Crusader Gold

by David Gibbins

  There were two ships, one with about thirty Greenlanders, the other with about the same number of Icelanders. Once they’d disembarked there was some kind of dispute, maybe involving women, some deep-rooted animosity, that led Freydis and the Greenlanders to run berserk and murder all of the Icelanders in one awful rampage. Freydis herself murdered the five Icelandic women, and probably their children as well. If it truly happened, the dark deed would probably have taken place at night inside one of these longhouses.”

  “Blood feud,” Jack murmured, remembering his troubled sleep. “I hope that’s not our most enduring legacy from the Vikings.”

  “Do we have firm dates for any of this?” Costas asked.

  “The radiocarbon dates look about right for the foundation of the settlement, around AD 1000, with the other expeditions recounted in the sagas taking place over the next fifteen years or so. Freydis’ expedition may have been the last.”

  “Until Harald Hardrada.”

  “That’s what we’re here to find out.” Jack rubbed his hands in anticipation and eyed the compact chart case that Jeremy had placed alongside their bags. “It’s time we looked at that map again.”

  Twenty minutes later they stood on the foreshore a few hundred metres from the archaeological site. Behind them lay the gently undulating meadows that surrounded the Viking settlement, and on either side the low-lying coast swept round the tidal flats of the bay. Beside them two Canadian Coast Guard crewmen were readying a lightweight Zodiac inflatable boat they had carried down from the helicopter. Jack shielded his eyes and looked out to sea. The light was pellucid, with the clarity they had seen in the icefjord, and the breeze carried with it a vestige of the chill air that flowed off the ice to the north even in June.

  For a moment Jack found himself thinking of the iceberg far away in the fjord, wondering whether it would finally melt somewhere near these shores and put Halfdan to rest on the trail of his companions. He brushed the thought aside and focussed on the low rocky mass visible a few kilometres offshore.

  “Great Sacred Isle,” he murmured. “That’s what we came here for.”

  “There’s no doubt about the identification.” Jeremy was holding a copy of Richard of Holdingham’s sketch and comparing it to a photocopy from the local Admiralty Chart. “According to Maria, Richard was a painstaking scholar and would have transcribed the map as accurately as he could, probably copying from an original sketch which somehow made its way to him from Greenland.”

  He suddenly put down the sketch and rushed over to a nearby hummock, where a cloud of steam was rising from a small camping stove.

  “So what exactly are we looking for?” Costas asked. “Pottery, coins, the odd rusty battle-axe?”

  Jack smiled at his friend. “Not a chance. Eight years of excavation at L’Anse aux Meadows in the 1960s produced exactly four Norse artefacts: a bronze pin, a stone oil lamp, a spindle whorl and a gilded brass fragment. And that was for a community that may have numbered over a hundred, and was here for several years. The Norse picked up what they dropped and didn’t throw away anything.

  If Harald Hardrada chose to leave something, we may find it. If not, we probably won’t find anything.”

  Jeremy came tottering over the grass carrying two wooden bowls and spoons, and thrust them at Jack and Costas. “Carved them myself when I was a kid,” he said proudly. “Exact copies of Norse bowls from Greenland. And the stuff inside’s authentic too.”

  Costas peered suspiciously at the congealed mass in his bowl and patted it with his spoon. “Looks old enough,” he said. “And smells like a resin factory. I take it this isn’t food?”

  “My own recipe.” Jeremy affected to ignore him. “Based on the analysis of Norse refuse sites. Coarse barley flour, ground peas and pine bark. A kind of gruel.

  Quite good really.”

  “Where’s yours?”

  “Couldn’t wait. Ate it already.”

  “Right.” Costas sniffed his spoon and took an experimental lick. “God almighty.

  Refuse is about right.”

  “It’s all you’re getting. The total Viking experience. No modern food allowed at L’Anse aux Meadows.”

  Costas grumbled, and Jeremy turned to Jack, who had quickly polished off his bowl and was staring again at the map.

