The Rosetta Key (27 page)

“Behold,” intoned Silano. “This is what is possible when men dream!”

Yes, here the book must reside.

W
e’d been traveling to this place several days from Nebo. Our party had followed the Jordanian highlands, skirting green pastures on the high plateau and passing by the brooding ruins of Crusader castles, as forsaken as the Templars. Occasionally we dipped down into deep and hot mountain canyons that opened to sandy yellow desert to the west. Tiny streams were swallowed by the dryness. Then we’d climb up the other side and continue south, hawks wheeling in the dry thermals and Bedouins shooing their goats into side wadis, watching silently from a safe distance until we passed. The siege at Acre seemed a planet away.

As we rode I had plenty of time to think about Silano’s Latin clue. The part about the angels pointing seemed somewhat plausible, though what forces were at play was beyond me. What had jarred my memory, however, were the words “snail shell” and “flower.” The same imagery had been used by the French savant, and my friend, Edme François Jomard when we climbed the Great Pyramid. He’d said the pyramid’s dimensions encoded a “golden number” or ratio — 1.618, if I recalled — that was in turn a geometric representation of a progression of numbers called the Fibonacci sequence. This mathematical progression could be represented by an interconnected series of ever-growing squares, and an arc through the squares produced the kind of spiral seen in a nautilus shell, or, Jomard said, in the arrangement of flower petals. My comrade Talma had thought the young scientist half addled, but I was intrigued. Did the pyramid really stand for some fundamental truth about nature? And what, if anything, did that have to do with where we were going now?

I tried to think like Monge and Jomard, the mathematicians. “Then at last the clear light reveals a certain part which formerly was both unknown, nor was it cognized in your estimation,” the Templars had written. This seemed like nonsense, and yet it gave me a wild idea. Did I have a clue that would allow me to snatch the Book of Thoth out from under Silano’s nose?

We camped in the most defensible places we could find, and one evening we climbed a hillock to spend the night in the limestone remains of a Crusader castle, its broken towers orbited by swallows. The ruin was yellow in the low sun, weeds growing from the crevices between stones. We rode up through a meadow of wildflowers that waved in the spring wind. It was as if they were nodding at my supposition.
Fibonacci
, they whispered.

As we bunched at the half-fallen gate to lead our horses into the abandoned courtyard, I managed a whisper to Astiza. “Meet me under the moon, on the battlements as far from where we sleep as possible,” I murmured.

Her nod was almost imperceptible and then, acting as if irritated, urged her horse ahead of mine to cut mine off. Yes, to the others we were bitter ex-lovers.

Our own trio had made a habit of sleeping a little apart from Najac’s gang of cutthroats, and when Ned was deep into his lusty snores I crept away and waited in the shadows. She came like a ghost, wrapped in white and luminous in the night. I rose and pulled her into a sentry post out of sight of any others, milky moonlight falling through the arrow slit. I kissed her for the first time since our reunion, her lips cold from the chill, her fingers knotting in mine to control my hands.

“We don’t have time,” she whispered. “Najac is awake and thinks I’ve gone to relieve myself. He’ll be counting the minutes.”

“Let the bastard count.” I tried to embrace her.

“Ethan, if we go too far it will spoil everything!”

“If we don’t I’ll burst.”

“No.” She thrust me away. “Patience! We’re close!”

Damnation, it had been hard to stay on keel since leaving Paris. Too much exercise and too few women. I took a breath. “All right, listen. If this lightning trick really works, you need to help me separate from Silano. I need time to try something on my own, and then we must rendezvous later.”

“You know something you haven’t told us, don’t you?’

“Perhaps. It’s a gamble.”

“And you’re a gambler.” She thought. “After we harness the lightning, tell him you’ll trade your share in the book for me. Then I’ll pretend to betray you, and go with him. We’ll abandon you. Act frustrated.”

“That won’t be hard. Can I trust you?”

She smiled. “Trust has to come from within.”

And with that she slipped away. We took care that the rest of the time we were as prickly as porcupines. I hoped it was truly a ruse.

