by Chuck Dixon
“What’s his deal?” Dwayne asked, licking fruit pulp off his chin.
“I think he’s a seer or a soothsayer,” Caroline said. “He’s creeping me out. What’s he here for?”
“Sailors back during this time didn’t sail from the sight of land without one of these guys around. They look at the portents and signs to divine whether or not the augments are favorable for the voyage.”
“So, what’s he doing down here with us?”
“The captain and crew have a lot of questions,” she said. “Are we real or phantoms? Are we witches or demons? Are we a danger to them or was finding us a good thing? Maybe we’re worth a ransom. Or maybe we’re favored by the gods.”
“And what he decides determines whether they kill us or not,” Dwayne said.
“Let’s hope we make the right impression.”
The old man removed a ball of string from the bag, and he unspooled a length. The string was made of strips of ragged cloth and twisted fibers knotted together. His fingers played over the knots. He muttered as he pulled another length from the ball. He stopped unraveling the ball. His fingers gently touched a hairy knot of the frayed material, and he cooed over it softly.
He turned to the boy and spoke in a reedy croak. The boy turned to Dwayne and Caroline and rattled off something that sounded like a question. Caroline shook her head in response, and the boy focused his attention on her. He repeated his question, but the words sounded different this time. The boy was trying to determine what language they understood. Caroline shook her head again. He spoke again, and this time it sounded almost familiar to Caroline’s ear. She nodded her head and beckoned with her fingers in a gesture she prayed he understood was a request for him to repeat that last phrase.
The boy’s brow wrinkled, and he leaned closer to whisper to the old man who replaced the looking stone in the bag and began to reel in the string. They were leaving.
“Look here! Here!” Caroline shouted, startling the boy. She traced a finger on the sand and wrote in ancient Greek script any word that she could recall that might be relevant.
STRANGERS
ISLAND
WATER
The boy moved closer on all fours to look at the letters traced in the sand. He looked up at Caroline with a raised brow.
He said something to her that sounded like, “You speak Greek?” But the phrasing and pronunciation were barely similar in sound to what she had learned on her own. It was like the difference between Italian and Portuguese. So close and yet so far. It would take time to work out the differences—time they didn’t have.
“Speak me words!” she said, forcing herself to go slow and enunciate. She pointed at each word. “Strangers. Island. Water.”
The boy read the words aloud then wrote a word of his own on the sand.
WITCH
“No!” she said. “We visit. Far away land. Not witch. Not bad.”
The boy pursed his lips and turned to the old man, who was eyeing the exchange with interest. The boy pointed at Dwayne and then wrote a new word.
EAGLE
“Yes. An eagle.”
The boy wrote again.
Ρωμε
Rome. He thought the eagle in the NRA symbol on Dwayne’s shirt meant they were Romans.
“We are Romans!” Caroline said in rushed college Latin. The boy’s eyes widened. She took a breath and spoke again more slowly.
“We are from Rome. We are scholars seeking knowledge of the world. We mean you no harm.”
The boy’s eyes narrowed as he tried to follow what she was saying. Caroline knew her Latin pronunciation was probably as far off as her Greek. But her Latin vocabulary was a lot more extensive.
“Your Greek is terrible. We will talk in Latin,” the boy said, smirking, and spoke some phrases Caroline couldn’t follow entirely.
“Please speak slower. Your Latin is not much better than my Greek,” she said, turning the tables on the little snot.
He spoke slowly and told her that the old man was ordered by Ahinadab, whom Caroline figured was the captain or ship’s master, to find out the true nature of the captives. The captain thought they were spies from Hamilcar of Carthage sent to spy on him.
Caroline spat at that name, as she knew from her reading any good Roman would do. The old seer suspected they were witches. These were times of uncertainty. The gods were unhappy, and Ba’al was casting his eye upon the Earth from a rogue star. A reference to the comet.
The boy asked how they arrived at the island and where their boat was. Caroline explained that they had been robbed and marooned by the crew of a merchant ship that promised to carry them to Alexandria. This was a story she worked out before falling asleep but added the part where they were Romans on a whim. She told him that her name was Commodus and that Dwayne was Maximus. These were the first names that came to her mind. Back on the Ocean Raj, two nights before leaving, they’d watched Gladiator on DVD at Dwayne’s insistence. Caroline never cared for movies much but had fun annoying Dwayne by pointing out every historical inaccuracy.
The boy nodded as Caroline finished her story. He turned and spoke to the old man who nodded as well. The pair had a lengthy exchange in which the boy did much of the talking in a language Caroline could not identify. After this the pair rose to their feet.
“He is Roman as well? He does not speak Latin,” the boy said and nodded toward Dwayne.
“He’s a Gaul. A barbarian who purchased citizenship,” Caroline said with mock scorn. Something like that wouldn’t be possible for a few more centuries. She was counting on the boy not knowing that.
The boy nodded sagely.
“What of us? What will you tell Ahinadab? Will you tell him we were only on this island due to misfortune?” Caroline said as the boy helped the old man up the planks to the deck above.
“We will tell him you are not spies. He will spare you.”
“Spare us?”
