by James Becker
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 him how to run an empire. As far as we know, it was never intended to be published – it was just a private letter. I found a single reference in that text to an important treasure that was supposed to be “hidden in the valley”, which I agree isn’t an exact correlation with the other references. I also checked the translation of a tenth-century geography book written in Persian and called Hudūd al-Ālam, which translates as “The Limits of The World”.’ She looked at Bronson. ‘Following me so far?’
‘Sort of,’ he said. ‘Just don’t question me too closely afterwards. And I hope you aren’t expecting me to remember any of this,’ he muttered.
Angela laughed. ‘Point taken. The Hudūd al-Ālam described what was then known about the entire world, and its author divided the world into three areas – Asia, Europe and Libya, by which he almost certainly meant the whole of Africa – and described the geography, the people, the languages, the food, and so on. In the section dealing with Asia, I found a phrase very similar to those I’d looked at before. One section referred to “the treasure of the world” and described it as being hidden in a place of stone located in a high valley.’
‘But still no mention of where the hell the place is?’ Bronson said, sounding frustrated.
‘No, and that’s probably because the author didn’t know either. It’s generally accepted that he was just regurgitating chunks of information he’d gleaned from earlier works. And I found similar references in other books that dated from the tenth century. I then went back about half a millennium to the sixth century and a man named Procopius of Caesarea. He left a manuscript known as the Anecdota, which means “unpublished things” and which is today normally referred to as the “Secret History”, and there’s a mention in that of a treasure hidden in the valley of the flowers. But, just like the other writers, he doesn’t give any helpful details, like in which country the valley’s located.’
‘So that’s it, then, is it?’
Angela smiled enigmatically and took another sip of coffee. ‘Not quite,’ she said, ‘because two interesting things have emerged. I told you about the grimoire, the Liber Juratus. There’s a theory that it was written by a small group of magicians and alchemists who had decided to incorporate their entire body of learning into a single volume. It’s a big book – ninety-three chapters in all – covering a huge range of topics. But one section is devoted to the finding of treasure, and whoever wrote that bit insisted that this particular treasure had some kind of magical powers.’
‘But he was writing a book about magic, so you’d expect him to say something like that, wouldn’t you?’ Bronson objected.
‘Well, the text of the grimoire was written in Latin, so when I did a search I had to use a Latin term, obviously. I tried thesaurus mundi first.’
‘A thesaurus? I thought that meant a word list.’
‘That’s what it means today, yes, just a list of synonyms and antonyms, but back then it meant a treasure or possibly a treasury. Anyway, that didn’t produce any results, so I tried a different Latin noun – arcarum – and that did find a reference.’
Bronson looked interested. ‘Go on.’
‘The word arcarum is more of a catch-all term than thesaurus, and to find out what the word means you have to analyse the context, which involves studying the sentence in which it occurs. One of the meanings was “money” and another one was “strong-box”, but there was a third meaning that hadn’t even occurred to me until then.’
‘Which was?’
‘“Ark”,’ Angela replied simply.
For a second or two Bronson just looked at her. ‘“Ark” as in Noah’s Ark, or “Ark” as in “Ark of the Covenant”?’ he asked.
Angela raised her hand. ‘Arcarum could mean “Noah’s Ark”, I grant you. But I don’t think we’re looking for the remains of a wooden boat on top of a mountain somewhere, Chris, do you?’
Chris leaned back in his chair and whistled. ‘Are you sitting here in this small Italian restaurant trying to tell me you might be looking for the Ark of the Covenant?’
‘And there’s something else. The authors of grimoires and other “magick” texts were very fond of using analogies to obscure the meaning of certain passages. It was a kind of rudimentary code – you needed to be educated in the craft to some extent before you could understand what they were talking abou
t. For example, a very simple code would be for the writing to include something like “a box without hinges, lock or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid”.’
Angela looked at him expectantly, but Bronson just shook his head. ‘No idea,’ he said.
