The Messiah Secret

24

For a few seconds, Angela stared at the page of text displayed on the computer screen in front of her, then glanced down at the copious notes she’d made on her laptop. She stood up, stretched her arms above her head and rotated her shoulder joints, trying to work the kinks out of her muscles.

She realized she’d been working on the computer for almost four hours without a break – once she got her teeth into any project, she tended to become remarkably single-minded about it. She needed to take a short walk, let her eyes relax for a few minutes and maybe grab a cup of coffee.

Twenty minutes later she sat back at her desk, put down her mug and took another bite of the salad sandwich she’d bought at a delicatessen a few dozen yards down Great Russell Street, across the road from the museum.

She still wasn’t entirely certain, but the references she’d uncovered were beginning to make sense, and a tantalizing hypothesis was starting to take shape. The ‘treasure of the world’ seemed to be almost a code phrase that had echoed through the last two millennia, and appeared to refer to something quite specific. Exactly what was meant by the expression, Angela still didn’t know, but there were one or two hints, and it did seem to be an ancient relic of considerable importance.

She also started to search backwards. Instead of looking for further first-century references to the ‘treasure of the world’, she’d started at the other end of time, trying to find much more recent documents that contained the expression. Her rationale was that if she found a reference to that expression in a later book or manuscript, there might well be a note about where the author of the work had found the phrase, and that would enable her to establish a trail back through the historical record, to back-track the references to the relic. Hopefully, each mention of the expression would amplify her knowledge and narrow down the search area – always assuming there was still something left to search for.

She’d consulted a wide range of late-medieval books without finding any reference to the phrase, and almost as an after-thought she’d decided to check the contents of a number of grimoires – a grimoire was essentially a textbook of magic. She wondered if that might be worth doing simply because, although such books mainly contained nonsensical spells, curses and incantations, they also often drew on a wide range of earlier sources.

The third grimoire she looked at was the Liber Juratus, also known as The Sworne Booke of Honorius, the Liber Sacer and the Liber Sacratus, a medieval grimoire written in Latin that dated from the thirteenth century. The original text had vanished long, long ago, but two fourteenth-century copies had survived, and the vast British Museum database had a scanned copy of the Latin text, as well as a copy of the only known English translation of the work.

Angela’s Latin was reasonable, so she’d carried out a full scan of the Latin text using the search string thesaurus mundi, which she thought was close enough to the expression ‘the treasure of the world’. That produced no results, so she altered the search term to arcarum mundi, and that generated two hits, not as part of any spell, but just in a passage that described a number of hidden relics. The author of the grimoire imbued one of these lost objects with the most extraordinary abilities, claiming that it could confer incredible power on its owner. From what Angela had found out so far, she had assumed that the hidden treasure was simply gold or silver or some other object of high intrinsic value, but the passage definitely suggested that whatever it was had magical properties.

The book also hinted that although the object’s hiding place was still unknown, it was most likely somewhere in the Middle East. According to Angela’s quick translation, it was described as ‘hidden most cunningly in the gorge of the blooms’, a location that sounded close enough to the ‘valley of flowers’. Unfortunately, the grimoire gave no indication of the country in which the ‘gorge of the blooms’ might be found and, as far as she could tell, the writer was apparently copying the information from an earlier, but unnamed, source.

Although thesaurus translated as ‘treasure’ or ‘hoard’, and could also refer to a place where valuables were stored, like a ‘treasury’, the Latin word arcarum had a much wider and more general meaning. Depending on the context – which in Latin meant analysing the declension of the other nouns and the tenses of the verbs clustered at the end of the sentence – it could mean a box, a chest, a strong-box, a coffer, wealth, money, a coffin or a bier, or even a cell or cage. And there was one other possible meaning of the word that came as a complete surprise, and opened up both a whole new field of thought and a tantalizing possibility.

Excited now, Angela started checking texts that dated from the fifth to the tenth centuries AD, finding sufficient references to convince her she was on the right track.

She glanced at her watch: it was already after five in the afternoon. She copied all the documents and references she’d looked at on to a memory stick, copied them on to her laptop, which she shut down, then switched off the screen of her desktop PC – most of the museum’s computer systems ran all the time – and locked her office.

Chris was coming to her apartment that evening and they were going out for a meal together. She wanted to make sure she looked her best.

25

‘OK,’ Chris Bronson said, leaning back in his chair. They were sitting over an after-dinner pot of coffee in a small Italian restaurant a few streets away from Angela’s apartment in Ealing. ‘Let’s look at it like a police investigation. What’s your evidence?’

Angela leaned towards him, her brown eyes shining in the candlelight. ‘We know about Bartholomew’s Folly – at least, we know what’s printed in the Carfax Hall guidebook and what Jonathan Carfax told us. I also told you I recognized the reference to the “treasure of the world” on the parchment that old Bartholomew found, and I was right – the same expression was used on the Hillel fragment. In fact, both appeared to be copies of the same source document. The only difference was that the parchment Bartholomew found is written in Persian, and the Hillel piece is in Hebrew, but the text is virtually identical on both.’

Bronson nodded, happy to see Angela so excited. ‘What else did you find?’

‘I looked at a thirteenth-century grimoire – that’s a kind of ancient magician’s sourcebook of spells and incantations – and I found the same expression there. It even suggested the treasure was hidden in the “gorge of the blooms”, which is close enough to the “valley of the flowers” to suggest it’s referring to the same treasure, hidden in the same place.’

‘But you still don’t know which country?’

Angela put her hand on his. ‘No. That’s the downside. But I plugged away, going back through all the ancient texts I could find, because I thought there might be some really old source document that other authors had copied from over the centuries, and if I could find that, I hoped it might tell us where we should start looking.’ She paused, and Chris raised his eyebrows, so she continued.

‘I started with De Administrando Imperio. That’s a really long letter written in Greek by the tenth-century Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII to his son, the future Emperor Romanus II, telling