The Crusader's gold jh-2

by David Gibbins

  “Okay,” Jack said, a flicker of anxiety crossing his face. “Just make sure you look after yourself.”

  O’Connor had one last thing to show them. He ushered Jack and Maria through the cloister and out into the grassy precinct in front of the abbey, leaving Costas and Jeremy behind to reformat a new scan of the Hereford map that had just arrived. Through the early-evening mist that now shrouded the island, Jack glimpsed the rocky outcrops that rose beyond the precinct, an image unchanged since the days of the Vikings. O’Connor led them along the cobbled track of Sraid nam Marbh, the Street of the Dead, past Reilig Odhrain, the hallowed burial ground of kings. On the way Jack paused beside the great stone cross of St. Martin, its weathered form still standing where it had been erected more than a thousand years before. He put his hand on the stone and felt the writhing serpents that had been carved into the granite almost two centuries before the Battle of Stamford Bridge, when the sea raiders of the north were still no more than a distant rumour to the monks on the island. He felt a frisson of immediacy, the same excitement he had felt on seeing the longship in the ice. Harald Hardrada had passed this way, had seen this cross. Jack suddenly had an image of the stricken king being carried on a bier towards the abbey, his wounded followers straggling up from the longships beached in the channel below. He felt he had been shadowing Hardrada all along, in the Golden Horn, in the icefjord, but he had never seemed so close, so certain that the trail ahead was drawing them on to follow the great king into the unknown.

  The three colleagues walked in silence, lost in their own thoughts, digesting what had gone before. Half an hour later they reached the western side of the island, a wide bay fringed with golden beaches. O’Connor led them over a dune and found a place to sit, with Jack and Maria on either side. The mist had lifted to reveal a long vista off to the west, the deep orange rays of the setting sun searing their way towards the horizon. O’Connor lit a pipe, drawing on it a few times, then began to talk quietly.

  “This is Camus Cul an t-Saimh, the Bay at the Back of the Ocean,” he said. “After days on the brink of death they brought Harald to this spot, fearful that word of his survival would leak out to the Normans. They brought his longships, the Eagle and the Wolf, and pulled them up on the beach. They filled them with provisions and placed Harald on his litter in the centre of the Wolf. Halfdan the Fearless, his oldest companion, lay grievously wounded at his feet, ready to die if his king began to wane.”

  “Wergild,” Maria murmured. “A man could forfeit his life to Odin to save the life of his master.”

  “The monks helped them haul the ships into the shallows. Those of Harald’s band who were still fit and able manned the thwarts, drawing the long oars through the tholes. The masts were set and the sails unfurled. From here Harald and his thole-companions sailed into history, watched by the monks of Iona and the small band of the faithful he had left behind to keep the fire burning.”

  “Where did the ships go?” Maria asked.

  O’Connor paused, took out his pipe and jabbed it towards the western horizon, then recited quietly from memory.

  But now farewell. I am going a long way

  With these thou seest-if indeed I go-

  (For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)

  To the island-valley of Avilion;

  Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,

  Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies

  Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard-lawns

  And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea

  Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.

  So said he, and the barge with oar and sail

  Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan

  That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,

  Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood

  With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere

  Revolving many memories, till the hull

  Looked one black dot against the verge of dawn,

  And on the mere the wailing died away.

  “Tennyson, Morte d’Arthur,” Jack exclaimed, shaking his head in wonder. “A pretty Victorian view of it, but if what you say is true, the romantic version of the Arthur legend goes right back to this spot.”

