The Barbary Pirates

For what?

Now I went more slowly, looking carefully. The limestone was slick, cool, and featureless. Finally I saw a glow ahead. Was the aqueduct ending already? No, there was a shaft of light from above. I awkwardly made my way to it, thighs aching, and looked up. There was a carved crevice in the rock about one foot wide, extending across the ceiling of the tunnel. It rose, a vertical pocket like the sheath of a sword, toward the surface of the plateau we’d stood on earlier. At the top, stones had been placed to close most of this shaft so that the opening to the sky was only a foot square, too small for people to fall into or climb out of. So why make the pocket so big? There was nothing in it.

I crawled on and in a hundred feet there was another slit, same as the first, carved upward in the ceiling. And another, and another. I counted six before finally stopping. The shafts served, I assumed, to equalize air pressure and encourage water flow in a channel that barely sloped. They also let in light for maintenance. Yet each one had been hollowed to enormous size and then closed back up at the top. It made no sense.

Unless it did, to Archimedes.

I reversed course and crawled back out the tunnel, skidding down the waterfall and landing in its pool with a splash. I climbed out, soaking, dirty, and puzzled.

“You took a long time.”

“It’s a long tunnel.” I poured water out of my boots. “There are man-made crevices in there that might have hidden something.” I drew a circle in the sand, and lines across it. “Suppose you divided the mirror into sections, like a pie. Perhaps you even cut each section into two or three lengths.”

“Not cut,” said Aurora. “They were hinged, to catch and focus the sun.”

“The result would be narrow slices. There are air shafts in the tunnel in which the pieces of a dismantled mirror might have been hidden.”

“Might?” Dragut asked.

“There’s nothing there now. I did see a Templar Cross chiseled into rock. This medieval order you want to emulate got here ahead of us, I think. We may be too late.”

“No,” Aurora said. “Then why hide a map in such a secret place on Thira, and make a signet ring marking it? The knights found the mirror but had to conceal it again, until their investigations were completed. Perhaps they didn’t know yet how to reassemble it, or were waiting for a military base to deploy it from.”

“Perhaps they decided it was such a terrible invention it ought never be deployed.”

She ignored me. “If the mirror had been reassembled and used, there would be a medieval record of it. If it was destroyed, there is no need to draw a hidden map. If it was shipped away to another city, they would not have drawn Syracuse. It’s here. I can feel it here.”

“Not at Euryalus, the abandoned Greek fort: we searched there,” said Dragut.

“No, some place more accessible than that, from which the mirror might be more easily shipped. Yet somewhere it would never be disturbed. Somewhere sacred, somewhere sacrosanct, somewhere unsuspected.” She walked to the edge of the ancient theater and looked at the city below. “Somewhere like a temple to Athena, the Greek version of Egypt’s Isis, built in 480 B.C. after the Greek victory over the Carthaginians at Himera. The continuity of temple into cathedral would appeal to the Templars. Why else mark its location with a cross on the map?” She turned to me. “Ethan, I think our weapon is hidden in the city’s cathedral, its duomo.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“How will you ever get it? Or get it out of town?”

“I told you to ponder how we might slip by Castello Maniace,” Dragut said. “How can our ship get safely away?”

I shrugged. “Any lateen-rigged corsair is going to be a primary target. You need a decoy. No—you need a second ship, a Sicilian ship, with your own as a false target. You’ve got to allow the Sicilians to sink the Isis, so you can escape with the other.”

He considered and nodded. “Sly. See? We are becoming partners, Ethan Gage.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The piazza in front of the Syracuse cathedral is one of the loveliest in Europe, elongated and artfully irregular, its slope following the natural contours of Ortygia. Its border is fine three-story stone-and-stucco buildings that provide a harmony of grand entrances, high windows, and iron balconies. The facade of the duomo itself is a baroque confectionery of pillars, statues, arches, scrolls, angels, eagles, and enough additional architectural frosting to decorate a wedding cake. The cathedral’s side is much plainer, a largely blank wall interrupted by the old Greek pillars of what had been in turn a pagan temple, Christian basilica, Arab mosque, and ever-evolving cathedral.

Inside, the hodgepodge continued: Greek columns, Norman arches, and baroque side chapels. A circular window with a thick-limbed cross, reminiscent of the muscular signature of the crusading knights that I saw in the aqueduct cave, shone in the sturdy wall above the vestibule. I had a feeling most any prayer would work in here, thick as the place was with the ghosts of intertwined faiths.

“What this place, Papa?” Harry and Osiris had rejoined us.

“A sanctuary.” I hoped it really was.

“What’s a sanry?”

“Where bad people go to be better, and good people go to be safe.”

“Are we bad?”

“Not you, Harry. You’re a good boy.”

He nodded solemnly. “And safe.”

A few old women sat in the pews, waiting for the confessional and the one person, the priest, who had to listen to them. An old man desultorily swept dust with a stick broom from one corner to another, and then back again. Except for its mix of architecture, the duomo seemed grand but unexceptional.

“The mirror must be long gone, Aurora.” Without even thinking about it I whispered.

“Then your little family will be destroyed.” Crossing herself with holy water—an act of blasphemy, given her character, that I half expected would be answered with a bolt from heaven—she played the English tourist again, slowly circuiting the side aisles while counting pillars and arches. She sauntered as if a cathedral was her most logical environment in the world, and smirked at me as she did it. Every intimacy had become an act of reprisal.

But even she had respectfully murmured, I noticed.

Light filtered in through small stained-glass windows, its dim glow supplemented by votive candles burning as offerings to the saints. The place had that church smell of old wood, wax, dust, incense, and water used to mop down the flagstones.

“There is no crypt, I asked the priest,” she whispered as we followed along. “We can see the roof beams ourselves, eliminating an attic. The walls are as thick and plain as a fortress. But this sacred site is what the Templars would have chosen, I’m certain of it. The spirit of a dozen religions is here. The knights would applaud the continuity of faith. But where, Ethan? Where? You’re the one with the knack for finding old relics.”

My only knack is for getting into awkward situations like this one, but I didn’t say that. I wandered about with Harry looking for who knows what, struck by how the Norman plainness contrasted with a central white altar that seemed spun out of sugar. The three other chapels were jewel boxes of marble and gold. Castles and cathedrals are where men put their energy, I’ve found: war, and the afterlife.

But I saw no hiding places for mirrors. Just angels, saints, and miracles on the ceiling, everyone up there floating about in flowing robes and pointing portentously. If only real life were so weightless! I was tired of old legends, and would give this one up in a moment except for Harry. He toddled along holding my finger, awed by a place so big and shadowy. So I looked, counting the old Greek columns—ten on one side, nine on the other—and marveled at the craftsmanship of the artisans. One chapel had steps of rose granite, a silver altar that glowed like