“He will probably sell you as slaves when we next reach port.” The boy shrugged and picked up the oil lamp and empty basket.
“Tell me your name,” Caroline said.
“Praxus,” the boy said as he took the light from them. “Praxus of Samos.”
35
Another Time in Rome
IN ANOTHER PLACE on another day, Andrea Spara was deep in the stacks of Vatican Apostolic Library doing the thing he did each day—reading.
He was a common fixture in the stacks of the esteemed collection, ever since being freed by an endowment from a dead-end associate professorship at Sapienza Università di Roma. It was over ten years ago that a benefactor had granted him his lifelong dream of reading and studying ancient Latin texts in their original manuscript form. His every financial need was covered, and he had an excellent apartment in Piazza Barberini that he only visited to bathe and sleep. His every waking hour, aside from a hurried breakfast of rolls and coffee and a simple meat or fish dinner, was spent in the confines of university libraries in Rome and Naples or here in the cloistered confines of the Vatican’s treasure trove of ancient books.
His only duty to his benefactor was to report any new discovery or unusual finding in whatever manuscripts he read. That was an odd request in, itself. Andrea was fascinated by the language and the nuance and seeing the words of the ancients in their own hand. But he knew, by their very nature, that there could never be anything new found there. Hundreds, thousands of scholars had read and examined these words since they were first recorded and re-recorded by scribes from all over the ancient and medieval world. Papers and theses and libraries of books had been written examining even the most trivial literary works of the Romans and Greeks of the classical era. What would he find that they could not? Still, it made no sense to question a gift from the gods, especially a gift that allowed Andrea to live within these walls and drink in the wealth of knowledge they contained without the distasteful burden of an occupation.
Most visitors to the library were only allowed access to the manuscripts via scanne
d images viewed on a computer monitor. But Andrea, thanks to the influence of his patron, was granted permission to read the actual words on the medium upon which they were written by the hand of the author. He was allowed access to the climate-controlled rooms in the library’s cellar, and whatever scroll or book he requested would be brought to him—except those contained in the Secret Archives, of course. But those were religious texts, and held no interest for him in any case.
Today he sat in a comfortable chair of rich leather at a broad table in a glass-walled booth. He laid out a rolled sheet of vellum that almost covered the entire flat surface. Andrea was assisted in this by an elderly Barnabite bishop he had come to know well over the years of his daily, excepting Sundays, visits to the library. They laid the vellum flat and weighted the corners with fist-sized bags of sand. The vellum was still supple despite its age, thanks to the restoration and preservation talents of generations of priests and monks who worked to ensure that these fragile treasures remained intact until the day of the Rapture.
The bishop left him to his work, and Andrea took to examining the document written in Latin by a lively hand that was a joy to read. It was the Codex Profectus Praxus, an abridged work written by a Greek slave over two thousand years before and, most unusually, translated into Latin by the original author. It was a tale of the journeys in the Aegean Sea made special by being the first written reference in western literature of Halley’s Comet. But there was even more of interest in this personal memoir of a slave who served as an assistant to an oracle aboard a Phoenician pirate ship in the days when Carthage ruled the inland sea.
It was filled with details that others would find tedious, but Andrea found fascinating. Chief among these was experiencing the resonance that came from reading and touching, albeit through acid-free cotton gloves, a document written in the hand of the author.
That it survived to this day was a miracle. The original Profectus was thought to have been lost in the fire that leveled the library at Alexandria. It was always a thrill to read the words as scribed on the actual document. Andrea could feel a contact with the humble slave and nimble wordsmith across the gulf of time that separated them.
He came to the passages about the bireme on which Praxus served coming to a hidden harbor for the crew to take on fresh water and hide a treasure of gold and silver coin looted from a trade ship separated from its escort fleet in a storm. Though Andrea had read this text in copies and in the original several times, he looked forward especially to this portion where Praxus writes of the high degree of fear among the crew that their theft be discovered and the punishment they would receive if captured by the rightful owners of the chest of coins.
Andrea read a passage. Then he read it again. Something was not right. He looked about him through the glass entry wall of the booth. The bishop was busy speaking to a pair of priests, and not watching through the observation-glass.
Andrea removed a magnifying glass from his jacket pocket. It was equipped with LED lights, and he held it close above the vellum. Direct light of any kind was forbidden in these booths, but Andrea had to confirm what he saw. He turned his back on the bishop and concealed the light with his body.
To his eye, he could see no alterations to the text. He switched the light on the glass to UV and bent back to the scroll. No signs of erasure or overwriting. It could not be. The text was different from the last time he had read this piece. It was substantially altered, from what he could recall. Andrea took out a notepad and copied by hand the passages concerning the events on the tiny island and the voyage from there to the boat’s next destination.
He signaled to the bishop that he was done for the day.
“Is there a problem, Signor Spara?” the bishop asked with concern.
“A bit of queasiness. Something I ate, perhaps. Or the flu.” He departed the room without helping the old bishop restore the vellum to its protective case; something he had never done before.
On the main floor of the library, he hurried to the wing off the Sala di Consultazione where the computer stations were set up. Row after row of sheltered stations where one could explore every document in the public section of the library’s collection. Andrea called up an Italian language translation of the Profectus Praxus and scrolled to the section in question.
