Crusader Gold

by David Gibbins

  “That reminds me,” Maria said. “The story of King Arthur. What about his queen, Guinevere? The menorah wasn’t the only thing Harald stole from Constantinople.”

  “Ah. I was wondering when you were going to ask that.” O’Connor tapped out his pipe on the sand and smiled at her, their eyes meeting. “Legend has it that Harald was tended by a woman, her hair cropped short, dressed in the tunic and trousers of a man. History tells us that years earlier Harald had released the princess and returned her to Constantinople after he escaped. But we know your namesake was never kidnapped at all, that she was a willing participant. It was Maria who released Harald and his Varangian guardsmen from prison the night before their escape. She stuck with him through thick and thin, through his marriage of convenience to the Kievan princess Elizabeth, through all he needed to do on his road to kingship. She tamed him, became the true guiding light of his life. And in his ultimate bid for power, to conquer England in 1066, she accompanied him, to a kingdom where she would at last have been able to assume her birthright as a princess. Harald planned to install her as his consort, to crown her Queen of England.”

  “Harald was fifty-one in 1066; she was maybe ten years younger,” Maria said.

  “Were there any other women in the two longships, when they set off to Vinland?”

  “Maria was the only one.”

  “Not the best advance planning for a new colony.”

  “The Viking mentality.” Jack smiled. “Steal what you need when you get there.

  And remember, they were probably half crazed with exhaustion and pain, unable to think straight. Most of them probably thought they were going to Valhalla.”

  The orb of the sun began to sink into the sea in the west, casting an orange glow over the eroded folds of bedrock that protruded from the slopes on either side of the bay. They looked silently out to sea, absorbing the muted radiance of the evening. “They say the holy isle is bathed in the bright light of angels,”

  O’Connor said. “It’s a light you see in places like this, where heaven and earth seem to meet, and in places where the crust of human endeavour has been peeled away to the bare rock beneath. The heart of the Forum in Rome, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.”

  “Both places where the menorah has been,” Maria said.

  “I’ve thought that,” O’Connor murmured.

  Jack leaned forward, his eyes suddenly ablaze as he stared at the horizon. “The menorah was here, with Harald, at this very spot,” he said. “Ever since I saw Halfdan in the ice I’ve known we were on the trail, almost as if something were willing us on. All we need now is some clue, something more concrete about where they went after leaving the icefjord.”

  O’Connor looked at Jack penetratingly, lighting his pipe again. “Halfdan gave you battle-luck, remember? He passed on the flame. Somehow I think there’s more ahead for you.”

  They were beginning to get up when Jeremy came bounding along the sand, and they could see the burly figure of Costas straggling some distance behind.

  Jeremy came to a halt in front of them, flushed and excited, his ebullience back in full force.

  “Well, what is it?” Jack said amiably. “Something else you’ve been concealing?”

  “Not exactly.” Jeremy was struggling to regain his breath. “The Mappa Mundi.

  While you were in the berg. I knew it.”

  “Slow down,” Jack said. “Take your time.”

  Jeremy sank to his knees and extracted a rolled sheet from his carrying case, then took a few deep breaths and began to regain his composure. “Sorry. But this has got to be the most exciting thing yet.”

  “Well?”

  “Those hours I spent in my cabin. Avoiding you all,” Jeremy said apologetically.

  “Well, I was poring over a digital version of the map we found in Hereford, Richard’s exemplar, twelve hundred dpi resolution. Something was nagging me, something I thought I saw when Maria and I first unrolled the map in the cathedral chamber.”

  “Go on.”

  “I had our imagery lab in Oxford do a multi-spectral scan. Take a look.”

  Jack took the sheet and unrolled it on his lap. It was a blown-up image of the lower left corner of the Mappa Mundi exemplar, showing the extraordinary image of Vinland and the New World they had first examined in Cornwall a few days previously, with the one inscription referring to Leif Eiriksson and the other to Harald Hardrada and the treasure of Michelgard. Jack suddenly saw what Jeremy meant. “There’s another drawing underneath!”

