Crusader Gold

by David Gibbins

  Costas whistled. “He was weighed down with gold.”

  Jeremy shut the book. “Avendaño failed to convert the Itzá. Two years later the city fell to Spanish arms.”

  “You say they brought their treasure with them from Chichén Itzá?” Costas said.

  “That’s the story.”

  “That’s an awful lot of gold, for a vanquished people.”

  “Just a thought.”

  Jack was nodding slowly. “If the Maya were so secretive about their sacred texts, those books of Chilam Balam that prophesised the arrival of bearded men from the east, then they could have concealed untold other treasures. With the Spanish hunting everywhere for gold, an island stronghold on a lake set deep in the jungle sounds about right.”

  “And maybe it was just gold, pure and simple,” Costas said. “All that prestige value, all the meaning the menorah had for the hated Toltecs, had fallen away.

  Once the Maya reached their hideaway, maybe they melted it down.”

  “And then it comes full circle,” Maria said softly.

  “What do you mean?” Costas said.

  “Think about it. The Spanish conquer the last stronghold of the Itzá. They finally get their Maya gold. Only it isn’t Maya gold at all. And what do they do with it?

  They’re hardly going to sit on their jackpot in the jungle.”

  “They send it home,” Jeremy said.

  “They melt it down again, they coin it, they send it back in the treasure fleets to Cadiz and Seville,” Maria said. “Hundreds of pounds of gold, a spectacular bounty. It goes straight into the coffers of the Spanish king. And to the other great power behind the conquistadors.”

  “The Catholic Church,” Jack murmured. “And some of that wealth filters back to the powerhouse of the Church, to the Vatican in Rome.”

  “Hang on,” Costas said. “You’re losing me again.”

  “Don’t you see?” Maria’s eyes were alight. “If we’re correct, the menorah was never lost at all. Three hundred years ago, the gold first cast in sacred form in ancient Israel returned to the lands of its earliest heritage, re-formed as bullion and as holy artefacts for a new world order. Maybe it was staring us in the face all that time, in the gilded splendours of St. Peter’s, in the golden reliquaries of the Vatican treasury, in countless embellishments and artefacts in churches around Christendom that received largesse from the mother Church.”

  “And maybe some of it even found its way back to Jerusalem,” Jeremy said.

  “Remember the saga of Harald Hardrada, offering gifts of treasure to the Shrine of Christ in Jerusalem? The story that climaxed with the Crusades, of western involvement in the Holy Land, wasn’t all one of plunder and greed. Maybe, just maybe, some of the gold of the Itzá found its way back in recent centuries to the shadow of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and is still there today.”

  Costas suddenly looked crestfallen, and glanced at his blueprint on the rock beside the cenote. “My sub-bottom borer. All my plans. Are we saying what I think we’re saying?”

  “All this is just guesswork,” Maria murmured.

  “And we have nothing to prove Harald even got here,” Costas said. “The wall-painting’s gone, the site of Harald’s last stand entombed forever. Nobody would believe us.”

  “We’ve got this.” Maria removed the smooth chip of stone from her shorts pocket, the runestone she had found inside the cenote.

  “It doesn’t actually mention Harald,” Costas said. “And the stone’s not local, it looks like a schist they probably picked up at L’Anse aux Meadows.”

  “But we know,” Maria said.

  “I’ll go with the Maya theory.” Jeremy was still reflecting on the menorah.

  “Better than trying to work out what to do with the menorah if we found it.”

  Jack got up, walked over to the sacrificial platform and peered down at the impenetrable green of the water. Then he turned his back on the cenote and unclipped a radio receiver from his belt. “The menorah may be in the Well of Sacrifice after all. Or we may have reached the end of the road. But before I even think about another project, I’ve got a small debt to pay to an old friend.

  Something to do with battle-luck.” He glanced at Maria. “And we need to get out of here.”

  22

  FOUR DAYS LATER, JACK WAS CROUCHED NEAR THE stern of Seaquest II, muffling his ears against the churning of the ship’s wake as he took a call from Maurice Hiebermeyer in Istanbul. After a few moments struggling to hear he got up and walked back to where Costas was standing beside Maria and Jeremy, who were sitting on a bench behind the ship’s helipad.

