Secrets of the Dead

‘“The trophy of his victory won,”’ Michael repeated. ‘You said trophy was another word for the labarum – the battle standard.’

‘It can be.’

Michael made Nikolic read the translation again, slowly, while he copied it out on the paper. He frowned at it. ‘Other than the “trophy”, it doesn’t seem to take us much further.’

‘Can you tell us anything more about the poem?’ Abby asked.

Nikolic looked up. ‘I can maybe tell you the name of the poet.’

He enjoyed their astonishment. Even under the circumstances, he couldn’t keep from smiling.

‘It was written by a Roman politician and poet called Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Further up the scroll, there is a list of names.’ He showed them on Gruber’s transcription. ‘By itself, that would make this a significant find. Eusebius of Nicomedia, the most notorious bishop of Constantine’s reign. Aurelius Symmachus, a noted pagan and minor philosopher. Asterius Sophistes, a controversial Christian theorist. And Porfyrius – a poet who specialised in highly technical, unconventional poetry.’

It was like reading a Russian novel – a deluge of unfamiliar, unpronounceable names. But Abby got the drift.

‘You’ve heard of all these people?’

‘For a scholar of Constantine, it is impossible not to.’

‘And Porfyrius wrote poetry?’ Michael repeated.

‘His poems are called technopaegnia. Riddles for amusing the Emperor. All his surviving poems contain secret messages.’

The smile had turned into a sheepish grin.

‘Is this for real?’ Michael asked at last. ‘This morning, you laughed us out of your office when we thought the poem had a clue to a treasure. Now you’re saying the chap who wrote it is famous for putting secret messages in poems?’

The smile faded. Under Nikolic’s calm good humour, the strain had begun to tell.

‘I don’t know, OK? There’s a poem and the name of a poet. You say the poem has a secret message and his poems are famous for secret messages. I made a connection. Maybe it means nothing.’ He brushed a hand across the table, pushing the papers away. ‘Maybe your German friend invented everything, and said what he thought you wanted to be true.’

They sat there in silence for a moment. Abby sipped at her coffee and realised she’d finished it. Trucks thundered past on the motorway.

‘Let’s assume the poem’s genuine, and written by who you say it is,’ Michael said at last. ‘How do we decode the secret message?’

‘It is like … I don’t know the English word.’

He said something in Serbian, but Abby drew blank. Nikolic stared at the table in frustration, trying to find a translation. Suddenly, his face lit up. He took the paper placemat that had been laid in front of him and spun it around. It was designed for children: a collage of bright pictures of fast food, dancing cartoon animals and puzzle games. There was a maze, a tangle of lines, a join-the-dots picture – and a word search.

Nikolic tapped his finger on the word search. ‘Exactly like this. You have the text of the poem, and then you read up or down or diagonally to find other words hidden inside it, yes?’

Abby and Michael both nodded. Underneath the grid of letters, the mat listed a dozen words for the children to find. Abby pointed to them.

‘In a word search, you know what you’re looking for.’

‘On Porfyrius’s poems, that is not the case.’ Nikolic sat back, doodling on the mat. ‘For the original manuscripts, the letters would have been picked out in red ink, or underlined. Some scholars think they might even have been presented to the Emperor inscribed on gold tablets, with gemstones underneath the key letters – though no such tablet is surviving.’

‘That would have been nice to find,’ said Michael.

Nikolic ignored him. Absent-mindedly, he drew bubbles around a couple of words in the puzzle on the mat.

‘Porfyrius’s poems are much more intricate, actually. The hidden words spell out messages, but they also make pictures.’

‘What do you mean?’

Nikolic circled some more letters in the grid, apparently at random. When he’d finished, the marks outlined the shape of a stick man. ‘Like so. Porfyrius was very clever. Sometimes the pictures themselves were of letters that spelled out short words, or numbers. For Constantine’s vicennalia, when he celebrated twenty years of his rule, Porfyrius wrote a poem where the hidden message made the form XX, the Roman numerals for twenty. One famous poem, the message makes the shape of a ship. In others, the Emperor’s titles or his monogram.’

Abby stared at him. ‘His monogram?’

‘The chi-rho. Like on the labarum.’

‘The labarum again,’ Michael said. ‘That’s got to be it.’

But Abby was thinking further and faster. She pulled Gruber’s printout from the pile – not the typed transcription, but the raw image reconstructed from the scroll.