by K. T. Tomb
“We'll never find this damned cave like this,” Laura said, heaving a sigh of frustration
Cash frowned. “How about we just ask at that farm?”
Laura blinked. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because you're not as clever as me?” Cash replied with a smile.
“We'll put it down to age and wisdom then?” Laura said dryly, chuckling.
Cash pulled a shocked face. “How dare you? I'm only a few years older than you!”
Laura grinned. “Shall we say experience then?”
Cash pursed her lips. “I can live with that.”
The path down was treacherous. It looked like it had been worn out over many years, digging through the topsoil and leaving just the gravel, the rocks and the chalk. Cash kept slipping, but Laura was having a much worse time of it. Time and time again, she landed on her backside as her feet lost their hold on the ground.
“I thought those sea legs of yours would help you now. Obviously, I was wrong,” Cash remarked as Laura slipped again.
“Nondedju!” Laura swore as she cut open her hand on a rock.
Cash sat down beside her, masking a new slip with the move. “Let's have a look at that.” She took Laura's hand and looked at the cut. She pulled the water bottle free from the side of her bag and pulled Laura’s hand toward her. She squirted water over it, washing away the sand and gravel.
Laura grimaced and swore some more.
“You'll be alright,” Cash reassured her.
“Doesn't feel like it, Mom,” Laura said.
Cash kissed the scrape. “Now Mommy has kissed the boo-boo, are you going to be alright?”
Laura nodded, making a face that looked remarkably like that of a small, petulant child. “Thanks, Mommy.”
Cash got to her feet again and clapped Laura on the shoulder. “Come on, almost down.”
Another minute of slipping and sliding on the rocks and they were in the valley. The farmhouse was just a little further away.
There was no gate, so they walked straight up to the door. Laura knocked. An old man opened it and looked at them gruffly. Cash gave him her warmest smile and nudged Laura. Laura conjured a beaming smile as well and explained to the man what they were doing there and what they were looking for. The man brightened up a bit and spoke back to Laura in an accent she seemed to only barely understand. She had to ask him to repeat himself several times. The man pointed to the other end of the valley and then seemed to indicate a corner and told them they should be going up the hill.
Laura thanked the man profusely and kissed him on the cheek, then turned to lead the way down the path to the bottom of the valley. Cash shook the man's hand as well and rushed after her.
“What did he say?” she asked when she caught up with Laura.
“Down the valley, there's a gap in the hills on the right and we go down there. Then up the hill and at the other side is the cave.”
It took them another hour to reach the cave and when they did, Cash laughed. It would be a great place to take a lover. From the entrance, they could see the city and Cash was amused by how close they actually were to it. She had reckoned it would be further away, but it was probably going to be quicker to walk down to the city than to make their way back to the bus stop.
“Well, I can see why your friends came up here.”
Laura nodded. “Yup.” She pulled out her phone to use it as a flashlight and ducked into the cave.
“OMG! Come and look at this, Cash!” she exclaimed, her voice echoing and magnified by the stone walls that surrounded them.
Cash went in and took her phone out as well. She whistled the moment she could make out what had caught Laura's attention.
Apart from the surprisingly small amount of debris from the odd person who came up here, there was nothing in the cave but the remarkable paintings and writings on the wall. The paintings were gorgeous, almost like the depictions on the old Greek pottery. It was sophisticated, even more so than the drawings in Hersonissos.
Cash squatted next to Laura and looked over the pictures. “Can you read this stuff?” she asked Laura about the writing.
Laura nodded. “You got pen and paper? I'll copy it down and translate it. Works easier that way; not all the letters are still completely intact.”
Cash dug through her bag. She had used a notepad and pencil for a long time, but these days, everything was done on laptop or tablet. It was just easier. Eventually, she found the notepad and the pencil and she handed it to Laura, who immediately set about jotting down the script and beginning her translation.
Cash looked at her working for a moment. She wrote one line and then left two lines blank every time. The second line was apparently for modern script. There was little difference between the old and the new Greek alphabet, but there were some differences it seemed. Besides that, she seemed to fill in characters and rubbed them out again where there had been none present on the wall. The line below that was English.
Meanwhile, Cash looked at the paintings. The woman holding the box was alone. People came and went. It seemed there were a man and some children; two girls and a boy. Then the woman died and the tallest child grew into a woman and carried the box with her. Then there were more people and she went with them. There were ships and she was on one of the ships, standing on the prow. The ships landed somewhere and then they began building a city. The woman with the box looked over them and she watched the city grow and she grew older. Eventually, she seemed to be buried and the box was left behind when she was gone.
“If Aurelia's Box is somewhere else now, someone wrote this down after all this had happened,” Cash said.
“Looks like it.” Laura was still engrossed in her work. She was working at lightning speed and needed all her concentration.
“Who wrote this down then?” Cash wondered out loud.
“No idea,” Laura answered without any real interest.
“Must have been someone local or from this other place where the daughter went to.”
Laura didn’t answer. Cash looked at her and just watched her work for a while.
Finally, Laura looked up. “The new place called Syracuse.”
