Crusader Gold Read online

  “The Norse were great believers in the spirit world,” Jeremy said. “The barrier between their world and the spirit world was porous, easily transgressed. The wolf-god, the eagle-god, the evil god Loki, any of them could appear in the real world in various guises visible to those with seid, a kind of second sight. The spirits of the dead could haunt a place. Maybe Harald and his men could sense a malign presence when they arrived here.”

  “You wouldn’t have needed second sight,” Costas said. “Even after half a century there’d still be all the skeletons, especially if they were trapped inside one of the longhouses.”

  “Harald’s men probably would have felt compelled to collect the bones and cremate them, and then burn and bury everything else they could,” Jeremy said.

  “And these runes probably had a double meaning, a protective magic to keep the spirits of this place at bay and safeguard Harald and his men for what lay ahead. They were a rune-spell, a galdrastafir.” He got up and reached under the overhang, tracing his fingers over the staves carved in the rock. “One rune might be the eagle’s beak, another the tooth of a wolf, another Thor’s hammer.”

  “And one might be the menorah,” Jack added quietly.

  “The more I’ve seen it, the more I believe the menorah became Harald’s own rune, not only a symbol of his prowess and achievement but also a kind of talisman, something wrapped up in his own destiny.”

  “His survival at Stamford Bridge would have seemed little short of a miracle,”

  Jack said. “As a Viking warrior Harald would have hoped for glorious death in battle, but the fact that he was spared may have suggested that an even greater battle awaited him. In their half-crazed state he and his men may already have crossed the boundary into the spirit world, and believed they were seeing portents of their own destiny at the final showdown of Ragnarøk.”

  “Remember what Father O’Connor said,” Jeremy added. “The Norse believed in predestination, that one’s fate is fixed at birth. Maybe Harald felt his was still to come, and was being driven onwards. He still needed to find the greatest triumph for his character, to die a death befitting the supreme image of the Norse hero.”

  “Okay, guys, you’ve lost me,” Costas said. “All I want to know is where he went from here.”

  Jack nodded and looked serious. “Well, one thing they would have been able to do here was replenish their water and food and carry out ship repair. One of the first things the archaeologists found in the 1960s was a primitive smithy where local bog iron was smelted and made into rivets. And some of those wood chips found near the foreshore could have come from Harald’s men making replacement hull timbers.”

  “And then where? East or south?”

  “West down the St. Lawrence estuary would have been a tough haul against the river flow,” Jeremy said. “And going any farther in that direction they would have been terrified of reaching the edge of the world and plunging into Ginnungagap, the great abyss.”

  “Not exactly the glorious end they had in mind,” Costas said. “So we’re talking south?”

  Jack nodded, then turned round and squatted with his back to the rock while he took out a palm computer from his backpack. He looked up at Jeremy. “It’s my turn to apologise for concealing something. I’m already one step ahead.” He flipped open the screen and activated the computer, and Costas and Jeremy squatted on either side of him. After a few seconds the isometric image of a Viking longship appeared on the screen.

  “Lanowski emailed this to me late yesterday evening, after you were both asleep,” Jack said. “It’s a 3-D image of our Viking longship in the ice, based on the photogrammetric data we acquired inside the berg. Assuming that the Wolf and the Eagle were sister ships, this gives a pretty good idea of what the vessel looked like that brought Harald and his men to Vinland.”

  Jack scrolled around the image to give them different isometric views, then zoomed in to reveal details. They saw an elegant vessel with a single mast and square sail, broad-beamed amidships, with the stem and stern rising symmetrically. They could see where each strake of the hull had been made up of several planks, the lower edge of each overlapping the outside of the one below and joined to it by rivets and clenched nails. The keel was deep, with steeply angled lower planks, giving the vessel good resistance to sideways drift.

  Below the gunwale were evenly spaced oarports, and at the stern a steering oar on a projecting boss, just as Jack and Costas had seen on the longship in the ice. Lanowski had left out the superb carving that had adorned the stem-post, but flying from the stern was a white flag which on close inspection proved to contain the distinctive IMU logo and a spidery image of a seven-branched candlestick.

