Ethan Gage Collection # 1

by William Dietrich

  “I traded it for knowledge, too. I lost it when I was caught in the secret archives of Copenhagen, researching the history of my nation and old Knights Templar lore. A sword tip got past my guard and I had to fight my way out with a face full of blood. Fortunately the pain focused me when I leaped into the slushy harbor and swam deep to avoid their gunshots. You’d have done the same, of course, but perhaps with more skill at arms to avoid being wounded. You don’t seem to bear many scars.”

  That’s because I would have surrendered to the first stern librarian, but no need to be absolutely candid. I decided to change the subject. “Asserting that the Christians took some of their best ideas from the pagans was the same kind of blasphemous claim a woman named Astiza used to make about the Egyptians. Contradicting this nonsense is like trying to stamp out a grass fire. You can’t believe hell is a Norwegian idea, Magnus. Especially since it’s supposed to be hot.”

  “Some hells are cold, like our Nilfheim. And no, it’s a universal idea—like so many stories in the Bible—echoed across time and culture. That’s why the biblical stories strike us as true. The Bible has the Flood, and the Norse have Ginunngigap, the periodic rising of the sea that swallows the world. The Bible has the Apocalypse, and the Norse have Ragnarok, the final war between gods and giants. Newer religions pass on the old. It’s no heresy to recognize the deep origins of religious belief, Ethan. By understanding the roots, we begin to comprehend the truth.”

  “How do you know all this? Are you some kind of Druid priest?”

  “I’m a patriot and a utopian, and as such an agent of the past because it was there, long in the past, that we lost the keys to a bright future.”

  “But now there’s science. Fifteen years ago, the French astronomer Comte de Corli proposed that fragments of a passing comet struck Earth and that is the cause of some of the disasters and miracles the Bible relates.”

  “Is that any likelier than Yggdrasil and Asgard? Your science is just the myth of our times, supplying a beginning. Aye, we’ve forgotten as much as we’ve learned, almost as though we’ve had a blow to the head that obliterated vital memory. Then the Knights Templar began to rediscover the truth. I’m on that path, and you’ve appeared to help me.”

  “Appeared, or dragooned by you and your mad Danes?”

  “Our being here, on this pitching ship, was foreordained.”

  “By whom?”

  “That’s the mystery, isn’t it?”

  ALL NONSENSE, OF COURSE, BUT I SUPPOSE IT WAS JUST AS well the voyage gave him time to jabber and me to rest. By the time we’d parted company with Pauline on the coast highway in France I was wrung out as a dishcloth, had a cramp in one leg, and was thoroughly unsettled by a visit from a squadron of French dragoons sent to look for me after the ambush of my carriage. They caught up with us just a few miles on our detour toward Brittany. I was frantically pulling on my boots, hoping to outrun what I assumed was General Leclerc’s vengeance, when a lieutenant saluted me through the coach door as if I wore epaulettes. He handed me an envelope. “Compliments of the First Consul, sir. You slipped away before orders could be issued.” He carefully kept his eye off Pauline.

  “Orders?” Was it back to Temple Prison as an unrepentant fornicator of the consul’s sister? Or simply a quick firing squad in the woods?

  No, it was a directive, in Napoleon’s quick hand, ordering me to wait on the coast for final instructions before departing for America.

  “You’re not here to arrest me?” I sounded incriminating, but I’m not used to such luck.

  “Our orders are to see you to a public coach and escort Pauline Bonaparte back to Paris,” the man said, his face a careful mask. “We are to ensure that everyone is on their correct path.”

  “So gallant is your concern, Lieutenant,” said Pauline, who at least had the decency to redden.

  “The concern is your brother’s.”

  Once again Napoleon was demonstrating his command of the situation. I was to be hurried off to America, and Pauline back to her home. Frankly, it was time to get distance from the girl. Nor, once I was spent, did I feel entirely moral about my performance. Conquering a Bonaparte was not as satisfying a revenge for my rough treatment as I’d imagined. Once again I wondered if I’d learned anything from my tumultuous adventures; if I was, in fact, impregnable to sense and good fiber. “He is a governor that governs his passions, and he a servant that serves them,” old Ben had lectured. Bonaparte thought too much about the future, I of the moment, and Bloodhammer of the past.

