by Anne Fortier
Fortunately, the Historia Amazonum had sustained only minimal damage; the object that had borne the brunt of my mudslide was Granny’s notebook. Limp and soggy, it had all but assumed the texture of a wet dishrag, and I felt like crying when I peeled away the front page and saw that the blue writing had been washed out so completely it was no longer legible.
Sitting down at the desk by the window, I carefully separated the middle pages in the hopes that the moisture had not penetrated to the core of the book … but it had. Of all the hundreds of words Granny had meticulously translated for me, not a single one was left.
Heavy with regret, I leafed around at random to see whether some trace of the words still lingered, and whether I could somehow reconstruct them. And then I saw it …
The invisible writing.
Just a single word drawn across every third page or so, but that was enough to make me jump up and bounce around with silent exhilaration.
What had Granny used? White crayon? Whatever it was, it had been imperceptible while there was blue writing covering every page. But now, with nothing but smudges remaining, the white crayon—greasy as it was—stood out by repelling the watery blue. So simple.
All this time, I thought with a cringe, I had been carrying around Granny’s secret message, and had it not been for my ordeal in the wet Teutoburger forest the day before I might never have discovered the truth.
Sitting down again, I began working my way through the sodden notebook from the beginning, holding up each individual page against the sun rising over the meadow outside in order to make out the hidden scribbles.
But it was not as easy as it seemed; at first glance, none of the words made sense. Intrigued, I searched the desk drawer, found a notepad and pen, and started transcribing the words in the exact order I found them:
PHIN XPO LEMS AHI PP LA PAD OB REMS
APA NTA RIT ETH ERMO DO AMR PE SI AACI
BI EINY THYI AMO LP AD AV AB URUS I
After my initial confusion, I started attacking the list with all the textbook code-breaking approaches I knew: shuffling the letters around, moving syllables around, taking every first letter, or second letter … but none of my attempts resulted in anything remotely intelligible.
Particularly frustrating was that the words were vaguely familiar to me just as they were, even if they didn’t make any sense; I had a feeling that with some minuscule tweak or change of perspective everything would become beautifully clear. And yet, at the same time, the list had both a Greek and a Latin feel to it, and I doubted Granny had mastered those languages. Even if she had been trained as an archaeologist, would she really, after so many years, have been sufficiently fluent to compose a message? Furthermore, if it was indeed written in a mix of ancient languages, how could she be sure I would ever be able to read it?
Whatever the case, clearly she had wanted to make sure the message did not fall into the wrong hands. The question was, what did it take to qualify as the right hands? What knowledge had Granny wanted me to acquire before I was deemed worthy of her trust?
But of course.
There they were, as clear as the constellations on a cloudless night.
I was so absorbed in my discovery I jumped with surprise when Nick put his arms around me from behind. “If you don’t come back to bed right now,” he mumbled into my hair, “I’m going to report you to Amnesty International.”
“But I’m just on the edge of an enormous breakthrough,” I protested. “Give me one second—”
“Sorry.” He lifted me from the chair and carried me off, notes, pen, and all. “I am the god of enormous breakthroughs, and this is where they happen.”
Only later, after excavating my papers from the jumbled sheets, was I able to engage Nick in an actual conversation about Granny’s secret message.
“I figured it out!” I told him, waving my notes in the air. “It’s basically a list of Amazon names broken into pieces, with one letter missing in each.”
Scratching his unshaven cheek, Nick took the list, which read as follows:
PHINX POLEMSA HIPP LAPADO BREMSA
PANTARITE THERMODOA MRPESIA ACIBIE
INYTHYIA MOLPADA VABURUSI?
After reading through the names, Nick handed the notepad back to me. “That explains everything.”
“Only someone familiar with the Amazon legends would be able to figure this out,” I explained. “The names are not obvious. See.” I handed him the last piece of paper, which looked like this:
SPHINX POLEMUSA HIPPO LAMPADO BREMUSA
PANTARISTE THERMODOSA MARPESIA ALCIBIE
MINYTHYIA MOLPADIA VABURUSI?
