I swallowed. ‘I’m only looking.’
‘Don’t even look. One does not quarrel with Red Jacket and survive. Just ignore them – unless you’ve already tired of my cousin.’
‘Lord Somerset, it is she who seems to have tired of me.’
‘I told you, patience. She favours few men with a hunt.’
‘And favours even fewer with anything else.’
He laughed and walked away, nodding to the Indian chief.
That night I bedded down by myself, tired of pursuing Aurora and tired of my companions commenting on it. I’m not averse to playing the fool when I think there’ll be sweet reward at the end, but there’s a limit to humiliation even for me. The game with Somerset had turned sour, and I decided to swear off women entirely.
Then there was a quiet footfall near my bedroll and a female whisper in the dark, in the French that dominated the fur trade.
‘Sauvez-moi.’ Save me.
Then Namida crept away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
We pushed on the next day, hugging the north shore. The lake was cold, the air crisp and flawless, the mountains a glittery granite. I’d thought the French to be tireless paddlers, but the Indians seemed even more so, impatient at our pauses to smoke. But then they, too, would drift alongside to beg twist tobacco to put in their pipes.
‘They’re just in a hurry to get to Grand Portage to drink,’ Pierre scoffed.
‘No, I think they can paddle longer than the great Pierre,’ Magnus teased him.
On and on we stroked across a vast blue universe, my arms and torso turning into twisted steel from this unrelenting labour, day after long summer day. Storms would pen us periodically, all of us dozing in camp as wind and rain lashed our tarps, and then the tempest would pass and we’d go on. At camp each night Namida kept her distance except for an occasional wary, pale-eyed glance, while Aurora was even more aloof now that Red Jacket accompanied our party. It was as if he was a wilderness duke who demanded propriety. She retreated alone to her tent and spoke nothing to the Indian women, nothing to me, and nothing to Red Jacket. Occasionally she sat alongside her cousin to have long, earnest conversations, gesturing towards all of us.
I, meanwhile, wondered if this Namida or her plainer friend, Little Frog, could shed any light on the Norwegian’s mysterious map, given that she came from the tribe and area that interested Jefferson.
My chance came on the fourth day after I first spied her bathing, when I was sitting apart from the others for a moment’s privacy and she came up to shyly offer some corn mixed with molasses. ‘I flavoured it with berries from the forest,’ she said in French.
‘Thank you.’ I ate with my fingers. ‘You come from the west?’
She cast her eyes down.
‘You are Mandan?’ I persisted.
‘Awaxawi, their cousins.’
‘Have you ever heard of Wales?’
She looked confused.
‘Why are your eyes blue?’
She shrugged. ‘They have always been blue.’ Suddenly she leant close to whisper. ‘Please. I can guide you.’
‘Really?’
‘Take me home and my people can help.’
‘You know what we’re looking for?’ Now that would be disconcerting!
‘Your giant’s ancestors left cave pictures of themselves. We have red-hair writing. Old writing on a magic stone. I can help.’
‘A stone?’ I was stunned. That sounded like the inscriptions I’d seen in the Orient! ‘What kind of writing?’
‘We don’t know. It is secret.’
‘Secret? Like a cipher?’
But Red Jacket snapped something at her and she hurriedly retreated.
The fact that she gave her corn mush treat to no other voyageur didn’t escape notice. ‘So now you have a serving wench, my friend,’ Pierre congratulated.
‘She thinks we could help get her back home. She claims her tribe has some kind of old writing. Somehow she surmised we’re going beyond Grand Portage to look for Magnus’s ancestors.’
‘All the camp knows that. Old writing? From where?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘No matter. She’s Red Jacket’s now.’
‘I don’t see him treating her with any respect.’ I kept eating. The sweet-sour berries added some interesting flavour, and there was also a crunch of seeds. ‘She deserves better. I want to rescue her.’
He laughed. ‘Ah, then her spell is already working!’
‘What spell?’
Pierre pointed to my food. ‘Indian women are well-practised in love charms. The Ojibway swear by the seeds of the gromwell to capture the heart. Oh yes, American, she is bewitching you.’
‘She didn’t need seeds to do that.’ I grinned. ‘Have you watched her hips?’
‘Keep your head, or you’ll lose your hair to Red Jacket.’
I glanced over at the Indian, who indeed seemed to be eyeing my scalp. I made a face at him and he darkened and looked away. Aurora frowned too, which gave me even more satisfaction. That girl had her chance, didn’t she?
Maybe she’d come crawling to me at Grand Portage.
Except that now there was Namida.
As we paddled on, I spied a long, low island on the southern horizon.
‘Isle Royale,’ Pierre said. ‘Forty miles end to end, and dotted with curious pits. You can still see chunks of copper ore and discarded tools. There are old copper mines there, so numerous you wonder what civilisation worked them.’
Magnus glanced up at the bowman.
‘The Indians had copper,’ the voyageur went on, ‘but nothing on the scale of those workings. It looks like enough was dug to arm the warriors on both sides of the walls of Troy. But how would this copper have got to Greece, eh?’
‘Perhaps people have been crossing the Atlantic and trading metal far longer than we guess,’ Magnus said. ‘Maybe my Norse were part of a train of explorers going back to ancient times.’
‘But who boated all this way in those days?’
I couldn’t resist joining in, even though I knew it would only fuel the speculation. ‘The astronomer Corli, and his colleague Gisancourt, speculated that Plato’s allegory of Atlantis was actually a real place, an island in the Atlantic. Perhaps the miners came from there. Trojan refugees. Carthaginians. Who knows?’
‘There, you see?’ said Magnus. ‘This lake has been a highway.’
‘Oui, there are mysteries in this wilderness,’ said Pierre. ‘Not just old pits. Sometimes a man comes across a mysterious mound or a tumbled stone wall in the oddest places. Who built them? But all is silence, no answer but the call of birds. You quest for El Dorado, giant, but no conquistador has yet found it.’
‘Not conquistador, but king,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘How about it, Magnus? Somerset called you royalty. What did he mean by that?’
‘Bloodhammer is an ancient name of a Norse monarch,’ my companion said evenly. ‘I’m proud to say I share his bloodline.’
‘You’re Norwegian nobility, cyclops?’ Pierre asked.
‘For what it’s worth. There’s no independent Norway, according to the Danes.’
Here it was then. My companion did not just want independence for his nation. He wanted to reinstitute Norwegian aristocracy in which he might claim a place. He was not so much a revolutionary as a royalist!
‘So you’re a long-lost king, Magnus?’ I clarified.
‘Hardly. And the lineage of my ancestors is nothing compared to what we’re looking for, Ethan.’
‘And explain again just what are we looking for?’