  “This was the place of no return,” Jack said. “If they really got this far, none of Harald’s men ever made it back home alive. They were on a one-way ticket to the end of the world.”

  “What about their guides?” Costas spoke through a sticky mouthful, his eyes fixed balefully on Jeremy.

  “I doubt whether any of the Greenlanders accompanied Harald this far,” Jack replied. “With only the one longship remaining after Halfdan’s burial they would have had no way of returning, and even at Ilulissat they would have had to await rescue by the Norse hunters and fishermen who made their way up to Norδrseta in the summer.”

  “Remind me,” Costas said. “We’re here because of the map, the depiction of Vinland with the reference to Harald Hardrada on the Mappa Mundi. How did the information that Harald had been here get back to England, to the félag and Richard of Holdingham all those years later?”

  “From what O’Connor was telling us, that bishop who arrived in Greenland in the early twelfth century, the one who was a member of the félag, managed to coax an account of Harald’s expedition out of the local Norse. The guides who had returned from the icefjord to the western settlement in Greenland must have told of Harald’s departure for Vinland, and the story would have passed down through the generations. If the history of Iceland is anything to go by, the Greenlanders must have had a rich tradition of sagas, some of them passed on secretively. None of the sagas survived the mysterious disappearance of the Greenlanders a few centuries later.”

  “What about that cross on the map, X marks the spot?” Costas said. “If that really does mark something out there, how could the Greenlanders possibly have known?”

  “Easy,” Jeremy said. “The Norse left way-markers, navigational signposts. They would have been essential to retrace voyages in such a huge area that was hardly explored. Some of the stone cairns around Baffin Bay attributed to the Inuit may in fact have been raised by the Norse. The Greenlanders’ Saga even tells us how Thorvold, the one who was shot down by the Indians, raised a ship’s keel as a marker on a cape somewhere to the north-east of here. It became known as Kjalarnes, Keel Cape.”

  “So you’re suggesting Great Sacred Isle was a known way-marker.”

  “I think there was more to it than that,” Jack said. “For the island to be singled out so precisely on the map suggests something more, something closely associated with Harald’s progress. It’s just a guess, but I wonder whether Harald promised his Greenlander guides before leaving Ilulissat that he would leave some mark of his progress. An obvious place for the Greenlanders to suggest was their own navigational way-marker for Leifsbúδir at Great Sacred Isle, a place Harald could easily find. The Greenlanders may never have ventured here to find out whether he made it, but the memory of Harald’s promise lived on.”

  “Let’s see if it’s waiting for us then.” Costas handed Jeremy his empty bowl, then gestured towards his rucksack. “Got any mead or beer to wash that down with?”

  “Out of luck there, I’m afraid. But what I have got is just as authentic. It’s a kind of sour runny yoghurt, made from cow’s whey left in an open vat for a few weeks. Best served warm. If you’ll just give me a minute with the stove…”

  Costas was already halfway to the beach, backing off with his hands held up defensively. Jack grinned at Jeremy and jerked his head towards the Zodiac. “I think breakfast is over.” A few moments later they were zipping up the survival suits and life jackets lent to them by the Coast Guard for the trip. They helped push the boat out into the shallows and then hopped aboard, sitting on the pontoons while one of the crewmen cranked up the outboard. As they chugged slowly out through the bay they turned and watched the low coastli
ne receding in their wake.

  “The tide’s in,” Jeremy shouted over the engine. “When it’s out, this whole bay is dry land. The Vikings caught salmon by laying traps at low tide, then returning on the next low tide. Harald’s men would have had no trouble stocking up with food.”

  The crewman opened the throttle as they left the bay, and they moved from the clear shallows to the greenish black sheen of the open sea. Ahead of them the island was suddenly lit by a brilliant shaft of sunlight, shining through a gap in the clouds that were beginning to fill the sky.

  “A shard from Mjøllnir,” Jeremy shouted.

  “What?”

  “The Norse believed that lightning and shafts of light were shards struck off Mjøllnir, Thor’s hammer,” Jeremy shouted. “It’s usually a good sign.”

