The Dakota Cipher

CHAPTER FORTY

The next morning dawned foggy and quiet. We couldn’t see the mysterious cloud, or anything else. Mist hung over our camping place, a fog that left a dripping like a cellar of ticking clocks. No birds sang. No wind blew. It was eerie: like being dead, I guessed. Little Frog had finally fallen asleep and came awake slowly, her forehead hot.

‘Why is it so quiet?’ Namida asked. We all looked at Magnus.

‘I don’t know.’

But I knew, or feared I knew. Send a man into the forest and sometimes nature falls silent, the animals holding their breath as the feared creature passes, waiting and watching to see what he’ll do. We should have heard morning bird call, but there was none. ‘We’re still being watched, I think. Red Jacket hasn’t given up and isn’t far away.’

And indeed, suddenly we heard one bird call from the marsh and an answer to it downstream. The women stiffened. Indian signals.

‘This is a good sign,’ Magnus tried to reassure. ‘They still aren’t killing us because they’ve decided to track us to see what treasures we lead to.’

‘And then?’

‘We find the hammer first and everything changes.’ Magnus used our tow rope to make a crude harness for his travois. ‘Let’s go find what the bastards want us to find.’ He began dragging at a trot, wending through trees, a ghost himself the way the mist shrouded him. Then he broke into a meadow, the track of his travois poles two lines across wet, late-season grass as he hurried with a sense of direction I didn’t share. We jogged to keep up.

‘Magnus, wouldn’t it be easier to leave the rock?’

‘This is proof my country was first.’

‘But what happened to your Norwegians if they learnt old powers?’

‘Who knows? A stone that records ten men red with blood and death says something. Maybe it was disease. Maybe they fought the Indians. Maybe each other. Or maybe they triggered something they couldn’t control, some malevolent force that was awakened.’

‘The Wendigo,’ Namida said.

‘Or they simply accomplished what they came for,’ Magnus went on, ignoring her. ‘At least one of them returned to Scandinavia, because he brought back a map. And some, perhaps, wound up living with the Indians.’ He stopped, turning his harness towards Namida. ‘Do you know your ancestor was a Templar?’

‘What’s a Templar?’

He shook his head, and on we trudged.

‘How do you know all this?’ I persisted.

‘I have Templar blood myself. We were penniless royalty, disenfranchised generations ago, but I grew up on stories in Norway about how my ancestors knew powers we had lost. And they were just stories – until we found the map. Then I heard rumours of new discoveries in Egypt and the Holy Land during the French expedition, and that an American savant could be found in the new Revolutionary court of Napoleon. I detected Odin’s hand! A medieval map is set in the American wilderness, and then I learn of an American nearby with the expertise to partner with? I admit that as a hero you are quite disappointing, Ethan Gage, but you do have certain persistence. Even your lust for the Indian girl has proved useful – it brought us to the rune stone. So work the ways of the gods.’

‘Do you ever use that pagan saying when things go wrong?’

‘Nothing has gone wrong yet.’

‘We’ve almost been clubbed, shot, burnt, and stampeded.’

‘Almost doesn’t count. Here we are, closer than ever.’

‘But they weren’t really gods, Magnus. Not supernatural beings. That’s myth.’

‘And what is your definition of supernatural? Suppose your Benjamin Franklin was transported to Solomon’s court and demonstrated electricity? Would not the Jews proclaim a miracle? We Christians have created a gulf – meagre man and extraordinary God – but what if the gap is not as great as we assume? Or what if there were beings between those extremes? What if history is deeper than we think, and goes back to times foggier than this mist, and that myth becomes, in its own way, fact?’ He pointed to the stone behind him. ‘What more proof do you need? Evidence that Norse were here is so tangible that we clobbered a bear with it.’

‘But this goes against all standard history!’

‘Exactly.’ The Norwegian stopped, reached out, and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Which is why you and I are here, on the verge of resurrection, and no one else is around.’

‘Resurrection?’

‘I haven’t told you everything. Not yet.’

‘Well, we’ll need resurrection if Red Jacket is out there. He’ll kill us all.’

‘Not if we have the hammer.’

The air grew colder suddenly, and I noticed we were walking on a carpet of crunching hail, perhaps laid down by the mysterious storm cloud of the evening before. The ice was still frozen, the ground a stony white. Our breath fogged.

We hesitated, as if something were holding us back.

Then Magnus grunted and forged ahead, pulling his heavy travois in a surge up a gentle slope, and we followed. It was as if we’d punched through an invisible barrier, like a sheet of transparent paper. The air warmed again. We entered a grove of birch, white and gold in the late year. The mist began to thin.

The trees were big as pillars. Here the hail had melted, but the first fallen leaves lay like golden coins. To left and right, late flowers made a purple ground cover among the white trunks, a carpeted temple that receded into lifting fog, tendrils lifted upward to heaven. Mossy boulders erupted like the old standing stones I’d seen in Europe. It was so beautiful that we fell silent, and even the scratch of the travois poles seemed like sacrilege. The ground rose gently and the light began to grow as the day gathered strength. Everything was lacquered with dew.