  “My God,” Costas murmured. “The guy’s got a sense of humour after all.”

  “After overwintering at the icefjord they would have needed to refit their ship for the voyage south,” Jack said. “Remember she was a venerable vessel by Viking standards, the same ship Harald had used to escape from the Golden Horn twenty-five years before. They would have had their work cut out for them making her seaworthy again after having survived the trip from Iona and then being laid up on the ice all winter.”

  “What time of year are we talking about?”

  “The palaeoclimatologists in Macleod’s team have got pretty excited about the ice cores they took through the berg where the longship was trapped.

  Apparently the winter of 1066 to 1067 in Greenland was particularly harsh, presaging the Little Ice Age of the medieval period. It would have been May or even early June before the Davis Strait was clear of drift ice.”

  “Once they’d decided to consolidate in one ship, the Eagle, they could have used timbers from the other vessel to make repairs,” Costas said.

  “Exactly what Lanowski found when he studied the pictures,” Jack said. “Crossbeams and even part of the keel had been removed from the stern area.”

  “What about caulking material?”

  “They could only have survived the winter by hunting and fishing on the ice,”

  Jack said. “I’m convinced they had Greenland Norse with them, men they had taken on board at the western settlement of Greenland to act as guides. They would have shown Harald’s men how to smear the timbers with seal blubber as protection against shipworms and to make rope from walrus hide.”

  “And they would have told them there was no hope in going north,” Costas suggested.

  “In theory, the Vikings could have navigated the Northwest Passage through the Arctic to the Bering Strait, but there’s no evidence they ever went west of Baffin Bay,” Jeremy replied. “There’s a smattering of Norse artefacts from Inuit sites as far north as Ellesmere Island, on the edge of the polar ice cap, but they were probably collected by Inuit hunters from shipwrecks or from abandoned Norse settlements in Greenland. It’s like the evidence for Franklin’s doomed expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1845, a tantalizing scatter of finds absorbed into another culture.”

  “It’s kind of spooky,” Costas murmured. “Everywhere we go we seem to be on the trail of the Vikings, yet it’s as if they weren’t quite there. I think I’m beginning to believe in that spirit world.”

  Jack jerked his head back towards the low shoreline behind them and the site of L’Anse aux Meadows. In his mind’s eye he saw the Viking ship, sail furled, drawn up and keeled over in the shallow tidal estuary. “You can be sure they were here. And remember our longship in the ice.”

  “So we agree they reached here in, say, late June of 1067?” Jeremy asked.

  “Once the drift ice had gone and the weather had settled, it would have been a relatively easy passage across the Davis Strait from Ilulissat and down the coast of Baffin Island and Labrador to this place, following the route told to them by the Greenlanders,” Jack said. “It’s iceberg alley out there, but they could have mustered enough fit oarsmen for short bursts to keep out of harm’s way.

  Chances are they had a steady and favourable wind all the way, behind th
em or on the quarter. Even in rough seas a vessel like this would have been able to ride out storms, supple enough to flex with the pitch of the sea, and with a high enough freeboard to prevent the hull sinking under the weight of icing. And the Norse were extraordinarily skilled navigators. They had a kind of sunstone, a refractive feldspar which would catch polarized light in overcast weather and tell them where the sun was, but mostly they navigated by their senses, by an intimate knowledge of the sea and stars. If Harald ever got caught in one of the perennial fogs of this coast, they would have kept on course by the smell of the land, the waft of the pine forests.”

  “And you really think Vinland was their promised land?” Costas persisted, looking dubiously towards the shore again. “It looks pretty bleak and forbidding to me.”

  “That’s not how it would have appeared to the first Vikings who came here. It had all the ingredients for the good life.” Jack paused and looked pensively towards the mainland. “But by Harald’s time it had a darkness over it, a pall cast by Freydis’ murderous crime. The Greenlanders would have known of it, and may even have warned Harald to stay away. Half a century after the events described in the sagas, Vinland may have acquired a sinister reputation, a place where people went but rarely returned. The Norse were the toughest adventurers around but were a pretty superstitious bunch, and for them this place was baleful, cursed. They would not have wanted to stay.”