  “Not another Norse omen,” Costas replied. “I’m beginning to dream wolf-dogs and blood-eagles.”

  “Don’t worry.” Jack grinned at Costas through the spray. “You’ll get over it. And you’ll soon have your feet back firmly on the ground.”

  15

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER JACK, COSTAS AND Jeremy stood on the lee side of Great Sacred Isle off the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, doffing the survival suits, which they left with the crewman beside the Zodiac. The island ahead of them was about a kilometre long and half a kilometre wide, and was made up of rocky outcrops interspersed with patches of bog and meadow. At various points it rose in low ridges that Jack was inspecting with a pair of lightweight binoculars.

  “My favourite.” Costas sighed contentedly and kicked on his hiking boots. “A treasure hunt.”

  “No sophisticated gadgets this time.” Jack lowered the glasses and glanced at Costas as he laced up his boots. “The terrain’s useless for geophysics, and what we’re looking for probably wouldn’t show up anyway. We’re talking Mark 1

  Eyeball. Anyway, it’s the only way I’ve ever found treasure.”

  “So what are we looking for?”

  “Something on the highest point, or a prominent point on the seaward side. But your guess is as good as mine. A cairn, or courses of stones lying on the ground that look too regular and may be from a collapsed pile. But if it was a wooden marker like that keel in the saga, then we’re probably out of luck.”

  The three of them fanned out over a fifty-foot swathe and began to work their way up towards the centre of the isle, Jack in the middle. The terrain was not difficult to traverse, but it was an awkward mix of exposed rock and soggy gullies that reminded him of their walk across Iona a few days before. After scrambling up the first small ridge, Costas stopped suddenly and looked at the ground. Jack caught his movement and spun round. “Got something?”

  “It’s about Harald’s Vikings.”

  “Go on.” Jack relaxed and looked at Costas expectantly.

  “No women. I mean, apart from Harald’s lady, and she was obviously out of bounds.”

  “Maria said that. But remember, they weren’t planning a colony. In their own minds they were going from one battle to another, to their last showdown.

  Anything they found on the way, fine, but if not, they had a higher purpose. Plus they were hardly in a fit state.”

  “Are you worried about her?” Costas said. “Maria, I mean?”

  Jack was silent for a moment, then replied, “She can look after herself. It’s O’Connor who’s in the firing line.”

  A little over two hours later they had scoured the entire island and come up with nothing. Jack had dropped out of sight of the other two, and found himself wandering along the rocky foreshore on the west side of the isle. He was beginning to feel dislocated, and the memories of his troubled dreams the night before were flashing back through his mind. For the first time he seriously wondered whether they had come to the end of the trail. For the archaeologists who had followed the Vikings before, this bleak and forbidding site had been a scene of triumph, of euphoria that made even the tiny scraps of Norse remains at L’Anse aux Meadows seem as exciting as King Tut’s treasure. Yet here the trail had ended. Nothing conclusive had ever been found farther west or south, no evidence of Viking settlement or exploration.

  Jack squatted down on the foreshore, found a flat pebble and skipped it far out into the sea, counting the splashes until it disappeared. Maybe this was truly the edge of the Norse world, the boundary of the afterlife. Maybe this was where they had found their mystical battle at the end of time, their Ragnarøk. Ever since Iona, Jack had felt an extraordinary convergence with Harald Hardrada, as if Harald were his spirit-companion, just present on the other side of the boundary. Maria had told him the Norse believed that those with wanderlust followed the paths left by their ancestors, by their spirit-companions, and Jack had begun to feel that he was being drawn along by this other presence. Now he suddenly felt marooned, swirling in a mist of uncertainty, without even a hint of where to go next.

  Maybe this was exactly what Harald himself had felt at this point. Jack thought again of the map, of the ship in the ice, of Halfdan’s great war axe. It was not all fantasy. It really had happened. There had to be something more here. He pressed his hands against the solid rock of the island, willing it to give up its secrets. He remembered the axe again. “Battle-luck,” he whispered to himself.

