David Gibbins - The Crusader's gold

“I took hundreds of pictures,” Jack replied. “Enough for a full photogrammetric reconstruction. There’s no way anyone’s going near that berg again. When we found Halfdan he was partway to Valhalla. I think we should let him finish his voyage.”

“What about the axe?”

Jack weighed the haft again in his hands. “I’ll look upon Mjollnir as a loan,” he said. “It got Halfdan through all those wars alongside Harald Hardrada, and it’s got us through a few scrapes. It’s still got what the Vikings called battle-luck. Something tells me those old Norse gods are willing us on, and this is one of the best clues we’ve got. If Halfdan still had his treasured battle-axe from his days in Constantinople, then who knows what else the Vikings could have brought out here.”

“That reminds me.” Costas suddenly jerked upright and reached into the hip pocket of his E-suit. “I pulled this out of the ice just before things went haywire down there. I’d completely forgotten.” He extracted the object and they could see it was another weapon, a dagger the size of a small hunting knife with a gleaming steel blade and a decorative handle. As he held it up and the blade glinted, the crew members who had been milling on the deck converged around the group, and there was a collective gasp of amazement.

“Let me take a closer look at that.” Macleod said. “Something’s not right.”

As Costas passed it over they could see what had caught Macleod’s eye, and their astonishment turned to disbelief.

“A swastika,” one of the crew exclaimed.

Macleod turned the dagger over in his hands. “Just as I thought,” he murmured. “They did find the longship. Look at the pommel. A skull and crossbones, the death’s-head symbol. This is a Nazi dagger, a weapon carried only by a sworn member of the SS.”

There was a stunned silence and then the woman in the crew spoke again, quietly. “Could someone explain how a Nazi dagger got on a Viking longship inside an iceberg off Greenland?”

Macleod handed the dagger back to Costas and looked at Jack. “I think it’s time we told the crew the whole story.”

At that moment there was a sudden lurch in the deck, an unusual sensation in a ship with a state-of-the-art dynamic stabilizing system. The sea remained dead calm and covered with a steely grey mist after the storm. Then someone shouted from the starboard railing. “It’s the berg! She’s rolling!”

Everyone except Jack and Costas converged on the opposite railing to watch the mouth of the fjord. Even though it was more than a mile away, the spectacle was awesome, a breathtaking display of a force of nature no human agency could ever control. Through the mist they saw the huge front face of the berg drop off the underwater threshold and roll over the edge, the jagged eruptions of ice from the top of the glacier replaced by smooth undulations sculpted by the sea and streaked with black from the threshold. As the berg stabilised, Jack and Costas knew that the longship was now lost forever in the abyss, its fallen warrior destined to sail south along the old Viking sea route to the New World and find his eternal resting place as the berg melted far out in the Atlantic. It had nearly been their tomb too, and Jack found himself gripping the axe hard as he and Costas rested against the bulwark, suddenly overwhelmed by exhaustion, and watched the berg float majestically towards the open sea.

Jack noticed Maria and Jeremy having a heated discussion, as if she were trying to persuade him of something, and then they detached themselves from the group beside the starboard railing and made their way back across the foredeck. Macleod joined them, and Jack peered up at Jeremy as they approached.

“You haven’t told us what the rest of the runestone says.”

“I was coming to that.” Jeremy pulled a palm computer out of his pocket, activated the screen and cleared his throat. “Prepare to be amazed.”

“Go on.”

“There are five lines of runes altogether, scratched into the quartz slate by one hand. As I said, they’re Norse and eleventh century, consistent with our warrior being the same Halfdan who scratched his name into Hagia Sofia in Constantinople.”

“Well, what does it say?”

Jeremy cleared his throat again. “I’ve had to add some connectives to make sense of it, but here’s the gist: Halfdan died here of wounds received in the battle against the King of England near Yorvik. Halfdan will fight again for Odin at Ragnarok. Harald Sigurdsson his king made these runes the winter after the battle. The Wolf takes Halfdan to Valhalla. The Eagle sails west for Vinland.”

There was a stunned silence. “Harald Sigurdsson,” Jack gasped. “That’s Harald Hardrada.”

“The Mappa Mundi inscription from Hereford suggests he was out here,” Maria said. “Now we know for sure.”

Jeremy nodded. “The Wolf must be the name of the ship in the ice. The Eagle, the other ship, sailed on for Vinland. That’s the name of the Viking settlement in Newfoundland, the site at L’Ause aux Meadows, the farthest Viking outpost in the west and the only one known in North America.”

“Wait a minute.” Jack’s mind was suddenly reeling in astonishment. “Yorvik was the Viking name for the city of York, seven miles west of Stamford Bridge. The battle can only be Stamford Bridge in 1066, between King Harold Godwinson of England and King Harald Hardrada of Norway.”

“Correct.”

“But Harald Hardrada died at Stamford Bridge.”

“So the history books tell us,” Jeremy replied quietly. “But remember there’s no firsthand account of the battle. The events of that year were completely eclipsed by the Norman Conquest, and the Norman annals were hardly likely to extol an English victory. Most of what we know comes from a brief mention in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and from the Heimskringla, the semi-mythical history of the kings of Norway written in Iceland almost two centuries later. The copy of the Chronicle we found in the Hereford library mentions it, but only in a few lines.”

“Plenty of scope for omission, even a cover-up,” Costas murmured.

“My God.” Jack slumped back against the railing, his face dripping with seawater and sweat. “So Harald Hardrada survived Stamford Bridge. That changes everything. Somehow he and his remaining warriors made it out here, in the same two ships he had used to escape from Constantinople twenty years before. Remember the treasure of Michelgard, that incredible reference on the Hereford map? Harald must have had his treasure with him when he went to England, ready for a triumphal procession through York and London that never happened. Instead he sailed off after the defeat, taking it with him and his surviving followers far to the west, seeking a new land beyond the edge of the Viking world.” Jack lifted Halfdan’s axe in his hands, then gave a tired but jubilant smile. “I think we’ve just had another piece of battle-luck. I knew I was right to come out here.”

“You might like to have this then.” Costas had reached into the inner pocket of his E-suit lying nearby, and pulled out a small nodule of ice. “I was sure I’d dropped this when the berg rolled, so I didn’t mention it. I found it loose above the burial chamber, near that Nazi dagger.”

He handed the dripping object to Jack, who rolled it in his fingers and then passed it to Maria. A lustrous gold band protruded from one side of the ice, and Maria eyed it closely. “It’s a finger-ring, a Viking design,” she murmured. “Twisted gold, like a miniature arm-ring or neck-torque. But I’ve never seen one with a signet like this.” She clasped the ice in the warmth of her palm and then began rubbing it, gradually revealing the gold beneath. After a few moments she held it up to the sunlight. “I can see the surface of the signet. It’s got an impressed design. It’s…” Her voice trailed off, then she regained her composure. “Jack, tell me I’m not seeing things.”