  “And there were the Scraelings.”

  Jack nodded. “By this stage Harald’s men probably numbered well under a normal longship’s complement of about thirty, maybe only half that. They would have known about the Scraelings from the Greenland Norse. To provoke any kind of confrontation would have been suicidal. They probably slipped into this bay unobtrusively, took the timber and iron they needed, tapped pine resin for caulking, killed a few deer for clothing and venison, collected as much fish and meat and wild fruit as they could. Their last act may have been to burn and level the settlement and then stop at this island to make their mark, before leaving Leifsbúδir forever.”

  “And then heading south,” Costas said.

  “Down the coast of Newfoundland, across to Nova Scotia, maybe along the eastern seaboard of the United States,” Jack said. “You remember the simulation programme Mustafa used to model the Black Sea exodus, the daily progress of the refugees from Atlantis? I had Lanowski use it to model the likely progress of a Viking ship along this route, factoring in everything we know about the longship, the likely season and the weather conditions in the eleventh century.

  Our new Canadian captain of Seaquest II knows these water like the back of his hand and was able to add his invaluable expertise. They were like ancient Mediterranean seafarers, the Vikings. They measured their progress in daily runs, doegr. With the Labrador current behind them and favourable winds, they would have been able to progress south. If they stuck close inshore and avoided the Gulf Stream, within three weeks they could have rounded the Panhandle of Florida and been in the Caribbean.”

  “The Caribbean?” Costas whistled. “Incredible.”

  “It’s just conjecture,” Jack said. “Wherever they got to, they would have needed to put ashore to replenish water and food within a week or ten days of leaving this place. Let’s say they encountered native peoples again where they put ashore, and were discouraged from trying to stay longer. Then another week or ten days and they were down opposite Georgia and Florida. The shoreline would have looked increasingly inhospitable, an unfamiliar terrain of tropical vegetation and dense scrub. But there would have been no easy turning back, against the currents and wind, with reliance on their sail and too few fit to man the oars for sustained rowing. With increasing desperation they may have continued south.

  It’s pure speculation, of course, but they could even have sailed through the Florida Keys and into the Caribbean. If that happened, the prevailing winds could have blown them south-west, even as far as Central America.”

  “That’s a hell of a long way from Constantinople.”

  Jack suddenly remembered his precious days with Katya six months before in Istanbul, the two of them absorbed in the labyrinthine past of the city, their discussion of how the back alleys of history could lead to the most extraordinary adventures of discovery. For a moment he felt a pang of regret, but then was overtaken by a surge of excitement. “A very long way indeed,” he said. “But look where we are now, how far we are already from their homeland. The Viking presence here at L’Anse aux Meadows is fully documented, corroborated by archaeology. Anything’s possible.”

  “Half crazed with thirst and exhaustion, some of them still crippled by their wounds from Stamford Bridge,” Jeremy murmured. “It’s an incredible image.

  They would have been terrified but exhilarated, fearful any moment of dropping over the edge of the world yet every day getting closer to Ragnarøk, to the showdown where they would join Odin and Thor battle-girded for the last time with their great war axes. To us the tropics seem benign, but to the Vikings they would have been a vision of hell, a gathering aura of crimson that would seem to be drawing them ever closer to their destiny.”

  Costas stood and gazed towards the north-eastern horizon, through the strait towards the shore of Labrador and the open Atlantic. Clouds were building up, and a sea mist was beginning to shroud the coast. Suddenly he pointed to a white form that appeared in and out of the mist on the horizon. “It’s Seaquest II,” he said excitedly. “And the Lynx is on the way.”

