Crusader Gold

by David Gibbins

  “How did he get to Constantinople, then?” Costas asked, looking at a map.

  “Well, the pickings were richer there. At the age of eighteen, Harald arrived in Constantinople to join the Varangian Guard. He quickly rose to be atrologus, chief of the Guard, and for nine years plundered his way across the Mediterranean in the name of the Byzantine emperor. In 1042 he fled Constantinople, laden with booty, and reclaimed the throne of Norway. Twenty-four years later, years in which he ravaged Denmark and ruled Norway with an iron fist, his ambition drove him to the fateful encounter with King Harold of England at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. It was a career drenched in blood from beginning to end, but along the way Harald secured his birthright and became one of the wealthiest and most feared rulers in the medieval world.”

  “It’s plausible that he should have visited Vinland,” Jack murmured. “Iceland and Greenland were predominantly Norse settlements, discovered by Norwegian Vikings, and a king like Harald Hardrada would have wanted to exert his influence. Also there’s the kudos factor. A voyage to Vinland would have been a daring feat, further shoring up his reputation as a fearless warrior and adventurer.”

  “He wouldn’t have been the only man to try,” Maria said. “The Icelandic annals mention a bishop of Greenland who set off for Vinland. He vanished forever, disappeared from history.”

  “It doesn’t add up.” Jack sounded troubled. “If Harald made the voyage to Vinland then he did survive, returning to Norway in time for 1066. He would have had everything to gain from proclaiming his success, asserting his claim over the western Viking settlements and extolling his courage. It’s the stuff of sagas, yet I’m assuming there’s nothing about it in the Heimskringla, is there? All we’ve got is a secret reference on a map in Hereford Cathedral. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “His treasure, the stuff he looted with the Varangians,” Costas said. “What do we know about that?”

  “It’s a fantastic story.” Maria flicked through the book to find a page and then held it open. “Listen to this:

  “His hoard of wealth was so immense that no one in northern Europe had ever seen the like of it in one man’s possession before. During his stay in Constantinople, Harald had three times taken part in a palace-plunder: it is the custom there that every time an emperor dies, the Varangians are allowed palace-plunder—they are entitled to ransack all the palaces where the emperor’s treasures are kept and to take freely whatever each can lay his hands on.”

  “I guess that’s the price you pay to keep the loyalty of mercenaries,” Costas said.

  “It means the Varangians not only had as much as they could carry from the palaces each time an emperor died, but also must have known the locations of treasures that remained out of bounds. After all, their main job in Constantinople was to guard the Imperial Treasury. But Snorri’s account of palace-plunder is undoubtedly exaggerated, something that would appeal to his Viking audience.

  The greatest treasures must of course have remained under lock and key.”

  “You’re talking about the menorah,” Costas said.

  Maria nodded. “But wait for the rest of the story. It gets even better. By 1042, after more than a decade in the service of the emperor, Harald had had enough of campaigning. He’d got all the fame and plunder he wanted and was now bent on reclaiming Norway. So on his final return to Constantinople from the wars, he resigned from the Varangian Guard. The emperor, Michael Calaphates, was a weak man who seems to have been okay with this, but the empress Zoe was furious. She already had a grudge against Harald. Apparently he’d asked for her beautiful niece Maria’s hand in marriage, but Zoe had refused. The story later put about by the Varangians was that Zoe herself wanted Harald, and this was the real reason she was so upset about his departure from Constantinople.”

  “A love triangle,” Costas chuckled. “The Thunderbolt of the North had finally met his match.”

  “Harald was thrown in prison but was released by a mysterious lady, maybe another lover. The story goes that Harald summoned his Varangians and they exacted terrible revenge on the emperor, blinding him in his bed. That same night Harald broke into Maria’s apartment and kidnapped her. This is what Snorri says happened next:

  “They went down to the Varangian galleys and took two of them. They rowed to the Bosporus, where they came to the iron chains stretched across the Sound.