“Sphinx?” said Nick. “Isn’t that an animal?”
“Yes.” I took the list from him again. “I’m guessing it’s a warning: ‘Beware of riddle.’ After that, it’s simply a list of Amazon names. If I remember correctly, Polemusa and Bremusa fought with Penthesilea, Molpadia took part in the raid on Athens and so on and so forth. The only name I don’t recognize is the last one: Vaburusi. But never mind. Look at the missing letters. They spell out ‘Suomussalmi.’ “
“Which still needs unscrambling,” said Nick, getting wise on the game.
“No!” I poked him with the pen. “Where did you go to school? It’s a town in Finland, just south of the Arctic Circle.”
Nick’s eyes narrowed. “Please don’t tell me you want to go there.”
I sat up straight, still giddy with excitement. “Why not? Isn’t this amazing? Granny is telling us to go to Suomussalmi. I can hear it.”
“That’s strange.” Nick cocked his head as if listening to a distant call. “To me it sounds like she’s telling us to stay right here … in this bed. In fact—” He reached out for me, taking me by the arms.
Although I was mildly upset that he seemed so uninterested in my discovery, I couldn’t help laughing when he pulled me on top of him. “What happened to the faraway island?”
“Why don’t you start with this island?”
Just then his cellphone rang. He ignored it.
One minute later, the phone started ringing again. When Nick eventually checked the display, he grimaced and handed the phone directly to me. It was my parents.
“Oh, thank goodness you’re safe!” said my father, sounding unusually shaken. “We weren’t sure we could call you back on this number. Where are you? Whose phone is this?”
I hesitated, equally loath to answer either question.
“Never mind!” interjected my mother. “Sweetie, we got a call at four o’clock this morning, and we don’t know what to make of it.”
“It was a very unpleasant person,” said my father, “who instructed us to inform you that”—he paused to recall the exact wording—”you have three days to hand over the notebook. There was mention of a specific park bench in Paris. If you do not comply”—my father cleared his throat, trying to sound businesslike—”harm will come to people you love.”
I was so shocked, I didn’t even try to pretend the situation wasn’t serious. “I know it sounds frightening,” I admitted, “but we’re working on a solution.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” my father wanted to know. “Is this all about Bex?”
“No,” I said. “It’s all about Granny.” I suppressed a childish impulse to add, “And we wouldn’t be in this pinch if we had just talked about some of these things.” For really, that was unfair. Instead, I said, “But don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds. I’ll explain when I see you. Meanwhile, isn’t it time you finally had that seaside weekend? I know it’s November, but why don’t you drive out to some cozy little B&B in Cornwall and stay there for a while? Under a different name. Please.”
“Reznik,” said Nick, as soon as I had hung up. “Always a bench. Always a crowd. And classic Moselane to tell him where your parents live.”
I felt an absurd sting of irritation. “Why not the Amazons?”
Nick got out of bed and started hunting around for our clothes. “The Amazons are not at
war with us; they’re at war with him. If they had really wanted that notebook, you can bet they would have stolen it a long time ago.”
“Perhaps they didn’t know it existed.”
Nick pulled the T-shirt over his head, grimacing in pain. “Good point. How does Reznik know about it? Through James?”
“James knows nothing about the notebook,” I said. Then something occurred to me, and I groaned. “The envelope! The one I took from you. The thugs from Geneva must have checked it out in my hotel room in Bramsche. If you recall, there was a medical article written by a Dr. Trelawny—”
“I never got that far,” said Nick with a scowl. “All I saw was the detective report on you and the letter from Reznik to his informant network—”
“You mean the letter to Jumbo? I thought it was a message to a hit man. Actually, I thought it was for you.”
“Jumbo. Big ears.” Nick demonstrated with his hands. “Reznik was trying to gather information. The million-dollar bounty came later. Because he’s paranoid, he has cameras everywhere, and the poor bastard caught his own son’s murder on tape. I’ll spare you the details. Let’s just say Alex Reznik knew who was killing him, and why. That was what triggered Reznik’s Amazon fixation. I don’t know how close he is to tracking them down, but his interest in your grandmother’s notebook tells me he is hot on their trail.”
