Khalil glared at Ciarán, while Subh looked at him as if surprised that he could talk. “Does Al-Mansor know of this?”
“I don’t know, Your Highness,” Ciarán admitted, “but we could make sure he never learns how to find it.”
“You realize,” she said sharply, “that to defy the Illustrious Victor is to court death.”
Ciarán swallowed hard. “I’ll take that risk.”
“Then you are either extremely brave or a fool.” Her lips curved into a slight frown. “Still, why do I care if Al-Mansor has another weapon? He already has the army, and I’ve abandoned any more thoughts of overthrowing him. He’s too cunning.”
“There is always his considerable pride,” Khalil interjected. “If we were to find the secret to this weapon in Al-Hakkam’s library, a poem of how such a secret slipped away under Al-Mansor’s very nose might find its way around Al-Andalus. Al-Hakkam, the caliph most wise, kept the secret to a weapon the invader Charles prized. But Al-Mansor lost the secret, believing the imams’ lies, for it was stolen from the library as books burned upon the pyres. Now, in Jannah, the wise caliph laughs, while the Illustrious Victor cries. This tale could become quite popular in León and Barcelona, not to mention the many places in Córdoba where people delight in any misfortune that befalls the king of the Moors.”
A wicked smile spread across Subh’s lips. “I may consider your request,” she said, reaching for Khalil’s hands. “But first, let us speak privately.”
Khalil followed her, disappearing behind the curtain of beads. Ciarán looked at Eli, who had stared dumbstruck at the sultana of Córdoba. They waited in the parlor for what seemed an hour. The whole time, Ciarán worried about the sultana’s decision.
When the beaded curtain parted, Khalil emerged alone. His face looked as hard as stone, and Ciarán’s heart sank. Then the Persian’s smile flashed. “She will get us the access we need. We go there tonight.”
Ciarán’s spirits soared. “What made her decide?”
Khalil smoothed his beard. “I have certain talents in the art of persuasion.”
Ciarán blushed as they left the parlor, only to walk straight into Najah’s bare chest. With his powerful arms, the eunuch pushed Ciarán aside. “I see your time is done,” Najah snapped.
Khalil’s eyes narrowed. Ciarán glanced between the Persian and the eunuch, wondering if he had been outside the entire time.
“Follow me,” Najah commanded.
Khalil gave Ciarán a nod, and they followed Najah back through the garden. By the time they strolled past the giraffes and gazelles, Ciarán had forgotten about the eunuch’s rough treatment and was instead brimming with anticipation.
For by this evening, they would stand inside the great library of Córdoba.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
THE SECRET COLLECTION
A half hour after sunset, Khalil met Dónall and Ciarán outside Abir’s house. His curved sword hung at his side, and his dark cloak fluttered in the chill wind that howled through the Jewish quarter.
“It is odd how that storm swept in so quickly,” Khalil remarked.
Isaac looked beyond the rooftops, where the obscured half-moon painted the edge of the storm clouds in an eerie glow. “This is not good,” he said to Dónall.
Alais gave Ciarán a worried look. “They must have followed us up the river,” he said under his breath. “Let’s hope the talismans keep them at bay.”
Dónall clung to the strap of his book satchel and glared at the storm. Then he pulled the talisman out from beneath his habit and let it dangle in plain view. “To hell with the Moors’ laws!”
Following Dónall’s lead, Ciarán pulled his talisman out. So did Alais.
“My thoughts exactly,” Isaac said with a nod. His talisman with the Star of David in the center showed just below his beard.
Khalil looked at them with a bemused expression. “Can we go now?”
Ciarán, Dónall, Isaac, and Alais followed Khalil down the winding streets lit by hanging oil lamps, to the plaza of the great library. Ciarán half expected to see angry clouds billowing up behind them, but there was only the wind whistling through the plaza.
At the plaza’s entrance, Khalil held up his hand to stop them while a trio of Moorish guards strode past. When they had gone, he drew the hood of his cloak over his head and said, “Follow me.”
He led them to a side door under an arched alcove far from the library’s main entrance. An unlit lantern hung over the door. Cloaked in the shadows, Khalil knocked three times.
