‘Then let’s go there now.’
‘No. Aristo, you need to go to the site of ancient Pergamon in Asia Minor. From what you’ve told me, it seems that there is something waiting for us there. Katerina will be going with you. I have a feeling she will be of help to you there.’
‘What about Giorgos?’
Elli turned to Giorgos. ‘Giorgos, I want you to go back to Limassol. I want you to investigate the possibility of an impostor placed on the throne of Byzantium at the time of the fall to the Ottomans in 1453. If it proves to be true, I want to know who perpetrated such an audacious act and why. And I want you to gather all that you found in the tomb in Cappadocia. I want us to have a talk about that in the next few days. Aristo, we are all going back to Limassol and you will, immediately, leave with Katerina for Pergamon.’ She turned back to the manuscript and after a while she indicated on the page. ‘Do you recognise this passage?’ Both Giorgos and Aristo looked at what she was pointing. Aristo recognised it instantly.
‘If I remember it correctly, it’s word by word the passage that Katerina and I saw in Ayia Sophia in Constantinople.’
“The tears run from the tropical depth to the middle sea, and the land cries and the general takes the ancient throne for centuries now vacant, the one-man democratic city shines in agony and pleasure in equal measure, and the golden statue absorbs and consumes the liquid of life around it, but spits it out, unsatisfied, and runs to the glowing horn by the sea, on a golden lamb upon which rides the brother of the matriarch and the matriarch herself… but then changes course for the city that carries the name of the gift to the baby Jesus, now totally destroyed, but chosen to join them all… But beware…”
Giorgos did not take long to figure out the meaning of the cryptic passage.
‘I know what it means. The first part is Alexandria. The tears is the Nile flowing into the Mediterranean and the general is Ptolemy that becomes pharaoh after a hiatus of a few hundred years of Egypt being under Persian control with no longer a pharaonic dynasty ruling it. The second refers to Athens. In name a democracy, but in practice with Pericles it was the rule of the one man. The golden statue is the great statue of the goddess Athena on the Acropolis that could be seen for miles around. The third is Constantinople. The horn refers to the Golden Horn, the city’s natural safe harbour. The brother and the sister riding the golden lamb refers to the legend of Elli and the golden lamb that led to the legend of the golden fleece. The matriarch of the Symitzis family is Elli, which matches the name of the girl in the legend. A coincidence? Probably but unlikely. But how does it all tie in together? Is there something we must do or find at these places? Do they have something in common?’
They all read further down the manuscript. Giorgos was becoming increasingly excited.
‘Do you remember the three keys we got in Athens and what Plato said?’
Aristo nodded. ‘Yes, the keys to the three greatest Greek cities, to wake him with the blood of his lost child. The three cities: Alexandria, Athens and Constantinople. And the fourth must be Smyrna, the one that was totally destroyed in 1922. There must be in the first three cities a place where the keys must be inserted. About Smyrna, I don’t know. Smyrna was one of the gifts of the three wise men to baby Jesus. Perhaps I’m going on a wide tangent here. The passage said that Smyrna joins them. If you put the four cities on a map, I believe they roughly form a cross. Perhaps the cross is the Jesus connection. Get me a map. If you draw lines from each city and join them, I want to see where the lines meet.’
Aristo got the map and drew the lines. It’s an irregular parallelogram. The centre of it is here… That looks like…’ Elli completed for him. ‘No, I thought it might be Mount Ellothon, but it’s not.’ Aristo continued. ‘Or if we draw a line from Constantinople to Alexandria and another from Athens to Smyrna… or… the centre is… No, it doesn’t work either. It doesn’t make sense, even though it could be a lovely coincidence. What if there is a fifth location? Giorgos, do you remember what we saw in Alexandria? The panel that was supposed to have a name but was empty and we saw those images instead with a fifth line leading to somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean? But the line did not meet its final point of call, its destination. There must be a fifth location which, I would venture to speculate, could be the location of the last Emperor’s tomb.’
Giorgos shook his head. ‘Yes, but without a clue… without further information…’ Giorgos looked again at the passage. ‘But look. There is more. This here completes the passage: “… the power unleashed, beware that that is unleashed…it can only be controlled by the one”.’
‘The one…’ all three of them repeated almost in unison, phrasing it as a question. And then they continued together as if in awe and deep contemplation, ‘… the power…’
‘That must have something to do with the revival of the last Emperor. That is what the Ruinands want. They must think it would give them the weapon to defeat us at last. We must not let them. We must beat them in this race.’
But they had forgotten that there was a traitor in their midst, an operative in the pay of the Ruinands.
CHAPTER 29
Pergamon, Asia Minor
(Modern-day Turkey)
Present day
One moment they were walking between ruins, and the next the whole landscape had been transformed and Aristo was standing with Katerina admiring the gleaming roofs and buildings of the acropolis of Pergamon.
Its greatest treasure was the vast, painstakingly accumulated and jealously guarded collection of manuscripts written on parchment or pergamene, the sturdy material the city invented and gave its name, a material borne out of necessity, when the Ptolemies of Alexandria in Egypt banned the export of papyrus. The ban led to a severe shortage of writing material, rare and expensive as it was already, a problem compounded by the fact that Egypt was the only source of the stuff.
Aristo and Katerina passed through the entrance to the acropolis without incident. At the entrance to the Library, they noticed a plaque attached to the wall. They asked the old man standing by the entrance what that plaque was for and what it said, but he looked at them with a blank expression, raising his eyebrows, and shaking his head he walked away, no doubt feeling sorry for these mad people.
Aristo nudged Katerina.
‘We should move on.’
Katerina, though, did not budge. She was staring at the back of the old man who was briskly moving away. As if he knew her eyes were on him, the old man turned and he was close enough for Katerina to see an expression of recognition beginning to cloud his face. She had the feeling the old man knew something. She thought she imagined it, but he winked at her and, without a backwards glance, hurried in the opposite direction.
Aristo was impatient. ‘Katerina, come on. Let’s go inside.’
Katerina hesitated. ‘No, Aristo. We can do that later. I think we are meant to follow that old man. Come on, he’s about to get away, although I believe he means for us to follow him.’
Aristo relented. He knew that stubborn side of Katerina, but he also trusted her gut instinct, which was right more often than not. She wouldn’t change her mind. He grabbed her by the hand and they almost broke into a run after the old man who disappeared around a corner.
‘Come on, we are going to lose him.’
As they were running, Katerina remembered something and turned to Aristo. ‘Aristo, about that plaque… I think I know what it says. It will sound weird and you probably will not believe me. Do you remember the language Giorgos and I made up as children? The writing on that plaque looks to have been written in that language. What are the odds of that? It can’t be a coincidence. Or then again perhaps we did not invent that coded language after all. Maybe we saw it somewhere and it subconsciously registered in a part of our brain until we dredged it up to encode our inner-most thoughts and feelings from prying eyes.’
‘Yes, but we are not going back now.’
‘No, of course not.’ Katerina said impatiently, annoyed, Aristo had no doubt, that he might have thought her capable of such stupid impetuousness and short attention span.
They saw the old man disappearing behind a lowhung wall sprayed with a wild bougainvillea. They rushed to it and cut through a group of people who ignored them as if they could not see them at all, but not before they saw