  “I read you.” Jack pressed the receiver against his ear. “Set it all out and I’ll see you in the Golden Horn tomorrow evening. And thanks for taking over the excavation, Maurice. Great work. I owe you one. Out.”

  Jack snapped shut the radio receiver and weaved his way around the lines that had been laid on the deck to secure the Lynx helicopter after its arrival.

  Seaquest II was heading back to the Arctic to resume the scientific project at Ilulissat icefjord, and several of the scientists who had disembarked during their diversion to the Caribbean were being flown back on board. The ship was now less than a hundred nautical miles east of Newfoundland, and the final helicopter shuttle was due in later that afternoon. Apart from a deep swell, the sea was settled and the sky was clear, but as they ploughed their way north there was a chill in the air that seemed more pronounced after their days in the fetid jungle of the Yucatán. Maria and Jeremy were both wearing IMU anoraks and were huddled behind the bulwark out of the wind.

  “That was Maurice Hiebermeyer,” Jack said. “It’s great news. They’ve finally got artefacts dumped after the siege of Constantinople in 1204.”

  “Crusader gold?” Costas said hopefully.

  Jack grinned. “A colossal gilt bronze statue of the emperor Vespasian, with a dedicatory inscription showing it had originally been set up in the Forum of Peace in Rome after the Jewish triumph. It’s not exactly what we had in mind, but then archaeology’s like that.”

  “It’s what I wanted to hear.” Costas sighed contentedly. “My sub-bottom borer has come up trumps. Anyway, as I recall there was quite a list of items looted from the Jewish Temple other than the menorah. We’ll find them. Just have faith in IMU technology.”

  “That might have to go on the back burner for a while,” Jack said. “Maurice had been itching to tell me about a find from the Egyptian desert since we came back from Atlantis, and I finally relented. It’s incredible.”

  “Not another papyrus,” Costas said. “The last one got us into enough trouble.”

  “This one’s Roman,” Jack said. “Just a scrap, but it holds a fantastic clue.”

  “Another treasure hunt?”

  “Ever heard of Alexander the Great?”

  Costas saw the familiar gleam in Jack’s eye. “Okay. My kind of archaeology. You can count me in. Just no icebergs.”

  “Deal.” Jack grinned and turned to Maria and Jeremy, but his expression changed as he saw Maria’s downcast face. “I’ve been meaning to ask, Maria,” he said gently. “Your Ukrainian heritage. I know the Jewish population were Ashkenazi, but any hint of anything farther back? I mean, I’m just trying to understand your passion for the Vikings.”

  Maria lightened up and gave Jack a sad smile. “After I put my mother to rest last year, I spent a few days in Kiev, went to the Cathedral of Santa Sofia and studied the famous wall-paintings. The kings and queens who ruled Kiev in the Viking age, traders and warriors who came down the rivers in longships from the north. Blond, bearded, impossibly tall, the very image of Harald Hardrada and his court.”

  “Varangians,” Jack murmured. “The Rus.”

  “Before my mother died, she told me something of her family for the first time. A story of intermarriage far back in our past, of family legend that had us descended from Rus nobility.”

  “Thought so.” Jack smiled.

  “Looks li
ke I’m the only one here who doesn’t have a drop of Viking blood,”

  Costas said.

  “Don’t count on it. Halfdan’s inscription of Hagia Sofia isn’t the only evidence of Vikings in that neck of the woods. There’s another runic inscription on an ancient sculpture in Athens. It looks like Harald and his boys had some fun in Greece too. They got pretty well everywhere.”

  Costas was looking at a map he had sketched of their adventure. “In the western hemisphere, anyway.”

  Jack was serious again. “I also just spoke to the IMU security chief in the UK,”

  he said, addressing all three of them. “As a precaution, just before she was taken by Loki, Maria emailed the penultimate draft of the dossier she was helping O’Connor prepare to the IMU security chief. As we speak Interpol are instigating a number of high-profile arrests. Apparently the félag were heavily involved in international crime, money laundering, drugs and arms, the antiquities black market. One of them was even implicated in an audacious robbery at the Roman site of Herculaneum in the Bay of Naples, right under the noses of the Italian authorities. It looks like our friend Reksnys wasn’t the only one using the power of the félag to line his own pockets.”

