Crusader Gold Read online

“It’s fantastic.” Lanowski was shaking his head and chuckling to himself, in a world of his own. “While you were away Inuva and I worked out where the 1930s expedition must have found the ship in the ice cap. Now I should be able to use my glacier-flow quotient to work out where the Vikings dragged the ship on to the ice for the funeral pyre. One of the tributary fjords to the north of Ilulissat, I’d say, where the ice cap is more accessible from the sea.” He pushed his glasses up his nose and peered at Jack. “Having such a closely datable horizon inside that berg is the greatest discovery of the whole expedition. It should provide independent corroboration for my flow theory, the first time we’ll be sure of the rate of ice discharge over the last thousand years. Well worth your efforts. Congratulations!”

  “We’ve just found a Viking longship, man,” Costas said in exasperation. “One of the most sensational archaeological discoveries of all time. A little more exciting than the rate of glacial ice flow.”

  Lanowski looked at him with unseeing eyes, his mind already far away in a world of figures and equations. He pulled out a pocket calculator and began furiously tapping at the keys, occasionally looking up and muttering under his breath.

  Costas shook his head in disbelief as the ungainly figure shuffled off without another word towards the deckhouse computer room.

  “Talk about a one-track mind.”

  “But a brilliant one.” Jack grinned at the dripping form of his friend. “That’s why we’re a team. I couldn’t do all that math.”

  Jeremy appeared beside Maria, and she nudged him forward in front of Jack.

  “We’ve translated the runestone that Kangia gave you, the one the Germans found in the crevasse,” he said diffidently.

  “Brilliant. Let’s hear what you’ve got.”

  “It’s west Norse, eleventh century, quite distinct from the runes used in England and Denmark at that time.”

  “And?”

  “His name was Halfdan.”

  “We know. A veteran of the Varangian Guard in Constantinople.” Jack raised the object that had been resting on his knees, and Jeremy suddenly recognised it for what it was. He stared agape as Jack pointed to the runic inscription on the axe blade.

  “Holy shit.” Jeremy suddenly forgot his restraint. “They’re identical to the Halfdan runes at Hagia Sofia in Istanbul.”

  “He’s our man.”

  “Tall guy, early middle age, long yellow hair and beard,” Costas interjected. “A little weatherworn and charred at the edges, but otherwise in pretty good shape for a guy who hasn’t moved for a thousand years. We’ve just met him, halfway to Valhalla.”

  “Huh?”

  Costas jerked his thumb towards the entrance of the fjord. “Inside the berg. He’s on ice. We were over the central burial chamber when it rolled. The funeral pyre must have been extinguished when the ship fell into the ice, and the flames only licked at the edges. My guess is that runestone was resting on his body.”

  A crewman pushed past the others and handed Jack a piece of paper. He quickly read it and then stared into the distance, a smile flickering across his face. “I knew it!”

  “What?” Costas asked.

  “A hunch I had before our dive. A pretty wild hunch, so I didn’t share it. You remember the dendro date for the ship timbers, 1040 plus or minus ten years?

  For some reason all I could think about was Harald Hardrada’s escape from Constantinople. If the sagas are correct, it took place very close to that median date, in 1042.”

  “And?”

  “I asked the IMU lab to run a comparison between the timber fragments we got from the chain in Constantinople and the wood Macleod’s ice-corer brought up from the longship. The full checklist, species identification, tree-ring characteristics, fibre and cellulose specs.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s not just the same species, Norwegian oak,” Jack said excitedly. “It’s incredible. It’s actually from the same tree. Planks cut radially from the same trunk.”

  “Whoa. Steady on there.” Costas held one hand in front of him, trying to marshal his thoughts. “Let me get this straight. You’re suggesting that one of the ships Harald Hardrada used to escape from Constantinople with the princess and the treasure is the same ship we’ve just seen trapped in an iceberg off Greenland?”

  Jack gave his friend an odd look and then started to nod.

