plumes of smoke rose that the entire Ohio Territory seemed a steaming stew. The meanest European peasant could come, girdle trees, plant his corn in the spaces between, set loose his pigs, and call himself a farmer. Their cabins were no bigger than a French bedroom, their yards mud, their children feral, and their wives so hard-used that their beauty was shot by twenty. But a man was free! He had land, black and loamy. Ohio seemed to be writhing with transformation as we rode, its skin twitching with change. I wondered if Jefferson’s prediction that this west would take a thousand years to fill had been too pessimistic. There were already fifty thousand people in the territory, and when we stopped at a tavern or bought a night in a farmer’s barn, all the talk was of statehood.

‘This dirt makes New England look like a rock pile!’

While the Ohio Territory was pockmarked with new clearings, it retained vast tracts of virgin forest where the world remained primeval. Oak, beech, hickory, chestnut, and elm, budding now with spring green, reared up to one hundred and fifty feet in height. Tree trunks were so thick that Magnus and I couldn’t encompass them with linked arms. Limbs were fat enough to dance on, and bark so wrinkled that you could lose a silver dollar in the corrugations of an oak. The arcing lattice of branches met neighbours like the peak of a cathedral, and above that great flocks of birds would sometimes fly, so thick and endless that they blocked out the sun, their cries a raspy cawing. The trees seemed not just older than us but older than the Indians, older than woolly elephants. They made me think of Jefferson’s baleful spirits.

‘You could build a grand house out of a single tree,’ Magnus marvelled.

‘I’ve seen families camp in hollow ones while they work on their cabin,’ I agreed. ‘These trees are as old as your Norse explorers, Magnus.’

‘From the time of Yggdrasil, perhaps. These are the kinds of trees the gods knew. Maybe that’s why the Templars came here, Ethan. They recognised this land was the old paradise, where men could live with nature.’

I was less certain. I knew my race, and couldn’t imagine any white men coming to America and not doing what these settlers were doing right now, converting these forest patriarchs to corn. It’s what civilisation does.

‘Why do you think the trees here grow so big?’ Magnus asked.

‘Electricity, perhaps.’

‘Electricity?’

‘The French scientist Bertholon constructed what he called an electrovegetoma machine in 1783 to collect lightning’s energy and transfer it to plants in the field, and said it radically enhanced their growth. While we know lightning can damage trees, could electrical storms also make them grow? Perhaps the atmosphere of the Ohio country is different than that of Europe.’

At last we ferried the Sandusky and, at its outlet to Lake Erie, a clearing finally gave a view.

‘It’s not a lake, it’s a sea!’

‘Three hundred miles long, and there are bigger ones than this, Magnus. The farther west we go, the bigger everything gets.’

‘And you ask why the Norse went that way? Mine were a people fit for big things.’

He made a point of cupping his hand to drink, confirming this vastness wasn’t salt. We could see the lake bottom to forty feet. As planned, we sold our horses and took passage on a schooner called Gullwing for Detroit, since the land route from here led into the nearly impassable Black Swamp that divided the Northwest Territory from Ohio. We sailed across Lake Erie, breasted the current of the Detroit River, and came at last to the famed fort. There I found us an easier way west – by flirting with a woman.

I have a knack for agreeable company.