“Are they gone?” a voice asked through the door—surprisingly, in Greek.
“There are no guards,” Khalil answered.
“Are you the poet?” the voice asked, this time in Latin.
“It is I,” Khalil responded.
The door cracked open, and an old eunuch peered out. His wide eyes and sharply hooked nose made him look like a strange, effeminate owl. Tufts of curly gray hair above his ears only added to the effect. A brass holder with a burning candle trembled slightly in his right hand.
“Only an educated man speaks both Greek and Latin,” the eunuch said with a certain air of pomposity. “It has been a long time, Khalil al-Pârsâ. Come in—quickly.”
They entered into a musty corridor. The eunuch closed the door behind them. In the candlelight, his eyes shifted nervously. “The imams have spies everywhere,” he said. “They would like nothing more than to see what is in the chamber you seek.”
“We were careful not to be followed,” Khalil assured him.
The old eunuch exhaled, trying to calm his nerves. “The sultana said you are scholars from the north. I am Talid, royal librarian to the caliph. Normally, I would not do this, but the sultana can be persuasive.”
Talid led them up a flight of stairs to a broad hall lit by hanging crystal lamps. Mosaics of marble and gleaming black stone adorned the walls, and on each side of the hall were rooms with sandalwood bookshelves, reading tables, and more hanging lamps.
“Can you believe this?” Ciarán whispered to Dónall. “There must be more books in one room than in all Derry!
“A great many more,” Dónall replied.
They followed Talid down the hall, past more rooms, some of them scriptoriums with long rows of desks and arcades of windows nearly two stories tall.
“How many scribes work here?” Ciarán asked.
“At least twelve score,” Talid replied. “We have separate rooms for copyists, binders, illuminators, and translators.”
“I don’t smell any vellum,” Ciarán observed, noticing only the fragrance of sandalwood.
“Of course not. We use paper.”
“Paper?”
“I suppose they don’t have it in your infidel homeland,” Talid said. “It’s made from wood instead of calfskin. It’s cleaner and far smoother to write on. And it makes our calves much happier than in your part of the world.”
“Do you have to scrape it?”
“Of course not,” Talid replied, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling. “What a primitive waste of time.”
Dónall stared at the library in wonder. “Never in all my years . . .”
“I told you,” Isaac reminded him with a smile.
Their footsteps echoed down the hall as Talid took them through an archway near the end, which led to a dark, zigzagging corridor that ended abruptly at a large bronze door. Alais gasped, grabbing Ciarán’s hand, when the flickering candlelight reflected against the face of a roaring lion.
“It’s only a relief set into the door,” Khalil whispered.
“The door has no handle,” Dónall said.
“Quite unnecessary.” Talid reached his left hand up into the lion’s gaping maw until it disappeared. If the lion were real, Ciarán imagined, it would surely have bitten the hand clean off. But then he heard a faint click, and with a grunt, the librarian pushed open the heavy door.
“Clever,” Dónall said.
Past the doorway, Talid led them up a steep,
curving stairwell, and Ciarán supposed they were ascending one of the library’s towers. At the top of the stairs, after a long climb, the candlelight revealed an archway of ebony and gold framing another door. Talid placed a burnished key into the lock and pulled the door open.
A scent of antiquity flooded the stairwell. “We are here,” Talid said, smiling.
He lit the first of three hanging lanterns. Suddenly the hexagonal chamber blazed to life. “Behold!” he proclaimed. “The Chamber of Enlightenment!”
Ciarán gasped. Twenty feet above, the domed ceiling glittered with gold and jewels set into ebony tiles to look like a clear night sky, depicting the constellations in their proper configuration. At the dome’s center were seven jewels of various sizes, arranged as planets around a sunlike mosaic of red and gold.
