Crusader Gold (13 page)

“Don’t be deluded,” Macleod said. “There are titanic forces at work here.”

As if on cue the silence was rent by a tremendous bang, followed by a percussive shockwave through the air and an immense rushing sound as a wall of ice slid off the glacier far away on the edge of the ice cap. The noise seemed to resonate off all the bergs trapped in the fjord, an eerie chorus of competing echoes that seemed to pummel the Zodiac from every direction and then trailed off like a long sigh. In the unearthly silence that followed, the bergs around them seemed even more awesome, their own stature more puny and impotent.

“The sea’s often this placid in the summer,” the crewman said. “But it’s also the most active time for the glacier. And the warmer it gets down here, the more likely you are to get a clash with the cold air coming off the ice cap. It can happen very quickly.”

He pointed up the fjord to the eastern horizon, to a band of sky over the ice that could have been dark blue or dark grey, but their attention quickly shifted to a growler the size of a car just ahead of them. It had suddenly begun to rock from side to side, an alarming sight that seemed to defy reason on the glassy sea.

Soon it rocked more and more aggressively and then tumbled over, revealing a surface sculpted smooth and sending a ripple coursing out into the fjord. The brash surged around them like a slurry of broken glass, and other growlers reared up uncomfortably close out of the depths.

“That was frightening,” Maria exclaimed.

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Macleod replied. “When a big berg rolls, you might not feel much out here, but a ten-metre tidal wave can hit the shore. You don’t want to go beachcombing around here.”

“Don’t speak too soon,” Costas said. “We want our berg to stay nice and quiet for at least the next twenty-four hours.”

Jack gazed back at the creaking mass of ice and then down the fjord towards the glacier. Outside the threshold the bergs seemed to glide majestically towards the open sea, but inside it was as if they were inchoate, shackled and straining to go, their jagged edges still raw and fresh from the violence of their birth. The power of the place was all the more awesome because so much of it was invisible, convulsions of energy that pulsed unseen through the depths each time a slab of ice fell into the sea, a steady unleashing of force seen like this nowhere else on earth. For Jack it was a new measure of human frailty in the face of nature, an envelope he seemed to be stretching farther and farther with each new project.

Macleod nodded at the crewman, who pulled the starter cord and fired up the engine. The Zodiac turned back in the direction of the open sea and then accelerated towards the shore, its wake rocking the brash that extended out from the fjord in long tendrils of white. The crewman found a patch of clear water and opened the throttle wide, planing the Zodiac in a wide arc towards the rocky promontory that marked the northern edge of the fjord. Jack held on to the safety line and leaned back from the pontoon where he was sitting near the front of the boat, letting the freezing spray lash his face and relishing the tang of salt in his mouth. It had been several months since he had dived and he had missed the taste of the sea. He saw Maria smile at him as she clung on beside him, and he watched as Macleod and Costas ducked down and held their hoods against the spray. He remembered his last dive with Costas, deep in the bowels of the volcano six months before, a dive that had reawakened his worst trauma.

The dive they planned now was even more confining, and would be one of the most extraordinary they had ever undertaken. The fears were still there, but under control, and all he felt now was a sense of overwhelming elation. The Golden Horn project had reignited his passion for archaeology, but it had been directed from the bridge of a ship, one crucial step removed from revealing history with his own hands. He was itching to get underwater again, to be the first to see and touch fabulous treasures lost for centuries in the ocean depths.

As the engine powered down, the roar of the outboard was replaced by an eerie chorus of howling and yipping, and they realised that the valley ahead was dotted with dogs chained to posts, some of them baying with hunger and others gorging on hunks of meat left for them in their muddy pens.

“The Greenlanders still use dog sleds in winter,” Macleod said, his hood now pushed back. “Much of the terrain’s too rugged for snowmobiles, and the ice cap’s a long way from fuel. They keep the dogs chained up all summer long and shoot them when they get too old to work. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but then they’re not pets.”

“I seem to recall that when they excavated the last abandoned settlements of the Norse Greenlanders, they found dog bones with cut marks on them, their final meal,” Jack said. “Ancestors of these dogs.”

