by Tony Abbott
The label read:
Decorated Box
Chinese, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
Early 16th century?
Porcelain with jade decorative tiles, featuring six of the seven “mansions” of the traditional Chinese astronomical symbol known as , or Seiryu, the Azure Dragon of the East, governing the season of Spring. Clockwise from upper left are:
Virgo: , or Horn (Jiăo), and , or Neck (Kàng)
Libra: , or Root (Dĭ)
Scorpio: , or Room (Fáng), and , or Tail (Wěi); the tile representing , or Heart (Xīn), is missing
Sagittarius: , or Winnowing Basket (Jī).
With yellow glaze and overglaze of green and white, and six of seven pale jade tiles embedded in the surface of the lid.
Gift of Dolly and Alan Hughes (Hughes Collection)
H1988.42.178b
“There’s a picture of the Hugheses in the brochure,” Becca said, flipping it open for us to see. “So they gave this box to the museum?”
“Among many other Ming pieces, nearly all from the early to middle sixteenth century,” said Dr. Powell. “Alan Hughes was an early inventor of the technology that became the World Wide Web and was quite wealthy. He died not long after he and his wife donated this piece in 1988. His wife donated the rest of their collection in her will. She passed away three years ago.”
“Do you know what’s inside the box?” Lily asked.
“We’ve never been able to open it. We believe it contains an internal lock that was broken over the last five hundred years. The artisans of the Ming court were among the most advanced in the arts and in mechanics, and we don’t want to tamper with it. That’s why the piece you . . . traced is so important. Some curators believe the box was used as a sort of sampler, to hold a variety of spices that traders would examine before buying and shipping to the West. But since we haven’t opened the box, that’s just a guess.”
Like everything else about the Copernicus Legacy, this small box had just become infinitely more mysterious.
I really wanted Dad to hear what the curator was saying, but his tail on the guy from the plane must have taken him to some other part of the museum. “Dr. Powell, I know my dad will be back soon and have more questions, but is there any way we can get a closer look at the spice box?” I asked. “To see how the tracing fits with the rest of the design? It’s hard to see through the glass.”
Dr. Powell frowned. “I don’t know.” She checked the time on her cell phone. “We’ve been searching for the missing piece since we received the Hughes donation. And your tracing is so exciting. I’ll be right back.” She glanced at the guard and hurried out of the gallery.
It was actually kind of neat to see an adult so enthusiastic about what a piece of paper could mean. Dr. Powell was definitely a geek, kinda like me. And Becca.
“I’m calling your dad; he needs to get back here,” said Lily. She tapped in the number and put it on speaker. Dad picked up.
“I’m on the main floor,” he said softly. “He’s down here somewhere, but he’s moving through the rooms quickly, so I’m not sure what he’s doing.” When we told him what the curator told us, he added, “What we don’t want is to alert the police that we have something of Mr. Chen’s. Say nothing. I’ll find the director. Maybe it’ll help that I have a bit of a name in science circles.” He hung up.
“Cool dad, you guys,” Lily said to Darrell and me.
“Do you think they’ll want to buy my drawing?” Darrell asked.
“You mean your tracing?” I said.
“I’m thinking a sweet million for my artwork. Plus they name a gallery after me.”
“Uh-huh,” said Lily. “The Gallery of Wishful Thinking.”
“Funny, people, really,” said Becca, studying the spice box’s label, “but Tricia Powell will be back soon. Lil, maybe you can take a picture of the box, and Wade, you could copy the label in your notebook.”
We took photos and made notes. Before long, Dr. Powell was back. “I found your father with the director in her office. They’re still chatting, but in the meantime she’s agreed we can study the box in the conservation lab, so let’s go.”
Dr. Powell and the security guard unlocked the display case and removed the spice box—it was apparently heavier than it looked. We followed them into a large, well-lit room with an enormous worktable in the center and smaller desks around the edges. Scattered here and there were computers and devices, some of which looked like they belonged in a hospital emergency room. There was one person in a lab coat, bending over a magnifying glass. He talked briefly with Dr. Powell, then left with the guard.