  So Magnus and I, tired and reprieved, climbed down from the stage and gave fumbled salutes to the dragoons. My new companion was tipsy from having warmed himself with a bottle of aquavit he’d smuggled from Mortefontaine with more sly initiative than I’d have given him credit for. We waved Pauline off to Paris, caught a public stage at first light, and eventually arrived at the coast like two vagabonds. With my rifle and tomahawk and Magnus’s map case our only luggage, we were about as inconspicuous as a gypsy circus—but seaports draw odd men, so no one questioned us too closely when we showed enough francs. The Breton rebel Georges Cadoudal was rumored to have returned to France from England to conspire against Napoleon, and we could have been anything from Bourbon sympathizers to the secret police. Accordingly, we were left alone.

  We found a brig for New York that was waiting for a break in the weather and the British blockade. The foul season was the ideal time to slip out.

  In Le Havre, my decision to take a break from France was reinforced when I received further instructions and one hundred silver American dollars, minted in Mexico, from the French foreign minister, Talleyrand himself. He informed me that the American commissioners were writing to my government to alert them of my coming. He added that France itself had a particular interest in my mission. Talleyrand wrote:

  It is in the utmost confidence and secrecy that I must inform you that agreement has been reached with Spain to return to France her rightful possession of Louisiana, a territory four times the size of my nation that, as you know, was lost in the Seven Years’ War. Announcement of this accord will probably be made early next year. The government of France has the keenest interest about conditions in Louisiana, and expects that your investigations with the Norwegian Magnus Bloodhammer may lead you to that territory. I must also advise that rumors of an amatory nature make it advisable for you to be at some distance from Paris, out of the sight of Pauline Bonaparte’s husband and brothers, for a while.

  It’s about as easy to keep a secret about a tryst in France as it is a sea profit in Boston, and no doubt my absence with Pauline rivaled my fireworks performance as theater gossip. Best to set sail.

  As a confederate of the First Consul, I hope you will be able to (1) ascertain if the Norwegian’s theories are at all true, (2) inform us and your own country of Britain’s designs on the northwest frontier, and (3) explore the possibility of new alliances between the Indian tribes of that region and France, so as to secure the sovereignty of both French holdings and the border integrity of your own United States. Our two nations, I trust, will always live in harmony along the boundary of the Mississippi River. In return, I enclose a preliminary payment for expenses, and a letter and seal to gain you the assistance of any French representatives you may encounter in your travels. Make no mistake: France’s enemy, England, is the enemy of your young nation as well. Treat all British representatives with the utmost caution and suspicion, and work toward the rebuilding of the natural alliance between our two republics.

  —TALLEYRAND

  Louisiana back to France? I dimly remembered, from my reading of aged American newspapers, about Spanish threats of closing New Orleans to American shipping down the Mississippi, choking off the west’s only access to the sea. If Napoleon had somehow bamboozled the Spanish into giving New Orleans back, the United States and France might find themselves in commercial partnership, with me neatly in the middle. Surely there was money to be made!

  All I had to do was
stay friends with all sides.

  Chapter 10

  SO WE PUT TO SEA, AND IF THE SHIP HAD ONCE STOPPED heaving up and down so distractingly I might have had the presence of mind to leverage my secret knowledge into a fortune. Instead, I had to listen to the fairy tales of Magnus, who like all fanatics seemed to live as much in his imaginary world as the real one. He displayed that unwavering conviction that always accompanies meager evidence, because to admit anything might be untrue would be to undermine his entire edifice of belief. He was entertaining, but eventually I had to interrupt his yarns about drunken gods and sly elves.

  “Enough, Magnus!” I cried. “I’ve been assaulted in a wine cellar, nearly incinerated by fireworks, forced to flee to America in weather that could sink a continent, and am allied to a lunatic who babbles about a mysterious map. What is going on?”

  He looked about. “What lunatic?”

  “You!”

  “Me! The man who saved you at Mortefontaine?”

