David Gibbins - The Crusader's gold

“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 Ragnarok. 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 heaved 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?”

“The Norse were great believers in the spirit world,” Jeremy said. “The barrier between their world and the spirit world was porous, easily transgressed. The wolf-god, the eagle-god, the evil god Loki, any of them could appear in the real world in various guises visible to those with seid, a kind of second sight. The spirits of the dead could haunt a place. Maybe Harald and his men could sense a malign presence when they arrived here.”

“You wouldn’t have needed second sight,” Costas said. “Even after half a century there’d still be all the skeletons, especially if they were trapped inside one of the longhouses.”

“Harald’s men probably would have felt compelled to collect the bones and cremate them, and then burn and bury everything else they could,” Jeremy said. “And these runes probably had a double meaning, a protective magic to keep the spirits of this place at bay and safeguard Harald and his men for what lay ahead. They were a rune-spell, a galdrastafir.” He got up and reached under the overhang, tracing his fingers over the staves carved in the rock. “One rune might be the eagle’s beak, another the tooth of a wolf, another Thor’s hammer.”