The rise finally crested at the edge of a low granite cliff, and as the sun burnt through and the mist retreated into the trees, we at last had a view.

I stopped breathing.

The panorama was lovely enough. We overlooked a vale of pond, meadow, birch, and aspen, a lush natural depression in the prairie that seemed hidden from the rest of the world. But that wasn’t what stunned us. On a low hill in the middle of this dell grew a tree of a size I’d never seen before, and never dreamt of. We stared, confused.

The tree was so immense that our heads tilted back, and back, and back, to follow its climb into the sky. It was a tree that dwarfed not just all others in this forest, but all others in this world, a green tower of ash with a top lost in the haze that persisted overhead. I’ve no idea exactly how high the patriarch was but we should have seen it from twenty miles. Yet we hadn’t because of cloud and mist. It was a tree far taller than a cathedral steeple, a tree with branches longer than a street, a tree of a scale never painted, suspected, or dreamt of – except, perhaps, by the ancient Norse. The butt of its trunk was wider than the biggest fortress tower and its branches could shade an army. It was as if we’d been shrunken to the scale of ants, or the ash tree had been inflated like a hot-air balloon.

‘Yggdrasil,’ Magnus murmured.

It couldn’t be! The mythical Norse tree that held the nine worlds, including Midgard, the world of men? This behemoth wasn’t that big. And yet it wasn’t normal, either, it was a tree that towered over the forest the way an ordinary tree towers over shrubs. Why? The ash is one of the noblest of trees, its wood supple and strong, a favourite for bows, arrows, staves, and axe handles – but while tall, it is not supernaturally large. Here we had a freak colossus.

‘There’s enough wood there to build a navy,’ I said, ‘but not to hold up the world. This isn’t Yggdrasil.’

‘Enough to mark Thor’s hammer,’ Magnus replied. ‘Enough to serve as a gate to power. Do you doubt me now, Ethan?’

‘Your hammer is there?’

‘What more likely place? What better landmark?’

‘Why is the tree so big?’ asked Namida.

‘That’s the mystery, isn’t it?’ His one eye gleamed.

‘And what is this here?’ I gestured at a small boulder nearby. Curiously, it had a hole the diameter of a flagstaff bored through it.

‘Ha! More evidence yet! A mooring stone!’

‘What’s that?’

‘Vikings would tether their boats to shore at night by pounding a peg with line into a hole drilled like this. They’re common in Norway.’

‘This isn’t the seashore, Magnus.’

‘Exactly, so why is it here? A marker, I’m guessing, to find Thor’s hammer if the tree somehow didn’t work. I’d wager there’s another mooring stone on the far side of the tree, and another and another. Draw lines between them and you’ll find what you’re looking for where the lines intersect.’

‘Clever.’

‘Proof.’ He set off along the brow of the low cliff to find its end, dragging the rune stone with him. We followed, and eventually came down into the vale, across a clearing, and under the goliath’s shadow.

By any measure the tree was old. I don’t know if its girth has been seen on this world before or since; but I do know I counted a hundred paces just to round its circumference. Great roots sprawled out from its trunk like low walls. There were folds and furrows in the bark deep enough to slide into, and burls as big as hogsheads. One could climb the plant’s crevices like cracks in a cliff to the first branches. These were thirty feet overhead and wide as a footbridge. The foliage was greenish yellow, heralding the turn of the year, and the tiers of branches were so numerous that it was impossible to see the top from the base.

‘This turns botany on its head,’ I said. ‘No normal tree can grow this big.’

‘In the Age of Heroes they were all like this perhaps,’ Magnus speculated. ‘Everything was bigger, as Jefferson said of his prehistoric animals. This is the last one.’

‘If so, how did your Norse Templars know it was here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And where is your hammer?’

‘I don’t know that, either. Maybe up there somewhere.’ He pointed into the branches. ‘Or inside. It is told that when Ragnarok spells the end of this world, a man and woman who hide inside Yggdrasil, Lif and Lifthrasir, will survive the holocaust and flood and repopulate the world.’

‘Well, there’s a note of cheer.’

Could the colossus be climbed? I walked away from its radiating web of roots to study the tree. Even as the fog was dissipating in the sun, an odd halo of cloud was forming around the crown as if the ash strangely attracted weather. The effect was to shield the tree from sight from any distance, I realised. I wondered if the dark thunderstorm we’d observed yesterday would be repeated.

I also noticed the tree’s top seemed oddly truncated, as if the height had been clipped. While the summit was too high and hazy to see clearly, there was a blackened stub as if hit by lightning. Of course! This was the tallest object around, and would serve as a natural lightning rod. And yet why wasn’t the tree even more stunted by ceaseless lightning strikes in this stormy climate? There’d been enough bolts yesterday to set it afire. How had it ever succeeded in growing so tall in the first place?

Nothing made sense.

