I held tighter and kept going.
Finally I broke clear of the primary globe of foliage and neared the tree’s dizzying top, a thousand feet or more above the ground. Through gaps in the clouds I could dimly see out across rolling prairie, an endless panorama of trees, meadows, and silvery lakes, but the day was growing greyer as the concealing overcast thickened. From a distance, was this Yggdrasil already hidden from view?
No, my eye caught movement. A party was approaching on horseback, one of them wearing a bright red coat, like a dot of blood on the prairie.
The trunk now had shrunk to something I could wrap my arms around. There were no hammers up here that I could find. Yet the very top of the tree still seemed truncated in that odd way I’d spied from the ground. Why?
I hauled myself up the last twenty feet, finally hitching myself up a gnarled extension of trunk no thicker than a maypole. When I looked again for Red Jacket the ground was already blotted from view. The prairie was walled off by a circular wall of cloud that seemed to be rotating slowly around the immense tree like a vast, gauzy cylinder. Its top was lit brilliantly silver by the sun, but the lower reaches were already dark. I heard a low growl of thunder. Hurry! There was something bright and odd glittering above, a golden thread, and it jutted from the very uppermost reach of the tree with a gleam like a promise.
This highest point had clearly been struck by lightning, as one would expect of the tallest organism on the prairie. But why hadn’t the tree burnt or died from what must be a hundred strikes a season?
I pulled myself the last inches, fearful the snag would break off or some new jolt of electricity would stab my perch. I was swaying a good twenty feet in the wind.
And then I had the answer to what had puzzled me on the ground. The golden thread I’d spied was in fact a stiff wire, a twisted strand of metal that poked from the tree’s peak as if growing out of the wood. It looked more likely to be an alloy of copper and silver and iron. The topmost snag had extruded a shiny filament like a twig.
If I’d not been an electrician, a Franklin man, I might have found the wire peculiar but not very illuminating. But I’d caught the lightning! What I was looking at, almost certainly, was a medieval lightning rod. Bloodhammer’s Templars, or Norse utopians, had wired this tree. The metal would draw lightning strikes and, if the wire was long enough, conduct them to discharge into the ground. Which meant this wire should lead all the way down through the tree.
Something was under the roots of this behemoth.
My skin prickled and I felt an uneasy energy in the air, the black clouds ever-darkening. More from instinct than prudence, I suddenly let myself slide down this uppermost stub to the first branch below, where I clung like an ape. As I squinted back up at the stub of wire, there was a flash and an almost instantaneous boom of thunder. My eyes squeezed shut as I went half-blind.
A bolt hit the tip of the wire and the tree shuddered. A jolt punched through me, but the worst of the energy was shielded by the wood as lightning was drawn down through the wire. I gasped, shaken, but hung on.
Then the tingle passed, the wire sizzling.
Fat droplets of cold rain began to fall.
I had to get off this tree.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
I descended as quickly as I could but a false step would mean a fatal fall, so I had to pick my way with care. It seemed an eternity until I came within hailing distance of my companions and could shout to Magnus. ‘There’s something under this tree!’
‘What?’
‘A strip of metal runs from the top through the trunk! It draws lightning! And I think it must be to power something down below! We’ve got to find it, because Red Jacket is coming!’
By the time I’d climbed to the lowest branch, swung by my arms, and then dropped to the carpet of leaves and soft earth below, Magnus had made another circuit of the trunk. ‘This Yggdrasil is planted as firmly as the Rock of Gibraltar,’ he said.
‘It’s been nearly four hundred and fifty years since your Norse were here.’ I didn’t say ‘might,’ or ‘maybe,’ I was accepting the presence of these long-lost Templar explorers as established fact. ‘The tree has undoubtedly grown a great deal, and maybe grown unusually fast because of the infusion of electricity, as the French scientist Bertholon theorised. But as it grew upward, it somehow carried a strip of wire skyward to serve as a lightning rod. I think the wire ran out, and lightning strikes keep the tree trimmed to the height it is now. That wire had to come from somewhere below.’
He squinted up at the branches. ‘I don’t see a wire.’
‘It’s inside the wood, going all the way to the ground. And what was the point unless the ground end of the wire is attached to something important? And if it was important, wouldn’t you want a way to get back to it? So there was a way under once, a tunnel or door.’ I was glancing about myself, impatient because the Indians were coming. ‘Where that root arches at the butt of the tree, perhaps.’ I pointed. ‘Imagine the wood growing over and around it. I know the tree looks solid, but …’
Magnus eyed the bark speculatively. ‘So there’ll be a door again. Forgive me, Yggdrasil.’ He took his huge axe and went to a concave cavity at the base of the tree near an enormous root. ‘It is odd how it grew here. The tree is indented.’ He aimed, and swung. There was a crack, and the tree groaned. ‘If there’s a tunnel, we’ll need torches.’
‘Little Frog and I will gather branches,’ Namida said.
‘How could your Norse Templars know to come here of all places, in the middle of an unexplored continent?’ I asked as my companion chopped.
‘They didn’t,’ Magnus said. ‘They knew the continent was here, from the Vikings, and after Black Friday of 1309 they scattered for survival and took their artefacts with them.’ He swung and chopped, swung and chopped, his breath catching as he talked. ‘From the Indians they hear of a rich hunting ground with rivers running north, south, east, west … Is it the ancestral site of paradise? They’re far beyond the reach of their persecutors, with superior technology amid primitive Indians. They had steel, and the natives didn’t. They dreamt of establishing a utopia centred around the energy of whatever artefact they’d brought.’ Chips were flying.
‘Thor’s hammer.’
He nodded, swinging the great axe again. ‘Perhaps they fought the Indians with it. Perhaps they reburied it when it became apparent their small numbers couldn’t prevail. And perhaps, with no time to build a pyramid or tower or other way to mark its place where they could find it again, they used ancient secrets to tie it to a living tree that could be a beacon to future Templars, while terrifying the Indians to stay away.’
‘A beacon hidden by its own storms.’
‘Yes, and the storm itself a beacon. So this tree, if not Yggdrasil, is a machine, to sustain what we’ve come to fetch.’
‘Sustain how?’
He nodded upward at the sky.
The day kept turning darker as the clouds built, and I heard a rumble of thunder. The tree’s energy somehow created its own storms each day as the sun climbed higher, and its own winter each night. Lightning flickered high above like that wielded by Thor’s hammer. Or did I have it backward – did the lightning feed the tool?
‘Men are coming!’ Namida warned.