Talid lit the remaining two lanterns, which hung above a small reading table, making the dome’s jewels shine brighter. Small wooden drawers lined three of the chamber’s five walls. Against the fourth wall stood a gigantic bookshelf, as tall as the ceiling and crammed with hundreds of tomes bound in wood or leather, many of them shimmering with jewels set into their spines. The entire shelf was secured by twin cagelike doors of burnished bronze, with bars cast in a hexagonal pattern similar to that of the tiled floor. Two ladders, which seemed attached somehow to the walls and had tiny wheels at their bases, allowed one to reach the higher works.
“The wisdom of the ages surrounds you,” Talid declared.
Dónall stood in mute wonder.
“I never could have imagined such a place!” Ciarán told Alais.
“Nor I,” she whispered.
“So,” Talid said, “tell me what is it you seek.”
Dónall and Ciarán looked to Isaac. “We are looking for records from the time of Cyrus the Great,” Isaac said.
Talid sighed. “Can you be more specific? Al-Hakkam was very fond of Cyrus. For decades, he sent envoys to Baghdad, Damascus, and Alexandria to procure from their libraries the rarest of works: scrolls transcribed from the Persians’ clay cylinders, and original artifacts lifted from the ruins of ancient Babylon, some even dating back to the time of Assyria or even Sumeria. In this room alone, there may be scores of such works.”
“These would concern the capture of Babylon,” Isaac explained. “Specifically, the fate of treasures of the Jewish Temple taken to Babylon from Jerusalem.”
“That’s not much to work with,” Talid sniffed, “but I’ll try to make do.” He reached for a leather-bound tome set in its own narrow shelf among the walls of drawers. From around his neck, attached to a golden chain, he took a smooth glass disk slightly smaller than his palm. He opened the tome and began reading through the glass.
“What is that?” Dónall asked.
“A lens,” Talid replied, “invented by the great Abbas ibn Firnas. It makes the words easier on these old eyes.”
“Moorish science,” Dónall remarked. “Fascinating!”
The page Talid read from did not contain words at all, but line upon line of symbols.
“Those symbols are astrological!” Ciarán said.
“Observant, eh?” Talid said, looking up from the page. “This is the catalog of every work collected in the Chamber of Enlightenment. It is priceless, though dangerous in the hands of men like the imams. So I had it written in a cipher based on the signs of the zodiac. Each symbol corresponds to a letter. Of course, there are scores upon scores of possible combinations, so to read it you need a key to match the symbols to the right letters. Without it, you’d be hopelessly lost. It’s my most brilliant security measure, I must say.”
“How do you know what the key is?” Ciarán asked.
“Ah, for that you’d have to know who invented this particular cipher, and then know where to find his particular key. I am fond of the cipher of Faris al-Basir, but there are others.”
Ciarán turned to Khalil. “Fierabras,” he whispered, and Khalil nodded, as if he, too, wondered whether it was a coincidence, or something more.
Meanwhile, Talid ran a bony finger down each page, puckering his lips as he read in silence. After a dozen or so pages, he looked up again. “There is nothing listed about the treasures of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, although there are several scintillating works on the famous Hanging Gardens.”
“That would not be it, I am afraid,” Isaac said.
Dónall looked to Isaac. “Where would the Babylonians have taken the Ark?”
“An ark?” Talid asked, taking the glass from his eye.
“The Ark of the Covenant,” Dónall explained. “The Jews’ most sacred treasure.”
Khalil stared at them incredulously. “That is what you are looking for in the hope of finding Enoch’s device?”
“Not exactly,” Isaac said. “But it is the only lead we have. As for where the Babylonians might have taken the Ark, let us start with Nebuchadnezzar. He was a conqueror, and the capture of Jerusalem would have been a significant event. To him, the treasures of the temple may have been trophies of war, to be put on public display or kept in his personal treasury.”
Talid searched the lists with his index finger. “There is a record from the siege of the palace of Nabondus, the last of the Babylonian kings. It refers to the treasury and an earlier list, from one Nebuzaradan.”
Isaac brightened. “That may be it! Nebuzaradan was Nebuchadnezzar’s captain of the guard—the very man who pillaged Jerusalem.”
“By Patrick’s beard!” Dónall breathed.