  “Seems a long way from the heroic ideals of Harald Hardrada,” Costas murmured.

  “The modern félag had nothing to do with that.” Jeremy’s voice had an edge to it. “They were a criminal organisation, pure and simple. They had about as much historical legitimacy as the Nazis.”

  “Apparently the dossier you and O’Connor compiled was crucial, the missing link that allowed Interpol to tie all these characters together,” Jack said to Maria.

  “And now that they’re implicated in murder, I don’t think we’ll be hearing from the félag for a good while.”

  “What about that shadowy character in the Vatican?” Costas said.

  Jack nodded, and a flicker of concern passed over his face. “That’s the one exception, I’m afraid. Reksnys nearly gave it away when he was boasting about his informers back in the chamber, but he stopped himself. O’Connor suspected who it was but wanted to be certain before telling us. His murder cut that short.

  That was Loki’s one small victory. But whoever it is, you can be assured he’ll be covering his tracks right now, keeping a squeaky-clean profile until the investigation dies down. Meanwhile we might uncover more in O’Connor’s records, some clue to who it is.”

  “I’m going back to Iona to finish the job.” Maria’s eyes had clouded, and she forced a smile through her tears. “At least Father O’Connor kept his honour to the end. You remember what he said about the Vikings? Your fate is predetermined, so what matters is your conduct in life, your uncompromising behaviour. So you can enter Valhalla and stand alongside the gods at the final battle of Ragnarøk knowing you have kept your honour and that of your brethren intact.”

  “He was one Hardrada would have been pleased to have had alongside him,”

  Jeremy said.

  “Such a waste.” Maria looked down again, her voice hoarse with emotion. “All that knowledge, all that humanity.”

  “Scholarship is about continuity,” Jack said gently, putting his hand on her shoulder. “About passing on wisdom to the next generation, knowing it can provide the basis for new discoveries, revelations you can hardly guess at.” He glanced at Jeremy. “I think Father O’Connor did that.”

  “Speaking of which.” Jeremy looked at Jack with a sudden burst of enthusiasm, and patted a package resting on his knees. “I had this flown in via Goose Bay in Labrador on the last helicopter shuttle. I wanted to see the real thing with my own eyes before telling you.”

  Jack smiled warmly. “I thought we hadn’t heard the last from you.”

  “You remember that afternoon with the old Inuit, when we talked about the disappearance of the Greenland Norse in the fourteenth century? That haunting final account, about how the Scraelings had taken the entire western settlement?”

  “Go on.”

  “The Hereford library has really come up trumps. Big time.” Jeremy clutched the package, his face flushed with excitement. “It’s what Norse scholars have dreamt of for years, a discovery as fabulous as any of Harald’s lost treasure.

  Found dumped with all the rest of the old stuff in that abandoned staircase.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Jack said.

  Jeremy stripped the bubble wrap from the package and revealed the hoary leather binding of an old book. “It’s phenomenal.” He turned to Maria. “The lost saga of the western Greenland settlement, Vestribygδa Saga. Written down in the fourteenth century.”

  Maria drew in her breath with sudden excitement and peered over Jeremy’s shoulder as he carefully opened the medieval codex to the final page.

  “Does it give any details of what happened?” Costas asked.

  “It certainly does.” Maria had been scanning the lines while Jeremy was talking.

  “By now you should be pretty familiar with this.” She pointed at two words in the centre of the page, and Costas peered down. “Haraldi konungi, our true king,”

  Maria said. “Harald Sigurdsson.”

  Costas whistled. “Harald Hardrada! The Norse Greenlanders remembered, almost three centuries after he left!”

  “And check out the symbol after his name.”

  “Don’t tell me. The menorah.” Costas grinned as they all peered at the symbol like a rune among the Latin letters of the text. “We seem to have come full circle. Constantinople, Iona, the icefjord and Vinland, the Yucatán and now back to the musty old cathedral library that started it all.”

