The Copernicus Legacy: The Forbidden Stone (16 page)

Chapter Thirty-Three

“T
he Day Book of Nicolaus Copernicus?” Darrell said. “His diary? Do you think it’s real? How did it end up here . . . ?”

As Becca stared at the leather cover imprinted with gold, the sound of Darrell’s voice faded until the chamber became so hushed that she heard nothing save her own excited breathing.

Finally Lily tapped her on the shoulder. “Becca, can you read it? I think this is why Carlo brought us here.”

Light from the lamps flickered across the gold print on the cover, as if the words themselves were on fire. “Yes, I think so.” Adjusting herself in the chair, Becca shifted the lamps on either side of the book so there was no glare, and slowly, carefully, as if she were handling something alive, she loosened the clasps and lifted the cover.

Though obviously centuries old, and solidly bound in boards and leather, its front hinge opened easily, and the cover lay flat against the surface of the raised stand.

“Um . . . everybody sit,” she said. “This probably won’t be fast.”

Wade turned his face up to the door, listening. “It’s quiet up there. I guess we’re okay.”

The thing Becca noticed right away when she opened to the first page was the handwriting. It was plain and legible. Copernicus’s assistant, Hans Novak, whoever he was, had good penmanship.

Darrell peeked over her shoulder. “Most pen and ink manuscripts fade after a while,” he said. “This is in really good condition. It’s been taken care of for the last five hundred years. The air in the room is cooled to the right temperature. The light is veiled. They know what they’re doing. Mom shows me lots of this kind of stuff.”

For a moment, the four shared a look as if they were all thinking the same thing. Sara Kaplan. Roald Kaplan. Both were far away from them. People were missing. Some were dead. And here they were, moments away from discovering why it was all happening.

The Copernicus Legacy. The twelve relics.

Is the secret hidden in these pages?

Becca turned one page, then another and another. “It looks to be mostly in German, but I see some Italian and Latin in here, too, so it may be a hodgepodge of different languages. I’m not as good in some as in others.”

“Better than the rest of us,” said Darrell, and Lily nodded.

“And there are pictures,” she said, finding pencil sketches of tiny devices, motors, and mechanisms, then a series of abstract diagrams, boxes, and triangles, as well as what could only be described as great airy masses, clouds maybe, or oceans, mostly done in pencil, some in black or brown ink and washed with color.

Then a word popped out at her. A single word.
Stern
. German for
star
and one of the words that started this whole adventure. From then on, she couldn’t draw her mind away from the text. Turning back to the first page, she began to translate, haltingly at first, then with more vigor as she grew accustomed to the old script.

†

I, Hans Novak, aged thirteen years, four months, eight days, here set down these words as Magister Nicolaus Copernicus has told them to me and as I myself have lived them.

The words swept over her, drawing her back to a time and place far away from their own.

To begin, I must record what happened before my humble appearance in the Magister’s story.

Nicolaus Copernicus was born in 1473 in the town of Toru
´
n, Poland, under stars that proclaimed him a visionary and a rebel.

How true were those stars!

†

At the age of eighteen, already on the path that would later crown him with glory, Nicolaus attended the great University in Krakow.

He studied hard. I know that, of course, as everyone must have, from his brilliance. He became a canon in law at Bologna. There he met the sword master, Achille Marozzo. At Via Cà Selvatica, he learned the art of the blade—

“I knew it!” Darrell slapped his hand on the table. “He was right here! In this place. Man. Go on, Becca. Sorry.”

Before he returned home to Poland, Nicolaus was given a gift from Achille. He related it to me thus:

“What is this?” Nicolaus said.

Achille laughed. “A master sword for a master swordsman! It is unlike any that I have forged so far. First you must name it.”

Nicolaus drew out a magnificent broadsword. “Himmelklinge,” he said. “Sky Blade.”

Achille approved, handing him a second gift. “To go with it, a dueling dagger, a prototype of my own design.”

“Its blade undulates like the Baltic Sea,” Nicolaus said.

Achille smiled. “May they both serve you well and protect you.”

“He’s talking about this dagger,” said Wade, holding it under the lamplight. “This actually belonged to Copernicus. Keep going.”

“Uh . . .” she flipped a page. “There are several pages in, I don’t know, maybe Polish? I’ll have to skip them for now. Here.”

I enter the story in Frauenberg, called Frombork, on the shores of the Baltic. It is the thirteenth night of the second month of the year 1514. Because I can wield a pen, I am sent by the Bishop to assist the Magister with his work.

I arrive after dusk.

The night is cold, clear. The moon is a silver sphere rising aloft over the fir trees. The sky is sapphire black.

“And I’m totally there,” Lily whispered, closing her eyes.

“Do you love the stars?” the Magister asks as we stand atop his tower.

“I do,” I tell him. “Though I know so little about them.”

Copernicus shakes his head. “I look to the heavens, Hans, I work its numbers incessantly, but the teachings are . . . incorrect. The sun and stars, the planets, do not move as we were taught. I must know more!”