“Maybe that’s why they’re howling,” Costas said.

Maria stared apprehensively at the dogs after the others had scrambled over the bow on to the pebbly beach, and it took Jack proffering his hand to persuade her to join them. Macleod quickly led them to higher ground, above the danger zone from berg displacement, then responded to a call on his two-way radio and handed it to Maria. She stopped and spoke briefly into it, then passed it back to Macleod and resumed her place beside Jack.

“That was Jeremy,” she said. “He stayed on board to finish analysing the Mappa Mundi inscription. He thinks he’s got something else. It could be really exciting, but he needs a bit more time.”

“Should be just ready for us when we finish our dive,” Jack said. “We’ll need to sit down and work out where we go from here.”

“I still can’t believe you’re doing it,” she said, gazing at him with concern.

“Sometimes I think you have a death wish.”

“This is your first time with IMU in the field.” Jack grinned. “As James said, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

Despite the warmth of the summer sun, they kept their survival suits zipped up against the insects, and followed Macleod from the beach escarpment up an eroded path towards a low saddle in the valley. No vegetation stood more than a few feet high, but the bleak rock of the surrounding ridges was offset by lush beds of moss and grass that carpeted the valley floor.

“The ruins ahead are ancient Sermermiut,” Macleod said. “A sacred place for the local Inuit. People have lived here for at least four thousand years, since the first Greenlanders made their way across the frozen sea from the Canadian Arctic.

The town of Ilulissat is over the ridge to the north, but it was only founded in 1741 with the modern Danish occupation of Greenland. The Danes called it Jacobshavn, but the Greenlandic name is a little more appropriate.”

“What does Ilulissat mean?” Costas asked.

“Icebergs.”

Costas grunted, and they trudged off the path over a marshy depression towards the ancient site, waving away the clouds of midges that seemed to rise from the bog like mist. “What about the Vikings?”

“To the Norse this whole stretch of coast up to the polar ice cap was Nordrseta, the northern hunting grounds, a forbidding place where hardly any Viking remains have ever been found.” Macleod stopped, waiting for Costas to catch up. “The Norse only settled permanently where they could have some hope of a traditional Scandinavian way of life, stock-raising and basic agriculture. In Greenland that meant the fertile fjord valleys near the southern tip, where Eirik the Red arrived with his family in the early eleventh century. Most of the colonists came from Norway and Iceland. Eventually there were hundreds of homesteads, a population that peaked at several thousand, and they even built crude stone churches after they converted to Christianity.”

“What happened to them?” Costas asked.

“One of the most haunting mysteries of the past,” Macleod said. “They clung on for generations, trading walrus ivory and furs back to Europe, but the last known contact was in the fifteenth century. When the Catholic Church sent an expedition to Greenland in 1721 to check that they were still God-fearing Christians, they found no sign of them.”

“Believe it or not, the Crusades were probably a factor,” Maria said.

“Huh?” said Costas. “The Crusades?”

“In 1124 the Norwegian king Sigurd Jorsalfar established an episcopal see in Greenland. That meant the Church could impose taxes on the Norse settlers, adding greatly to their hardships. Sigurd was known as ‘The Crusader,’ one of a number of Scandinavians who joined the Crusaders in the twelfth century. He had the gall to exact a special tax for the Crusades from Greenland, of all places.

They paid it in walrus tusks and polar bear hides.”

“That’d be handy in Jerusalem,” Costas muttered. “The Crusades really were a global madness.”

“The Church was undoubtedly an economic burden,” Macleod said. “But others think the Norse in Greenland were wiped out by the natives, or by English pirates, or even by the Black Death. I think environment was the biggest factor.

The so-called Little Ice Age of the medieval period blocked off the sea routes that were their lifeline back home, with sea ice remaining all summer long round the coasts. The cold would also have ruined their agriculture, and maybe they were unable or unwilling to adapt to the native way of life and survive by hunting and fishing.”

“So the last of the Vikings were done in by climate change,” Costas said. “Not exactly a glorious end for a warrior elite, was it?”

“Let’s wait and see,” Jack murmured. “It could be that the real warriors among them got farther west than this.”