As Talid pulled a brass ring with scores of tiny keys from under his robe, Ciarán’s anticipation mounted. The old man’s gnarled fingers jingled through the keys until he found the one he wanted. Then, walking over to one of the walls of drawers, he inserted the key into a tiny slot, pulled open the drawer, and lifted out a heavily stained papyrus scroll. Carefully, he unfurled it. The scroll was written in a foreign script.
“It’s in Persian,” Khalil said. “May I?”
“Better you than I, my friend,” Isaac said, smiling.
Khalil took the scroll from Talid and read for some time. “It’s an inventory from the Persians’ seizure of Nabondus’s palace. And it does mention a list, prepared by Nebuzaradan, of what was taken from the temple of the Hebrew god in Jerusalem. The author transcribed this list from the Chaldean tongue.”
“What is on it?” Isaac asked eagerly.
“Pillars of bronze, shovels, basins, ladles, and the vessels of bronze used in the temple’s service,” Khalil said. “Also, fire pans, pots, lamp stands, incense dishes, bowls for libations, and the bronze oxen that supported the basin of the sea. But it says nothing of your golden ark.”
Isaac rubbed his fingers over his eyes. “That is it, then?”
“There is nothing more,” Khalil said.
Dónall grimaced. “Maybe Jeremiah did hide the Ark . . . So now what?”
Ciarán shook his head. “What if Nebuchadnezzar was scared of it? After all, the Ark contained the power of the Hebrew god. He might not have wanted it in the palace.”
“Then where would it be?” Dónall pressed.
“If I may?” Khalil said. “Suppose the Babylonians believed their gods were more powerful. Might they have charged their own gods to look after such a treasure?”
“The Babylonian temples, maybe?” Isaac said. “Are there records?”
“Perhaps.” Talid set the lens to his eye and began scanning more pages in the catalog. “There is a document, written by a Persian scribe, about the Etemenanki.”
“What’s that?” Ciarán asked.
“The ziggurat of Marduk,” Talid said as he began to climb one of the ladders. He stopped at a point about half way up the wall. “The largest of the temples, set in the center of Babylon, beyond the famous Ishtar Gate. Herodotus once described it as eight square towers, with one erected atop the other. At the summit of the topmost tower was a great temple, whose only resident was a Babylonian girl—whichever one the god Marduk had chosen.” He unlocked another drawer
and removed a thick papyrus scroll.
“It is long.” Khalil remarked.
“The Etemenanki was one of the most significant structures in the world,” Talid said. “It stood nearly three hundred feet tall. Some scholars believe it was the fabled Tower of Babel.”
As Talid descended the ladder, Ciarán could only imagine how old that temple must have been. Talid handed the scroll to Khalil, who began reading. After some time, he looked up. “Here,” he said, “the scribe talks about a chamber they discovered beneath the lowest tier of the ziggurat. He read it aloud, translating the Persian into Latin:
At last we came upon the oft-rumored chamber where Nebuchadnezzar, in his madness, hid the most sacred treasures of the Hebrew god, for these were things the king feared. The chamber’s entrance was marred with symbols of the Chaldean gods. Past it, on a stone slab, we found a budding almond rod, a serpent made of bronze and shattered into pieces, and the signet ring of the Judean kings.
Khalil shook his head. “There is no mention of your Ark.”
But the monks and the rabbi glanced at one another with shared recognition in their eyes. “A signet ring,” Ciarán said. “It could be the Seal of King Solomon!”
“Is there more?” Isaac asked.
Khalil gave them a puzzled look and then read more of the text.
And so the magi were summoned, but when they arrived in the chamber, the ring was gone, leaving only the large gemstone that had been in the ring’s center. The magi took this gemstone, for they recognized it and were unafraid of the power of the Hebrew god. And they vowed to keep the stone until the time of the prophecy of Zoroaster.
“My God!” Dónall murmured. “A magian connection.”
“But what about the Ark?” Ciarán asked.
“That is no matter,” Isaac insisted. “As in my dream, the Urim must have been removed, along with the rod of Aaron, and kept with the brazen serpent of Moses, which was broken by King Hezekiah. Who knows when that happened? Yet if these magi found the Urim, where would they have taken it?”
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