I walked back down to the others. ‘There’s something odd here. The tree seems to attract cloud, or weather, and yet it hasn’t been killed by lightning.’

‘I don’t like it here,’ said Little Frog. ‘Namida is right. This is a place for the Wendigo, eater of human flesh.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Magnus. ‘It’s a holy place.’

‘The Wendigo carries people off to places like this one.’

‘There’s no such thing as the Wendigo.’

‘But your fables are true?’ Namida challenged. ‘Little Frog is right. There is something wicked about this place.’

‘So we’ll look for the hammer and leave,’ I said. ‘Quickly, before Red Jacket finds us. I’m going to climb.’

By jamming hand and feet in the crevices of the aged trunk, I managed to work myself up the first branch, hauling myself onto its log-like girth. It was broad as a parapet, and I waved more bravely than I felt to the trio below. Even at this modest start, the fall looked disconcertingly long.

Better not to think about that and keep climbing. So I did.

In some places the climb was a relatively simple process of hauling myself from one branch to another. In others I had to climb the main trunk like a spider to get to the next horizontal platform, using the deep corrugations. The trunk was so twisted, rent, and studded with bowls that I always had plenty of handholds; I was a human fly! I was the squirrel Ratatosk, carrying insults from the dragon Nidhogg to the sacred eagle at the topmost branches! Up, up, and up I went, the ground lost to the wicket of branches below and the sky equally invisible above. I was in a cocoon of leaves, the tree homey and snug in its own way. It was also wrenched and cracked, and when I came to a place where a branch had half broken but still hung, I was surprised at the width of the growth rings. They were half an inch wide, suggesting this giant was incredibly fast-growing.

The further I went the slower I crept, the height dizzying and my muscles beginning to ache. Even hundreds of feet off the ground the trunk and branches were still thick and firm, but as more sky filtered in and my view improved, I saw just how terrifyingly high I was. The surrounding forest looked low as a lawn. My companions were entirely lost to view, and birds orbited below. The circle of clouds around the tree had thickened, like the rotating clouds of the day before, and their bulk was building high like a thunderhead. The wind was picking up, and this castle of an ash was beginning to sway. It was slightly sickening to ride it, like clinging to a rolling ship.

I held tighter and kept going.

Finally I broke clear of the primary globe of foliage and neared the tree’s dizzying top, a thousand feet or more above the ground. Through gaps in the clouds I could dimly see out across rolling prairie, an endless panorama of trees, meadows, and silvery lakes, but the day was growing greyer as the concealing overcast thickened. From a distance, was this Yggdrasil already hidden from view?

No, my eye caught movement. A party was approaching on horseback, one of them wearing a bright red coat, like a dot of blood on the prairie.

The trunk now had shrunk to something I could wrap my arms around. There were no hammers up here that I could find. Yet the very top of the tree still seemed truncated in that odd way I’d spied from the ground. Why?

I hauled myself up the last twenty feet, finally hitching myself up a gnarled extension of trunk no thicker than a maypole. When I looked again for Red Jacket the ground was already blotted from view. The prairie was walled off by a circular wall of cloud that seemed to be rotating slowly around the immense tree like a vast, gauzy cylinder. Its top was lit brilliantly silver by the sun, but the lower reaches were already dark. I heard a low growl of thunder. Hurry! There was something bright and odd glittering above, a golden thread, and it jutted from the very uppermost reach of the tree with a gleam like a promise.

This highest point had clearly been struck by lightning, as one would expect of the tallest organism on the prairie. But why hadn’t the tree burnt or died from what must be a hundred strikes a season?

I pulled myself the last inches, fearful the snag would break off or some new jolt of electricity would stab my perch. I was swaying a good twenty feet in the wind.

And then I had the answer to what had puzzled me on the ground. The golden thread I’d spied was in fact a stiff wire, a twisted strand of metal that poked from the tree’s peak as if growing out of the wood. It looked more likely to be an alloy of copper and silver and iron. The topmost snag had extruded a shiny filament like a twig.

If I’d not been an electrician, a Franklin man, I might have found the wire peculiar but not very illuminating. But I’d caught the lightning! What I was looking at, almost certainly, was a medieval lightning rod. Bloodhammer’s Templars, or Norse utopians, had wired this tree. The metal would draw lightning strikes and, if the wire was long enough, conduct them to discharge into the ground. Which meant this wire should lead all the way down through the tree.

Something was under the roots of this behemoth.

My skin prickled and I felt an uneasy energy in the air, the black clouds ever-darkening. More from instinct than prudence, I suddenly let myself slide down this uppermost stub to the first branch below, where I clung like an ape. As I squinted back up at the stub of wire, there was a flash and an almost instantaneous boom of thunder. My eyes squeezed shut as I went half-blind.

A bolt hit the tip of the wire and the tree shuddered. A jolt punched through me, but the worst of the energy was shielded by the wood as lightning was drawn down through the wire. I gasped, shaken, but hung on.

Then the tingle passed, the wire sizzling.

Fat droplets of cold rain began to fall.

I had to get off this tree.