Cash blinked. “Syracuse?”
“Yeah, it's a colony founded by people from Corinth and Argos. This says Medea's daughter went with them.” Laura frowned at Cash. “You didn't know that?”
Cash shook her head. “That's what the pictures seem to indicate as well, though. Only this would be Aurelia’s tallest daughter, or rather her eldest: Julia Caesaris, the major.”
Laura looked up at the wall paintings. “Looks like it, yeah.”
“Then we'll have to go to Syracuse, I'd say.” Cash said. “If you're up for it?”
“Sure.” Laura nodded. “But can we go and have some lunch first?”
Cash chuckled and nodded to the opening of the cave. “Yeah, let's go.”
“Pictures?” Laura nodded to the wall.
Cash swore and pulled up the camera app on her phone. She quickly took the pictures and then headed out into the sunshine again. She looked back as Laura followed her.
“Can’t help but wonder who put this all here.”
Chapter Six
Lying in bed, something else bothered Cash even more than who had written the text and made those paintings. Laura was sound asleep in the bed next to hers, even snoring lightly. Meanwhile, Cash’s head was full of thoughts. They were of her investigation, Laura, the book, her publisher, Tim and Paddy. Her mind felt terribly full. She growled and rolled onto her side, facing away from Laura. She grabbed her tablet from the bedside table and pushed the ear buds into her ears. Soon the music was calming her stormy mind and she fell softly to sleep.
When she woke in the morning, Cash found she had rolled back over almost crushed her tablet in the process. She quickly inspected it and to her relief found it intact. She lay it on the side table, got up quietly and went into the shower. When she got out, Laura was awake and getting dressed. Th
ey had agreed to take it easy that day and take an afternoon flight from Athens to Italy. They would fly to Rome and then, from there to Syracuse.
They caught the train to Athens airport a few hours later and Laura fell asleep as they sat, watching the landscape pass them by. Just before they reached the airport, Cash used the toe of her sneaker to wake her. She shot up and blinked, trying to find her bearings.
“Where are we?” Laura asked.
“Five minutes out of Athens,” Cash said, beginning to pack her stuff up. She had busied herself finding out things about Syracuse and its history.
Laura growled and closed her eyes.
“Oi, don't you bloody well go back to sleep,” Cash said in a thick Aussie accent. She kicked Laura again.
“Not sleeping, Mom,” Laura grumbled. “Just resting my eyes for another five minutes.”
Cash shook her head but laughed when she saw Laura glaring at her through half-closed eyelids.
They boarded the plane an hour and a half later and Laura was back to sleep the moment they were in the sky. They had lunch during the hour-long wait at Fiumicino and landed in Cátania just after four o'clock. From Fontanarossa, they took a shuttle to Syracuse. It took them forty-three minutes to get to the town and during the last flight and the shuttle ride the roles were reversed. Cash was exhausted and Laura was awake and talkative. They checked into the hotel and then went out to have dinner.
“So?” Laura asked as she sipped her wine. “What's next, boss?”
“Be buggered if I know,” Cash said, twisting pasta on her fork. “I'd say museum again, but I just don't know. It seems unlikely we’ll find anything there as well. If any museum has anything on it, we'd already know about it all, wouldn't we?”
“Suppose so. But that doesn’t mean clues might not be there hidden in something else.”
Cash ate a few bites and looked down into her plate. She was thinking.
“If it's still here, it won't be in the city, will it?” Laura asked suddenly.
“No. It was outside the city in Corinth as well. Maybe for a good reason.” Cash pursed her lips. “But where? Another cave?”
“Or a farmhouse?”
Cash nodded. “But then that house won't be there anymore, will it?”
“I guess not.” Laura looked at the people on the street as well. She focused on a couple of people talking in their local Italian dialect. She smiled at the hand gestures. They were so typical. “And a lot happened between then and now as well.”
Cash nodded. “Yeah.”
“Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Austrogoths, Crusade, so Saracens, Byzantines, Lombards and Normans, Turks came here, Austrians, French, Spanish.”
“Everyone with a ship and any kind of power came here,” Cash said, nodding.
“Anyone could have taken it,” Laura continued.
Cash frowned suddenly. She began thinking. The thoughts ran through her head and something was telling her what to look at. She had no way of knowing what was going on, no way of knowing where to look, but something just made sense to her.
“Maybe...” she began, still thinking, her author's brain busy trying to work it out. “Maybe, it isn't here anymore.”
Laura frowned but said nothing.
“Think about it. The Carthaginians could have taken it, but if they did, then the Romans took it from them. The Romans didn’t take it, here or in Carthage. They adopted aspects of Greek religion, Egyptian later, even Babylonian. They were vultures and took anything of worth and anything of mythological value but if that were the case it would be with the Jaguar God now in Heraklion. But if they did…”
“They would have kept it and it would have had pride of place in the Parthenon.”
“Yup, which is probably exactly what happened to the Jaguar God, seeing it was solid gold. But the box was probably left behind.” Cash continued, “So if someone took it, it was taken well after that.”
