Ethan Gage Collection # 1

by William Dietrich

  We’d ignited Ragnarok, end of the world.

  Chapter 42

  “UNDER THE TREE,” MAGNUS CROAKED. HIS BEARD WAS smoking. “Down below, to save our lives!”

  We retreated down the tunnel of tusks to the chamber we’d been in before, this time without the hammer suspended in its cage of wire and roots. The wires were smoking now, the tree shuddering with convulsions overhead, and Magnus looked horribly burned.

  “Little Frog snatched it to avenge Pierre,” Namida said shakily.

  “And half killed herself doing it,” I amended. Smoke began to follow us down the tunnel. The heat was growing. “We haven’t found Eden, Magnus, we’ve found hell.” I automatically, without thinking, began reloading the rifle that seemed welded to my fist. How many times had it saved my life?

  “No, no, this is paradise, I know it!,” Magnus gasped. “The hammer was the apple, we should never have touched it! But the sky god’s power is still here—we are connected to heaven by a wire! It will work, Ethan, it will still work!”

  “What will work?” The giant was even crazier than before.

  “It will resurrect Signe!”

  “What?”

  “It’s the tree of life, Ethan, that’s what the Norse Templars were looking for! They were searching for the remnant of Eden and the youth of the world that it still might contain! The hammer was a seed, to collect the sky’s energy, and the tree a machine of rejuvenation! They didn’t have the time to make it work before they were overwhelmed by the Indians, but it’s been growing for four and a half centuries. Now, Ethan, now, I can bring her back!”

  “Bring back your dead wife?”

  “With my child in her womb!”

  And in triumph, he held up the map case. “Don’t you wonder why I carried this across the prairie with no map?” With burned, smoking fingers, he winced as he tore the end of it open. “The texts are ambiguous, but I think they imply resurrection. That, or oblivion. I never loved anyone else, Ethan, never for a moment, not like Signe!” And he dropped into his palm a cup of gray powder. His eyes gleamed. “Her ashes! Didn’t I tell you it’s the greatest treasure on earth?”

  “No! What do you mean to do?”

  “Stand back, both of you! I’m going into the cage with her and grasp the wire, but this time I think it will heal! So promise the old texts!”

  “Magnus, that’s insane!”

  “The electricity will reconstitute her! Why else would the Templars build this?”

  “Cecil said it was for some purpose we don’t know!”

  “The Somersets are the blind ones, in a dark cellar with jewels they cannot find.” He smiled. “Signe and I will finally be together one way or another. I’m going to be a conduit for the lightning. I’m going to touch the finger of God! Get back, in case it doesn’t work.”

  “Magnus, Signe can’t be resurrected!”

  “You think I care about this life if she can’t?” And he reached like a madman toward the web of root and wire, grasping toward the rod that ran to the top of the tree. For the first time since I’d met him, he seemed at peace. Odin the one-eyed had finally found what he roamed the world for.

  I fled.

  As I hauled Namida back up the smoking tunnel, I saw him reach for the wire as Adam reached for the Almighty. “Come back, lost love!” His fist squeezed the ashes.

  And then there was a roar, a world-wrenching sound that dwarfed that of the lightning before, and I suppose our hearing was saved only because the clap brought down on Namida and me a roof of earth as the tunnel and its tusks collapsed on top of us. Magnus had triggered the apocalypse, and everything was snuffed out in an instant. We were buried alive, in ground that shook like a wet dog.

  I clung to the Indian woman I’d dragged to this hell, cursing that I hadn’t followed my own instincts. I was to be entombed in a nameless prairie, never to report on woolly elephants, British scheming, or the sexual charm of aboriginal maidens!

  And then, as Magnus had promised, we were resurrected.

  Not in the biblical way. Rather, the earth erupted, carrying us up with it as a root ball as wide as a village was ripped out of the ground. First there was terrifying, suffocating blackness as the tunnel caved in, and then the light of our explosive rebirth, a tumult of earth, rock, and wood as roots flailed and soil flew up in great geysers of flying dirt. I dimly heard and felt a titanic crash of thousands of tons of wood striking the ground, shaking the earth even more. Then bits of burning foliage rained down out of a storm-tossed sky like little candles, lighting a gloom of dust and cloud. I spat soil and gasped for breath.

