She wanted me alive.
She wanted me to follow what I’d read.
And by the time I crawled back to my rifle and reloaded it, Aurora Somerset had disappeared into the trees.
CHAPTER FOURTY-FOUR
What came next I recall only dimly. I was in shock from blood loss, electrical discharge, grief, the plague that had ravaged the Indian village, amazement that the hammer had existed at all, and confusion. What message had I come away with? A Latin script kicked into oblivion by the hooves of a dying pony. What did it mean? I hadn’t the faintest idea. What did Aurora think I knew? I had even less notion of that. Where had she gone? She’d passed into the trees like mist, as if she’d never existed.
I was utterly alone. I saw no Indians, no buffalo, no smoke.
I bound up my wounded leg as best I could and drank some dirty water from one of the puddles. Rain continued to fall.
Then I knelt and dug three places in the mud to bury my Pierre, Little Frog, and Namida, using Magnus’s axe as a crude hoe. Good farmland, I noted as I scraped. Good land for Jefferson’s yeoman farmers. A good place for democracy.
What a price my friends and I paid for that geographical information.
And Napoleon? This was a place that could swallow armies.
I think I had an idea what should become of Louisiana.
So did my thoughts blessedly wander. Then it was done, three holes together. Namida first, laid as gently as I could, pushing her eyes closed. Then brave and burnt Little Frog, who’d seized the god’s fire to avenge little Pierre. And then Pierre himself, his clothes slightly scorched, his skin raw from the cruel lashings of the accursed Cecil Somerset. I’d failed to protect any of them.
As the rain came down I mounded dirt on the first and the second and began on the third, scooping handfuls to hurl on the body.
Suddenly Pierre coughed and spat.
‘What are you doing, donkey?’
I reeled back from his grave as if the devil himself had spoken. By Franklin’s lightning! And then the Frenchman blinked, squinted against the rain falling into his face, and grimaced. ‘Why am I in a hole?’
‘Because you’re dead! Aurora killed you!’ Had Magnus’s dreams of resurrection somehow come true? What weird magic was this?
The voyageur slowly sat up where I’d been about to entomb him, staring in dull disbelief at the crater, the dead Indian pony, the lattice of roots, and the gargantuan trunk of Yggdrasil, stretched out across the prairie. ‘Mon dieu, what disaster have you made this time, American?’
I feared to touch him, lest my hand go through his ghostly breast. Was I hallucinating? ‘She shot you! Didn’t she?’
He began turning his head as if to look at his back wound himself when he winced, groaning. ‘I think she shot it, my friend, and left me unconscious.’
‘It?’
‘Hurts like the very devil.’ And so he carefully reached into his ragged shirt, still sitting in the mud, and painfully drew out a cotton string and something …
Bent around a bullet.
‘I took it from shattered Cecil one night when the fool was wrestling me down to beat me, the maniac blind in one eye and enraged in the other, and after I stole it I tied it to the inside of my shirt to torment him. You can imagine how frantic he was when he missed it: his distress kept me amused while he tortured me. Who knew it would be useful? I’m bruised and bloody, but it kept the bullet from penetrating.’
And he held up a very warped symbol I’d seen on Somerset’s neck when he coupled with his sister, a pyramid and a snake that had flattened and held the lead ball Aurora had fired, cupping it like a pancake. ‘It turned out to be my luck and not his, no? And yours, because you’d be lost in the wilderness in an instant without the great Pierre to look after you.’ He coughed, and winced.
And now I fell forward not just to touch but to hug him, laughter and tears coursing down my cheeks at the same time. Alive!
‘But where is Little Frog?’
So I told him how her courage had helped save his life.
I left Pierre to grieve for the women and practise taking breath again – his back was a massive bruise – while I buried three other things.
No, not the remains of Cecil or Red Jacket. I reflected that Aurora, for all her perverse love for her brother, had not stayed to do the job either. The girl wasn’t one for sentiment, was she? I left them for the coyotes and crows.
These others, however, I didn’t want found.
One was the stone tablet. It was too heavy to take back. I don’t know why it seemed important to keep the thing a secret, but if Aurora had been curious about the Latin cipher in a sheet of gold, why not Norse runes? I’m not sure she ever even realised we’d found it. So I dragged the rune stone to the travois that had escaped the worst of the flames, rolled it back on and, limping, dragged it a mile or more where its location would not be particularly obvious. I used the big axe to cut a hole in the turf of a grassy hillock, looking carefully out of fear she was watching, slipped the stone under the sod, and left it sleeping. Maybe some new tree will grow atop it someday.
Then I went back for the curious holed stones the Norse had set around their tree and carried them in the travois to my new location, where I placed them so that lines drawn between would intersect where the rune stone was. It was the best I could think of in case there was some reason to find it again.
I cast the double-bitted axe in a pond. The tool had been useful many times over, but there was a ding on its blade where Aurora had blocked my bullet, and I wanted no physical reminder of the price of that miss. The tool could rust away in peace.
And Thor’s hammer? It seemed dead now, no more than a fused piece of slag, but it wasn’t something I felt the world needed. Nor did I want it within reach of lightning that might reanimate it. I found a granite boulder sitting lonely on a meadow, scooped out a small tunnel beneath it, and secreted the hammer there. There are other odd boulders in that country, and this one I didn’t mark. It can sleep until the real Ragnarok.
I salvaged enough gold flakes, which just bore torn letters now, to roll into a ball the size of a grape. This would be my new stake when I found a decent game of cards.
Then Pierre and I said our last prayers and goodbyes and set out east. Using the lance as a crutch, my rifle over my shoulder in a makeshift sling, I started limping. He hobbled bent like an old man, his torso a mass of bruises and pain. We made all of three miles that first day, but what a relief to have escaped the strange Eden of Magnus Bloodhammer! The swirling storm clouds had disappeared with the fall of the tree, but not the feeling of foreboding and loss.
I felt like the gates of Eden were swinging shut behind us. I looked back once and saw only empty sky, stretching endlessly west.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t kill him with that first shot from the canoe,’ I told Pierre. ‘I’m always missing by inches.’
‘It was better that way because your first execution would have been too merciful,’ the Frenchman said grimly. ‘You took away his vanity and filled him with shame. What happened at the tree had to happen, Ethan. We brought things to a necessary end.’
I began to spy game the second day and brought down first a raccoon and then a buck deer. The women had taught us to spot edibles, and we gathered what late-season roots and berries we could find. There was frost in the mornings now, the leaves falling faster. On the fourth day we trudged through a premature flurry of snow.
I skinned out the deer and when I came to a river we made another Welsh coracle, or Mandan boat. The task consumed a full day and if Pierre had been any bigger we would have swamped the vessel, but it worked, just, in the gentle river. It allowed me to rest my sore leg as we floated downstream, steering with the stock of my rifle. If I was still ravaged by sorrow inside, I was beginning to heal on the outside.