David Gibbins - The Crusader's gold

“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 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.”

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.