We followed the old caravan tracks and I feared Ottoman patrols, but it was as if the clash at Mount Tabor had temporarily made Turkish forces disappear. The world seemed empty, primeval. We were trailed once by native tribesmen, tough little men on camels, but our party looked tough too, and poor to boot, hardly worth robbing. Najac rode to talk with them with his toughs, and they disappeared.

By the time we reached the city of the Templar maps, no one followed us at all.

We turned west and dropped from the edge of the central plateau toward the distant desert. Between us and that waste, however, was the strangest geologic formation I’d ever seen. There was a range of moonlike mountains, jagged and stark, and in front of them a boil of brown sandstone, lumpy and rounded. It looked like a frozen brew of brown bubbles, or wildly risen bread. There seemed no way in or around this odd formation, but when we came near we saw caves on it like a pox, a hundred-eyed monster. The sandstone, I realized, was dotted with them. Carvings of pillars and steps began to appear in the outcrops. We camped in a dry wadi, the stars brilliant and cold.

Silano said the paths we would tread the next morning were too narrow and precipitous for horses, so when the sky lightened we left them picketed at the canyon’s entrance with some of Najac’s Arabs as guard. I noted the horses were oddly nervous, neighing and stamping, and they shied from a wagon that had appeared at the edge of our camp sometime in the night. It was boxy but covered with tarpaulins, and Silano said its supplies included meat that made the animals skittish. I wanted to investigate, but then the morning sun lit the escarpment and picked out its cracklike canyon and welcoming Roman arch. We entered on foot and within yards could see nothing of the world behind. All sound disappeared, except the scuffle of our own feet as we descended the wadi.

“Storms have washed cobbles over what was once an ancient road,” Silano said. “The flash floods boil most frequently this time of year, records say, after thunder and lightning. The Templars knew this, and used it. So will we.”

And then, as I have described, we came after a mile to the canyon’s other end, and gaped. Before us was a new canyon, perpendicular to the first and just as imposing, but this is not what amazed us. Instead, on the wall opposite was the most unexpected monument I’d ever seen, the first thing to be on a par in glory with the immensity of the pyramids. It was a temple carved from living rock.

Imagine a sheer cliff hundreds of feet high, pink as a maiden’s cheeks, and not on it but
in
it, carved into its face, an ornate pagan edifice of pillars and pediment and cupolas rearing higher than a Philadelphia church steeple. Sculpted eagles the size of buffalo crouched on its upper cornices, and the alcoves between its pillars held stone figures with angel wings. What drew my eye weren’t these cherubim or demons, however, but the central figure high above the temple’s dark door. It was a woman, breasts bare and eroded, her hips draped with Roman folds of stony cloth, and her head high and alert. I’d seen this form before in the sacred precincts of ancient Egypt. Cupped in her arm was a cornucopia, and on her head the remains of a crown made of a solar disc between bull’s horns. I felt a shiver at this weird recurrence of a goddess who’d haunted me since Paris, where the Romans had built a temple to this same goddess on what is now the site of Notre Dame.

“Isis!” Astiza cried. “She’s a star, guiding us to the book!”

Silano smiled. “The Arabs call this the Khazne, the Treasury, because their legends claim this is where Pharaoh hid his wealth.”

“You mean the book is in there?” I asked.

“No. The rooms are shallow and bare. It’s somewhere nearby.”

We rode to the Khazne’s entrance, splashing across a small stream that ran down the center of this new chasm. The canyon twisted away to our right. A broad staircase led to the dark pillared entry. We stood a moment in the cool of the temple’s portico, looking out at the red rock, and then stepped into the room beyond.

As Silano said, it was disappointingly empty, as featureless as the room that had held the empty sarcophagus in the Great Pyramid. The cliff had been hollowed into straight, sheer, boxlike inner chambers. A few minutes of inspection confirmed there were no hidden doors. It was plain as an empty warehouse.

“Unless there’s a trick to this place, like its mathematical dimensions, there’s nothing here,” I said. “What’s it for?” It seemed too large to live in and yet not big and luminous enough for a temple.

Silano shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. We are to find the Place of High Sacrifice. If there’s one thing we can confirm about this, it isn’t high.”

“Glorious, however,” Astiza murmured.

“Illusion, like all else,” Silano said. “Only the mind is real. That’s why cruelty is no sin.”