  “Of course.” Costas suddenly snapped his fingers and stared back at Jack. “The repair work on the hull.” He looked up at the others. “We found a section of planking which had been expertly replaced near the bow. It’s in the photographs. I assumed it was collision damage with ice or rock, but it’s exactly where the ship might have driven up against the chain across the harbour when they fled Constantinople.” He shook his head in disbelief and turned to Jack. “So if this is one of Harald’s ships, where’s the treasure?”

  “They’re not exactly going to have put it in a funeral pyre,” Jack said. “And we don’t know the date when this happened. The Halfdan we saw was an older man, and he could have sailed here years after their Constantinople adventure, maybe seeking a new life for himself in the Greenland settlement. By then Harald would have been king of Norway and the treasure of his Varangian days secure in his stronghold at Trondheim.”

  There was a percussive boom from the direction of the fjord, followed by an immense falling sound that reverberated across the still waters. Another giant slab of ice had calved off the iceberg, dropping out of sight into the depths and then emerging again like a surfacing whale to bob out into the bay.

  “What about the longship?” Macleod jerked his head at the iceberg, a sense of urgency in his voice. “We haven’t got much time now. It’d be risky to go close again, but we could try another sonar scan.”

  Jack lifted the axe from where it rested on his knees, twisting it until the sunlight sparkled off the gilding on the blade. He stared at it pensively for a moment and then looked at Maria, knowing they were both remembering their visit to the old Inuit the day before and her apprehension about Fenrir, the Norse wolf-god on the carved prow they now knew had been the spirit guardian of the longship.

  “I took hundreds of pictures,” Jack replied. “Enough for a full photogrammetric reconstruction. There’s no way anyone’s going near that berg again. When we found Halfdan he was partway to Valhalla. I think we should let him finish his voyage.”

  “What about the axe?”

  Jack weighed the haft again in his hands. “I’ll look upon Mjøllnir as a loan,” he said. “It got Halfdan through all those wars alongside Harald Hardrada, and it’s got us through a few scrapes. It’s still got what the Vikings called battle-luck.

  Something tells me those old Norse gods are willing us on, and this is one of the best clues we’ve got. If Halfdan still had his treasured battle-axe from his days in Constantinople, then who knows what else the Vikings could have brought out here.”

  “That reminds me.” Costas suddenly jerked upright and reached into the hip pocket of his E-suit. “I pulled this out of the ice just before things went haywire down there. I’d completely forgotten.” He extracted the object and they could see it was another weapon, a dagger the size of a small hunting knife with a gleaming steel blade and a decorative handle. As he held it up and the blade glinted, the crew members who had been milling on the deck converged around the group, and there was a collective gasp of amazement.

  “Let me take a closer look at that.” Macleod said. “Something’s not right.”

  As Costas passed it over they could see what had caught Macleod’s eye, and their astonishment turned to disbelief.

  “A swastika,” one of the crew exclaimed.

  Macleod turned the dagger over in his hands. “Just as I thought,” he murmured.

  “They did find the longship. Look at the pommel. A skull and crossbones, the death’s-head symbol. This is a Nazi dagger, a weapon carried only by a sworn member of the SS.”

  There was a stunned silence and then the wo
man in the crew spoke again, quietly. “Could someone explain how a Nazi dagger got on a Viking longship inside an iceberg off Greenland?”

  Macleod handed the dagger back to Costas and looked at Jack. “I think it’s time we told the crew the whole story.”

  At that moment there was a sudden lurch in the deck, an unusual sensation in a ship with a state-of-the-art dynamic stabilizing system. The sea remained dead calm and covered with a steely grey mist after the storm. Then someone shouted from the starboard railing. “It’s the berg! She’s rolling!”

  Everyone except Jack and Costas converged on the opposite railing to watch the mouth of the fjord. Even though it was more than a mile away, the spectacle was awesome, a breathtaking display of a force of nature no human agency could ever control. Through the mist they saw the huge front face of the berg drop off the underwater threshold and roll over the edge, the jagged eruptions of ice from the top of the glacier replaced by smooth undulations sculpted by the sea and streaked with black from the threshold. As the berg stabilised, Jack and Costas knew that the longship was now lost forever in the abyss, its fallen warrior destined to sail south along the old Viking sea route to the New World and find his eternal resting place as the berg melted far out in the Atlantic. It had nearly been their tomb too, and Jack found himself gripping the axe hard as he and Costas rested against the bulwark, suddenly overwhelmed by exhaustion, and watched the berg float majestically towards the open sea.

