The Mask of Destiny

by Richard Newsome

  They came to a single marble column in the middle of the road. Several tall earthenware pots circled its base.

  Ruby craned her neck to look up to the top of the pillar, about four metres in the air. ‘What do you think this is?’ she said.

  Nico ran a finger across the sealed top of one of the pots and rubbed it against his thumb. He whispered something to Sam.

  ‘Hey Gerald,’ Sam said. ‘Do you still have that flint you bought for the camping trip?’

  Gerald put his right hand to his throat. After all they’d been through, he was surprised to find the black leather cord was still around his neck. He pulled it over his head and gave it to Sam.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Gerald asked.

  ‘Nico wants to test an idea.’

  Their young guide had his knife out and was running the blade around the rim of one of the pots, easing out a clay stopper the size of his fist. He pulled it free and, with Sam’s help, tipped the pot and poured its contents into a shell-shaped cup on the side of the column.

  ‘Oil,’ Sam said as they put the empty pot back on the ground. ‘Now let’s see if this thing works.’ He pulled the striker from the flint and dashed it along the side of the box. A nest of sparks erupted into the cup and a second later light glowed from the top of the column.

  ‘Brilliant!’ Sam said. ‘Ancient street lighting.’

  The light peeled back the darkness and bathed the area in a sepia haze.

  ‘Nice one, Nico,’ Ruby said. ‘Look, there’s another lamppost up here. Come on, Gerald. Give us a hand.’

  Together, Ruby and Gerald hauled one of the oil pots to the next column. Soon another flower of light bloomed. The glow spread, and Sam let out a sharp gasp. ‘Will you look at that…’

  The lamppost stood opposite a tall building with two stout columns supporting a small portico. Gerald looked through a square window in the front wall to see a chest piled high with gold coins.

  ‘Oh my gosh,’ he breathed.

  ‘That’s right, billionaire boy,’ Sam said, making a dash for the door to the building. ‘It’s our turn to be rich now.’

  Gerald, Ruby and Nico joined Sam in the doorway. The walls were covered with frescos of maidens bathing in tree-lined streams. The painted faces gazed into the room at rows of golden ornaments arranged on oriental rugs across the floor. Chests of coins sat beside piles of glittering gems the size of quails’ eggs.

  Ruby plunged a hand deep into a bowl of pearls; the spheres dropped through her fingers in a lustrous waterfall. ‘Incredible,’ she whispered.

  For the next hour they walked along the Sacred Way, lighting street lamps and revealing more and more treasuries as they went.

  ‘This is truly extraordinary,’ Ruby said. She was holding a solid gold statuette of an archer. They were inside the largest of the treasuries, a long building outside a walled-off section of the city. Every space inside was piled high with offerings to the Oracle of Delphi and to Apollo. ‘That this place has been buried here for—what?—sixteen hundred years. And look at all this stuff. It’s exactly the way it was in ancient times.’

  ‘I guess there’s no wind down here to blow the dust around, so anything inside a building is going to be preserved,’ Gerald said. He was looking at a carving of a white bull the size of a house brick. ‘What is this? Ivory, do you think?’

  Ruby gazed out the doorway to the path of lights that led down to the spring; it looked like a string of charms on a giant bracelet. She sat back on her heels and a thoughtful expression settled on her face.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘If this is the ancient city of Delphi, what are the ruins back in town?’

  Gerald settled into a pile of silk cushions, each as perfect as the day it was woven. ‘The ruins are a twin,’ he said.

  ‘A twin?’

  ‘Yep. Just like Castor and Pollux: one living above the ground and the other in the underworld. That’s what was going through my mind when Jarvis took a shot at us. Remember the tour guide in the museum saying the cult of the twins was really popular around here.’

  ‘Do you think the locals buried the city to protect the treasure from the emperor?’

  ‘Nope,’ Gerald said. ‘I think my thieving ancestors did that.’

  ‘What? Quintus and his sons buried the entire city of Delphi?’

  ‘Sure. Think about it. I couldn’t figure how my rotten relatives could move this much treasure away from here. It would take a thousand horse carts and forever to do it. The trick is, they didn’t move it. They left it right here.’