Becca paused. Were there noises from the fencing school? Faint sounds? She listened. No, she thought. It’s nothing. Keep going.

†

Then comes the fateful day when a knock comes on the door. Nicolaus leaps down the stairs. “It has arrived!”

It is a ratty old scroll, said to be the secret writing of the great second-century astronomer Ptolemy, author of the infamous
Almagest
.

“I know about him,” Wade said. “Ptolemy was the first to catalog the constellations in any kind of reasonable order. He found forty-eight of them. Dad taught them to me. They’re on my star map.”

“Ptolemy,” Nicolaus says, “was as clever as you and I put together, Hans. This scroll describes astounding astronomical events visible only from the south. Hans, we must go!”

And so, under cover of night and deception, we lock up the Frombork tower and ride the high road south.

Becca paused to breathe slowly. “A journey south from Poland. But for what?”

“Keep reading,” said Lily. “Please.”

March 17, 1514. Following Ptolemy’s scroll, Nicolaus and I undertake a nearly fatal voyage to . . .

“It gets all garbled here with some kind of code we haven’t seen yet,” Becca said. “It’ll take work to figure it out. I’ll skip it for now.”

. . . where he uses mathematical calculations and
the positions
of the stars to locate an ancient device first built by Ptolemy himself.

“It is for this,” he says, “that we have risked our lives.”

“Device? What kind of ancient device?” asked Lily. “Really, that’s all it says? This is so not helpful.”

Becca was stumbling over words she didn’t know the meaning of, but they weren’t the only problem. There were obvious astronomical calculations, passages that looked like primitive algebraic equations, more strange drawings.

“Does anybody else hear sounds from upstairs?” said Darrell.

They listened. Something fell, clattered to the floor. Then quiet.

“Keep going,” Lily said.

Becca flipped over another three pages of coded script. “So that’s followed by another screwy part.”

For days Nicolaus studies the device. “Ptolemy had a vision, but his device was doomed to fail. Ours shall not.”

On the island, Nicolaus builds, he steals from this and that. What he cannot find, he forges with his own hands. He invents and reinvents.

Then one evening, “Ptolemy’s dream is now complete!”

Soon, the long-promised celestial event occurs . . .

“Something about an explosion of light,” Becca said.

Nicolaus positions himself in the center of the device and I behind him . . . there is a hole in the sky, and the voyage begins . . .

“A
hole
in the sky?” Wade jotted it down in his father’s journal. “What is he talking about? There’s no such thing as . . .”

Becca kept turning pages. “This diary is coded for whole stretches of pages. It’s got numbers, letters, and there’s the letter V a bunch of times.”

Wade turned to her, a frown creasing his forehead. What was going through his mind, she couldn’t imagine, but he must have pushed his worry about his father to the side, because then he bit his lip, and his fingers drummed on the table, which she’d seen him do when he was deep in thought. “I wish I had my books. . . .”

She flipped through another several pages, then stopped at a page folded over itself. Delicately, she unfolded it, then gasped.

“What?” said Lily.

And there it was, in a sketch that reminded Becca of the famous drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. Though exactly
what
it was, she couldn’t say.

“
That’s
the device? What in the world is it?” said Darrell. “It looks like a globe or something . . . or . . . is that a chair?”

But she couldn’t stop reading, the words coming ever more quickly.

†

Having laboriously brought the device back to
_
, Nicolaus suddenly fears the vast power of the Knights of the Teutonic Order of Ancient Prussia, their murderous Grand Master, Albrecht, and the evil they will do if they possess the device. “It cannot fall into the hands of these men!”

“You don’t think . . . I mean . . . is the Teutonic Order still around?” asked Lily. “If Copernicus was afraid of them finding the relics then, could they be the same bunch of people chasing us now? Are the Knights still, you know, a thing?”

Nicolaus makes a decision.

From the machine’s giant frame, its grand armature, he will withdraw its twelve constellated parts—without which the device is inoperable.

“I will entrust them to twelve . . . relic keepers . . .”

“Guardians!” I say.

“. . . who will vow to hide the device through all time!”

Darrell nodded over and over. “The twelve relics are the twelve parts of the device Copernicus discovered. Plus you know what else? I bet
GAC
means the Guardians of Something of Copernicus. All we have to figure out is what the thing is that begins with
A
.”

Becca’s stomach twisted. “Listen to this.”

The relics will be hidden far from one another and all across the world, known and unknown.

“The first relic will be presented to a man above all men who will raise it as if it were his own child,” Nicolaus says.

“The relics will be bound, one to another. The first will lead to the last, so that—God forbid it should ever be necessary—the great machine might one day be reassembled.

“This, Hans, this machine, will be my true legacy.”

Wade stood and started pacing around the table, murmuring. “And there it is, the relics. The secret society of Guardians to protect them around the world. The first will circle to the last. The machine, whatever it is. The Copernicus Legacy—”