She set down the spice box on one end of the white worktable. “Now, the tracing. May I?”
She made a photocopy of it and trimmed the extra paper away. Her fingers trembling slightly, she placed it gently over the box. She drew in a breath. “Wow. A perfect match. This is pretty amazing, I have to tell you. See how these strands of the design on your tile continue across the other six? What I wouldn’t give to have the original.” She gave us a quizzical look. “Excuse me for a second. I need to grab a couple of reference books. Please don’t touch anything.” She hurried out of the lab, and we were alone.
I knew I shouldn’t have moved an inch, particularly after what my dad had said about not showing the original. But something came over me with the box just sitting there. At least I had to see the tile next to it. I fished it out of my pocket and held it over the gap in the box lid.
“Wade . . .” Becca lifted her hand to me, then stopped. “No, go ahead. Do it.”
Darrell and Lily crowded on either side of us, breathless. The room went absolutely silent, like a vacuum. Like the cave in my dream. Trying to still my shaking fingers, I lowered the tile until it nearly touched the box. It slid down out of my fingers and dropped into place.
The moment I moved my hand away, the round jade tiles, all seven of them, began to turn.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Each tile revolved in place as if on an invisible axis. A few went clockwise, others counterclockwise, some slowly, others more quickly, like seven dials seeking a single combination.
“Wade . . . Wade . . . ,” Becca whispered. I didn’t know what she meant by that, because she didn’t say anything else. I wanted to answer, “Becca . . . Becca . . .” But I just looked up at her.
Then the box made a low grinding noise, like tumblers shifting.
Darrell shook his head. “Good-bye to the Darrell gallery. Dude, you just busted it.”
“He didn’t bust it,” Lily hissed. Then she shot me a look. “Wade, you better not have.”
One by one, the tiles stopped moving until only one—the slowest one, the one from Mr. Chen—was still spinning. Then it stopped, too.
So did the grinding. What had been a random collection of jade designs just moments before was now lined up in a single sequence across the top of the box. A complete picture emerged out of the threads of jade.
It was a scorpion.
“Scorpion, for Scorpio, the constellation?” asked Lily, without waiting for an answer. “And the relic! I know it’s inside the box. This is what Leathercoat is looking for. We found another relic!”
Could we possibly have encountered a second relic so soon?
The answer was no. Seconds after the scorpion appeared in the design, the lid sprang open on invisible hinges, probably for the first time since the seventh tile was removed. The box was empty. Oddly, however, the inside of the box was coated with a layer of dull gray metal that I thought might be lead. That was what had made it heavy. The inside of the lid, also lead, had several lines of Chinese characters engraved on it.
Then the curator came back, toting a big pile of books.
She stopped in her tracks when she saw the spice box. “What in the world did you do?”
“We . . . ,” I started. I took a deep breath before continuing. “We had the seventh tile, not just a tracing. I know we should have told you, and we’re sorry. We can�
��t really tell you how we got it, but it was given to us by a nice man who is now—”
“Out of town,” Darrell said, jumping in.
“Do you have any papers?” Dr. Powell asked.
“Like our passports?” Lily asked.
“No, papers that document the tile,” she said.
“No,” I said, “but you can see it’s not a fake. It’s part of the original piece. See how it fits.”
“Does your father know this?” she asked.
“He knows,” said Becca. “That’s probably what he’s talking to your director about. He should be here very soon.”
“The museum will want it, obviously,” Dr. Powell said. “It’s part of the spice box. But we can’t acquire it if it doesn’t have any documentation. And we’ll likely have to call the police. I mean, I’m sorry, but the director is required to do that.”