  ‘And buried it?’

  ‘It sits in a natural valley in the hillside. The Romans were good at engineering. Who’s to say they couldn’t devise some sort of structure held up by some props. Grow some grass across the top and you’d never know it was here. Then you build a fake Delphi further down the valley.’

  ‘And make it look like the city has been trashed and all the treasure stolen?’ Ruby said.

  ‘Exactly. It’s not like you’d need to take much care. It’s meant to look like a ruin. That way when Quintus and the boys don’t return to Rome and the emperor sends out a search party, it looks like they’ve stolen the treasure, torched the town and taken off.’

  ‘When all the time the treasure is right here, just waiting for the three brothers to come back and take it.’ Ruby tilted her head to the side. ‘Nice theory.’ Then her face turned dark. ‘But what happened to all the people who lived here?’

  Gerald breathed out. ‘My guess is Quintus probably forced them to bury the city. Remember when Dr Serafini read that letter to the emperor. Quintus and his sons were due to meet up with a company of soldiers. They enslave the locals, get them to bury the city, create a fake Delphi, then,’ Gerald paused, ‘then kill the lot of them.’

  Ruby gasped. ‘But that would be thousands of people.’

  Gerald closed his eyes. ‘I know.’

  Ruby looked down at the statuette in her hands. ‘But how would Quintus and his sons fool an entire company of soldiers? And if all the treasure is just laid out like this, what are the golden rods for? What do they unlock?’ Ruby put the statuette back on its pedestal. ‘Nice try, Gerald. But I think your theory needs some work.’

  Nico and Sam appeared in the doorway. They both held blazing iron torches. Sam had a gem-encrusted crown on his head. ‘Come on you two,’ he said. ‘Nico’s just had a brainwave.’

  Nico’s face was beaming. ‘These are the treasuries,’ he said, indicating the line of buildings they had been exploring. ‘The real prize must be up this way.’

  ‘What?’ Gerald said. ‘Even more of a prize than this?’

  ‘Of course,’ Nico said. ‘The Temple of Apollo—and the inner sanctum of the Oracle herself.’

  Sam slid his crown to the back of his head. ‘Then lead the way, Nico. If it’s more impressive than this lot, it’s something I want to see.’

  They climbed a set of stairs onto a terrace cloaked in shadow. They stopped at another lamppost, this one taller than the others and with three lanterns at the top. Nico broke the seal on an oil pot at its base and he and Sam emptied the contents into a well in the centre of the pillar. Nico squinted into the narrow opening.

  ‘One more perhaps?’ he said to Sam, and they poured in a second pot for good measure.

  ‘This should keep it going for a while,’ Nico said.

  Sam struck the flint and the three lanterns—pop, pop, pop—flared into life. Then, a second later, a colossal burst of light erupted to their left. A string of three-headed lampposts ignited in a chain reaction across the terrace, pouring out a wave of light that rolled over them and the exterior of the Temple of Apollo.

  The darkness fell away as if someone had opened a curtain onto a sunny day.

  ‘Holy cow!’ Sam said. ‘That is awesome.’

  Gerald could almost hear a choir burst into song.

  It was the most breathtaking sight.

  Marble columns lined the outside of
the long rectangular temple. Gold inlay glistered in the lamplight and brightly painted friezes capped the roofline. Standing to their right, across the terrace, was a colossal bronze statue of a man at least fifteen metres tall draped in silk. In one hand he held aloft a blazing lantern, the brightest point of light in the underworld. In the other hand was a bow and arrow.

  ‘Apollo!’ Nico said. ‘The archer.’

  A shiver ran the length of Gerald’s spine, then turned around and scuttled back the other way. Things seemed to be getting very close to home.

  Ruby appeared at his elbow, holding two blazing torches. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s see what’s so special about this temple.’

  The four of them approached the temple steps in a line. Columns towered above them and Gerald had a flashback to walking into the British Museum for the first time just eight weeks ago.

  They entered the portico. The doors to the temple— two enormous wooden portals—stood closed before them. Gerald was so transfixed by the majesty of everything around him that he didn’t see the slab of white marble jutting up from the floor. He stubbed his toe, hard.