  Finally it was quiet except for the hissing of a gentle rain. Or was that ringing in my ears?

  Shakily, I sat up. Namida and I were black with earth, coughing, clawing it out of our ears, eyes streaming. My rifle jutted from the mess like a dirty stake. We were in a crater big enough to make a respectable lake. The great ash tree, our modern Yggdrasil, had been blown skyward by Magnus’s rash experiment and had fallen, flaming, to earth. It stretched a quarter-mile across the prairie, flames boiling from its branches. As it toppled it left a hole where the roots had been. Its root pan formed a vast disk and individual roots jutted two hundred feet high into the air, while the weight of its trunk had hammered a depression into the ground. Cracks in the earth radiated away from the trench where it had fallen.

  The greatest tree on the face of the planet had been killed.

  Of Magnus there was no sign. The cave was gone, of course, obliterated in the explosion and toppling. So was the cage of roots and wire, Signe’s ashes, and the Norwegian himself. He had connected with Valhalla, and vanished.

  Maybe the couple found a common grave in the pit of the tree’s crater. Maybe they were vaporized by the energy they harnessed. Maybe they were remade in some better place.

  And me? As always, I was left in this bitter world.

  Oblivion from sorrow, I realized, was Bloodhammer’s real Eden. He wanted an end to his mourning, one way or another—and had gotten it. Norway, royalty, treasure? In the end it didn’t matter. Magnus had found the paradise of being subsumed.

  Namida and I crawled from the crater to its rim, shaking. I dragged my now-battered rifle with us, knocking soil from the muzzle mouth, and used it to shakily lever myself erect. Then I helped up the Indian woman.

  The grass fire at the tree’s base had consumed all the fuel and burned itself out, leaving behind a smoking ring. Fires still radiating out from its periphery were dying in the drizzle. We found the bodies of Little Frog and Pierre and Cecil in the bare ground under the tree where the fire hadn’t reached, and the smoked, charcoal husk of Red Jacket. Several other blackened corpses lay in the devastated meadow. Of the rest of the Dakota, and Aurora Somerset, there was no sign.

  I did find the hammer, curiously inert and shrunken. Much of its weight had evaporated in our apocalypse. The husk remaining was dull gray now, a lump of iron, no longer hot to the touch. Our wayward use had disarmed it.

  “Thor’s hammer, he called it,” said Namida, looking at the weapon in wonder.

  “Just old metal, now.”

  “There are some things men shouldn’t find.” She began to weep for her lost friends.

  I looked skyward. The storm clouds had flattened to a sullen overcast, and the rain began in earnest.

  Chapter 43

  THE TREE TRUNK WAS A HORIZONTAL WALL AS TALL AND LONG as the storied walls of Constantinople, but the fire and fall had shattered its abnormally fast-growing column into long, twisted pieces. Rain was already pouring into yawning gaps. It would rot fast, I guessed, and when it decayed would anything of like grandeur ever replace it? Not without the peculiar influence of electricity and hammer. The root hole would become a lake, the tree would molder into the soil, and the burned meadow would grow back. No trace would remain of Bloodhammer’s peculiar Eden. Or was it his Ragnarok? Did only the whim of chance separate the two?

  The rune stone was still there, forgotten in all the
excitement. The fire had passed over it without harm. In a generation or two, when the tree was gone, it would be the only proof of my tale.

  Also abandoned was the ax of my Norwegian friend. Namida picked up its handle to drag it in a daze, like a child’s doll.

  And then, as we staggered in weariness around the wreck of the tree, we noticed another thing not immediately apparent in the tangle of roots exposed by Yggdrasil’s toppling.

  The tree’s heave out of the earth took with it not just tons of clinging dirt but granite boulders the size of hay wagons, clinging like nuts in a dough. The root pan was already streaming with rainwater, and it too would eventually break down. But there was something else we saw, something so strange that it made us shiver and wonder if this place was indeed cursed.