  “Substitute Vinland for Avalon and you’ve got the promised land, the earthly paradise,” O’Connor said. “The story of Leif Eiriksson’s discovery of the New World would have trickled back to Harald’s court well before his decision to invade England, and it would have intrigued such a well-travelled man. He’d been pretty sedentary for years, apart from the occasional war parties to Denmark and Sweden, and he must have had wanderlust. Maybe he’d been planning an expedition across the western ocean even before Stamford Bridge. He wanted one last adventure, one last great voyage of discovery, something to take him back to the glory days of his youth with the Varangian Guard. With his defeat at Stamford Bridge the voyage became an imperative. The reports would have suggested a land of great abundance, of lush meadows for pasturage and endless forests for shipbuilding, the two things the Vikings coveted above all else. And there was nothing to go back to Norway for. His prestige would have been shattered if he’d returned alive, whereas death assured his place amongst the heroes. The Heimskringla even records that his remaining army in Norway swore eternal allegiance to him after news of the defeat had reached them, even after they thought he was dead.”

  “And he had his treasure,” Jack said.

  “Chests of it,” O’Connor said. “They certainly weren’t going to the New World in search of gold. They already had so much they didn’t need any extra ballast. Silver coins, tens of thousands of them, Arab dirhams, English pennies of Cnut and Aethelred, coins from Harald’s empire and beyond. Gold and silver neck-torques, arm-rings, precious heirlooms of his ancestors. And all of Harald’s booty from his days with the Varangians in the Mediterranean, some of it melted down, some still intact. Priceless religious reliquaries and ancient jewellery. And to cap it all, the greatest treasure of Harald’s reign, the treasure which had been ennobled by his exploit in escaping Constantinople, which had come to mean far more than its weight in gold.”

  “The menorah,” Jack murmured.

  “If Vinland is the site of L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, then it’s pretty well due west from here, over more than two thousand miles of open ocean,” Maria said. “So what’s our longship doing way up in Baffin Bay at Ilulissat?”

  “It’s in the sagas,” Jack replied. “Leif Eiriksson found Vinland by sailing first up the west coast of Greenland, then across to Helluland and Markland. These places correspond to Baffin Island and Labrador, and the staging point in Greenland must have been Disko Bay, at the narrowest point of the Davis Strait. Harald was following the best available navigational advice.”

  “That’s what Kunzl must have worked out in the 1930s,” O’Connor said.

  “So they overwintered at Ilulissat?” Maria asked.

  “They were probably forced to stay by the pack-ice clogging up the sea,” Jack replied. “It would have been autumn when they arrived. The light gets poor, and ships get iced up by spray. Macleod said the slush ice begins to form in October, and when it hardens it can cut timbers like a saw. Overwintering would have been tough, but these were tough men used to hardship. They probably had some of the local Greenlander Vikings with them from the southern settlements, as guides and hunters. I wouldn’t be surprised if they camped in the same bay beside the icefjord where we saw Kangia, among the ancient tent circles.”

  “It would have been especially tough on the wounded,” Maria said.

  “Many must have perished on the voyage, and in the camp,” O’Connor replied. “By the time Halfdan died my guess is the number was so depleted they were easily able to spare one of the ships for the burial, the Wolf, the ship you saw in the ice. There weren’t enough hands left to man two ships.”

  “So how did word get back?” Maria asked. “Two centuries later Richard of Holdingham knew they had r
eached Vinland, was confident enough to sketch it on his map. The archaeology indicates that the settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows was pretty short-lived, abandoned well before 1066, so it’s not as if there were regular supply trips that could pass on reports.”

  “Jack was right about the Greenlanders,” O’Connor replied. “They were sympathetic to Harald, a fellow Norwegian, especially when they saw he had no intention of subjugating them and staying there. He swore them to secrecy, and the silver he gave them kept their trade with the Old World prosperous for generations to come. We know this because the felag sent out an expedition in search of Harald several generations later. Eirik Gnupsson, Bishop of Greenland and one of the felag, convinced his flock that he was a loyal follower of Harald, and learned what I have just recounted. He was told that Harald promised to leave a way-marker in Vinland if he and his companions decided to sail farther south. Richard must have been told this in the greatest secrecy, but nothing more. Eirik Gnupsson sailed for Vinland but was never heard of again. There was never another expedition, and the location of Vinland was lost to history. Even to the Greenlanders it became a kind of Avalon, a mythical promised land, ruled by the once and future king.”

  “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 th
e 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 suddenly 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.”