“Then why would Blaylock go to all the trouble of randomly carving Aztec glyphs on the bell’s interior? And why the bell?”
Remi said, “I assume that’s a rhetorical question.”
“I’m working through it. Did you read this poem from Blaylock’s journal?”
“I didn’t know there was one.”
“I just found it. Pete and Wendy just uploaded it,” Sam said, then recited:
In my love’s heart I pen my devotion. On Engai’s gyrare I trust my feet. From above, the earth turns, my day is halved Words of Ancients words of Father Algarismo“Not bad for a mathematician,” observed Remi.
“I wonder if he used the bell because it’s durable, unlike paper. I also wonder if he used it because of its shape.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“The first line of his poem-‘In my love’s heart I pen my devotion’-he’s got to be talking about his wife, about Ophelia, which is what he renamed the El Majidi .”
Remi caught on. “And a ship’s bell could be considered the heart of the ship.”
“Right. Now, the second line, ‘On Engai’s gyrare I trust my feet.’ In Swahili, Engai is one of the spellings for the Maasai’s version of ‘God,’ and gyrare is Latin for ‘gyre’; it’s a synonym for vortex or spiral.”“As in the Fibonacci spiral. God’s pattern in nature.”
“That’s what I was thinking. Blaylock was using the spiral to guide himself. Put the lines together and maybe you’ve got Blaylock inscribing the bell with the source of his devotion-his obsession-and using the Fibonacci spiral as some kind of encoding technique.”
“And since by the time he made the inscriptions his wife was dead and he’d found the Shenandoah, his ‘devotion’ was something else altogether,” said Remi. “What about the gyre? How exactly would that fit in?”“Picture a golden spiral.”
“Okay.”
“Now picture it superimposed on the interior of the bell, starting at the crown and spiraling downward and outward toward the mouth.”
Remi was nodding. “And wherever the spiral intersects a symbol it means . . .” She shrugged. “What?”
“I don’t know. Something to do with the last three lines of the poem, maybe. I’m still working on that. All I know is that two of the most frequently repeated items in his journal are the Fibonacci spiral and Aztec symbols. If he’s hiding something, they’re probably involved.”
THEY GOT UP, made a carafe of coffee, and headed down to the workroom. Selma was asleep on a cot in the corner. The overhead halogen lights were dimmed. Pete and Wendy sat at the worktable, laptops open, the screens’ glow illuminating their faces.“Coffee, guys?” Sam whispered.
Wendy smiled, shook her head, and nodded toward the collection of Red Bull cans on the table.
“We’re almost done,” Pete said. “Those Ziploc bags must have done the trick. It’s just a guess, but I’d say the letters have been protected in one way or another for most of their life.”“You got them all?” Remi asked.
Wendy nodded. “Aside from some illegible spots here and there. We’ll have everything uploaded and sorted in a couple hours.”
“Sam’s got a hunch he wants to play,” Remi said.
“We’re all ears,” replied Wendy.
Sam explained his theory. Pete and Wendy considered it for a few moments, then nodded in unison. “Plausible,” Pete said.
“Ditto,” Wendy added. “Blaylock was a mathematician. Those guys love order within chaos.”
From across the room Selma’s scratchy voice said, “Buy what?”
“Go back to sleep,” Remi said.
“Too late. I’m up. Buy what?”
She got off the cot and shuffled to the worktable. Remi poured her a cup of coffee and slid the mug down the table. Selma palmed it, took a sip. Sam reexplained his spiral/bell/symbol theory.
“It’s worth a shot,” Selma agreed. “The crown of the bell would be the likely place to start the spiral, but how do we know how big it is? And you’re assuming it would unravel and end at the bell’s mouth. What if it doesn’t?”Sam smiled wearily. “Killjoy.”
THE GROUP BEGAN BRAINSTORMING. At the top of their list was the question of scale. A Fibonacci spiral could be built to any scale. If Blaylock was in fact using a spiral, he would’ve used a reference size for the first box in the grid. They tossed around ideas for an hour before realizing they were getting nowhere.“It could be anything,” Sam said, rubbing his eyes. “A number, a note, a doodle . . .” “Or something we haven’t even seen yet,” Remi added. “Something we’ve overlooked.”
Across the table, an exhausted Pete Jeffcoat laid his head down on the wood and stretched his arms before him. His right hand struck Blaylock’s walking staff, which rolled off the edge and clattered to the floor.“Damn!” Pete said. “Sorry.”
“No problem.” Sam knelt down to retrieve the staff. The bell clapper had torn free of its leather bindings and was hanging by a single thong. Sam picked them up together. He stopped and peered at the head of the staff. He frowned.“Sam?” said Remi.
“I need a flashlight.”
Wendy pulled out a storage drawer and handed an LED across to Sam, who clicked it on and shone it onto the staff’s head. “It’s hollow,” he muttered. “I need some long-handled tweezers.”Wendy retrieved a pair, handed them over.
Gingerly, Sam inserted the tips of the tweezers into the opening, wriggled them around for a few seconds, then began withdrawing them.
Grasped between the pincers was a corner of parchment.
CHAPTER 28
“OH, SURE,” SAM MUTTERED. “IT COULDN’T HAVE BEEN SOMETHING easy. Like a map with a big X on it.”
Wary of damaging the remainder of the parchment, or anything else that might lie hidden inside Blaylock’s walking staff, Pete and Wendy had taken it into the archive vault for extraction and triage preservation.
Ten minutes later a digital image of what Sam had grabbed with his tweezers appeared on the workroom’s LCD screen:
Pete came out of the vault. He said, “We had to reduce it. The map’s actual dimensions are roughly six inches wide by ten long.”“What about those notations along the coast?” Sam asked.
“Once we get the map digitized, Wendy’s going to work her Photoshop magic and try to clean them up. Based on their placement and the capital R suffix, they’re probably river names-in French, by the looks of it. The partial word in the upper left-hand corner-‘runes’-might be something we can work with, too.“There’s another notation,” Pete continued. “See the arrow I superimposed?”
“Yes,” Remi replied.
“There’s some microwriting overtop that little island. We’re working on that as well.”
The archive vault door opened, and Wendy emerged carrying a rectangle of parchment sandwiched between two panes of Lexan clear polycarbonate.
“What’s this?” Remi asked.
“The surprise behind door number two,” replied Wendy. “This was rolled up at the bottom of the staff.”
She laid the pane on the worktable.
Sam, Remi, and Selma gathered around it and stared in silence for ten seconds. Finally Remi whispered, “It’s a codex. An Aztec codex.”