  Harald told some of the oarsmen to pull as hard as they could, while those who were not rowing were to run to the stern of the galleys laden with all their gear.

  With that, the galleys ran up on to the chains. As soon as their momentum was spent and they stuck on top of the chains, Harald told all the men to run forward to the bows. Harald’s own galley tilted forward under the impact and slid down off the chains; but the other ship stuck fast on the chains and broke its back.

  Many of her crew were lost, but some were rescued from the sea.”

  “That’s it,” Jeremy said excitedly. “What I was saying yesterday. The timbers you found in the chain in the Golden Horn were from Harald’s second ship. Snorri doesn’t say it actually sank, which explains why you only found the wood broken off in the chain. The skull with the helmet must be one of the drowned Varangians.”

  “What happened to your namesake?” Jack asked Maria.

  “According to Snorri, Maria was released unharmed when they reached the Black Sea and even given an escort back to Constantinople. Maybe her kidnapping was Harald’s way of cocking a snook at Zoe, but he’d already moved on and was planning to marry King Yaroslav’s daughter Elizabeth, probably a girlfriend of his in Kiev before he joined the Varangians.” Maria smiled at Jack. “But others think Maria remained with him and was his mistress and true love to the end.”

  “So you think the menorah was stolen on the same night?” Costas persisted.

  “Yes. If the Varangians had time to kidnap Maria, they also had time to snatch the greatest treasure they knew of in Constantinople.”

  “That maybe explains the menorah symbol on the Hereford map.” Costas stared into the middle distance for a moment, lost in thought. “If the Vikings were only interested in the treasure as gold bullion, then it seems odd that the shape of the menorah should still have meaning years later when Richard of Holdingham wrote down that runic inscription. Maybe the fact that it was forbidden treasure, not palace-plunder, gave the menorah added significance. It could have become a symbol of Harald’s prowess, his manliness, a spoil of victory like in Roman days, to be endlessly trumpeted by the Vikings in sagas and feasts. When they got back home the story of that final night in Constantinople must have kept the Varangians in free drinks for the rest of their lives.”

  They all turned to Jeremy, who averted his gaze and then glanced down at his computer, then looked Costas full in the face. He paused for a moment before speaking, his tone oddly troubled. “You’re probably right. But that may only be part of the story.”

  At that moment the pilot’s voice came over the cabin speakers to announce that they were beginning their descent into Kangerlussuaq, the former US air base that now served as Greenland’s main international hub on the west coast. Jack looked out his window and saw that they had crossed the edge of the Greenland ice cap and were now approaching the Davis Strait, the wide channel of ocean between western Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. Below them lay sinuous fjords and expanses of green that suddenly made the Viking settlement of these shores seem plausible, an inconceivable thought on the barren east coast. As the aircraft banked sharply and turned back east they came in line with the longest inlet of them all, Søndre Strømfjord, with the bleak and sparse settlement of Kangerlussuaq scattered over the valley at its head. A few minutes later the undercarriage dropped and Jack could make out two aircraft parked in bays of the former military airfield in the centre of the valley, the first an Antonov An-74

  transport jet which had preceded them with Costas’ precious gear and the second a Lynx helicopter bearing the distinctive logo of the International
Maritime University.

  “We’re coming over the icefjord now. Take a look out to port and you’ll see the tips of icebergs through the mist.”

  James Macleod took his hand momentarily off the cyclic and pointed past Jack at the jagged pinnacles of white that appeared like peaks of distant mountains through the clouds. In the passenger compartment behind them, Maria and Jeremy leaned forward to follow his gaze. With the three-hour time difference from England it was still early morning, and the sun had yet to burn off the sea mist caused as the cold air tumbled off the ice cap and met the warmer air rising from the sea. In the summer sun it was actually warmer at three thousand feet than on the surface of the ice cap, but even so the temperature was a few degrees below zero and they all wore fully insulated flight suits as well as helmets, a precaution against turbulence as the helicopter encountered thermal updraughts over exposed land and water along the coastline.

