“I know. Very important.” Another kiss.
“Mommy!”
“Okay, okay. I’ll let you get back to your job.” She glanced at Pearse, then turned to the courtyard entryway.
How different from the last time he’d tried to unearth the “Hodoporia,” thought Pearse. No children’s songs or soccer balls. No Petra in the Vault of the Paraclete. The change in venue seemed somehow appropriate, less of Mani and more of the stonemason. Or carpenter. Either would have done.
The hole was nearly a foot deep when he uncovered what felt like an iron bar sticking out from the base of the fountain. He traced it to the wall. There, he discovered a small indentation in the stone, one that extended some four inches up, and which was exactly the same width as the bar. It was caked with mud. He chiseled into the dirt and found that the slot went deep enough into the stone for him to place his fingers fully inside of it. More than that, he found that the bar continued on through the slot, into a hollow in the belly of the fountain.
He had simply cleaned out the groove along which the bar could be moved.
His first inclination was to pull up. After all, what else would the slot be there for? Then again, these were the Manichaeans. Up meant down. Even so, he reached in and tried pulling up. It wouldn’t budge. After the third attempt, he decided to continue digging below the bar. There, too, he found a groove, the continuation of the slot heading straight down. Reaching underneath the iron handle, he did his best to clear it out. With enough room to get his fingers around the handle, and with the now eight-inch groove unblocked, he turned to Ivo. “Okay, watch out,” he said, repositioning himself so as to gain as much leverage as he could. Ivo moved to the side.
Going with his first instincts, Pearse put his full weight onto the bar and began to push down. It took several seconds of constant pressure to make it move, but when it did, he realized why the slot ran in both directions: the handle inched downward on an angle toward the wall. The other end of the bar-the one extending into the hollow- was moving up, filling in the upper groove like a counterweight. He had no idea how the mechanism worked, nor did he care as he saw the lower of the two triangular pieces begin to dislodge from its partner. It was forming a gap in the fountain’s base.
“Look! Look!” said Ivo.
Pearse nodded and again pushed down with all his weight. Another quarter of an inch.
Ivo brought his hands to his face, his muddy little fingers shaking with anticipation. Petra did her best to keep them out of his mouth. Ivo at once latched onto her arms, eyes fixed on the stone, his feet hopping every time there was even a hint of movement. “Look, Mommy! Look!”
“I see it, sweetie.” She tried to rub the mud from his hands with her own.
On the fourth try, the stone finally gave way, the bar rotating flat into the slot. Pearse pulled his arm up from the hole and sat, a little winded from the exertion. As he looked into Ivo’s eyes, he felt a faint tremor of anticipation, a distant echo of what he had known in Photinus.
The “Hodoporia” was here.
He reached his hand into the gap and blindly groped his way through. There was an odd feel to the air, somehow heavier, yet with none of the dampness he expected. The few times his fingers rubbed against the stone, there, too, he was surprised by the texture, dry and cold, flawlessly smooth, no signs of decay. He attributed it to the strange mechanism, the bar and counterweight evidently having produced an almost perfectly insulated space. With his arm halfway down the opening, he hit on something metallic with rough iron edges, the feel of tiny bolts running under his fingertips. Another box.
Ambivalence or not, his heart kicked into high gear.
He reached his fingers around the side of the box and began to lift. He half-expected it to be tied down, one more trick to unravel before bringing it into the light. Instead, it came up easily. Angling it through the opening, he set it down at his side.
The box was identical to the one Ribadeneyra had used on Athos. Same size, same meaningless latch. Pearse looked up at Ivo and Petra.
“Well, here it is,” he said. Channeling his nervous energy, he reached back into the hole and pulled up on the bar. The two stones came back together. He then began to push the dirt back in.
Ivo quickly knelt down, the same chocolate-hopeful expression spread across his face as he offered to help. “It’s pretty old, isn’t it?” he said.
“Pretty old,” answered Pearse, tamping down the last of the soil. He brushed away as much of the dirt on his hands as he could, then picked up the box and sat on the lip of the fountain. Ivo stood and edged in close to his side, his eyes transfixed on the prize now in Pearse’s lap.
The mud was still thick under his nails as Pearse struggled with the latch. It finally gave way, the same velvet and gold coins waiting inside. This time, though, the glass dome was considerably bigger. It had to be; a scroll, not a booklet, lay underneath. Like its “Perfect Light” counterpart, it was bound in leather, two tie-strings holding it together. He was about to separate the dome from the velvet, when he saw the state of his hands. He turned to Petra.
“I probably shouldn’t touch it,” he said. “You’re going to have to open it up.”
She hesitated.
“I could do it,” piped in Ivo, ready to grab the dome.
Petra moved in quickly. “That’s okay, sweetie.” She reached over and placed the box on her lap. With a nod of encouragement from Pearse, she gently pulled the dome from its sealant. She looked at him.
“Go ahead,” he said, a strange tingling now in his throat.
She placed her hand on the scroll and immediately pulled it away. “It’s … oily.”
“That’s a good thing,” he said. “Try untying the straps. Gently.”
She started to touch them, then stopped. “You’re sure you don’t want to do this yourself?”
He smiled. “Did I leave my sink next to your sixteenth-century map?”
“I just think-wouldn’t it be smarter if you did this?”
As much as he now desperately wanted to hold it, he knew he couldn’t take the risk of harming the scroll. “I think we should see what’s inside.”
Again she hesitated. “All right.” She deftly inched the knot apart, then laid the strands at the side.
“Now peel back the binding. If you feel anything start to give, stop.”
She did as she was told, rolling back the first inch of leather. A strip of vellum appeared, straw-colored, gritty even to look at. She turned to Pearse. He nodded; she rolled back a bit more.
The edge of a separate sheet of parchment, distinct from the scroll itself, suddenly appeared between leather and vellum.
“What do I do with that?” she asked.
For a brief moment, Pearse entertained the frightening thought that perhaps they’d uncovered the next clue on the wild-goose chase. Unwilling to indulge it for more than a few seconds, he said, “Just keep rolling it back.”
Another few turns, and she had unrolled enough so that the separate sheet could be pulled out easily. With a little encouragement she did just that, holding it out in front of him so he could read it.
“It’s from Ribadeneyra,” he said as he read the Latin. “April 1521. ‘Take the gold … leave the scroll’”-his eyes racing along-“‘let this be an act of contrition….’” More nodding as he explained. “It’s the same thing he did on Photinus. Except this time he finishes up the story.” Paraphrasing as he went, Pearse read, “He got here in 1520…. He knew he wasn’t well…. Mani found him this spot to die…. ‘Praise be to Mani,’ so forth and so on.” He nodded for her to flip the sheet over. “That’s interesting.”
“What?”
“It says he helped design the fountain. He even laid some of the stonework….” Reading several lines, Pearse said nothing, his eyebrows arching as he scanned the text. “Wow.
That’s why,” he finally said. “That’s why what?” she asked.
“You really were very clever, weren’t you?” he said to the sheet, disregarding her question. “A Manichaean through and through.”
“What?” she asked again.