  “Magnus, you said those were your enemies, not mine. I have nothing against Denmark. I could barely find Norway on a globe. I don’t care what the numbers of a roulette wheel add up to, or coincidences in 1776, and I’m not entirely certain what we’re supposed to do when we reach the United States.”

  “Uncertain? You, the famous Freemason?”

  “I’m not a famous Freemason. My late friend Talma took me to a lodge meeting or two.”

  “Do you deny the significance of October 13, 1309?”

  “The significance of what?”

  “Come, Ethan, don’t be coy. Let’s agree that the events of that black Friday the Thirteenth were momentous for world history.”

  Now I remembered. That was the night the French king Philip the Fair had arrested hundreds of Knights Templar, two centuries after the order’s founding in Jerusalem during the Crusades. My old jailer, Boniface, had told stories about it. Grand Master Jacques de Molay, unrepentant at the end, had gone to the stake in 1314, vowing correctly that both Philip and the pope behind him would follow him to the grave within a year. Philip had allegedly tried to plunder an organization both mysteriously rich and annoyingly independent, and found frustratingly little to steal.

  “The Templars were crushed. Musty history.”

  “Not to true Masons, Ethan. While some Templars died or recanted their order, others fled to places like Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia…and perhaps America.”

  “America hadn’t even been discovered then.”

  “There are Viking legends of exploration, and rumors of just such a Templar escape. Legends tied up with stories about Thor and Odin. And then, eight months ago, in a secret crypt below the floor of a Cistercian abby on the island of Gotland, exploring monks found a map and the legend became truth. That is what is going on.”

  “This map you claim to have.”

  “The Cistercian order was founded by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, you may recall, nephew of André de Montbard, one of the Templar founders.”

  Now I felt a chill. I’d found the tomb of Montbard—or some Christian knight, anyway—in a subterranean chamber beneath a lost city in the Holy Land, and with it the Book of Thoth. Despite my best efforts, the villain Silano had used the book to help usher Napoleon Bonaparte to power. Now Napoleon called the Tuileries home, and I was on a ship to America. My lost love, Astiza, who had returned to the sun of Egypt, would agree with Bloodhammer that it was all foreordained. For a world in which everything is supposedly predestined, life seems awfully complicated.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” Magnus went on, watching me. “Saint Bernard was a mystic who saw holiness in geometry and inspired the greatest of the Gothic cathedrals. His monasteries became some of the most prosperous and powerful in Europe, rising hand-in-hand with the secular power of the Templars. Was it coincidence that some of the persecuted knights fled to Gotland where the Cistercian order was particularly strong? The monks succeeded in winning Norse pagans over by blending some of the old beliefs with the new, or rather in recognizing a continuity of religious belief as old as time. Not so much one true God as that every god was, in its own way, a manifestation of the One. And not just God, but the Goddess.”

  Damnation. Pagans pop up on me like pimples on a youth. And if you get involved with one or two of them, as I have, the others seem to seek you out.

  “You’re saying Saint Bernard and the Cistercians weren’t Christians?”

  “I’m saying Christianity allows more freedom of thought than many denominations will admit, and that Bernard recognized that devotion can take many forms. Of course they were Christian! But both the knights and the monks recognized the many paths the holy have walked, and the many manifestations of their power. It’s rumored the knights brought some secret back from Jerusalem. That’s why I wanted to meet you at Mortefontaine, to learn if it is true.”

  It was gone, so why not tell him? “Was true. It was a book.”

  I could hear his sharp intake of breath even over the roar of the sea. “Was a book?”

  “It burned, Magnus. Lost forever, I’m afraid. I could hardly even read it.”

  “This is a monstrous tragedy!”

  “Not really. The scroll caused nothing but trouble.”

  “But you believe me, then? If the Templars found and hid a sacred book, why not an important map? Correct?”

  “I suppose. The book was in a crypt, too.”

  “Aha!”

  I sighed. “What led to the discovery of your map?”