Laura pursed her lips and then looked as though a light went on. “The Byzantines would have known. They knew everything about anything that went on in Greece.”
Cash nodded. “The Turks and the Arabs might have known after they sacked Constantinople, but I doubt it. It would have come back in the translated Greek works too.”
“So we're going to look at what happened then and there?”
Cash nodded again. “Seems logical, doesn't it?”
“It's still a needle in a haystack.”
“Yes, but it's a start. And I have a hunch it is how it is.”
“And your hunches are usually right?”
“Yup.”
Laura smiled. “Now, much as I like talking about your hunches, shall we look at the practical side of that?”
Cash grinned and then handed her the tablet. “Knock yourself out; I'm eating.”
Laura frowned as she took it. “Is that a response to my eating habits?”
Cash just gave her a smile and continued eating.
Laura began looking up articles and finding clues as to where the Byzantine troops might have been.
“Interesting stuff, that expedition,” Laura commented.
“Is it?”
Laura nodded. “Think I might study that more.”
Cash looked at her questioningly.
“Lots of people involved,” Laura continued. “Lots of different interesting figures.”
“Like whom?”
“Like a Norwegian king.”
Cash frowned and dropped her fork. She gestured for the tablet as she kept chewing. She got it the moment she swallowed. “What Norwegian king?”
“He wasn't king then.” Laura handed the tablet back. “He was the head of the Varangian Guard, the emperor's bodyguard.”
Cash knew whom she was talking about before she looked at the tablet. “Harald Hardrada?”
Laura looked at it and confirmed her thought.
Cash shook her head. “There were a lot of people there.”
“I just found that one interesting.”
“Why, in particular?”
Laura smiled wickedly and grabbed Cash’s bag. Cash protested but let her go ahead searching the front pockets of it. Soon, Laura produced a set of glossy booklets. They were the programs from the museum exhibition on Heraklion. Cash had held on to them because they were so beautifully and expensively done. Laura turned the booklet over and showed Cash the names listed in the credits. The owner of the exhibit was listed as Marcelus Hardrada and H&H Foundations.
“Now that’s what’s interesting. Don’t you think?”
Cash nodded. “It is, and I do think.”
She took her last bite of food and called for the bill. When it had been paid, she beckoned Laura to get up and began walking back to the hotel.
In the morning, they left for the country outside the city. Cash had rented a car and they were going to the places the army of George Maniakes had been to. Maniakes had been the Byzantine commander who had retaken Syracuse from the Saracens and Cash figured his forces were most likely to have come across it if they did. Not just that, Maniakes had taken a number of relics back to Constantinople and while those were displayed, there might have been other things not displayed. Surely, he had taken trophies back that were worth something to the Basileus of Byzantium. They just had to figure out where they could find that… assuming that was what happened, which was still a bit of a leap of faith.
Syracuse had been huge in its day. At the nearby city of Belvedere, there had been fortresses that had helped in the defense of the city. There were heaps of places like that around the island, built by everyone who had come there. Cash figured it was as good a place as any. She had read up on the siege and knew it was one of the first places the armies of Maniakes had attempted to conquer.
The castle was a ruin, of course, and there wasn’t much to see there. Cash and Laura went over the stones, looking for anything that might connect to it. There were a few images of people carrying what looked like treasure chests etched in the stones, as
well as heaps of other images, mostly of a rude nature.
Cash came over to look as well and laughed. “Yeah, that's not very accurate, I think. If it were, I'd like to meet the man, though.”
Laura frowned. “I'm not so sure about that.”
Cash grinned. “Not interested at all then?” Laura shook her head.
Cash looked at the drawing and saw the markings below it. “Interesting.”
Laura looked at them as well. “Yeah, I can't read those.”
Cash looked more closely. “They're runes,” she said in surprise. “Hold up.” Cash took her phone and took a picture of them. “Tim should be able to read these.”
Laura sighed then and
Cash looked up at her. “What's the matter?”
“Nothing,” Laura muttered.
Cash frowned. “Nothing, huh?”
Laura nodded. “Nothing.”
“Right.” Cash sent the picture. “I hope he's coping with the wee hell raiser.”
Laura smiled. “That worried about the little one?”
“Nah, Paddy will be fine; it’s Tim I’m worried about.” Cash grinned. “And if he's not coping, he's not going to answer this for days.”
They moved on to another site on the coast just after that. They found nothing of interest so they went for lunch in the city and then ditched the car to walk to the Castello Maniace. It had first been built by the Byzantines under Maniakes, but it had been rebuilt and renovated many times since then. It was built on the tip of the island that enclosed the southern harbor of Syracuse. Syracuse had always had two harbors, a deep sea harbor south of the island, and a small harbor to the north, protected by moles. The Greeks had begun to throw those up and they had been maintained by all the rulers since then.
There was a crowd of tourists walking through and they joined in with them. Behind them, they sauntered through the corridors of the ancient building and they kept looking for any hint of what they were looking for.
After a while, though, at the top of the building, where the parapets separated her from the sea, Cash lay her hands on her neck and sighed. “This is a waste of time,” she said.