  “Here it is, isolated and enhanced. Costas helped me do it.” Jeremy handed him another sheet, and Maria and O’Connor craned over to look. It was a simple linear tracing, a deep U-shape with the line bending back down on either side and trailing off, and two irregular circles in front.

  “It’s Vinland!” Maria exclaimed. “It’s exactly the same as the image of Vinland on the map that superimposed it, only on a bigger scale. The U-shape is the bay, and Vinland is marked at the head of the bay on the superimposed map. I was at the Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland last year. The archaeological site is at the head of the bay, exactly where Vinland is marked here, and these are the promontories on either side that extend out into the Strait of Belle Isle. Those circles are the islets off the coast, Little Sacred Island and Great Sacred Island. They would have been crucial navigational waymarkers for the Vikings.”

  “That’s what’s so fantastic,” Jeremy said.

  “What do you mean?” Jack asked.

  “Take a close look at the larger one.” Jeremy passed him a magnifying glass.

  “There, where there seems to be a smudge.”

  Jack slid the tracing aside and looked again at the imaging scan. “I can see a cross mark on it, a definite cross,” he murmured. “And that smudge on the side.

  Are those letters?”

  “Runes.”

  Jack’s excitement mounted. “Translation?”

  “There are two lines,” Jeremy said. “Even with the image intensifier I can barely read them, but I’m pretty sure of it. The first line says Haraldi konungi, Harald the king. The second line has two words, gold and Michelgard, the gold of Michelgard. That’s Constantinople, of course.”

  “Good God.”

  “Richard of Holdingham must have done this sketch to begin with, but then had second thoughts. It’s too exact, it gives too much away. So he erased it and drew the more generalized map showing Vinland, with the Leif Eiriksson inscription. Then he thought again and decided to add a reference to Harald Hardrada after all, that he had been in these parts with the treasure of Michelgard.”

  “The first sketch is telling us something,” Jack murmured. “It’s telling us something incredibly precise.”

  “X marks the spot.” O’Connor smiled broadly, for the first time since they had seen him. “This suddenly makes it all worth while.”

  Costas suddenly appeared over the head of the dune, looking slightly flustered after his route march over the island. “The chopper’s returned,” he panted as he joined them. “Macleod wants to know whether you’ll be returning to Seaquest II or going back to Istanbul. They’re standing by in Disko Bay awaiting instructions.

  They’re scheduled to sail north to carry out research on the edge of the polar ice cap, and some of the scientists are getting distinctly itchy feet.” He leaned over and spoke his next words quietly, directly into Jack’s ear. “I also called Tom York on Sea Venture to check on their progress in the Golden Horn. We’ve got a problem. One of the crew went AWOL two days ago, the ship’s second officer, the Estonian we recently appointed.”

  Jack nodded once, grimly. “I remember him. It’s been niggling me since O’Connor suggested a traitor. The Estonian was listening in from the bridge when we first discussed the menorah with Hubermeyer in the navigation room.”

  The two men glanced at each other, tacitly agreeing that there was nothing that could be done about the Estonian at the moment. Costas straightened, then sud
denly noticed the sheet of paper on Jack’s lap and knelt for a closer look.

  “A treasure map,” he exclaimed at his normal volume. “My favourite. Where is it?”

  Jack gazed at Costas with a familiar gleam in his eye, and then pointed his finger at the glowing orb of orange on the horizon.

  “Due west, about twenty-three hundred miles. You can tell Macleod to dig out the copy of the Viking sagas I left him. It tells you how to lay on a course for Vinland.”

  O’Connor stood up. “It’s time for you to go, it seems?” He shook Jack by the hand. “I don’t know where my path will lead me. Just do one thing for me, will you, Jack?”

  “You name it.”

  “Find out what happened to the menorah.”