The enormous stupidity of what I’d just done was dawning on me. We could be in deep trouble. A priceless piece of art given to us by a murder victim? I should have let Dad handle it. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
“Excuse us a second, Dr. Powell. Guys . . .” Becca drew us back a few steps away from the table. “Look. If this belonged to Mr. Chen, forgetting for a moment how he got it, wouldn’t he have come here and done the same thing we just did? He had a piece of the puzzle leading to a relic—possibly Scorpio—and needed to attach it to the spice box. How would he have handled this situation?”
“There’s no document somewhere deep in that pocket of yours?” Darrell asked me.
“I wish,” I said. “Let’s get Dad back here. Maybe we could donate the tile to the museum. I mean, just give it to them. Once we find out what it’s supposed to tell us, we may not even need it anymore.”
“It’s worth a try,” said Becca.
I flashed her a shy smile. “You say that now . . .”
We—I—told Dr. Powell what we’d decided and that she should talk to the director and my father, “who, by the way, is an astrophysicist at the University of Texas,” which seemed to impress her. She was still suspicious, but the fact that we offered to donate the tile to the museum, and that my dad was making deals with the director, seemed to take some of the guilt away.
She said she would hold on to the tile until everything was decided. Which was fine with us. The tile seemed to be merely a way to open their spice box, and maybe the real clue was the writing inside.
“Um, if it’s not too much to ask,” said Lily, “do you think you could translate the words on the inside of the lid?”
“What exactly are you working on?” Dr. Powell asked.
We shared a glance. “A legend,” I said. “A story.”
She seemed to accept that. “I’ll translate the text for you. It will take me a few minutes.” She sorted through the books she’d brought in and pulled down several more from a shelf and set them on the table next to her computer.
“Lily, you should probably take some pictures of this thing, right?” Darrell suggested.
Lily did. And so did Dr. Powell. She sent her photos to a computer sitting at the far end of the worktable so we could examine them in high resolution. We set ourselves up around it, while she turned her attention to the writing inside the box.
“This is definitely a Ming-era object,” she said right off, “but the writing inside the lid is not Ming. Strange, no? The characters are modern simplified Chinese. This particular form of it wasn’t even around until 1956 at the earliest.”
“Dr. Powell, are you saying that writing was added to the box sometime in the last sixty years?” I asked.
She nodded once. “Yes. And please call me Tricia. Now, come over here and look.”
She moved the box under a lens that was connected to her computer. “There are two tiny impressions stamped into the inside of the lid. They are old.” She pointed out a tiny ball with rings around it hovering over what looked like a small dish.
“It looks like a Christmas ornament,” said Lily.
“Isn’t it an armillary sphere?” I asked.
Tricia blinked. “It is! How did you know?”
“Wade’s a geekologist at the University of Texas,” said Darrell.
Actually, we all knew what it was. Copernicus’s astrolabe had elements of a giant armillary sphere. There was a sketch of it in the diary, and we’d seen plenty of spheres at a museum on a hillside in Rome.
“Well, back when very few people knew how to read,” Tricia continued, “images, drawings, and symbols were used to represent people or governments, rather than words.”
“Like stained-glass windows for people who couldn’t read Latin,” Darrell said. “My mom taught me all about them.”
Tricia nodded. “Absolutely. This armillary sphere is an image we’ve seen before in Ming work. It’s not Chinese, but a Portuguese symbol representing King Manuel the First, who ruled Portugal from 1495 to 1521.”
Becca glanced at me. Exactly the right time.
“The spice box was created in China. There’s no doubt about that,” Tricia went on. “From these marks I’d guess it was crafted in Beijing for either King Manuel or for a well-to-do Portuguese trader. Why it was lined in lead, I have no idea, but that seems original, too. Also, the little dish floating below the sphere could be the symbol of a specific merchant, but I’d have to do more research to track that down. This is so exciting! Now the text.”
