The Dakota Cipher

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

We now walked where no white men had ever gone, except perhaps grizzled Norsemen centuries ago. Ever since the Ohio country and its gargantuan trees, the west had been opening up, every vista broader, every sky bigger. Now the sensation of endless, empty, uncomplicated space was complete, the world reduced to its simplest elements of earth and sky. The horizon seemed to curve and distant clouds to dip. This was our planet before the Garden. The few trees we saw were hunched in winding coulees to hide from the ceaseless wind, and the grass rolled in waves like the ocean. Yet the more lost we three white men felt, the more Namida and Little Frog were encouraged. They must be near home!

They hoped, and I doubted. America unrolled to complete nothingness, somewhere ahead.

Napoleon was to do something with this? I kicked at the soil, black and endlessly deep. Maybe Jefferson’s yeoman farmers could make something of it, but for French imperialists, this would be like the sands of Egypt. There was not even fur.

I saw no more elephants, no mountains of salt, no belching volcanoes, and no pursuing Dakota. The prairie had been swept clean. Each night our low coals were the only light on the empty plain. The true illumination was overhead, stars brilliantly silver and the air cold. Whereas before Namida and I, and Pierre and Little Frog, had lain as couples – Magnus once or twice looking at us with wistful envy – we now all lay huddled like sheep. I didn’t want to be out here when the first snow blew.

‘How long before winter?’ I asked Pierre.

‘We must hurry. The question will be if we have time to get back to wherever you wish to go. Where is that, sorcerer?’

‘Norway for Magnus. Washington and Paris for me.’

‘And poor Pierre? I am a thousand miles from my paddling companions, a marooned pilgrim with no winter post.’

‘You can come back with us.’

‘Can I? And Namida? And Little Frog? It’s not easy to go between two worlds.’

We’d been walking several days, deeper and deeper into the plains, me longing for a horse, when we woke one morning and found our voyageur had disappeared.

It took a moment in the predawn stillness to realise Pierre was gone. Little Frog said something in her native tongue to Namida, and the women began running up and down the swale of land where we’d camped, growing increasingly anxious.

Magnus and I stood, uneasy. Our companion could have crept off to relieve himself, or perhaps he saw some game. But the three guns were stacked as we’d left them and his water skin remained behind.

We could see no sign of him, and we could see a very long way.

‘Pierre!’ Our cries were feeble against the immensity of the prairie.

Silence.

‘Pi-eeeerrrre!’

The wind was our answer.

‘He went back to his canoe,’ Magnus said without conviction. ‘He hated walking.’

‘With no gun? And no word?’

The four of us fanned out at the points of the compass, going to the limit of where we could keep each other in sight.

‘Pierre!’ The shouts were swallowed.

We came back together to eat a cold breakfast. Little Frog looked miserable.

‘Perhaps he’s scouting,’ Magnus tried again.

No one replied.

‘He slept with us last night. He just vanishes?’

I began to examine our campsite. I’m not a tracker or a frontiersman, and we had trampled our little hillock gathering buffalo chips and water from a nearby pothole of a lake. Yet there – were there trails in the grass where someone might have crept towards us? And there? And there? The grass was bent in snakelike undulations towards our camping place.

I shivered. Men had been among us, I realised – men with scalping knives, men the Ojibway condemned as snakes – and had carried one of us off without a sound or sign. I touched my throat. Why wasn’t it slit? Why weren’t they on us right now?

‘Somebody took him,’ I told the others. ‘Dakota.’

‘We’d be dead if it were just Dakota,’ Namida said. For the first time since I’d met her, she looked truly fearful. ‘Something’s changed. The evil English couple can’t be killed, and have come and told them to take just one.’

‘Why? Why not capture or kill us all?’

‘Because they want to follow where we lead,’ Magnus said heavily. ‘They’ll torment Pierre for information, and use him to trade for the hammer. They are snakes who want into our Garden. And when they come, Ethan, when they enter the secret of my ancestors, then, my friend – then there will be Ragnarok.’

‘What is Ragnarok?’ Namida asked.

‘The last battle of gods and men,’ Magnus said. ‘The end of the world.’

The prairie wind was getting colder.

‘Pi-eeerrre!’

We gathered our things and hurried on, imagining eyes on us in the emptiness.

Before Eden, purgatory. Before Valhalla, the hell of Nilfheim.

So it was when we actually found, against all expectation, the Awaxawi village of Namida and Little Frog, clustered on the bend of an unnamed river lazily winding across the western prairie. We were so far from obvious landmarks or trails that I would have needed a sextant and chronometer to fix our place on earth, assuming I knew how to use them. But Namida recognised subtle curls and lumps on the prairie invisible to my eyes, and grew steadily more excited as we neared her childhood village. ‘See! There is the coulee! Look! A seed from a cottonwood! Listen! A call from the river bird!’

From a bluff above, the village indeed looked more medieval than American. The huts were earth-covered domes of sod, surrounded by a palisade and a dry moat spanned by an earth causeway. Its valley was an oasis, fields of corn and beans interspersed with groves of trees along the river. But no sound greeted us as we approached, not even the barking of dogs. Namida and Little Frog’s joy turned to disquiet when nothing moved.

‘Something’s happened,’ Namida whispered.

A man was sprawled by the gate.

We walked down cautiously and halted a careful distance to study him. His belly was extended by bloat and his skin had erupted in small pustules, some red and leaking pus. His mouth was open, his eyes blind.