The ruins of the ancient site were barely recognisable, humps of turf and low circles of unworked rocks set close into the ground, some of them nearly swallowed up by the alluvial soil and others exposed in patches of peaty bog. On a slight platform on the seaward edge was a low, dome-shaped tent about fifteen feet across, its frame of whalebones covered with layers of sealskins and musk-ox hide. A thin wisp of smoke rose from a hole in the centre.

“Some of these stones are tent circles, used to batten down tents against the wind,” Macleod explained. “You see them all over the Arctic, the main evidence of ancient habitation. People haven’t lived in this place for generations, but it’s hallowed ground for the Inuit of Ilulissat. Sometimes the elders who remain close to the old ways come here to prepare for death. Their families erect traditional tents inside the sacred stone circles of their ancestors when they know the time is close.”

A team of lean white huskies had been chained to stakes surrounding the tent, and as Macleod led the others forward the dogs strained at their fetters and slavered menacingly at them. Maria held back uncertainly, but Jack led her on, careful to keep outside the radius of the chains. The growling had alerted the occupants of the tent, and a flap opened, revealing a Greenlander woman wearing a traditional sealskin parka, her dark hair tied back and embellished with beads. As she looked up they recognized Inuva, who had left Seaquest II by Zodiac an hour before them. She hushed the dogs and beckoned to Macleod, who knelt down and exchanged a few words with her before the flap closed again.

“Inuva’s the old man’s daughter.” Macleod turned back to the others and spoke quietly. “He knows Danish but will only speak Kalaallisut, the local Inuit dialect, so Inuva will translate for us. His name is Kangia, which is also their name for the icefjord. He’s well over eighty years old, a great age for these people. They have a tough life. In his youth he was one of the most renowned hunters of Ilulissat, venturing hundreds of miles along the edge of the ice cap with his dogs, paddling his umiak far beyond the last settlement to the north.”

They stooped under the flap as Macleod held it open, then he followed them in.

Jack’s eyes smarted from the acrid smoke rising from the hearth, fed by slabs of dried musk-ox dung. Macleod motioned for them to sit down below the smoke on a ring of hides arranged around the fire. As their eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, they could see that the far side of the tent was occupied by a wooden sled, its rails dark with age but beautifully carved with flowing animal shapes. Sitting on the edge, draped in blankets, was an old Inuit man, his face leathery and gnarled and his long white hair flowing free over his shoulders. As he looked at them they could see that his eyes were dimmed by snow blindness, and his skin had the grey pallor of approaching death. With great effort he began to speak, and Inuva translated the soft clicking sounds of the native Greenlandic every time he paused.

“My father says that since time immemorial his people have lived here, and outsiders have come and gone,” she said softly. “Now it is nearly time for him to leave and join the dog sleds of his ancestors, as they speed across the ice cap for all eternity.” The old man extended a wizened hand out of the blankets and picked up a worn photograph on the sled beside him, nodding silently at Macleod as he passed it to him.

“This is why we’re here,” Macleod said. “Inuva told him about our research ship in the fjord, and it was she who summoned me to Kangia two days ago. Take a look at the picture.”

Macleod passed the photograph to Jack, and Maria and Costas shifted closer to get a better view. It was a faded black-and-white image of a group of men dressed in full polar gear, standing beside wooden sleds laden with equipment and surrounded by dogs.

“Some time before the Second World War, judging by the gear,” Jack said. “The 1920s, maybe 1930s.” He paused, then peered more closely. “That older man in the centre. Isn’t that Knud Rasmussen? I know he was born in Jakobshavn.”

“Kangia was one of his dog-handlers,” Macleod said. “He’s the boy on the left.”

“So Kangia knew Knud Rasmussen!” Jack looked in awe at the old Inuit, then glanced at Costas. “One of the most celebrated polar explorers, half Danish, half Inuit. The first person to make it all the way across the Greenland ice cap.”

“Rasmussen was a father figure to Kangia, and encouraged him to keep the old ways. Kangia revered him and admired his respect for native traditions. Which is more than can be said for these characters.” Macleod took a waterproof photograph sleeve out of his inner jacket pocket and passed it over. “Kangia also gave me this.”