‘It’s an egg, you idiot. What else could it be?’ Angela shook her head. ‘Anyway, somebody a lot brighter than you would look at the rhyme and correctly identify the object as an egg, so that when the author of the work later referred to an egg, because of the words used in that rhyme they’d realize he was talking about a treasure chest. The egg would be the analogy for the treasure chest.’
‘I follow that,’ Bronson said, ‘stupid policeman though I undoubtedly am. But what’s that got to do with the Ark of the Covenant?’
Angela sighed. ‘My point is that there were two references in the grimoire that used almost the same words. But in the second one there was a misspelling – the author had substituted the letter “n” for the second “r” of arcarum.’
‘So instead of arcarum mundi it read arcanum mundi,’ Bronson said. ‘Gutenberg didn’t invent the printing press until the fifteenth century, if I remember my history correctly. So, if you’re right about the date of the grimoire, the first version must have been handwritten. Those two letters are very similar. Are you sure he didn’t just write the “r” with a slightly elongated down-stroke?’
‘I don’t think so. The two phrases were so similar that I’m certain it was done deliberately. And you haven’t asked the obvious question.’
‘I know,’ Bronson replied. ‘What does arcanum mean?’
‘I’d have thought you’d have guessed it, because it’s so similar to a modern English word. Arcanum means a sacred secret, a secret known only to a very few people, or a secret of nature, the kind of thing the alchemists spent their time searching for. It’s usually found in the plural form – arcana – and it’s the origin of the word “arcane”.’
‘So let me get this straight. In the grimoire you found, this hidden treasure is called both the arcarum mundi – meaning the “treasure of the world” – and the arcanum mundi – the “sacred secret of the world”.’
‘Precisely. There can’t be that many relics that could be considered to be both a treasure and a sacred secret, but without any doubt the Ark of the Covenant has to be one of them.’ Angela took his hand again. ‘Shall we continue this conversation at my flat?’
26
The night was warm and the streets still relatively busy as Bronson and Angela walked up Ealing Broadway.
‘You said there were two things you’d found. Obviously one was the grimoire, so what was the other?’ Bronson asked.
‘The other was the box of papers we found under that revolting stuffed fox. I’ve gone through them all now. In the main, they comprise notes of Bartholomew’s abortive expeditions, but they also contain his thoughts and conclusions. On his very last expedition to Egypt he writes that he is now certain that he is on the trail of the sakina, and that someone he refers to as “Sq” took it to Sinat.’
‘And that means exactly what?’ Bronson asked.
‘Well, he obviously didn’t want to write down his thoughts in plain language,’ Angela said. ‘Maybe he was worried about somebody reading them and stealing a march on him. The “Sq” is almost certainly his own pet abbreviation for Shishaq – he’s the only pharaoh I can think of whose name begins and ends with those letters.’
‘What about “Sinat”?’
‘Look,’ Angela said, taking his hand, ‘I think Bartholomew used a very simple code here. The word “Sinat” is “Tanis” spelt backwards, and that was where the Pharaoh Shishaq had his capital city, so if he did seize any prize or treasure, that would obviously be where he’d take it.’
‘And the “sakina”?’
‘It’s an Arabic word that derives from sakoon, meaning “peace” or “tranquillity”. But it has a more obscure secondary meaning as “the Chest in which the tranquillity of the Lord resides”. In other words, that sentence says that Shishaq seized the Ark of the Covenant and took it with him to his capital at Tanis.’
‘And we both know, from the time we spent together in Israel, that both the Ark of the Covenant and the tablets of stone it protected, actually existed,’ Bronson said slowly.
‘Absolutely,’ Angela agreed. ‘Anyway, according to one story in the Bible, Shishaq seized the Ark in about nine hundred and twenty BC. In another account, the Ark was looted from the First Temple, also known as Solomon’s Temple, in Jerusalem in five hundred and eighty-six BC, by King Nebuchadnezzar and his army. But nobody actually knows, and there’s nothing in the historical record to support or deny either suggestion.’ She paused. ‘However, I have got a theory of my own.’
They turned the corner towards the Common and Angela’s apartment block came into view.
‘I think we need to find out what the original Persian text said before we go any further,’ Bronson said. ‘And unless you’ve found it in that box from Carfax Hall, I’ve no idea where we’d start looking for it.’
‘It wasn’t there, Chris. If it had been, I’d already have told you. But there was something that suggested where we should start looking for it.’
Angela stopped suddenly, looking startled.
‘What is it?’ Bronson said, his hand on her shoulder.
‘I think there’s someone in my flat,’ she said.
27
Bronson stopped short and stared at the apartment block, seeing immediately what she meant. The lights in her lounge windows were blazing away, and he knew she always switched everything off whenever she left home.
‘OK.’ Bronson passed her the leather-bound box he’d been carrying, fished in his pocket and pulled out his car keys. ‘My car’s parked in the next street,’ he said. ‘Get in it, lock the doors and drive back here. Pick a spot where you’ve got a good view of the building and keep watch. And keep your mobile on and close to hand.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going inside, of course, and find out what’s happening.’
‘Shouldn’t we call the police?’
‘My dear Angela, I am the police. If I call the local bobbies, they’ll send a squad car along, blues and twos switched on, and whoever’s up there will leg it long before the car gets anywhere near the building.’
Reluctantly, Angela passed Bronson her keys. ‘Just be careful in there,’ she said, shivering a little as she remembered what had happened in Carfax Hall.
Bronson leaned across and kissed her. ‘I don’t intend to get hit on the head again,’ he said. ‘So stop worrying, and get the car.’
‘Looking both ways, Bronson strode briskly across the road. On the opposite side he stopped and looked back, making sure that Angela had gone, then walked towards her front door. He looked closely at the lock. Even a casual glance was enough to show him that it had been forced.
Angela paused briefly at the street corner and looked back towards her apartment building. Bronson had just vanished inside the front lobby. She muttered a silent prayer for him and walked on.
As she did so, a shadow detached itself from a doorway on the opposite side of the street and moved after her.
Bronson pushed open the lobby door and the automatic hall lights flared into life. He had a choice of the lift or the stairs. Using the stairs would have been the quieter option, but Bronson knew he’d be out of breath by the time he reached Angela’s floor, and that wouldn’t be a good thing if he was going to have to get physical with a couple of tea-leaves in her flat. So he pressed the button for the lift instead.
When the doors opened, he stepped inside the lift and pressed the button for two floors above Angela’s apartment – that way, if somebody was burgling her flat, they’d hear the lift carry on past that floor, and wouldn’t expect him to then come creeping down the staircase. Or that’s what he hoped, anyway. Then he took out his mobile and pressed triple nine, but not the button to dial the number. If there w
as an intruder, he’d only have one button to press, and he could do that with the phone in his pocket. The mobile cell triangulation system would pinpoint his position even if he couldn’t speak, and he knew that would probably be a faster way of summoning help than talking to the operator, especially if the background noise on the call was the sound of fighting.
The lift shuddered to a stop and he made his way slowly and silently down the two flights of stairs to the correct floor.
Angela’s apartment door was ajar. Bronson could see a thin sliver of light between the door and the jamb. It looked as if whoever was inside the flat had switched on most of the lights. It also meant that there could be several intruders, confident they could handle anyone who tried to interfere with them.
If so, it wasn’t good news.
* * *
Angela walked swiftly down the street, looking for Bronson’s BMW. She spotted it about a hundred yards ahead, and felt in her coat pocket for the keys.
But as she approached the car, a figure dressed in black stepped out on to the pavement from between two parked vehicles a few yards in front of her, and stood there, motionless by the kerb, looking towards her.
Angela’s stride faltered. There was something about him, some hint of menace or implied threat, that her heightened awareness picked up. She stepped off the pavement, deciding to cross to the other side of the road in order to avoid him.
She glanced both ways but there was no traffic coming from either direction. When she got about halfway across the road she looked back, and her heart pounded in her chest. The man had also stepped off the pavement, and was angling towards her.
‘Oh, God,’ she whispered, remembering all too clearly what had happened to Bronson and Jonathan Carfax.
