The Dakota Cipher

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

It was the third morning, not long after dawn, that we encountered our most serious obstacle yet, a living river perpendicular to our own. The buffalo were migrating.

A great herd was moving south, black and shaggy against the plains, and their course took them across our river ahead like a wall of horns and humps. The majestic animals were backlit by the climbing sun, a shambling tide that seemed as powerful and inexorable as the lunar one. We drifted, wondering how to get around.

‘It will take them days to cross,’ Namida said. ‘More buffalo than stars.’

‘If we flip in the middle they’ll trample us under,’ I said.

‘We don’t have days,’ Magnus put in.

And as if to accelerate our thinking, an arrow arced out from the brush on the river’s northern bank and thunked into the wood of our canoe, quivering.

Ambush!

It was a neat trap. Our enemies had trailed us by horseback, waited until we had the rune stone, scouted ahead to spot the vast buffalo herd, and set up a riverside assault where we’d have to stop. Smart – which meant we had to be smarter.

So when an Indian rose from some reeds with bow in hand, arrogant as a duke of Spain, I lifted my rifle, shot him, and pounded Magnus on the back.

‘Paddle!’ I cried. ‘Towards the bison!’

‘We’ll be overturned and drowned!’ Namida warned.

‘We’ll be shot and tortured if we stay here! Go!’

Now there were cries on all sides, warriors rising up from the concealing foliage to whoop and yip. A volley of arrows arced towards us and only the sudden surge as Magnus dug with his paddle kept us from being perforated. Several missiles clattered onto the stone tablet, two more stuck in the stern of our canoe, and the rest hissed into the water. Muskets went off, bullets kicking up spouts around us, and Little Frog gave a cry and clutched her shoulder, losing her paddle.

She was grazed, the blood bright but not pulsing, so I thrust my own paddle at her. ‘Keep stroking!’ I fired our two muskets and two more Indians yelped and fell. Now we were flying down the shallow river as Magnus and the women thrashed, spray flying, aiming straight for the great herd as if we were anxious for a goring. Our sprint took the Dakotas by surprise and their shots went wild as the range grew. They began running from the river’s brush to the enclosing hills where they’d no doubt tethered their horses. They’d stampede the buffalo onto us.

‘Ethan, we can’t paddle through the herd!’ Magnus protested. ‘There must be ten thousand animals just in sight, and a hundred thousand behind them!’

‘Pass me your axe!’

‘What? Why?’

‘Sorcery!’

I glanced back. Dakota riders, bent low over their ponies, were galloping towards the bison. The animals, already rippling in confusion from the gunshots, represented our gravest danger and greatest hope. I reloaded our guns, threw them down until we needed them most, and gripped Magnus’s axe.

‘What’s your plan?’ Namida asked, looking fearfully at the wall of dark fur plunging into the river. Bison skidded down the bank and splashed with great sheets of water, waves rolling away from their bulk. In midriver, hundreds of horns jutted like menacing pickets. Great dark eyes rolled as the beasts saw us coming, hesitating between panic and charge.

‘Paddle faster!’

‘Ethan?’

‘Faster!’

More shots, the buzz of balls passing like hornets. I shot one gun back, to keep them thinking.

Then I squinted ahead. We were flying with the current straight at the rising sun, old bulls moving to the edge of the herd to eye us grumpily, horns lowered, hooves pawing, as cows and calves skittered from our approach.

‘They’re going to attack us!’

‘Keep going!’

We could hear snorts and smell the rank, rich odour.

‘Ethan!’ Namida moaned.

I raised the axe.

Magnus had, as I’ve explained, polished it as if it were a piece of antique silver, giving more care to his hatchet than most men give to their horses or wives. It shone like a mirror, and he’d wiped it clean as china after the bear fight.

Now it caught the sun.

When it did, it flashed the morning’s rising light into the startled eyes of ten thousand hesitant buffalo. It was a winking flash, as if our canoe had exploded with pulsing light. The animals jerked, bawling, and then bolted. In an instant the entire plain surged into reactive motion, the ground quaking as thousands of tons of flesh and hoof began pounding in both directions away from us, across the grass. In the river, panicked bison were surging away from our midriver course, trying to flee the winking axe blade of light as we swept down on them like Valkyries. The river boiled as buffalo heaved out of it. I kept twitching the axe, catching the rays like a necklace of Marie Antoinette’s. We raced into the buffalo ford, parting the herd.

I glanced back. Behind us the confused bison, pushed by unknown tens of thousands more in the hills, was wheeling back towards the river. As they did so they stampeded into the pursuing Indians. The Dakota fired to frighten the beasts towards us, but that only added to the milling confusion, some buffalo running one way and others the opposite. Dust pillared in the morning air. A horse screamed and went over, the rider gored.