  Jack flashed a smile and put his other hand on O’Connor’s shoulder. “We’ll do our best. Things have gone pretty well since Halfdan lent me his axe. I think there might just be a little battle-luck left.” He suddenly looked deadly serious.

  “And you must take the greatest care.”

  14

  THIRTY-SIX HOURS LATER, JACK LAY IN PITCH blackness on an earthen floor on the other side of the Atlantic, cocooned in a sleeping bag and insulated from the damp ground by a Therm-a-Rest. He shifted his rolled-up clothes to make a more comfortable pillow and stared into the darkness. Beside him Costas was snoring loudly, and he could hear the occasional rustle from Jeremy beyond his feet. He had leapt at the chance to spend the night in a reconstructed Viking longhouse on the very spot where Leif Eiriksson and his band of Norse adventurers had built their first crude shelter on the shores of North America a thousand years before. But for Jack it had been a restless night, plagued by ill-defined dreams. His mind was still full of the extraordinary account O’Connor had given them on Iona two days before, of a secret brotherhood that had spanned the centuries and come to be associated with the worst horror of modern times. Every time Jack dozed off, the same images crowded his mind—

  snarling wolf-gods and swirling eagles, the seven-branched candlestick and the dreaded swastika, images that no longer seemed like dislocated fragments of history but meshed together to tell a story full of potency and danger.

  Jack awoke with a start to a steaming mug of coffee thrust in his face. Costas gave him a gentle kick and leaned his stubbly face towards his friend. “Rise and shine,” he said cheerfully. “We’ve only got the site to ourselves for the morning.

  The Parks Canada people need to open it for a tour group at noon.”

  Jack grunted and quickly raised himself, pulling on his jeans and blue fisherman’s sweater and lacing up his boots. He flinched as he rubbed against the wound in his thigh, his legacy from the iceberg. In the sunlight streaming through the low entrance he could see Jeremy rolling up his Therm-a-Rest and packing his sleeping bag. They had arrived in darkness the night before, and for the first time Jack could appreciate the dimensions of the longhouse. It was elongated and low-set, built entirely of turf on a timber frame with a stamped dirt floor and a pitched roof. He could see how it might have accommodated twenty or thirty people, several family groups, clustered around hearths evenly spaced along the chamber. It would have been a damp, dark place, fetid and rank during the long winter months. He could understand why the Vikings always yearned for the open air and the sea, for the summer months tending their flocks and embarking on long voyages of raiding and exploration.

  Jack took his coffee and stooped through the entrance to the world outside, shielding his eyes against the glare of the morning sun. On the grass a short distance away was the red and white form of the Canadian Coast Guard Sikorsky S-61N Sea King helicopter that had brought them to the remote northern peninsula of Newfoundland from Goose Bay in Labrador, the nearest airfield where the IMU Embraer jet had been able to land. Jack turned from the helicopter and looked at the site around him. The longhouse was one of three sod buildings reconstructed on the edge of the original Viking settlement, only yards from the meadow where three dwellings and a primitive smithy had been excavated by the Norwegian archaeologists who had discovered the site in 1960.

  They had found only low ridges where there had once been turf walls, ghostly imprints of post holes and fire pits, and a meagre handful of artefacts, but it was enough to prove conclusively that the Vikings had been here. Jack looked across the lush grassland to the seashore and out to the rocky islets with their sparse vegetation framed against the northern horizon. The site had none of the splendour of an ancient tomb or a lost city, but it had been one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time, irrefutable proof that adventurers from the Old World had visited the Americas five hundred years before Christopher Columbus. It was the first known European settlement in North America beyond Greenland, the first place where iron was smelted in the New World. And now Jack knew they were poised to open a whole new chapter in the history of the site, an episode that could scarcely have been dreamt of before the Mappa Mundi find. As he finished his coffee he felt the darkness of the night lift from him, and he began to tingle with excitement.

  “Hard to believe Iona lies more than two thousand miles to the east.” Jeremy’s tousled head appeared through the entranceway, and he stood beside Jack rubbing his eyes and cradling a coffee. “But it looks much the same, doesn’t it?