  ‘Ow!’ he cried, hopping on one foot and holding back the stream of swear words that flooded his brain. ‘Why would you leave that in the middle of the floor?’

  He pointed his flaming torch to the ground. The slab of white stone was about a metre square and lay right in front of the temple doors.

  ‘Look,’ Ruby said. ‘There’s something carved into it.’

  She moved her torch in closer. The flickering light waved across letters chiselled into the polished surface.

  It read, in clear English, Gerald Wilkins, welcome.

  Chapter 27

  Gerald stumbled backwards, almost falling to the ground. Ruby stared at the slab in astonishment. ‘How did that get there?’ she said.

  Gerald gazed dumbly at the letters carved into the stone.

  ‘How could anyone know you’d be coming here?’ Ruby said. ‘This place has been deserted for more than a thousand years.’

  ‘It’s fate,’ Gerald muttered. ‘Someone must have known.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ Ruby said. ‘It’s just a—’

  ‘Coincidence?’ Gerald interrupted. He took Ruby by the wrist and pulled her torch down until the flames licked across his name on the slab. ‘Even this must be too much for the coincidence queen to write off as just one of those things. Two turns around the table in London didn’t stop me from seeing this, did it? So much for the chaos theory. So much for nothing is certain. This looks pretty certain to me.’

  Ruby dropped to her knees and ran her fingertips across the chiselled letters of Gerald’s name. ‘But if this was carved all these years ago, how would they know how to speak English? Wouldn’t it be Greek?’

  ‘The Oracle,’ Nico said. ‘It must have been the Oracle.’

  ‘She could speak English?’ Sam said.

  Nico shook his head. ‘The Oracle would go into a trance and communicate directly with Apollo,’ he explained. ‘The temple priests would write down the responses, even if they didn’t understand them.’

  Ruby snorted. ‘So Apollo was dictating? He told her to expect a visit from a Gerald Wilkins in about sixteen hundred years and she’d better put the kettle on? That’s ridiculous.’

  Gerald tapped his foot against the marble slab. ‘Well, it’s a tonne of ridiculous, whatever it is.’

  ‘It’s signed,’ Ruby said.

  There was a dull silence.

  ‘What did you say?’ Gerald asked.

  ‘I said, it’s signed. The Oracle’s name is at the bottom.’

  ‘Well, that’ll come in handy if I happen to bump into her down here. What’s her name?’

  Ruby swallowed. ‘It’s…Clea.’

  ‘Clea!’ Gerald said. ‘The same name as my dad’s cousin? The captain of the parlour game goon squad?’ He raised his head to the ceiling. ‘So that’s just another coincidence, is it Ruby?’

  Ruby took in a sharp breath. ‘Oh my gosh, Gerald.’

  ‘What now?’ Gerald asked.

  ‘Your family tree from Mason Green’s room in the Rattigan Club.’

  Gerald furrowed his brow, remembering the diagram of his family tree scrawled across the wall in Green’s private rooms. It seemed so long ago.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Ever since we met your dad’s cousin that night of the party, something has been bugging me. Don’t you remember? The family tree showed your mother’s family, all the way back to Quintus Antonius and his three sons.’

  ‘Yeah—that’s why we’re here,’ Gerald said.

  ‘We’ve been concentrating on them all this time: the secret mission for the emperor, the three caskets, the assassin sent to hunt them down.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘But what about your father’s side of the family? Think about what was on the wall at the Rattigan Club. Your dad’s family traced back to one woman.’

  Gerald focused his mind. He saw his father’s name written on the wall, then lines and names branching back through the generations, and finally homing in on a single name.

  ‘Clea!’

  Gerald stared with saucer eyes at the writing on the marble slab.

  Clea.

  Was he a direct descendant of the last Oracle of Delphi; the same woman that his mother’s ancestors had been sent to destroy?

  ‘You are the progeny!’ Ruby jumped up and grabbed Gerald by the arm, her excitement flowing through her touch. ‘That’s what the fortune-teller in India told you. He saw it in you. After sixteen hundred years, the two sides of this puzzle have come together. Your blood flows from the Oracle of Delphi, and from the emperor’s right-hand man.’