“Not as hot as we are,” I said.
Nick looked at me with narrow eyes. “Meaning?”
“Think about it.” I sat up on my knees, urging him to understand. “If we give Reznik the notebook, he’ll see the secret writing right away. And considering his Amazon obsession he just might be able to unscramble Granny’s riddle, too. God knows, maybe ‘Suomussalmi Vaburusi’ is all he needs in order to find the big Amazon mother ship, as you call it, and”—the thought made me shiver—”blow it up.”
Nick walked over to me, graver than ever. Lowering his hand to touch my cheek, he said, “And are you sure that would be such a bad thing?”
WE BROKE THROUGH THE clouds to find Finland covered in snow. Even as we walked to our rental car, large, fluffy flakes kept falling from the sky like a welcoming puff of confetti. “Not exactly the sandy beach you were hoping for,” I said to Nick.
As we rolled out of the parking lot, the snow fell so heavily against the windshield I had to put the wipers on top speed. “Isn’t it wonderful, though?” I said, doing my best to be jolly. “I can almost hear the cheers of Finnish children.”
“You hear a lot today.” Nick turned on the cabin lights to better see our map. “Are any of the voices telling you whether to go left or right when we hit the Oulun Lääni—whatever that is?”
I touched the brake a few times to determine exactly how slippery the road was. “I told you we should have taken the GPS.”
“Real men don’t use GPS,” he reminded me.
“And that,” I pointed out, “is why we have so few real men left. They keep crawling out of the gene pool and can’t find their way back.”
We were silent for a while. I knew Nick was still irked by my decision to go to Suomussalmi, but then, he hadn’t been able to propose any viable alternatives. The one positive thing was that he hadn’t deserted me, and for that I was immensely grateful.
Before leaving his cottage that morning, I had called the Kalkriese Museum to ask for Dr. Jäger’s phone number. She was, after all, the closest I had been to a humane Amazon so far. But Felix told me she had left unexpectedly, to stay with a sister no one knew she had. Not surprisingly, she had given him no contact information.
Considering the way they had treated us both, neither Nick nor I were particularly fond of the Amazons anymore. But unlike Nick, I felt an obligation to side with them, if only out of love for Granny. I simply couldn’t give Reznik—or anyone else—the notebook. And yet if I didn’t, I would forever worry about my parents’ safety.
In the end, even Nick grudgingly agreed we had to go to Finland. If only from the morbid principle that the enemy of your enemy is your friend, it seemed our best chance was to find the Amazons before Reznik did. Maybe they were in Suomussalmi, maybe they weren’t … but it was the only lead we had. Also, as I kept telling Nick, convincing myself in the process, I was confident my grandmother would not send me there for naught. Admittedly, her white-crayon summons was almost twenty years old, but surely she had not written it on a whim. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that Granny had entrusted me with the magic key to an impregnable Amazon fortress, and that once we got there, our troubles would be over.
“Chin up!” I said to Nick as we sped through the slush. “Soon you’ll be having vodka martinis in a hot tub, surrounded by busty super-women in ridiculously small bikinis.”
As we drove inland from Oulu Airport, however, I could feel the grimness of our situation bearing down on us from all sides. In the silent snowy murk of Finnish winter it was impossible to tell whether we were driving through farmland or tundra, for everything was frozen in place—every post, every shrub, every weed. Above this hibernating landscape hung an old sun, too fatigued to dispel the twilight although it was still only midafternoon.
“I have an idea,” I said at last, pulling over in the middle of the dense Kainuu forest. “You drive and I’ll read us a story.”