  “We’ve got fifteen minutes until the helipad’s clear. Time for a quick sightseeing tour.”

  Macleod had met them on the tarmac at Kangerlussuaq and had escorted them straight to the waiting Lynx helicopter. It had taken them just under an hour to fly due north to the Ilulissat icefjord, on Greenland’s west coast, almost a hundred and sixty miles north of the Arctic Circle. They had been following a heavy Chinook transport helicopter, based out of the remaining US air base in Greenland at Thule, a welcome part of the US government’s contribution to the IMU project. Costas had decided to fly in the Chinook to oversee the transfer of his equipment, and Jack could imagine the other man’s gnawing anxiety as he sat in the loading bay watching the fruit of months of labour suspended in a cargo net above the void. Now Jack and Macleod watched as the Chinook descended into the sea mist at the head of the fjord.

  “This is where the iceberg came from that sank the Titanic,” Macleod said, his thick Glaswegian brogue enhanced by the intercom. “It’s one of the fastest-moving glacial ice streams in the world.” He swung the helicopter round to the east, facing inland, and flew at maximum speed for a few minutes until they had cleared the mist and could see the Greenland ice cap rising ahead of them in a vast stark dome. “The Ilulissat glacier’s the main pressure outlet for the ice cap, where the glacier flows down to discharge ice into the sea. You can see where the ice floe begins now.”

  Macleod worked the controls and swung the Lynx in a wide arc back towards the sea. As they peered out they could see where the seamless undulations of the ice cap began to fracture and crenellate, forming a corrugated flow that seemed to ripple off towards the west.

  “Believe it or not, that thing’s flowing at an incredible rate, almost eight miles a year,” Macleod said. “The crevasses are caused by the pressure of the glacier as it moves against the bedrock, in places almost three thousand feet below. It’s like a river flowing through rapids. And now for the fun part.”

  He dipped the nose of the helicopter and they were suddenly hurtling towards the glacier, its fractured surface looming up at them in gigantic folds and fissures. At what seemed like the last moment Macleod levelled out, and almost immediately they were enveloped in sea mist, the glacier only fleetingly visible as the rotor swirled away the mist to reveal patches of white and yawning crevasses of deep blue.

  “We’re actually more than five hundred feet above the glacier,” Macleod reassured them. “Remember how huge those features are.” For a few minutes he flew by instruments alone as they continued to hurtle through the mist, and then he eased back on the cyclic and dropped down until the altimeter read only two hundred and fifty feet above sea level. “Here we are.”

  As he brought the Lynx to a hover the mist parted and a spectacular image materialised before their eyes. It was a vast wall of ice, towering almost as high as the helicopter and extending on either side as far as they could see. Rather than a sheer face of compacted ice, it was a fragmented mass of towers and canyons, fissured with streaks of blue where meltwater had flowed down from the surface and frozen again. The whole mass looked unbelievably fragile and precarious, as if the slightest nudge would bring it all cascading down.

  “The leading edge of the glacier,” Macleod announced. “Or rather the mass of icebergs that have sheared off it and jammed up the head of the fjord. The edge of the glacier itself is more than five nautical miles east of us towards the ice cap, back the way we came.”

  “It’s awesome.” Jeremy’s voice came cracking over the intercom, and for once he seemed at a loss for words. “So this is where the North Atlantic icebergs come from?”

  “Ninety per cent of them,” Macleod replied. “Twenty billion tons every year, enough to affect global sea levels. That wall of ice may seem pretty static, but it’s sped up recently and is actually moving towards us at nearly fifteen feet an hour. Some of the large bergs will be pushed out more or less intact, but almost all of them calve, producing smaller bergs and vicious little slabs called growlers.

  Almost ten thousand big bergs make it out of the fjord every year into Disko Bay. They process anti-clockwise with the current around Baffin Bay and then float as far south as the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and as far east as Iceland.”