We came back outside, the canyon half in sunlight, half in shadow. The day was hazing. “We’re lucky,” Silano said. “The air is heavy and smells like storm. We won’t need to wait, but must act before the tempest breaks.”

This new canyon slowly broadened as we followed it, allowing us ever better glimpses of the maze of mountains we’d entered. Rock shot skyward like layer cakes, rounded loaves, and doughy castles. Oleander bloomed to reflect the strange rock. Everywhere the cliff walls were pierced with caves, but not natural ones. They had the rectangular shape of human doors, indicating people had once carved them. It was a city not built on the earth, but of it. We passed a grand semicircular Roman theater, its tiers of seats again carved from the cliff itself, and finally passed out to a broad bowl enclosed by steep mountains, like a vast courtyard surrounded by walls. It was a perfect hiding place for a city, accessible only by narrow and easily defended canyons. Yet it had room enough for a Boston. Pillars, no longer holding anything up, reared from the dirt. Roofless temples rose from rubble.

“By the grace of Isis,” Astiza murmured. “Who dreamed here?”

One cliff wall was a spectacle to rival the earlier Khazne. It had been carved into the façade of a fabulous city, a riot of staircases, pillars, pediments, platforms, windows, and doors, leading to a beehive of chambers within. I began counting the entrances and gave up. There were hundreds. No, thousands.

“This place is huge,” I said. “We’re to find a book in this? It makes the pyramids look like a postbox.”

“
You’re
to find it. You and your seraphim.” Silano had pulled out his Templar map and was studying it. Then he pointed. “From up there.”

A mountain behind us that rose above the ancient theater was carved into battlements but appeared flat on top. Goat tracks led upward. “Up there? Where?”

“To the High Place of Sacrifice.”

A
narrow footpath had been built from crude steps chiseled out of sandstone. It was muggy and we sweated, but as we climbed our view broadened, and more and more cliffs came into view that were pockmarked with doorways and windows. Nowhere did we see people. The abandoned city was silent, without the keening of ghosts. The light was purpling.

At the top we came out to a flat plateau of sandstone with a magnificent view. Far below was the dusty bowl of ruined walls and toppled pillars, enclosed by cliffs. Beyond were more jagged mountains without a scrap of green, as stripped as a skeleton. The sun was sinking toward looming thunderheads that scudded toward us like black men-o’-war. There was a hot, humid breeze that picked up funnels of dust and spun them like tops. The rock shelf itself had been precisely flattened by ancient chisels. At the center was an incised rectangle the size of a ballroom, like a very shallow and dry pool. Silano consulted a compass. “It’s oriented north and south, all right,” he pronounced, as if expecting this. To the west, where the storm was coming from, four steps led to a raised platform that appeared to be some kind of altar. On it was a round basin with a channel.

“For blood,” the count told us. His cloak flapped in the wind.

“I don’t see anyplace to hide a book,” I said.

Silano gestured to the city far below, ten thousand holes pocking the sandstone like a lunatic hive. “And I see infinity. It’s time to use your seraphim, Ethan Gage. They are made of holier metal than gold.”

“What metal?”

“The Egyptians called it Ra-ezhri. Tears of the Sun. The finger of God is going to touch it, and then point to where we must go. What do we need to draw down the finger of Thoth? How can the essence of the universe give us a sign?”

He was crazy as a loon, but so was old Ben, I suppose, when he proposed to go kite-flying in a tempest. Savants are a balmy lot.

“Wait. What happens when we retrieve the book?”

“We study,” Silano said shortly.

“We don’t know if we can even read it,” Astiza added.

“I mean who gets it,” I insisted. “Someone needs to become the caretaker. It seems my seraphim are the critical tool, and my skill at setting them the key. And I’m not really on the French
or
the British side. I’m neutral. You should entrust it to me.”

“You couldn’t have found this place by yourself in a thousand years,” growled Najac, “or care for a grocery list.”

“And you couldn’t find your right ear if you had a cord tied from it to your cockles,” I replied with irritation.

“Monsieur Gage, surely the situation is plain by now,” Silano said impatiently. “You join me, join the Egyptian Rite, and win a share of power.”

“Join a man who in Egypt sent me my friend’s head in a jar?”

He sighed. “Or, you can leave with nothing.”