‘Smallpox,’ Magnus muttered.

The women burst into tears.

We could see that beyond this first victim were others inside the palisade, lying exposed on the hard-packed earth. A mother lay dead, breasts bare and pocked, with her expired toddler, not yet weaned, atop where he’d cried for milk that no longer came. An old man sat upright, eyes squeezed shut against the horror. A warrior lay curled into a ball.

Smallpox was ghastly enough in Europe, carrying off kings and commoners, but in America it was the absolute scourge of the tribes.

‘So die the Mandan,’ I said heavily.

First the village massacre caused by Red Jacket’s pursuit back in the forest country. Now this. The red race seemed to be dissolving before my eyes.

Namida and Little Frog were staring in shock and fear, choking back sobs for relatives that had to be dead. They seemed rooted, as if an invisible wall kept them from daring to open the gate, and that was good. To go inside was a sentence of death.

‘Magnus, keep the women away. This disease will kill them in hours or days if they’re infected. I’ll go see if anyone is left alive or if I can find the tablet.’

‘It’s my quest we’re on,’ he said, his face ashen. ‘I’ll take the risk.’

‘No, I’ve been inoculated.’

‘You’ve been what?’

‘Given a mild form of the disease so I can’t catch this.’ I gestured at the dead gatekeeper. ‘An Englishman named Jenner has been giving people cowpox with great success, and the treatment came to France the year I was in the Holy Land. Having seen smallpox do its work in Egypt and Italy, I decided to try it last year after the Marengo campaign. And, inoculated, here I am.’

‘Inoculated how?’

‘A prick on the skin.’ I pulled my tattered shirt off my shoulder. ‘See the bump?’

The Norwegian made some kind of sign against my scar and retreated on the causeway, pulling the women with him. ‘Finally, you show some sorcery.’

I was not entirely certain that inoculation worked, but I’d seen smallpox before and not contracted the disease. If Red Jacket’s Indians were truly still after us, and the women’s relatives dead, all hope of help was gone. It was imperative that we complete our mission as quickly as possible, which meant finding that tablet of stone. We needed either a clue to Thor’s hammer or an excuse to abandon the quest.

Entering the village was grisly. Smallpox strikes Indians swiftly, dropping people where they stand. Women had keeled over near smoking racks and weaving circles. Two men had fallen at their palisade, as if insanely trying to climb the walls to escape. A girl had fainted while carrying a water jug, shattering it. The place reeked of excrement and corruption, the sweet stink of triumphant death. There was a sound, I realised – the horrid buzzing of flies.

Inside the lodges the only light came from the door and smoke hole, but it was enough to confirm apocalypse. Bodies were curled at the edges, as if shrinking from the shafts of light. Everyone had a hideous eruption of sores, mouths gaping for a final breath, eyes sightless, fingers and toes curled in agony.

There was no stone tablet, however. I systematically overturned every robe and trade blanket, poked into every underground cache of corn, and turned up nothing. My heart hammered from anxiety. I was sweating, not from fever but fear.

I was ready to give up my macabre quest when I finally heard a voice croak from the sod lodge farthest from the village gate. A survivor? I crawled to enter the dwelling again and realised an old man I’d seen propped on a shadowy backrest, presumed dead, was in fact barely alive. He was skeletal in his leanness, covered with pustules, with odd pale eyes and long grey hair and – most unusual – a thin beard. He looked like a chief or elder so while he groaned, muttering something in his own tongue, I made a second quick inspection. But no stone tablet, or anything else out of the ordinary. Still, perhaps this was Namida’s medicine man. Could the women interrogate him? I laid him, moaning, on a buffalo robe, my own flesh crawling at having to touch his corrupted skin, and grimly dragged him into the sunlight. He squeezed his eyes shut and whimpered like a child, but I didn’t know what else to do. I pulled him across the dirt yard of the village and out past the dead sentry at the gate, calling to my companions.

‘Namida! I found someone alive!’ She rushed but I held out my arm. ‘Remember, he can make you sick!’

‘It’s Yellow Moon,’ she said, eyes wet with grief. ‘He’s so old I thought he’d be the first to go. Instead, he’s the last. He has the medicine.’

‘Ask him what happened.’

The conversation was halting, the old man gasping for breath. ‘Some men from the village went to the Missouri to trade furs. When they came back with blankets, everyone became sick.’

‘Does he still have the tablet with its writing?’ asked Magnus.

‘The men who traded died first. He tried to make medicine, but …’

‘The tablet!’ The Norwegian’s hands were twisting on the shaft of his axe. Namida asked again.

The medicine man’s words were a mutter. He was fading. I felt like a torturer myself, making him talk like this in the bright sun.

‘When everyone began dying, he moved the stone to a cave by the river. Someone, or something, guards it.’ She leant to try to hear and I held her, fearful the disease could somehow leap the gap between them. ‘Dakota have been sighted riding nearby. A man in a red coat.’

I cursed to myself. ‘Which cave?’

‘He says you have spirit power, because you were unafraid to come into the sick village.’

‘Has he seen Pierre? Was he with Red Jacket?’

But the old man was gone. I shivered, feeling like a plague myself. The rolling plains around us suddenly seemed menacing, the grass brown, the river low. The season was growing late, and Pierre’s disappearance had rattled me. It reminded me of Talma vanishing in Egypt, and then having his head delivered in a jar.

Everything was going wrong.