  “Snow and thaw. It was a bad winter, water penetrated the foundations, and cracks developed in the masonry of the chapel floor. A bright young monk realized there was a cavity under what had been assumed to be a solid foundation, and when it was excavated for repair they found the tombs. Curiously, the entrance had been sealed so no one could spot it. In one sarcophagus of a monastery leader, dated 1363, a parchment map was encased.”

  “I don’t suppose it was in a golden cylinder?”

  “Gold?” He looked surprised. “Now that would have gotten our attention. No, a leather tube, sealed quite effectively with wax. Why do you ask?”

  “My own book was encased in gold. Splendid piece, carved with figures and symbols.”

  “By the steed of Odin! Do you still have it? It could be of incalculable value in understanding the past!”

  I felt sheepish. “Actually I gave it away to a metallurgist, probably to be melted down. I’d cost him his home, see. There was this woman, Miriam…”

  He groaned. “Your brain is in your breeches!”

  “No, no, it wasn’t like that. I was going to marry her, but she was engaged, and her brother was laughing at me…” It sounded puzzling even to me. “Anyway, it’s gone too.”

  Magnus shook his head. “And to think you have a reputation as a savant. Are you an expert in anything beyond the female form?”

  “Don’t act superior to me! Don’t you like women?”

  “Aye, I like them, but they don’t like me. Look at me! I’m no dandy.”

  “You have a certain, umm, mutilated, bearlike charm. You just haven’t found the right one.”

  Instantly, he was gloomy. “I did, once.”

  “Well, there you go then.”

  “And if she does like you, and then you lose her…well, there’s nothing more painful than that, is there?”

  It was the kind of confession that makes you realize someone has the potential to be a friend. “It hurts, doesn’t it?” Yes, I’d been in love, too, and with far better women than Pauline Bonaparte. “You’ve had your heart broken?”

  “Not in the way you think. I lost my wife to illness.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry, Magnus.”

  “It’s not so bad, I think, never to know joy, never to see paradise. But to have it, to see it, and then lose it…. After Signe’s death I dedicated myself to learning the truth of legends I’d first heard as a boy. I’ve searched libraries and archives, sailed to mines and hiked to dolmens, lost an eye and offered my so
ul. While Signe has gone on, I remain in our earthly purgatory, trying to get back in.”

  “Get back in what?”

  “Paradise.”

  “You mean another woman?”

  “No!” He looked offended.

  “What, then?”

  “Suppose it didn’t have to hurt?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Imagine there was a place, a way, where bad things didn’t happen? Or where bad things could be reversed, corrected?”

  “What, heaven? Valhalla? Not in the world I’ve seen, Magnus, and believe me, I’ve looked.”

  “Suppose there was a better world we’ve lost? A real place, in a real time, not a legend.”

  “These myths you talk about aren’t real, man. They’re stories.”

  “Stories like Templars escaping to America, more than a century before Columbus. Stories about secret books, and underground tombs in lost cities.”

  He had a point. The planet seemed fuller of inexplicable oddities than I’d ever imagined. I had, after all, scooped treasure beneath the pyramid, found a secret chamber beneath the Temple Mount, swum in a secret well to a Templar’s grave, and gotten help in the middle of a dire fight from a long-dead mummy. Who’s to say what’s impossible? “Let’s see your map, then.”

  So he pulled it out of that tube he carried. I noticed the map case was longer than the scroll, and wondered what was at its hidden end.

  “There are stories of other maps. The Earl of Orkney, Prince Henry Saint Clair, is said to have taken thirteen ships west at the end of the fourteenth century, nearly one hundred years before Columbus, and come back with a map showing Nova Scotia and perhaps New England. But this one is earlier, and better.”

  The chart was on some kind of skin parchment, not paper, with the coastline of Europe clearly visible and what appeared to be Iceland and Greenland at the top. There was a crude compass rose, which meant an origin no earlier than medieval times, and Latin inscription. But what drew the eye, of course, was the map’s left-hand side. It appeared to show the northeast coast of an unbounded land mass with a large, almost circular bay. From this, squiggly lines, like rivers, led south into a blank interior. In the middle of nowhere was a curious symbol, like a squat, fat T. Near it was a little peak.