In this edition, the pirate bireme anchored in the hidden harbor and buried the chest of coins, then departed the same day for Rhodes. It was the same as every other time he had read this text. Until today.
Andrea called up the scans of the original manuscript and slid the cursor to the same section. It was the same. The boat arrived at the island, hid the treasure, then departed on the evening tide.
The scan made several years before differed from the original he had just read down in the archives.
But how could that be? Was his memory failing? Was this Alzheimers? He’d seen a professor at university turned into a blithering idiot, quick to anger one moment and catatonic the next. Was that happening to him? But he was only forty-eight. Wasn’t that too soon?
Or was this precisely why his benefactor endowed him to do nothing with his life but read ancient texts in the original? Was he supposed to be reading Herodotus and Tacitus, looking for changes no one else had seen or noted? What could explain this? He was not a man of faith. He did not believe in miracles. But had he just witnessed one?
Later, in his apartment, he sat in his favorite chair with his cell phone clutched in his hand. A bottle of red wine sat open on the table by him. He was normally a sipper, perhaps a half glass before bed. This time he drank from the bottle, and it did little to still his nerves. Was he a fool, or was this what was expected of him?
At last, he dialed.
A voice answered first in English and switched to Italian when Andrea identified himself. He was politely asked to hold. The music on hold was a pleasant arrangement of a Verdi overture, and he wondered if even the hold music was custom chosen for each caller.
Inside of ten minutes, a voice came on the phone speaking in rich, fluent Neapolitan-accented Italian.
“Andrea, so nice of you to call. I trust you have something for me?”
“Yes, it is an alteration to—” Andrea began, but the voice on the other end gently cut him off.
“I wish to hear of your finding in every detail. But not over the phone. Pack a bag, Andrea. Bring enough for three days. The morning after tomorrow, a car will come to collect you.”
“Um, yes?” Andrea had so many questions, but the line was dead.
His bell rang the morning after the next day, and he was met at the door by a smiling man in a fine suit who held a hand out for his bag.
“My name is Augustus Martin. You were expecting me, yes?” the man said in Italian free of any accent.
The Rolls limousine took him out of the city beyond the Grande Raccordo to an executive airport in Ara Nova, where a sleek Gulfstream sat on the hardstand along the main runway. Signor Martin took Andrea’s bag and walked him to the steps that led up into the plane.
Sir Neal Harnesh was waiting in the main salon of the plane and offered Andrea a glass of sparkling wine.
“I prefer this so much to a traditional breakfast,” Sir Neal said. He was dressed as though for a golf game in a short-sleeved shirt, slacks and loafers. But each garment was of such quality that, even though he wore the best suit he could afford, Andrea felt underdressed.
His benefactor kept the conversation light and inconsequential until they were airborne and high over the Adriatic.
“What have you found, Signor Spara?” Sir Neal said.
“An anomaly, my lord,” Andrea said.
He handed a Xerox copy he’d made from his own paperback edition of the Codex Profectus Praxus to Sir Neal. The relevant passages were highlighted. Sir Neal read them then took another paper offered by Andrea. It was a version of the codex that Andrea had typed up in Italian from his notes.
“They are substantially different, obviously,” Sir Neal said gravel
y.
“Yes, my lord. In every version, the pirates spend one day on the island and leave without incident the same day. Here we see that Praxus spoke with two prisoners they took from the island and remained anchored until the following day, which led to—”
“I appreciate the difference, Signor Spara,” Sir Neal said, holding up a manicured hand. “The prisoners. The author describes them as a young boy and a cyclops.”
“Oh, ‘cyclops’ does not refer to a person with a single eye. That’s a common misconception people take away from Homer’s Odyssey. It simply means a giant.”
“A giant.”
“Well, anyone of two meters in height would appear to be a giant to people in that time.”
“He says they were Romans, Signor Spara.”
“It is possible. Rome was just beginning to extend its power to the sea in this period. But Romans traveled widely throughout the region in this period.”
“And the other events in this codex, Signor Spara?”
“Those are much harder to explain.”
“I see,” Sir Neal said, and sat back with hands templed before him. He gazed out the port to the clouds drifting past like smoke.
“This is monumental! This will be an earth-shattering revelation in the world of ancient academia!” Andrea’s excitement could no longer be contained.
“No, it will not be a revelation of any kind, signor.” Sir Neal’s eyes met his. All traces of polite suavity were gone from his voice and his eyes.
“But if I were to publish what I’ve found I—” Sir Neal Harnesh held up his hand again.
“You are paid to read only, Signor Spara. Not to write. Certainly not to publish.”
Andrea Spara nodded in agreement. But within him, he felt his heart shrink. To find something so marvelous and be obliged to remain silent would be like torture.
A WEEK LATER, a tragic and unexplained fire occurred within the antiquities section of the Vatican Apostolic Library. The blaze was contained by the state-of-the-art Halon system installed in the library in the 1990s. The only casualties were an unemployed former associate professor of ancient languages, who died at the scene from smoke inhalation, and a rare Latin manuscript that was entirely consumed in the blaze.