Our paddlers meanwhile were artfully threading the river between panicked buffalo trying to swim or wade away from our course. Horns and massive heads slid by, the animals bewildered by our boldness and our odd towed sled with its rune stone. One bull crashed into the shallows to charge us so I threw down the axe, snatched up a musket, and shot. The animal stumbled and crashed, setting off yet another current of stampeding animals. A tendril of blood curled into the water as we swept past.

Now we had a curtain of panicked buffalo between us and our pursuers, buying us time. Animals were spilling in all directions, sweeping the frustrated Dakota before them. I hoisted the axe again and again, sun flashing, and finally we were through the crossing. Dust from the stampede rose like a wall behind us, screening us from view. We stroked until we couldn’t see the herd anymore, or any pursuit. Finally we drifted to rest, the rune stone still trailing behind like a little dinghy.

‘That wasn’t sorcery,’ Magnus panted. ‘That was my axe.’

‘The sorcery was what I did with your axe. Magic is nothing but ideas.’

At length our meandering river met the Red, flowing northward to Lake Winnipeg. Guessing from Magnus’s vague map, we turned south and paddled upstream until we came to a tributary leading east again. Then we went up that, towards Bloodhammer’s best guess of where the Norwegians and Gotlanders might have journeyed. Given that the rivers writhed and twisted like Italian noodles, I was unsure how close we were to anything, let alone a vague symbol on a medieval map we no longer had.

The creek was slow and swampy, and as we went east the echoing emptiness of the plains was giving way to a more familiar landscape of wood, meadow, and pond. About half the land was forested, and periodically the river widened into a small lake.

Then we saw our biblical pillar, our gate to Eden.

At first I thought it was simply a black squall, streaked and sagging against an otherwise blue autumn sky. But as I watched, this squall didn’t move despite the breeze blowing across the prairie. Or rather it did move, we saw as we paddled closer, but in a slow gyre around some central point, like a viscous, heavy whirlpool. Its rotation reminded me of those eerie funnel-shaped clouds we’d fled towards on the plains, because this too was dark and hinted of power. But this cylinder of clouds was far wider, a lazily revolving curtain that hid whatever was behind it. Occasionally, lightning flickered and thunder tolled in dull warning as we approached.

We studied the phenomenon uneasily.

‘I’ve heard of this place,’ Namida said. ‘The storm that never ends. No one comes here. Or if they do, they don’t come back.’

‘But we have a sorcerer,’ Magnus said.

‘Who thinks your destination looks like hell instead of paradise,’ I replied.

‘It’s just a home for Thor.’

‘I want go home,’ Little Frog said in halting French. Her shoulder was sore from the bullet, and she had a fever. ‘Go Mandan.’

‘No, there is home, the place from which we all started.’ The Norwegian’s eyes were gleaming. ‘There is the birthplace of gods and kings, of heroes and sirens, of life everlasting. There you will be cured, Little Frog!’

Life everlasting? It looked like a poisonous thunderstorm, albeit a beautiful one. As lightning flashed, the clouds glowed green and purple. They roiled, climbed, and descended, as if bound like planets to something within. And as the sun dipped to the west and lit the storm, a rainbow appeared as bright and solid as a flying buttress.

‘Bifrost!’ Magnus roared. ‘The flaming bridge that linked Asgard, home of the gods, to Midgard, home of man! There it is, a welcoming gate!’

‘It’s just a rainbow, Magnus. A rainbow and some rain.’

‘A rainbow with treasure at its end, I wager! Come, if you don’t believe me!’

How could we turn back now? We paddled as near as we could in a mosaic of lakes and streams, portaging brief distances three times, dragging the rune stone through the mud, and then paddling again. Either the strange, stationary storm was farther than it looked, or it kept receding from us. Our progress seemed glacial. Then as our creek finally shelved into marsh and we could paddle no closer, we beached the Mandan canoe for a final time, pulled ashore the coracle, and lifted out the heavy rune stone.

‘I’m not going to leave it for anyone else to discover,’ Magnus said.

‘How are we going to carry it?’

‘We can build a travois,’ said Namida. ‘My people use them to pull things across the plains. The Dakota pull them with horses, but we use dogs.’

‘We don’t have a dog, either.’

‘We have a giant.’

We cut poles and lashed them to form a triangle, with the coracle’s bear hide tied to the centre to bear the stone. Absent the wheel it was the best we could do.

Then, as the setting sun lit the cylinder of cloud orange, we bedded for the night. A chill breeze wafted down and Little Frog couldn’t sleep, watching the pulse of lightning. At midnight I woke and she was still upright, her face resigned.

‘La mort,’ she whispered when I touched her. Death.