While Becca, Lily, and I went back to our computer and studied the images of the box, Darrell paced behind us. “We can’t let on too much,” he said, raising his eyes at the curator and keeping his voice low, “but here’s what I think. Sometime in the past sixty years, a recent Guardian wrote the message in the spice box, then took out the tile to keep the box from being opened without it.”
Lily’s grin told us she liked the way that sounded. “But it wasn’t just a spice box, was it? You wouldn’t line it with lead if it only carried cinnamon. I’m thinking the relic used to be in here.”
“Lead keeps Superman safe from Kryptonite,” Darrell said, which seemed random, but it got me thinking.
“I wonder if you-know-who knew that in the 1500s.”
“Unlikely,” said Darrell. “The first Superman comic was in 1938.”
I gave him a fake smile. “Not Superman. I mean if Copernicus knew that lead could protect you. When did people discover that?”
A hundred questions. No answers. Yet.
“Kids . . .” Tricia called us over. Everyone but Becca hurried to the other end of the table to see what she’d come up with. Becca leaned over the Copernicus diary, hiding it and reading intently, but gripping her arm tight, as if it was hurting all of a sudden. Lily shot me a worried look.
“The very first word of the text is on a line by itself, like a title,” Tricia began, pointing to a series of three characters that looked like this: . “It took me all this time to figure out because it’s actually rendered backward, like a mirror image. Very strange. But once you reverse it, it’s easily read as the Chinese character for the constellation Scorpio, which follows the scorpion design on the lid. Also, the lines below, though not backward, are a poem. I’ll keep working.”
At the other end of the table, Becca had her notebook out next to the newspaper-covered diary and was carefully unfolding the page that contained the Trithemius cipher.
“What did you find?” Darrell whispered to her.
“Remember how I showed you the line beginning one of the coded sections?” she asked. “‘Bfe cyhylk bf wuxzz ifgb oiud and so on?”
“Ifgabood. I remember,” said Darrell.
“Well, if this letter square is the way to decode it, maybe the key word is the title of the poem Scorpio, but not really Scorpio, but the reverse of it.”
“You mean oiprocs?” Darrell said, almost without missing a beat.
“Uh . . . no,” she said. “Not in English.”
“Chinese?” said Lily. “No, the characters would be different.”
Becca smiled, but her smile was strained
as if even that hurt. “I’m thinking it could be Portuguese. Because of the markings Tricia found. I don’t know Portuguese really at all, but maybe the computer—”
Lily’s finger tapped on the museum’s computer keyboard for a moment before she said, “Scorpio in Portuguese is Escorpião.”
“Go, Trithemius,” I said.
Becca shook her head. “Not yet. It needs to be spelled backward, just like the symbol is in the box. So it’s . . . O-A-I-P-R-O-C-S-E.”
“That’s the key word?” I said.
“We’ll see.” Becca shifted over to the computer in front of Lily. “What we do is line up the letters of the key word above the coded word to give us the message in Portuguese. Like this.” And she wrote out the key word—OAIPROCSE—over and over above the coded passage.
OAI PROCSE OA IPROC SEOA IPROCSEO
BFE CYHYLK BF WUXZZ IFGB OIUDQYKG
“The Trithemius cipher uses three steps,” she went on. “First you use the column of letters down the left side to locate the first letter of the key word. So, we see that O is about halfway down the left-hand column of letters.”
“Step two is to locate the coded letter, in this case B, from BFE.” Becca ran her finger from left to right along the row and stopped at B.
“The final step is to follow that column all the way up to the top row of the square to give us the first letter of the message.” Becca ran her finger up from B to the very top. It landed on M.
“If I’m right,” she said, “the message begins with the letter M.”
She did the same with the second letter, going all the way down the left-hand column to row A, in to letter F, and up to letter E. The third letter—I to E—gave us U. The next word, CYHYLK, became MESTRE.
“Lily, anything?” asked Becca.
Lily searched the dictionary for the translation of the first two words. She jumped. “In Portuguese, meu mestre means . . . ‘my master’!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