  Then he stood and strode resolutely back up the low ridges of the island until he spotted Costas and Jeremy together on a slab of rock near the lower eastern shore. He reached them in a few minutes, then passed them his water bottle before taking a swig himself. “We’ve got an hour before the ebb tide begins and we have to leave. Any suggestions?”

  “I’ve just been telling Costas,” Jeremy said. “Something’s been niggling me.

  Something about that map.” He took out the copy of Richard of Holdingham’s map and placed it on the rock, then sat down and stared at it with his hands clasped over his head. Suddenly he jumped up exultantly. “I’ve been stupid,” he exclaimed. “What I said about Richard, how meticulous he was. Look closely at his sketch. It’s not a cross, an X. It’s the Viking symbol of Thor’s hammer, the stem with two arms coming to a point at the top.”

  “Cool.” Costas sounded deadpan. “But how does that help us?”

  “Let’s say they found a rock of that shape and put their cairn there. Maybe not the best place for a beacon, but that’s exactly what the Norse would have done.

  It would have been an affront to Thor to ignore it.”

  “We’ve just found it,” Costas suddenly exclaimed. “Take a look around your feet.”

  They looked down and realised the slab they had been standing on had a peculiar regularity in its shape. They would not have noticed it without prompting, but as they clambered around they could see from one angle a clear similarity to the Thor’s hammer symbol.

  “Okay,” Jeremy said excitedly. “What we’re after is markings, probably runes.

  Look under any overhangs you can find, anywhere sheltered.”

  He vaulted over the side of the slab and began working his way along the edge, scanning the worn surface of the granite intently. After only a few seconds he dipped under an overhang and they heard a muffled whoop of delight. Jack jumped down beside him, and Jeremy took his hand and pressed it against the underside of the slab. “Can you feel it?”

  Jack moved his hands over the rough, damp rock and began to feel interjoined linear depressions, like gouged lines. “Yes!”

  “Do you have a torch?”

  Costas moved alongside them and thrust a mini Maglite into Jeremy’s hands. He squatted back under the overhang and trained the light on the rock. “Two runes,” he said. “The first is the third rune in the Norse futhark, the sound th.

  With only two runes here, I’d suggest we’re looking not at the letters of a word but at the rune’s symbolic meaning, which in this case is eagle.”

  “Eagle,” Jack said excitedly. “Could that mean Harald’s ship?”

  “The second one clinches it,” Jeremy said. “You’d better take a look.” He hea
ved himself out and passed the light to Jack, who crouched down and took Jeremy’s place under the rock. Jack trained the light upwards straight on to the seven-branched symbol of the menorah. He stared transfixed, barely breathing. He could scarcely believe it. Harald Hardrada himself must have been at this very spot, staring up at the marks his men had made, perhaps the last person to see this before now. The pitted rock of the ancient runestaves looked like the surface of the carved stones Jack had seen two days before on Iona, yet he had only seen the symbol of the menorah carved in stone on the Arch of Titus in Rome. The image he was now looking at seemed to defy all the conventional parameters of history. It was incredible. He had to blink hard to remind himself that he was thousands of miles away from Iona and Rome on the other side of the Atlantic.

  When Jack re-emerged he had a broad smile on his face, and he slapped Jeremy on the back as he shook his hand. “That’ll do nicely,” he said. “Very nicely.

  Congratulations, Jeremy.”

  “What do the runes mean?” Costas said.

  “The Eagle, Harald’s ship, plus the symbol of his treasure,” Jack replied.

  “Harald was here.”

  “Something like that.”

  “So it really did happen.” Jeremy slumped down on the grass beside the rock, exultant but drained. “This rewrites the history books completely. Vinland was not just an obscure outpost, but a place visited by the greatest king of the Viking age.”

  “And he went further,” Jack murmured.

  “What happened here?” Costas said, peering glumly at the low shoreline where it was beginning to spatter with rain. “I mean, if this godforsaken place was such a paradise for the Norse, why didn’t Harald stay?”