  “One of them’s calving now,” Jack said suddenly.

  Without warning a vast slab of ice had cracked off the precipice immediately in front of them, the wrenching noise audible even above the din of the helicopter’s rotor. The slab of ice slipped straight down into the water and disappeared completely, then erupted upwards almost to its full height before settling down again, bobbing up and down until only a jagged pinnacle was visible above the slurry of ice fragments in front of the bergs.

  “I see what they mean about icebergs being mostly underwater,” Jeremy said, his tone still awestruck. “The bigger ones must scrape along the bottom of the fjord.”

  “That’s exactly what happens. Sometimes they drag along the sea floor, sometimes they tumble over.” Macleod flipped down a small video screen from the cockpit ceiling and tapped a keyboard, revealing an image of the fjord bathymetry.

  Jack whistled. “Pretty deep.”

  “Over three thousand feet.”

  “That underwater ridge on the image, across the mouth of the fjord,” Jack said.

  “I assume that’s where the ice tongue reached its maximum extent?”

  “The Danes who settled here in the eighteenth century called it Isfjeldsbanken, the threshold,” Macleod replied. “A huge sill of sediment bulldozed by the glacier. The tip of the threshold’s only about six hundred feet deep, so the bigger bergs get stuck on it. Until recently it marked the edge of the ice tongue, the congestion of bergs that choked the fjord.”

  “But now the breakup occurs several miles closer to the ice cap, where we are now?”

  “Correct.” Macleod tapped the screen and another image appeared, a satellite photo of the fjord. “Courtesy of NASA, a composite image from the Landsat satellite. The sequence of red lines across the fjord shows the retreat of the calving front of the glacier between 2001 and 2005. At the same time the glacier has accelerated dramatically, almost doubling its velocity. And airborne laser altimetry measurements have shown a thinning of the glacier by up to fifty feet a year.”

  “Global warming,” Jeremy said.

  “Bad news for the environment, but good news for us.” Macleod snapped the screen closed and re-engaged the cyclic, pulling the helicopter round on a westward bearing and flying through the mist away from the ice face. “Bad news because it suggests global warming has a more dramatic effect on the ice cap than many have feared. Good news because it allows us to work in the fjord itself, to carry out research that’s never before been possible.”

  “And now we’re into summer,” Jack said. “I’m assuming that increases the rate of calving and ice disintegration along the glacier front?”

  “That’s why I wanted you here now,” Macleod replied. “A few more days and we’re closing shop. We’re working on the edge in more ways than one.”

  Twenty minutes later
he eased back on the cyclic and the Lynx began to descend over the jagged line of icebergs near the head of the fjord. Jack’s heart began to pound as he saw a ship’s superstructure appear out of the mist to seaward. Macleod reached over to the ship-to-shore intercom, but before pressing engage he turned and looked at Jack.

  “And now it’s time to let you know why I dragged you halfway round the world to this place.”

  6

  THE MAN IN THE PRISON CELL SLOWLY RAISED his head and listened hard for any signs of life, but heard nothing. He had heard nothing but the sounds of his jailers for more than five years now. He closed his eyes and breathed in slow and deep, immune to the aroma of feces and urine and vomit that had long ago impregnated the fabric of the prison. He had been sent to serve out his sentence in his grandfather’s homeland, in an empty prison left over from the Gulag, saving them the trouble of putting him in solitary confinement. But sensory deprivation held no fear for him, his training having taught him to exclude the reality of confinement and live in a world of his own creation. He slowly bent his head from side to side and then leaned again over the chessboard, the only indulgence he had asked of his captors. He lowered his elbows to the table and raised his hands together in their fingerless mitts, rubbing them against the damp chill that pervaded the cell all year round. For the thousandth time he reached down and picked up a little white pawn, shaped like a Viking warrior with chain mail and a shield, and placed it in front of the Christian king.