  Gerald tried to keep the curdling feeling in his belly from erupting into his throat. ‘Professor McElderry said something about the progeny at the fancy dress party,’ Gerald mumbled. ‘Something about a family legend.’

  ‘Of course!’ Ruby said. ‘The big family secret that Mason Green kept banging on about. I bet that’s why you had those visions—in the museum, and in Mr Hoskins’ bookshop in Glastonbury. Somewhere deep inside you, Gerald, lies the power of the Oracle.’

  Gerald stared again at his name in the white marble. A name carved in antiquity. He thought back to the golden rods, and the gems that had kept them locked away in the caskets. Of the visions he had experienced when under their spell. The sensation of being everywhere, of seeing everything.

  Of having the power to see all that would be.

  The power of an Oracle.

  ‘What am I supposed to do?’ Gerald looked Ruby square in the eyes. His voice quavered. ‘What am I supposed to do?’

  Ruby reached out to Gerald’s shaking hands.

  ‘The door’s open.’ It was Sam. He and Nico were standing at the temple entrance. One of the enormous portals stood ajar.

  ‘How did you manage that?’ Ruby asked.

  ‘Um, I just sort of leaned against it and it moved,’ Sam said. ‘Want to take a peek inside?’

  Gerald looked to Ruby. She gave him a reassuring nod. ‘Let’s do it,’ she said.

  Two torches flamed above the entrance, on either side of a large block of marble. Some script in Greek lettering was carved into the stonework. Ruby nodded towards it. ‘Nico, can you read that?’

  Nico gazed at the lettering. ‘Of course. It says gnothi seauton—’

  Gerald came to an abrupt halt.

  ‘Did you just say nothing is certain?’

  Nico looked at him, confused.

  Gerald advanced on him. ‘Did you just say nothing is certain?’ He was almost shouting at Nico.

  Nico stared up at Gerald.

  ‘Answer me!’ Gerald’s face was flushed and the torch light cast deep shadows under his eyes.

  ‘Steady on, Gerald.’ Sam moved to Nico’s side. ‘He’s just reading what’s there.’

  ‘Then he can tell me if it says nothing is certain.’ Gerald’s voice verged close to hysterical. ‘That phr
ase has been dogging me since the last day of school and I want to know if somebody carved it here two thousand years ago.’

  Nico cleared his throat. ‘It says gnothi seauton. It is a Greek saying.’

  Gerald was breathing hard, his temper bubbling under his skin.

  ‘It means know thyself,’ Nico said calmly. ‘It is the most famous of the seven maxims that were said to be carved in the temple walls.’

  Ruby grabbed Gerald and pulled him away. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ she said. ‘Why are you yelling at Nico?’

  Gerald clenched a fist against his forehead, punching himself. ‘It sounded like he said nothing is certain. You don’t understand. It was in a daydream I had at school. Then the fortune-teller in Delhi said it. Maybe I heard it wrong. But it’s doing my head in. This whole Oracle thing…it feels like my brain is about to explode.’

  Ruby squeezed Gerald’s arm. ‘We’ve come a long way, Gerald,’ she said. ‘You know I’m with you on this. No matter what.’

  Gerald’s eyes were closed. He breathed deep, and nodded.

  ‘We can’t be far from whatever’s at the centre of all this,’ Ruby said, her voice a balm. ‘Let’s just keep going.’

  Gerald opened his eyes to find Ruby staring at him. The corners of her mouth tweaked upwards.

  Gerald apologised to Nico and the four of them crossed the threshold into the Temple of Apollo.

  The interior was lit by a string of oil lamps that ran the length of the ceiling high above.

  ‘That’s one impressive lighting system,’ Sam said. ‘It must all be connected to that lamp out the front. You Greeks were pretty clever, Nico.’

  ‘We still are,’ Nico said.

  The temple was one enormous chamber filled with shrines and offerings to Apollo. Rich tapestries hung from the ceiling, gold and silver statues stood atop marble plinths and murals of Apollo’s heroic deeds covered the walls.

  The only sound was the soft landing of four sets of shoes on the polished stone floor.

  ‘It’s untouched,’ Ruby said. ‘This must have been exactly how it was in ancient times.’