I didn’t propose it merely to cheer us up. The truth was, I was itching to return to the Historia Amazonum and see how it ended. Even though P. Exulatus had written it two thousand years ago I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps, in some roundabout way, his knowledge might help us when or if we actually managed to find the Amazons. And so, translating from the original Latin as I went, I read the rest of the ancient manuscript aloud to us both. It went something like this:
“Of the barbarians in Sarmatia and Germania Magna much remains to be said, but I will restrict myself to those accounts that concern the Amazons. Many claim to have seen women fighting on horseback in those regions, but whether they can rightfully be called Amazons is a different matter. Women who consort with men on a daily basis I do not consider Amazons, nor would these barbarian wives, who carry weapons to protect their families and the fruits of their labor, refer to themselves as Amazons. They are simply acting according to”—I paused to ponder the appropriate translation—”common sense, and in these wholesome people it is still possible to find virtue in men and women alike. They do not pretend to hide behind written treaties backed by distant armies, but wake up every day prepared to defend their own rights.”
“I like this guy,” said Nick, when I stopped briefly to make sense of a blurry part. “Too bad nobody reads him anymore.”
“Well,” I said, “let’s hope we can change that.” Then, after skimming the next few pages, which gave examples of famous Sarmatian and Scythian warrior women, I jumped forward to where the action picked up again. “Okay, here we go: So much for the exemplary tales from those horse-riding peoples. We are now nearing the end of our history, for of all the legends of Germania Magna only one concerns the Amazons. It was told to me by a soldier stationed there during the Varian disaster, who only narrowly escaped the slaughter.”
I gasped and quickly went over the last sentence again. “The Varian disaster! That was the Roman name for the Battle of Teutoburger Wald—the big ambush I told you about, where Dr. Jäger’s bog woman died. Now we’re getting somewhere! Listen to this: The soldier swore that he had been an orderly for the commander of the Nineteenth Legion.” I was so excited, I grabbed Nick by the arm. “A survivor! Those three legions were thought to have been annihilated to a man. But here is an eyewitness!” I returned to the text, barely able to contain myself. “On the eve of the disastrous battle, a woman disguised in men’s clothing came late at night to request a favor of the commander. She demanded to speak to him privately and alone. Intrigued, he sent away everyone except his orderly.”
“I smell trouble,” said Nick.
“When requested to name her errand,” I went on eagerly, “the woman a
sked the commander whether he was familiar with the legend of Alexander the Great and Thalestris, the Amazon queen. When he acknowledged having heard the story, she told him hers was a similar errand. It was her desire, she explained, to spend a night with him; by dawn she would be gone forever.”
Nick whistled. “I didn’t even know you could say that in Latin.”
“The commander was naturally astounded by the request,” I continued, poking Nick in the ribs. “As a Roman he was not used to such forthright womenfolk. But at length he decided she must have been sent to him as a humorous present from his officers, and, being a proud man, he resolved to make the most of it. To his surprise, when dawn came, the woman rose from his bed and prepared to leave as promised. And when the commander, who had enjoyed her … um … company, invited her to stay, she responded as follows: ‘Roman, our paths have briefly crossed, as do sometimes those of the Sun and the Moon, but now we must once again part. Such are the rules we both live by. But today, when the darkness comes, you may comfort yourself with the knowledge that your strength will live on.’
“Not content with her obscure response, the commander urged the woman to stay, making the sorts of promises that usually work with women. But now she showed him the bracelet upon her arm and said, ‘You are a man of many virtues, a strong and unblemished man, which is why I chose you. But this sacred jackal dictates my fate and reminds me the Moon is my mistress. I cannot close my ears to her demands. She forbids me from sharing the daylight with you.’
“To which the commander said, ‘You speak with such confidence that I am compelled to challenge you. Are you a German noblewoman? Perhaps, during peace negotiations, I will see you again.’
“ ‘You may see me again,’ she replied. ‘But it will be no happy reunion. We both know there can be no peace without blood.’ Standing on the threshold, she looked back one last time and said, ‘Because the sight of you is still sweet to me, I would tell you to save your own life. But I know that is contrary to your nature. Your bravery is why I chose you from amongst thousands to be the father of my child. And so I will leave you with this: Roman, you live to kill, and your honor feeds on the flesh of others. For as long as this golden band is upon my arm, and upon the arms of my sisters, we will steal your strength but despise your power, and the power of others like you. For there will be others; every century breeds another hungry master, but they will all be turned to dust while we, the Amazons, will live forever.’ ”