  Jack noticed Maria and Jeremy having a heated discussion, as if she were trying to persuade him of something, and then they detached themselves from the group beside the starboard railing and made their way back across the foredeck.

  Macleod joined them, and Jack peered up at Jeremy as they approached.

  “You haven’t told us what the rest of the runestone says.”

  “I was coming to that.” Jeremy pulled a palm computer out of his pocket, activated the screen and cleared his throat. “Prepare to be amazed.”

  “Go on.”

  “There are five lines of runes altogether, scratched into the quartz slate by one hand. As I said, they’re Norse and eleventh century, consistent with our warrior being the same Halfdan who scratched his name into Hagia Sofia in Constantinople.”

  “Well, what does it say?”

  Jeremy cleared his throat again. “I’ve had to add some connectives to make sense of it, but here’s the gist: Halfdan died here of wounds received in the battle against the King of England near Yorvik. Halfdan will fight again for Odin at Ragnarøk. Harald Sigurdsson his king made these runes the winter after the battle. The Wolf takes Halfdan to Valhalla. The Eagle sails west for Vinland.”

  There was a stunned silence. “Harald Sigurdsson,” Jack gasped. “That’s Harald Hardrada.”

  “The Mappa Mundi inscription from Hereford suggests he was out here,” Maria said. “Now we know for sure.”

  Jeremy nodded. “The Wolf must be the name of the ship in the ice. The Eagle, the other ship, sailed on for Vinland. That’s the name of the Viking settlement in Newfoundland, the site at L’Ause aux Meadows, the farthest Viking outpost in the west and the only one known in North America.”

  “Wait a minute.” Jack’s mind was suddenly reeling in astonishment. “Yorvik was the Viking name for the city of York, seven miles west of Stamford Bridge. The battle can only be Stamford Bridge in 1066, between King Harold Godwinson of England and King Harald Hardrada of Norway.”

  “Correct.”

  “But Harald Hardrada died at Stamford Bridge.”

  “So the history books tell us,” Jeremy replied quietly. “But remember there’s no firsthand account of the battle. The events of that year were completely eclipsed by the Norman Conquest, and the Norman annals were hardly likely to extol an English victory. Most of what we know comes from a brief mention in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and from the Heimskringla, the semi-mythical history of the kings of Norway written in Iceland almost two centuries later. The copy of the Chronicle we found in the Hereford library mentions it, but only in a few lines.”

  “Plenty of scope for omission, even a cover-up,” Costas murmured.

  “My God.” Jack slumped back against the railing, his face dripping with seawater and sweat. “So Harald Hardrada survived Stamford Bridge. That changes everything. Somehow he and his remaining warriors made it out here, in the same two ships he had used to escape from Constantinople twenty years before.

  Remember the treasure of Michelgard, that incredible reference on the Hereford map? Harald must have had his treasure with him when he went to England, ready for a triumphal procession through York and London that never happened.

  Instead he sailed off after the defeat, taking it with him and his surviving followers far to the west, seeking a new land beyond the edge of the Viking world.” Jack lifted Halfdan’s axe in his hands, then gave a tired but jubilant smile. “I think we’ve just had another piece of battle-luck. I knew I was right to come out here.”

  “You might like to have this then.” Costas had reached into the inner pocket of his E-suit lying nearby, and pulled out a small nodule of ice. “I was sure I’d dropped this when the berg rolled, so I didn’t mention it. I found it loose above the burial chamber, near that Nazi dagger.”

  He handed the dripping object to Jack, who rolled it in his fingers and then passed it to Maria. A lustrous gold band protruded from one side of the ice, and Maria eyed it closely. “It’s a finger-ring, a Viking design,” she murmured.