  “This closes one loop, but then leads off somewhere fantastic,” Jeremy said.

  “Wait till you hear what the text says.”

  Maria translated slowly as she traced her finger along the lines. “Anno Domini 1332. The leaders of the Vestribygδ determined to follow their true king Harald Sigurdsson to the Norδrseta, and across the sea to the west.” She looked up.

  “They were fleeing Church oppression, like the Crusader tax imposed on them in the twelfth century. The Norse Greenlanders were pagans at heart. To them Harald Hardrada was their true king, not some distant pontiff in Rome.”

  “So where did they go?” Costas asked.

  Maria continued, her finger farther down the page. “North to the great icefjord where Halfdan the Fearless set forth in his ship to Valhalla.”

  “Good God,” Jack murmured. “It actually mentions Halfdan and the longship.”

  He glanced over at Costas. “The iceberg wasn’t just a dream after all.”

  “Nightmare, more like.”

  “They numbered one hundred and twenty people, men, women and children, and after packing their ships with provisions they set off northwest, never to be seen again. They were led by Erling Sighvatsson, Bjarni Thordarson and Endridi Oddsson.”

  “I know those names,” Maria said excitedly. “They’re on the Kingigtorssuaq runestone, found on an island north of the icefjord. The only other runestone found in Greenland until the longship discovery.”

  “Sometimes the pieces really do all fall together!” Jack murmured, shaking his head in wonder.

  “So you’re saying Bjarni and these characters led the refugees from Greenland towards the Northwest Passage?” Costas said.

  “That’s what the saga implies.”

  “Any chance they made it?”

  “No reason why not,” Jack said. “They were the hardiest seafarers ever. Look at where Harald and his depleted crew got to after Stamford Bridge. They almost circumnavigated the western hemisphere. If the passages through from Baffin Bay to the Beaufort Sea had been free of ice in the summer of 1333, then the Greenlanders could have made it.”

  “Vikings in the Pacific in the fourteenth century,” Jeremy mused. “So much for ancient Chinese voyages of discovery. The Vikings would have to take the cake.”

  “I think you might want to get some of your anthropology colleagues out there to run a few DNA tests,” Cos
tas murmured.

  “It’s a fantastic thought,” Jack said. “All along we’ve been seeking Harald himself, his treasure. But maybe his greatest legacy was the survival of these people, the people in all the Norse world who were closest to his ways. His brief passage through their land may have been the beacon of light that saved them from a miserable end all those years later.”

  “If that was his legacy, I can’t help thinking it would have satisfied him as much as any of his great victories,” Maria said, looking at Jack. “A way of ensuring that the best of his people lived heroic lives with honour to the end.”

  Jeremy closed the book and slipped it into its protective wrapping, and then he and Maria stood up between Jack and Costas. For a moment all four of them stared out over the stern to the east, where the rays of the afternoon sun were playing far out across the swell of the Atlantic. To Jack the distant horizon of the Old World seemed to beckon him back, heavy with the radiance of history, yet the shores of the New World and the seas beyond now had an allure he would never have dreamt possible only a few days before. His mind flashed back to the Golden Horn in Constantinople, and a surge of excitement coursed through him as he thought of all they had done.

  Costas was holding the jade pendant they had found with the skeleton under the cairn, and was peering at the two silver coins mounted in the eyes. After a moment he looked up at Jack, his expression slightly bemused. “So this is all we get of Harald Hardrada’s treasure?”

  “One Viking coin, one Roman.” Jack’s face creased in a smile. “I think that’s pretty good, don’t you? By themselves no more than dislocated fragments of history, but together they tell a fantastic story, something I never would have believed possible before all this. We found Harald’s treasure all right. Those coins are worth all the gold in the world.”

  “One final question,” Costas said. “The Byzantine princess, Harald’s other treasure from Constantinople. Maria’s namesake. Do you think she really was with him to the end? I fancy her surviving, becoming a fearsome queen of the Toltecs. That would certainly add some spice to history.”