Pierre cut himself a paddle and began to talk of building a canoe.
Was Aurora following? I saw no sign. Maybe she died of madness on the prairie.
The river passed through lakes, gathering water as it went. On the third day we recognised this as the river we’d first ascended with our second canoe. So we slipped east and south, drifting finally to an Indian village, dazed to see children playing happily at the edge of the river, men fishing, women cooking and mending. The world was unchanged by our trauma. Whole villages were still normal and happy. Here beyond the frontier, white and red were not at each other’s throats.
Why didn’t I just stop? This was the real Eden, wasn’t it?
Because I’m a Franklin man, a savant, and a man of science with discovery to report. Because I’m Napoleon’s opportunistic minion, and Jefferson’s naturalist, and Sir Sidney Smith’s wayward spy and electrician. I was the hero of Mortefontaine! Because I was lover to Namida and Astiza, one dead and one lost back to Egypt, but perhaps not, in the end, irretrievable. Because I’m a man more of the Palais Royal and the President’s House than wigwam and prairie. And because Aurora Somerset thought I might still find something, somewhere, of even more importance than Thor’s hammer.
If I found her again, I’d make her tell me what.
So they gave us an old canoe, in the generous manner of poor people in wild country, and we continued on, portaging around some falls we encountered.
Two weeks after we limped away from Yggdrasil we came upon a camp of four French trappers who were descending to Saint Louis to spend the winter behind logs and glass. The growing river we were on, they informed us, was indeed the infant Mississippi! We greeted them in French, and I told them I was a scout for Jefferson and Napoleon.
‘On this side of the river you are a scout for Napoleon, my friend,’ said one of the voyageurs. ‘The Spanish flag still flies over Saint Louis, but word is that we will soon have the tricolour. And on that side,’ he said, pointing to the eastern bank, ‘you are a scout for Jefferson. Here the empires meet!’
‘Actually he’s a donkey and a sorcerer,’ Pierre informed them.
‘A sorcerer! What use is that? But a donkey – ah, how we’ve wished for one sometimes in the backcountry!’
We told them nothing of Norse hammers, but did interest them with our account of the upper Mississippi and reports of plentiful fur and game. But the country was also thick with Dakota, I cautioned, and at mention of those fierce warriors the trappers seemed to lose interest.
Pierre said it was too late in the season to try to catch his North Men, so we swept south just ahead of winter. On October 13th – another anniversary of the betrayal of the Knights Templar – we paddled onto the shelving levee of Saint Louis, where riverboats could ground to unload cargo before being pushed off the stone ‘beach’ again. Like Detroit, this French settlement was a hundred years old, but unlike Detroit it was growing instead of shrinking. French refugees from the aggrandizements of Britain and the United States fetched up here to make a new life in Napoleon’s empire. The city is just a few miles south of the Mississippi’s junction with the Missouri River, and a more strategic spot can scarcely be imagined. If Bonaparte wants Louisiana, he’ll have to assert control from Saint Louis as well as New Orleans. If Jefferson wants to reach the Pacific, his Meriwether Lewis must come through Saint Louis.
And so I ended my western sojourn. I was exhausted, heartsick, poor, had no proof that Jefferson’s elephants still lived – and couldn’t really reveal just what we did find since I had a hunch it might prove useful to an inveterate treasure hunter like me. Thira? Og? As always, the ciphers didn’t make a lick of sense. So I had my first hot bath in months, ate white bread light as a cloud, and slept on a bed above the floor.
My new boots hurt my feet.
Pierre said he’d never invite insane donkeys into his canoe again. It was awkward for a few days, because we were the closest of friends and yet he knew I was as anxious to go back to cities as he longed for the freedom of the voyageur. Both of us carried unspoken grief and guilt for the women who’d died, but it’s hard for men to talk of such things plainly. I wondered if I should persuade the little Frenchman to come back with me to Paris. But one morning, without word, he was gone. The only sign I had that this was his choice and not a kidnapping was that he left the mangled pyramid and bullet next to my bed.
Would I ever see him again?
It was in Saint Louis that I met a visiting Louisville squire named William Clark, a younger brother of the famed Revolutionary hero George Rogers Clark. This Clark’s own Indian fighting days had ended with nagging illnesses and a decision to settle down to domestic life in Kentucky, but he was a rugged-looking, congenial man who sought me out when he heard I’d been tramping through the northern Louisiana Territory.
‘I’m impressed, sir, very impressed indeed,’ Clark said, pumping my hand as if I were the president. ‘But perhaps not such a trick for the hero of Acre and Mortefontaine?’
‘Hardly a hero, Mr Clark,’ I said as I sipped a bottle of blessed French wine, bringing to mind past bliss in Paris. ‘Half the things I try seem to turn to ashes.’
‘But that’s the experience of all men, is it not?’ Clark asked. ‘I’m convinced the difference between a successful man and a failure is that the former keep trying. Don’t you agree?’
‘You seem to have the wisdom of my mentor Franklin.’
‘You knew Franklin? Now there was a man! A titan, sir, a Solomon! And what would Franklin have said of Louisiana?’
‘That it’s cosier in Philadelphia.’
Clark laughed. ‘Indeed, I bet it is! Philadelphia is no doubt cosier than Kentucky, too, but ah, Kentucky – such beauty! Such possibility!’
‘Louisiana has that as well, I suppose.’
‘But only for Americans, don’t you think? Look at these French. Bravest fellows in the world, but trappers, not farmers. They drift like the Indians. More Americans sweep down the Ohio in a week than all the French who live in Saint Louis! Yes, Americans are going to fill up the eastward bank here, and soon!’
‘Do you think so? I’m to report to both Jefferson and Napoleon.’
‘Then report the inevitable.’ He took a sip of wine. ‘Tell me. Did you like it out there?’
I considered, and decided to be honest. ‘It frightened me.’
‘It pulls on me. I wish I had the chance to see that land of yours, Ethan Gage. I’ve heard our new president is intrigued, and I know his secretary, a captain named Lewis. It would be great to set off again, but then I’ve got a family and troublesome digestion. I don’t know. I don’t know.’ His fingers played a tattoo, looking westward at things I couldn’t see. ‘So what will you tell Napoleon?’
That I needed to find Og, I thought. ‘That Louisiana is an opportunity, but of a different kind than he might think. I think I’ll tell him there’s money to be made.’ I was forming the report in my own mind. ‘I think I’ll tell Thomas Jefferson how to make a bargain.’
HISTORICAL NOTE
On November 8th, 1898, an immigrant farmer named Olaf Ohman was clearing land near the village of Kensington, Minnesota, when he unearthed a stone slab the size of a grave marker that was entangled in the roots of a poplar tree. Upon inspection he realised the stone was carved with Norse runes, or letters, eventually translated as: