Metaxos stood up. “Oracle! Oracle of Delphi! Breath of the god Apollo! Did Metaxos steal the Athenians’ golden stone?”
He sat down and winked at Sam.
At first nothing happened except for a slight clicking of teeth, as if the Pythia was chewing on something. Then a strange swallowing sound was heard, and she seemed to spit on the ground — like the archon, Sam thought. Everybody spits here! After a short silence, a hoarse voice rose that would be hard to imagine coming from a woman’s throat.
“Apollo, the god most beloved of the gods, has heard your request, Metaxos. Here is his answer: Does the lamb steal the grass it eats from the mountain? Does the bird steal the water it drinks from the fish? Metaxos has never taken anything except the air he breathes and the milk he drinks from his animals’ teats. It is Apollo’s pleasure to give them to him.”
The oracle then fell silent. A second passed, then ten seconds … Sam wasn’t sure he grasped the message’s hidden meaning, but overall, things were looking pretty favorable. In fact, the good priest was the first to express his pleasure.
“So much the better!” he exclaimed. “We now have proof that —”
From behind the curtain, the Pythia cut him off. “Apollo’s breath has not expired! There is something else that men must know!”
Sam shrank on his bench: His father was surely about to be accused!
“Apollo, son of Zeus, has many times crossed the sky in his golden chariot,” the hoarse voice continued. “He follows the course of the sun and sets the rhythm of the day. He knows the value of time and of the passing hours. Men of Delphi, let the shepherds friend depart. Let him depart now. May he return through the gate of days that led him here. But he must hurry: One of his people is trying to close it. Apollo has spoken.”
Sam had no time to think about the warning, because the more suspicious of the Athenians was on him in three quick steps.
“Whoever you really are, Samos of Samos, it would seem the gods have decided in your favor. But don’t celebrate too soon. We will catch the stranger one of these days, and when that time comes, believe me: He wont steal anything ever again.”
An hour later, Metaxos and his dog were chasing each other among the olive trees, delighted to be together again. The shepherd put his hands on his forehead to make them into horns — like the Minotaur? — and head down, charged his dog, who was barking joyously.
“Don’t you want to play with us, Samos?”
“Not now. I’m thinking.”
Sam was leaning against a wall in the huts shadow, trying to make sense of the Pythias warning. Apparently the Greek gods — or at least those who traveled with the sun and knew about the passing of time — shared some idea of the high priest Setni’s magic. Egyptian gods and Greek gods, all wrestling with the same eternal question …
“One of my people,” Sam repeated to himself. Someone from his own time, probably, who was trying to close the gate of days. Was it to prevent him from traveling? To keep his father from returning? And how did you close the “gate of days,” anyway?
“Come out and play, Samos!”
“Thanks, no. I have to leave.”
Sam had been turning the coin in his pocket over and over. What if he spent an extra night here? The Treasury of the Athenians was so close; wasn’t it likely that it held at least a few coins with holes in them? His father had done half the job by breaking the lock with his drill. If Sam was careful …
Argos suddenly bolted inside the hut, followed by his master, who tripped and fell to the ground, laughing. “Metaxos is going to eat you up, you hound from Hades!”
There was also that comment by the Athenian representative: “We will catch the stranger one of these days, and when that time comes, he won’t steal anything ever again.” Did that mean his father had stolen other things from this time besides the Navel of the World? And that he could be expected to return soon? Who knows — maybe if Sam stationed himself by the stone for a while, he would see him reappear!
“Here, Samos, this bread is for you.”
A sweaty Metaxos emerged from his poor shelter, holding a nearly whole round loaf under his arm. He gave Sam a slice a handbreadth wide.
“This is the Navel of the World,” he added with a sly look.
“I’m sorry?”
“This is what I was hiding the other night when the guards saw me leaving the city. A nice loaf of bread my Delphi mother gave me; a nice loaf she baked for me! But you mustn’t ever tell anyone that the oracle takes care of Metaxos, all right? It would shame her, since I’m just a shepherd. That’s why I had to keep quiet.”
Sam was astonished. “The Athenians could have had you put to death,” he said. “You risked your life so you wouldn’t betray your Delphi mother?”
“I was right, since Samos came,” he answered candidly. “The gods rewarded me well. For that matter —” Metaxos put his other hand in his pocket. “You deserve a reward too. You can give these back to your father.”
He held something out: Dangling from wires were two coins with holes in them. Two coins with holes!
“These are the pretty earrings your father made with the ram’s horns. He gave them to me before the stone swallowed him.”
Sam laid them cautiously in his palm. Two coins, the right size and with nice holes in them, mounted as pendants and bearing the ram of Delphi. His father must have stolen them from the Treasury of the Athenians.
“I’ll give one back to you, anyway,” Sam blurted, trying to master his emotion. “You can pick it up next to the stone after I’m gone?”
“That way I’ll have a souvenir of both of you!”
“Yes, and I’ll have a souvenir of you.”
All that remained was for Sam to leave for good. Metaxos let him understand that he didn’t want to accompany him to the stone statue, and that he would retrieve the precious coin later. Indeed, the shepherd seemed almost relieved to see him go, as if the threat of being torn from his hills and sucked into nothingness would disappear with Samos of Samos. He barely waved good-bye, just turned his back to go tend his animals. Was that a way of making the farewells easier?
Sam climbed back up the hill toward the meadow where he had arrived only that morning — an eternity ago! In the distance, the sun was setting on the glowing sea, and he saw a black dot racing above the waves. Was it Apollo’s chariot, crossing the sky at the end of the day? After all, nothing was impossible.
7 A Rabid Rabbit
Sam lay on the basement’s cement floor for a moment, catching his breath. Aside from nausea, one of the most uncomfortable effects of his trips was the echo effect he experienced on his return, where every sound and movement around him was repeated with a slight delay. This deja vu effect had been invaluable when he faced big Monk during the Sainte-Mary judo tournament the previous week, because it let him anticipate his opponent’s moves and eventually win the championship. But it was very unsettling, and Sam spent several minutes waiting for it to wear off.
He then left the secret storeroom, taking care to pull the tapestry that hid the entrance back in place. The bookstore was empty, and he was able to change his clothes — nothing like a good pair of jeans! — before wolfing down a chocolate bar that he had thought to stash in one of the kitchen cabinets. He then climbed out the ground-floor window and crossed Mrs. Bombardier’s and the Fosters’ backyards. The Fosters’ dog, who was usually pretty friendly, bared its teeth at him; maybe it caught a whiff of its distant Greek forebear.
After making sure Barenboim Street was empty, Sam hopped the fence and took the bus to his grandmother’s, praying that Aunt Evelyn wouldn’t be home. Alas, Apollo must have withdrawn his blessing en route. Sam had barely gotten off at the bus stop when a brand-new Porsche 4x4 drove up onto the sidewalk, heading straight toward him, and stopped in a squeal of tires a foot away. Evelyn’s boyfriend Rudolf — that’s what she called him, “my boyfriend,” even though at fifty he was long past being a boy —jumped out.
“Wel
l, well, if it isn’t Samuel! Mind telling me where you’re coming from?”
“Is that any of your business?” Sam said coldly.
The passenger-side window came purring down, and a familiar voice rode a gust of air-conditioning out of the car.
“Of course it’s his business, you rude thing!” screeched Aunt Evelyn. “Someone has to be concerned about how you spend your days! If your father hadn’t disappeared and forced your grandparents to —”
“That’s all right, darling,” said Rudolf. “I’ll deal with him.”
He strode toward Sam as if he were about to give him the beating of the millennium. Ever since Allan Faulkner had disappeared, Rudolf had shown an unfortunate tendency to view himself as the head of the family, and to see in Sam a particularly intractable future delinquent. He had first suggested the boot camp in the United States for Sam not long before.
“You didn’t have lunch with Grandma, did you? She left to play bridge just now and was wondering where you’d gone to.”
“I let her know,” replied Sam. “I was at Harold’s all afternoon.”
“Harold, eh? He’s very convenient, Harold is.” Rudolf’s glittering blue eyes looked anything but friendly. “Tell me, what did you do to your aunt this morning?”
“This morning?”
“Yes, when you were trying to involve Lily in your dirty little tricks. You got Grandpa upset at Evelyn.”
“What?” shouted Sam. “She’s the one who got hysterical! We were just eating our cereal when —”
Rudolf drew back his hand and seemed about to hit him. “Don’t ever speak about your aunt that way!”
Sam was about to defend himself when he noticed Lily waving wildly at him from the back of the car. He didn’t understand what his cousin was trying to tell him, but he figured that a fight with Rudolf would only cause her extra problems. So he stepped back and lowered his eyes.
“That’s better,” Rudolf snapped, mistaking his reaction for submission. “Don’t you know your aunt has weak nerves? She’s very sensitive to being called hysterical. And your father hasn’t always behaved well toward her. In fact, it’s partly his fault that she’s in the state she is. So if you’re planning to go the same route, you’ll have to deal with me.”
Sam shrugged and held his tongue.
“We’re going to spend the night at a hotel near the water park. When we get back, I don’t want your grandparents telling me you’ve gotten into trouble again. All right?”
Sam nodded slowly. He was only half listening to Rudolf rant because he was trying to understand the charades Lily was acting out in the backseat. First she drew something in the air: a rectangle … a rectangle that you unfold… a book… the Book of Time, for sure! Okay, what next? She slipped her right arm under her left one, then put both hands above her ears and began to wiggle them while shaking her head … A rabbit? What did a rabbit have to do with anything? She also opened her mouth in a funny way, as if she were trying to bite. … A crazed rabbit that hopped out of the Book of Time? It didn’t make any sense!
But Evelyn was raising her window and Sam couldn’t see anything more through the tinted glass. Rudolf walked back to the car, pointing his finger at him. “Don’t you give your aunt a hard time, boy, ever again!”
He slammed the door and roared off, probably pleased by his show of strength. Rudolf really was a self-satisfied idiot.
When Sam got to his grandmother’s, he first checked to make sure he was home alone, then attacked the refrigerator. He stacked a tray with a big glass of orange juice, two slices of cold pizza reheated in the microwave, the remains of a pasta salad, a piece of cheese so artificial that the milk it was made of probably came from a plastic cow, two chocolate yogurts, and a nice red apple that he polished with his napkin. He carried all this to the table and devoured it at a speed close to the world snacking record.
His hunger satisfied, Sam went up to his room, pulled on a clean T-shirt, and rummaged in his closet for the hidden box. He found the collection of photographs of Bran Castle and the sheet with the alchemist’s Latin text, but not the Book of Time or the coins. Lily hadn’t put them back, apparently. Was that what she was trying to tell him in the car?
He hurried to her bedroom next door, a place he didn’t often have occasion to enter. Before discovering the stone statue, Sam and Lily had avoided each other as much as possible, each viewing the other as a living monument of purest stupidity. Their time-travel adventures had brought them much closer, but hadn’t given Sam time to visit his cousins domain.
A very strange place, a girls bedroom — all mauve and pink, from the bedspread to the curtains, and including the pillows, lamp, bandanna on the chair back, book bag, and dance slippers. Orlando Bloom ruled the appropriately lavender walls: Orlando Bloom as an elf, Orlando Bloom as a pirate, Orlando Bloom as a Trojan warrior, Orlando Bloom sitting with his legs crossed, Orlando Bloom standing with his arms crossed, Orlando Bloom lying down with his fingers crossed. He was clearly a full-time demigod.
All right, wondered Sam, where could she have put them?
He opened closets, looked under the bed, and parted the curtains: nothing. He moved books, pulled out the bookcase, and felt behind the chest of drawers: nothing. Zan, Lily’s favorite stuffed animal, lay on one of the stereo speakers and seemed to be mocking Sam’s efforts. He was a floppy dog with short gray fur, a pointed snout, and long, dangling ears. Ears! His cousin wasn’t pretending to be a rabid rabbit, but her pet pooch! Arf!
Sam grabbed Zan and shook him, but the dog was too small to contain a book. He then inspected the speaker Zan had been on, tipping it back and forth. Sure enough, something moved inside. He gently removed the black screen covering the loudspeaker and — bingo! — out slid the Book of Time and his father’s black notebook. The three coins with holes were neatly taped inside the speaker case. Sam carefully replaced the screen. His cousin might have dubious taste in colors, but when it came to hiding places, she couldn’t be beat!
Sam waited until he was back in his room to open the big red book. The same title appeared on every page: “Delphi, the Sanctuary of Apollo.” Two black-and-white engravings showed the ruined city from above and the Temple of Apollo with its few remaining upright columns. The text recounted a legend in which Apollo had to defeat a terrible serpent before establishing his temple and his cult. There was also a reference to the Navel of the World, or omphalos, the famous stone that the two eagles dropped to mark the center of the earth.
The omphalos…
Sam sat down at his computer and launched an Internet search. He wasn’t so much interested in the history of the omphalos as in what had happened to it recently. He found a few photographs of the stone — it was indeed bullet shaped, the way it had looked behind the temple curtain, with braided ropes carved on its sides — and some articles that confirmed his hunch. The original of the Navel of the World was on display at the Delphi Museum, but a number of copies of it existed. One long-missing gold copy had recently turned up and been auctioned in London for the equivalent of $10,125,000. The seller was Arkeos, a private company that specialized in high-end antiquities. It reportedly received the piece from an anonymous collector whose name it had agreed not to reveal; the buyer was a major Japanese bank.
Sam clicked on the arkeos.com link and swore under his breath when he saw the company’s home page appear. Arkeos’s logo was a pair of tapering horns enclosing a solar disk — the same strange U as the one tattooed on the burglar’s shoulder!
How could that be? Unless … Sam dreaded what he was starting to suspect. Had his father stolen the Navel of the World in order to sell it to Arkeos? Was he perhaps in league with the thief at the museum? If the thief had been an archeology intern with Allan in Egypt, they might have been friends — but then he probably wouldn’t call and threaten Allan, nor would he beat up Allan’s son! Of course, according to Sam’s theory, the other intern also knew how to time-travel, so he could have stolen the omphalos himself. But where wo
uld he have found a stone statue? As far as Sam knew, the Barenboim house sheltered the only one in Sainte-Mary — in North America, as a matter of fact. And Metaxos had been so certain that his visitor with the rams heads was Sam’s father.
“What kind of a mess did you get yourself in now, Dad?”
But Allan didn’t answer him, any more than he had that morning.
Sam opened the black notebook and scanned the odd list again.
It still didn’t make much sense, but thanks to the Web, Sam learned a little more about each of these things. Meriweserre, whose name was spelled several different ways, was an Egyptian pharaoh of the fifteenth dynasty. Al-Hakim was a Middle Eastern ruler around 1010. Xerxes was a Persian emperor who fought the Greeks. Izmit and Isfahan were cities, one in Turkey and the other in Iran. Had his father gone to all those places and all those times? Or was he planning to go there? And what was the connection with Bran Castle?
As for the rest of the message, only the money amount made sense. Was Allan supposed to receive a million dollars as a commission on the Navel of the World sale? Or was it the value of some other archeological treasure he planned to steal? A million dollars would certainly pay off the mortgage, allowing him to continue time-traveling — and to continue stealing antiquities.
Sam decided to store all the information he’d gathered in his computer. As he copied a picture of the omphalos into his images folder, he came across the family photo album he’d scanned a few years earlier. He usually avoided looking at it, because the past was still too painful. But today, after everything he’d learned — including the mounting evidence that his father was a thief— Sam wanted to look back at that wonderful time when he had both his parents and no harm could ever reach him.
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