  Beside old mastodon tusks there were human skeletons caught in the web of roots, their bones as gray-brown as the tree parts that surrounded them. Flesh and hair was long gone, but buried armor showed these were not Indians. The red rust of shields was clearly visible. Also caught in the wheel of soil were remnants of old breastplates, swords, mail, and helmets. We’d found the Norse! Some at least had apparently been buried in a semicircle around what four and a half centuries ago must have been a sapling, tied to an electrical machine dug in a barrow deep into the earth.

  “Bodies,” I said to Namida.

  “The red-haired strangers,” she said, looking at the remnants of armor.

  “Yes. White men like me.”

  “So far from home.”

  “Magnus would say they thought they were going home.”

  “The white man is so strange, always searching for home. The world is the world, anyplace you are. Eden is where you make it. Why does the white man always travel so far, so restlessly, with such violence?”

  “To find peace.”

  “White men need to make peace where they are.”

  “The Templars were warriors. So were the Vikings. So are the Ojibway and the Dakota. It was who they were, and are. It’s who men are, different than women.” But I wasn’t really trying to explain, I was staring upward at the suspended skeletons and rusting armor with sudden excitement. Was that gold?

  I’d found gold with the remains of the knight Montbard in the City of Ghosts, far away in the desert, so why not here? My heart began to beat faster, my body to recharge.

  “White men should find home where they are.”

  “I think we found treasure.”

  And before Namida could stop me, I grasped a root and began to climb the disk of earth, pulling myself up to the skeleton I’d seen with its glint of yellow metal. If it seems sacrilegious to disturb the dead, they are past caring, aren’t they? Was I finally to get some reward for this journey? But why entomb gold? Did refugee Templars bring gold to America? Or did they find it here, like the mysterious copper mines on Isle Royale? Was supple metal, not Eden, what drew them?

  “There’s something with these bones,” I called down.

  Namida shook her head. “The bones are why this place is wicked!”

  “Just sacred, like a burial ground.”

  She began to moan. “No, this is an evil place! That hammer was evil, look what it did! Leave their things, Ethan! We must get away from here, quickly! This is a place of bad spirits!”

  “It’s time to salvage something from the wreckage.”

  “Nooo, we must go, I can feel it!”

  “Soon, I promise. I’m almost to it!”

  I reached the remains, the skull grinning in that disquieting way that the dead have—I was getting used to this macabre aspect of treasure hunting—and brushed some dirt aside next to the armor. A flake of gold came with it.

  I paused. Was the treasure that delicate? I picked at the dirt more carefully now, and realized there was indeed gold, but in a sheet far thinner and broader than I’d imagined. It was a disk of gold, as broad as an arm is long, but no thicker than paper.

  It was paper, of a sort.

  The size and shape of a round shield.

  And there was raised writing on the metal. Not runes, but Latin script.

  The Templar trick reminded me of how I’d hid the Book of Thoth in plain sight in the Egyptian cotton of a sail on the Nile. In this case, a wood-and-metal medieval shield had become a sandwich sheathing a sheet of gold no thicker than foil, and used, I presumed, because it would not decay. The imprinted gold leaf had been hidden.

  Why?

  To keep its message secret until the right discoverer came along, I guessed.

  Somehow I doubted they had me in mind.

  I looked more closely. It was Latin, all right, but backward in my view as in a mirror: the shield had been buried with the writing facing the sky, and I was on the underside. I broke off a root stub and began digging around the edge of the shield, the covering rotting and the gold itself as delicate as a dried leaf.

  “Ethan, hurry!”

  “There’s writing, like a book!”

  “What’s a book?”

  “You can store a thought and then let it speak to someone who never heard it, miles or years away!”

  That, of course, made no sense to her and it reminded me of the gap between us, she of the prairie and me of the gambling salon. What would become of us now? Should I send her back to her people? Could I take her to the President’s House and Napoleon’s court like some Pocahontas? Or should I send her to the Mandan? At length I got most of the rotting shield free from the soil, cursing as flakes of gold floated away, and carefully crawled down, holding the ragged remnant from one hand like a friable sheet of newspaper. When I got back to the crater I peeled more rust and rotting wood away and tried to read.