  This would have been familiar terrain to the Vikings.”

  “This must be home turf for you too,” Jack said with a twinkle in his eye.

  “My mother was Canadian, from Nova Scotia,” Jeremy replied. “Visiting this place as a kid was what inspired me to study Norse archaeology. It’s amazing how few people come here, even thought it’s a UNESCO World Heritage site. Read some history books and you’d still think the European involvement with North America began with John Cabot in 1497.”

  “But the Vikings didn’t stick around.” Costas had caught Jeremy’s words as he stacked their bedding outside the longhouse, and he came over to join them. “I thought L’Anse aux Meadows was more an outpost, a seasonal camp.”

  Jeremy nodded. “If we go by the archaeology alone, this place was occupied for a few seasons at most, then maybe visited sporadically for a few years after that. The three longhouses could have accommodated upwards of a hundred people, so maybe there was an attempt to establish a permanent settlement.

  There were women here too, and livestock. But it didn’t last. We’re talking around AD 1000, maybe a little later. Iceland had been colonised from Norway about the end of the ninth century, Greenland by Eirik the Red about a century later, so that’s probably where the settlers here came from. The style of turf house is typical of Iceland and Greenland at that period. Leif Eiriksson was the son of Eirik the Red, as the name implies.”

  “They were probably testing the boundaries of their world,” Jack reflected. “The Phoenicians did the same. The farthest Phoenician outposts date from the earliest period of exploration, and were all short-lived. Mogador in west Africa, Cornwall in Britain. Attractive trading potential, but too far away and vulnerable to last for long. It looks like the same story here.”

  “That’s a good model,” Jeremy said, ruffling his hair. “Excavations here in the 1970s revealed lots of evidence for woodworking, for preparing logs and planks suitable for shipbuilding. It’s a little difficult to envisage now, but there were dense forests of deciduous trees reaching right up to these meadows. It would have seemed like a gold mine to the Icelanders and Greenlanders, who had no forests of their own and had to import large timbers from Scandinavia. They repaired their ships here and may even have built new vessels, but most of the timber was probably shipped back to Greenland and Iceland.”

  “I’m baffled,” Costas said. “With all that wood, plus great pasturage and fishing, why didn’t they establish a permanent colony?”

  “Scraelings,” Jack said.

  “Who?”

  “The Norse name for the native peoples, the Indians,” Jeremy replied. “It means wretches, which says it all for the Viking attitude. There was quite a large pop
ulation in Newfoundland at that time, and their war canoes and bows made them more than a match for the Vikings. The archaeology doesn’t give us much to go on, but the sagas tell an ugly story. When Leif Eiriksson first arrived, relations with the natives were tense from the outset. Soon there were confrontations, violent clashes. The occasional murder by one side or the other may have turned to outright war, with more distant bands joining in and the Vikings soon being overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers. They probably had to direct all their energy to stockading this place, to building a wooden palisade around their dwellings. It would have been impossible to tend livestock or hunt and fish, and in their weakened state illness would have been rife. They would have been unable to fell trees and prepare timber for shipment back home, their main reason for being here. The sagas tell us that Leif’s brother Thorvold was killed by an arrow, and that may have been the death knell for the settlement.”

  “Sounds like the Pilgrim fathers in America, at Jamestown,” Jack said. “Hemmed in by hostile natives, plagued by starvation and disease.”

  “There’s an even darker story.” Jeremy took out a battered paperback from his pocket. “These are the Vinland Sagas, passed down by word of mouth and written down in Iceland in the thirteenth century. They’re difficult to read as history, sometimes contradictory and confused, but the discovery of this site proves they’re based on real voyages. According to the Greenlanders’ Saga, another of Eirik the Red’s offspring, his daughter Freydis, organized an expedition to Leifsbúδir, ‘Leif’s Houses,’ their name for the Vinland settlement.