  “Twisted gold, like a miniature arm-ring or neck-torque. But I’ve never seen one with a signet like this.” She clasped the ice in the warmth of her palm and then began rubbing it, gradually revealing the gold beneath. After a few moments she held it up to the sunlight. “I can see the surface of the signet. It’s got an impressed design. It’s…” Her voice trailed off, then she regained her composure.

  “Jack, tell me I’m not seeing things.”

  She passed the ring over and Jack stared through the ice that still clung to the signet. The form beneath wavered, but the outline was unmistakable.

  “The menorah.”

  Jack stared at the seven-branched shape, his heart racing. Something amazing was happening. First the ship in the ice had proved to be Viking, the funerary vessel of a Varangian warrior. A man who would have served with Harald Hardrada, whose last journey to the far side of the world took place in one of the very vessels Hardrada had used to break free from Constantinople, a ship which had sailed across the Golden Horn on the very spot where Jack and Costas had stood aboard Sea Venture only days previously. And now this, an extraordinary link to the greatest lost treasure of antiquity, something Jack assumed had disappeared forever after Stamford Bridge.

  “Don’t get your hopes up yet,” Costas said quietly. “This might not be all it seems.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Costas had sidled up alongside and was peering inside the ring, at the interior face of the signet. “As Maria said, tell me I’m not seeing things.”

  Jack flipped the ring over and let out a gasp. It was a shape as old and familiar as the menorah, but this version of it could only be modern. They had been looking at it on the dagger only minutes before. It was a swastika.

  Jack looked up slowly, his elation replaced by blank puzzlement. Maria glanced at him and then turned to Jeremy, her face set. “The time is now,” she said to the young man firmly. She squatted down between Jack and Costas while Jeremy remained standing, fidgeting slightly and looking paler than usual.

  “Jack,” Maria said quietly, “about that Nazi expedition. There’s more you need to know. There are forces at play here far darker than we could ever have imagined. Jeremy’s got something to tell you.”

  12

  MARIA AND JEREMY LED JACK AND COSTAS through the imposing west entrance of Iona Abbey and down the worn flagstones of the nave. It was cool inside, a refreshing break from the tepid summer air outside, and the east window above the altar bathed the interior in a rich light. Sta
nding off to one side was a tall, blond man gazing contemplatively at the window, his arms folded across his chest and one hand on his chin. When he saw Jack he seemed to know who he was and pointed towards the doorway opposite him. Jack nodded in acknowledgement and followed the others through a low stone entrance into the open courtyard of the cloister beyond.

  “Father O’Connor is waiting for us,” Jeremy said. “He’s a long-standing member of the Iona community, and he has a room in the north range where he retreats for research and writing when he can get away from the Vatican.”

  “Do we trust this guy?” Costas said, his voice sounding loud in the cloister. “I mean, he’s a bit of an unknown quantity.”

  Maria stopped and turned sharply on him. “You wouldn’t be here if I didn’t trust him.”

  “Okay.” Costas saw Jack gesturing at him to back off. “Sorry. It’s just a hell of a long way to come.”

  “He insisted that we meet him here.” Maria’s voice was still curt, and she stopped and took out her cellphone. “I’ll join you. I’ve got to make an urgent call. Jeremy knows the way.”

  That morning they had flown in the IMU Embraer from Greenland to Glasgow in Scotland, and then taken the waiting helicopter one hundred miles northwest to the island of Mull. It had only been twenty-four hours since Jack and Costas had escaped from the perils of the iceberg, and both men had slept soundly most of the way. On Mull they had joined the well-worn pilgrim route to the holy isle of Iona, taking the ferry across the narrow channel to Port Rònain, then walking up through the village to the abbey buildings in their setting of meadows with the sparkling blue sea beyond. As they gazed at the abbey Jeremy had explained that a building had stood on this spot since the time St. Columba arrived from Ireland almost fifteen hundred years before, had survived Viking raids, the Reformation and abandonment, and was now once again a thriving monastery and one of the holiest sites in the British Isles.

  They passed along the sunlit alley of the cloister to another small door and ascended a wooden staircase to an attic corridor with windows overlooking the abbey. Jeremy knocked on a door and a moment later they heard the clatter of a bolt being unlatched and a chain withdrawn.