  I’m not a scholar, spending more of my desultory time at Harvard peering through the panes at passing Cambridge damsels than paying attention to the lives of the caesars. I could no more rattle off Latin than explain Newton’s Principia. But there were words I thought I recognized. Poseidon, for example, and Atlantic. No, wait. I peered closer. Was it Atlantic or Atlantis? And near it another word that oddly rang a bell, though I couldn’t remember having heard it before. Thira. And another: hasta. An old poem came to mind. Didn’t that mean spear in Latin? I recalled Silano had found a medieval Latin couplet that had helped point the way to the Book of Thoth. Could these Norse Templars, thousands of miles from their real home, have left behind another Latin clue to treasure or power? But why bury the clue where the hammer was? You don’t bury the treasure map where the treasure is. There were odd words, too, like Og.

  What the devil did that mean?

  It made no sense. Unless the treasure—Thor’s hammer—was not the true treasure, or at least the ultimate one. That this great tree was but a signpost.

  I remembered what Magnus had told me. The Templars had been crushed and scattered. Whatever artifacts, treasure, or books of power they’d accumulated had scattered with them. One I’d found cached in an underground sarcophagus in the City of Ghosts in the desert southeast of Jerusalem: the Book of Thoth. Another I’d come almost halfway around the world to find, here: Thor’s hammer. So if there were two, why not more? What had Cecil said about the Templars trying to assemble something? And if there were more, why not hide a key to their whereabouts in the one place the scattered Templars might be expected to find and re-gather at, the gigantic myth tree fueled by electricity, Yggdrasil?

  I groaned, inwardly. Somehow I knew I wasn’t done.

  The trouble with being called is that you don’t get to quit.

  And then something sang and banged past my head, and there was the report of a gunshot. A hole appeared in the rusting shield, the delicate gold parting like tissue paper.

  “Wait!” I cried.

  But Aurora Somerset was galloping toward us like a woman possessed, hair flying, teeth bared, her green eyes afire with the madness of grief. She was on an Indian pony, tossing aside her empty musket and drawing instead her brother’s broken rapier with her free arm and shaking an Indian lance in the other. The
sword’s jagged edge glinted like the shard of a broken ale bottle. She wanted vengeance!

  I looked for my rifle. I’d propped it against a shattered root, too far away. I dashed, just as her pony pitched down into the tree crater.

  And then I felt sharp pain stab my calf. I stumbled, sprawling.

  The thrown lance, with flint tip, had speared through my leg.

  I braced to be ridden down, the dangling spear hobbling me.

  But Aurora wasn’t galloping for me. She was aimed at the parchment of gold, leaning down like a Cossack to snatch it. Did she know what it was?

  But just as she strained to snatch it, Aurora’s horse screamed and pitched forward, launching her over the animal’s neck. Horse and rider crashed into the artifact I’d found with a spray of mud, golden script shattered into golden confetti. Antique wood and flakes of wisdom went flying in yellow destruction, Aurora wailing in outrage as she slid in a scrim of ruin. The horse was on its back, writhing in agony, filaments of gold on its hooves. And then Namida reared up on the other side, heaving Magnus’s ax over her head, and brought it down on the pony’s throat, killing it.

  She’d used the abandoned weapon to bring the horse down.

  Aurora, scrabbling on her hands and knees, went for the other woman with a shriek of outrage, the broken rapier still in hand, slashing. Namida’s grip slipped as the sword scraped on the ax handle and both weapons slid away.

  My rifle!

  I yanked the spearhead from my calf, roaring at the pain, and crawled across loose gravel and mud to get my weapon. The two women were wrestling in the dirt, grappling for Aurora’s broken sword.

  “Namida, get clear so I can take a shot!” I hollered.

  The Indian woman shifted her grip to Aurora’s forearms, grunted, and heaved, throwing Lady Somerset and the broken rapier to one side and then bending to the other to give me a clear line of fire. Sprawled awkwardly, I raised my rifle and aimed. Aurora was prone on the ground too, not the best target, and I had but one shot. Careful! Sight, stock to shoulder, breathe, hold, squeeze…