“So you’re suggesting Great Sacred Isle was a known way-marker.”
“I think there was more to it than that,” Jack said. “For the island to be singled out so precisely on the map suggests something more, something closely associated with Harald’s progress. It’s just a guess, but I wonder whether Harald promised his Greenlander guides before leaving Ilulissat that he would leave some mark of his progress. An obvious place for the Greenlanders to suggest was their own navigational way-marker for Leifsbúδir at Great Sacred Isle, a place Harald could easily find. The Greenlanders may never have ventured here to find out whether he made it, but the memory of Harald’s promise lived on.”
“Let’s see if it’s waiting for us then.” Costas handed Jeremy his empty bowl, then gestured towards his rucksack. “Got any mead or beer to wash that down with?”
“Out of luck there, I’m afraid. But what I have got is just as authentic. It’s a kind of sour runny yoghurt, made from cow’s whey left in an open vat for a few weeks. Best served warm. If you’ll just give me a minute with the stove…”
Costas was already halfway to the beach, backing off with his hands held up defensively. Jack grinned at Jeremy and jerked his head towards the Zodiac. “I think breakfast is over.” A few moments later they were zipping up the survival suits and life jackets lent to them by the Coast Guard for the trip. They helped push the boat out into the shallows and then hopped aboard, sitting on the pontoons while one of the crewmen cranked up the outboard. As they chugged slowly out through the bay they turned and watched the low coastline receding in their wake.
“The tide’s in,” Jeremy shouted over the engine. “When it’s out, this whole bay is dry land. The Vikings caught salmon by laying traps at low tide, then returning on the next low tide. Harald’s men would have had no trouble stocking up with food.”
The crewman opened the throttle as they left the bay, and they moved from the clear shallows to the greenish black sheen of the open sea. Ahead of them the island was suddenly lit by a brilliant shaft of sunlight, shining through a gap in the clouds that were beginning to fill the sky.
“A shard from Mjøllnir,” Jeremy shouted.
“What?”
“The Norse believed that lightning and shafts of light were shards struck off Mjøllnir, Thor’s hammer,” Jeremy shouted. “It’s usually a good sign.”
“Not another Norse omen,” Costas replied. “I’m beginning to dream wolf-dogs and blood-eagles.”
“Don’t worry.” Jack grinned at Costas through the spray. “You’ll get over it. And you’ll soon have your feet back firmly on the ground.”
15
T
WENTY MINUTES LATER JACK, COSTAS AND Jeremy stood on the lee side of Great Sacred Isle off the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, doffing the survival suits, which they left with the crewman beside the Zodiac. The island ahead of them was about a kilometre long and half a kilometre wide, and was made up of rocky outcrops interspersed with patches of bog and meadow. At various points it rose in low ridges that Jack was inspecting with a pair of lightweight binoculars.
“My favourite.” Costas sighed contentedly and kicked on his hiking boots. “A treasure hunt.”
“No sophisticated gadgets this time.” Jack lowered the glasses and glanced at Costas as he laced up his boots. “The terrain’s useless for geophysics, and what we’re looking for probably wouldn’t show up anyway. We’re talking Mark 1
Eyeball. Anyway, it’s the only way I’ve ever found treasure.”
“So what are we looking for?”
“Something on the highest point, or a prominent point on the seaward side. But your guess is as good as mine. A cairn, or courses of stones lying on the ground that look too regular and may be from a collapsed pile. But if it was a wooden marker like that keel in the saga, then we’re probably out of luck.”
The three of them fanned out over a fifty-foot swathe and began to work their way up towards the centre of the isle, Jack in the middle. The terrain was not difficult to traverse, but it was an awkward mix of exposed rock and soggy gullies that reminded him of their walk across Iona a few days before. After scrambling up the first small ridge, Costas stopped suddenly and looked at the ground. Jack caught his movement and spun round. “Got something?”
“It’s about Harald’s Vikings.”
“Go on.” Jack relaxed and looked at Costas expectantly.
“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 Ragnarøk. 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.”
“And one might be the menorah,” Jack added quietly.
“The more I’ve seen it, the more I believe the menorah became Harald’s own rune, not only a symbol of his prowess and achievement but also a kind of talisman, something wrapped up in his own destiny.”
“His survival at Stamford Bridge would have seemed little short of a miracle,”
Jack said. “As a Viking warrior Harald would have hoped for glorious death in battle, but the fact that he was spared may have suggested that an even greater battle awaited him. In their half-crazed state he and his men may already have crossed the boundary into the spirit world, and believed they were seeing portents of their own destiny at the final showdown of Ragnarøk.”
“Remember what Father O’Connor said,” Jeremy added. “The Norse believed in predestination, that one’s fate is fixed at birth. Maybe Harald felt his was still to come, and was being driven onwards. He still needed to find the greatest triumph for his character, to die a death befitting the supreme image of the Norse hero.”
“Okay, guys, you’ve lost me,” Costas said. “All I want to know is where he went from here.”
Jack nodded and looked serious. “Well, one thing they would have been able to do here was replenish their water and food and carry out ship repair. One of the first things the archaeologists found in the 1960s was a primitive smithy where local bog iron was smelted and made into rivets. And some of those wood chips found near the foreshore could have come from Harald’s men making replacement hull timbers.”
“And then where? East or south?”
“West down the St. Lawrence estuary would have been a tough haul against the river flow,” Jeremy said. “And going any farther in that direction they would have been terrified of reaching the edge of the world and plunging into Ginnungagap, the great abyss.”