  Jack looked out to sea. He had gambled a little bit of his reputation on persuading Macleod to call a halt to the icefjord project and sail south to meet them, in the expectation that they would be going somewhere farther after L’Anse aux Meadows. Jack never normally exerted authority over his colleagues in the other IMU departments, and fortunately Macleod had developed a keen interest in the archaeology after having brought Jack to Ilulissat in the first place. The conditions for taking ice cores were rapidly becoming untenable as summer drew in, and there had been serious rumbles of discontent among the invited scientists. Jack pursed his lips and for the next few minutes watched as the dark speck of the helicopter became recognisable and the thud of its rotor filled the bay. It flew lazily overhead and then settled down on its pontoons in the shallows close to the Zodiac. After the turbine had powered down they watched the helmeted figures of Ben and Andy emerge and wade across to greet the two Canadian Coast Guards.

  “Where do we go from here?” Costas asked. “Looks to me like the trail’s wide open.”

  “We need something more,” Jack said, his brow knitted. “I’d hoped there’d be something extra, some small clue. But at least there’s nothing for anyone else to go on. It means I can get back to Father O’Connor and give him the go-ahead to break his story to the press and Interpol. He and Maria should have finished compiling the dossier on the félag by now, and we haven’t got enough here to justify delaying any longer. As long as the discovery of the menorah was likely, O’Connor’s overriding concern was that we get there first and prevent it falling in the wrong hands. Now we must focus everything on stopping that character Loki. O’Connor’s life may depend on it.”

  “I don’t want to be there when you have to tell Macleod to turn right round and sail back to the icefjord.” Costas squatted down to adjust his boots and leaned back against the grassy verge below the slab of rock. Suddenly there was a tumbling sound and a stream of Greek expletives. Where Costas had once been all they could see were his boots emerging from a mound of turf.

  “Are you all right?” Jack spun round and peered anxiously into the black hole that had formed beneath the rock. He and Jeremy began frantically heaving away the turf and stones that had trapped Costas’ legs.

  “Just the usual shattered pride.” The voice was muffled, and was followed by a pause. “But I’ve found a new friend.”

  As Costas’ upper body came into view, they were met by an astonishing sight. In the small cavity in front of his face was a crouched human skeleton, the
skull tucked down beneath the knees and the feet buried in earth. Hanging off the bones were the tattered remains of animal-skin clothing, and the scalp still retained patches of long white hair.

  Jeremy leaned forward for a closer look. “My palaeopathology’s a little rusty, but I’d say we’ve got a male, maybe late middle age.”

  “Scraeling?” Costas said.

  Jeremy shook his head. “The physiognomy’s European. And this guy’s tall, well over six feet. He could be one of the early English or French explorers, but I’d say these bones are older than that, really old. I’d say we’ve got ourselves a Norseman.”

  Jack closed his eyes and swayed slightly. This could be it. He prayed that his luck would hold.

  “Those are some pretty impressive scars on the bones,” Costas said.

  “I’ve seen that before in Viking warrior burials in England,” Jeremy said. “Battle injuries caused by axes and swords. Not the kind you’d get from an encounter with Scraelings, who had no edged metal weapons. This guy was pretty severely hacked about. There are some odd scars that may be later injuries, particularly those ring marks around his wrists, as if he’d been shackled. But all the battle wounds I can see look well healed, a long time before he died.”

  Jack looked pensively at the skeleton. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Remember there were other Norse out here,” Jeremy cautioned. “But it’s possible, just possible, that we’ve got another of Harald’s men, another one to add to Halfdan. The thing that baffles me is the age of the injuries. If he died on their voyage down from the icefjord, the slash marks from wounds at Stamford Bridge the autumn before would still be fresh on the bones. These ones had healed up years before, even decades.”

  “And this isn’t a burial,” Jack said. “This guy crawled in here and holed himself in with those rocks. That’s why his bones haven’t been scavenged.”

  “This might help.” Costas’ muffled voice came from under the rock, where he had squeezed his upper body into the space in front of the skeleton and was gingerly feeling in the darkness under the rib cage. He carefully prised out two objects and held the larger one out. Jack took it without thinking, his mind still on the puzzling enigma of the skeleton.