Wade and the Scorpion's Claw (9 page)

Lily's grin told us she liked the way that sounded. “But it wasn't just a spice box, was it? You wouldn't line it with lead if it only carried cinnamon. I'm thinking the relic used to be in here.”

“Lead keeps Superman safe from Kryptonite,” Darrell said, which seemed random, but it got me thinking.

“I wonder if you-know-who knew that in the 1500s.”

“Unlikely,” said Darrell. “The first Superman comic was in 1938.”

I gave him a fake smile. “Not Superman. I mean if Copernicus knew that lead could protect you. When did people discover that?”

A hundred questions. No answers. Yet.

“Kids . . .” Tricia called us over. Everyone but Becca hurried to the other end of the table to see what she'd come up with. Becca leaned over the Copernicus diary, hiding it and reading intently, but gripping her arm tight, as if it was hurting all of a sudden. Lily shot me a worried look.

“The very first word of the text is on a line by itself, like a title,” Tricia began, pointing to a series of three characters that looked like this:
. “It took me all this time to figure out because it's actually rendered backward, like a mirror image. Very strange. But once you reverse it, it's easily read as the Chinese character for the constellation Scorpio, which follows the scorpion design on the lid. Also, the lines below, though not backward, are a poem. I'll keep working.”

At the other end of the table, Becca had her notebook out next to the newspaper-covered diary and was carefully unfolding the page that contained the Trithemius cipher.

“What did you find?” Darrell whispered to her.

“Remember how I showed you the line beginning one of the coded sections?” she asked. “‘Bfe cyhylk bf wuxzz ifgb oiud and so on?”

“Ifgabood. I remember,” said Darrell.

“Well, if this letter square is the way to decode it, maybe the key word is the title of the poem
Scorpio
, but not really
Scorpio
, but the reverse of it.”

“You mean
oiprocs
?” Darrell said, almost without missing a beat.

“Uh . . . no,” she said. “Not in English.”

“Chinese?” said Lily. “No, the characters would be different.”

Becca smiled, but her smile was strained as if even that hurt. “I'm thinking it could be Portuguese. Because of the markings Tricia found. I don't know Portuguese really at all, but maybe the computer—”

Lily's finger tapped on the museum's computer keyboard for a moment before she said, “
Scorpio
in Portuguese is
Escorpião
.”

“Go, Trithemius,” I said.

Becca shook her head. “Not yet. It needs to be spelled backward, just like the symbol is in the box. So it's . . .
O-A-I-P-R-O-C-S-E
.”

“That's the key word?” I said.

“We'll see.” Becca shifted over to the computer in front of Lily. “What we do is line up the letters of the key word above the coded word to give us the message in Portuguese. Like this.” And she wrote out the key word—
OAIPROCSE
—over and over above the coded passage.

“The Trithemius cipher uses three steps,” she went on. “First you use the column of letters down the left side to locate the first letter of the key word. So, we see that
O
is about halfway down the left-hand column of letters.”

“Step two is to locate the coded letter, in this case
B
, from
BFE
.” Becca ran her finger from left to right along the row and stopped at
B
.

“The final step is to follow
that
column all the way up to the top row of the square to give us the first letter of the message.” Becca ran her finger up from
B
to the very top. It landed on
M
.

“If I'm right,” she said, “the message begins with the letter
M
.”

She did the same with the second letter, going all the way down the left-hand column to row
A
, in to letter
F
, and up to letter
E
. The third letter—
I
to
E
—gave us
U
. The next word,
CYHYLK
, became
MESTRE
.

“Lily, anything?” asked Becca.

Lily searched the dictionary for the translation of the first two words. She jumped. “In Portuguese,
meu mestre
means . . . ‘my master'!”

A
s Tricia Powell worked through her translation of the spice box poem at the other end of the table, Becca used the cipher square, the diary's coded passage, and the dictionary to translate the coded passage into her notebook. Then she whisper-read it so only we could hear.

“Whoa,” Darrell breathed out. “That's the moment they find Ptolemy's ancient astrolabe. This is incredible.”

The diary had begun with Hans Novak's first entry on February 13, 1514. Here it was, over three months later, and they were on an island.

“Go on, Bec,” Lily urged.

The centuries-old pages of the diary sat illuminated by the computer screen in front of Becca. Listening to the deep sorrow in the words she read, I was struck by how things so old can be as alive now as they were when they were first created.

Lily whispered what we all felt. “It's so amazingly sad. The Copernicus biography I read on the plane said that his brother died just a few years later than this. How terrible Nicolaus must have felt.”

“I never knew his brother was involved in the building of the machine,” I said. “The books say he had leprosy, but all this scorpion stuff, it makes me wonder . . .”

“He still doesn't tell us what island they're on,” Darrell said. “It reminds me of those old charts showing dragons bobbing around in the sea. Maybe looking at old maps would help us figure it out.”

“And what is the ‘change of days'?” Lily asked. “‘The change of days Ptolemy wrote about.' That sounds ominous.”

It did sound ominous, as if there was suddenly a deadline we hadn't known about. “I wonder if Galina knows about a deadline for the astrolabe. Maybe that's why she's so obsessed with chasing down the relics. Is there any more?”

Becca frowned. “There's a teeny red drawing in the margin that is repeated next to another coded passage later in the diary. It's a scorpion, I think, but the key word we just found doesn't work for the later passage.”

She showed us the margin.

Tricia suddenly stood at her table and stretched. “Kids? I translated the text inside the box. It's a poem. There's one odd thing I have to tell you about, but first listen to it.”