The Cortés Enigma

by John Paul Davis

  He withdrew his fingers, all of which were still intact. There were small pellets in his hand, each less than a centimetre in length.

  “What are they?”

  Ben studied them, one by one. He gestured Valeria to come nearer, shining the torchlight on the pellets.

  “They look like gold,” she said, taking one and holding it up, studying every angle in the light.

  Suddenly Ben realised the significance. “It’s totoloque,” he said. “Don’t lose that.”

  Valeria moved her hand nervously; surprised by the urgency of Ben’s outburst, she nearly dropped it. She passed the pellet back to him. “What is it?”

  “It was a game played by the Aztecs. It’s called totoloque. The objective was to throw the five pellets at that circle.” He pointed to the inner circle. “If we step on the outer circle, the floor will collapse.”

  Valeria was horrified. “You have to throw? Why?”

  Ben didn’t know, but he was sure it was somehow connected to the lost replica emeralds.

  “Give me as much light as you can.”

  Valeria made her way to the other side of the circle, shining the torch on the ground. Directly opposite, Ben did the same, holding one pellet in his right hand and the torch in his left.

  He threw the first pellet, missing the inner circle by over a foot. Composing himself, he tried again, this time he was slightly nearer.

  He heard movement coming from behind him. It sounded like a dull creak.

  Valeria was starting to panic. “Ben?”

  Ben felt himself rooted to the spot. Looking over his shoulder, he saw dust moving, debris falling. For the moment he was unsure whether it was new or not.

  “Ben?”

  Ben took a deep breath, attempting to remain calm. “It’s booby-trapped,” he said, feeling sweat fall down his brow. “If we don’t hit the circle, we’re trapped.”

  Valeria was furious. “We’re what?”

  “Don’t come any closer,” he yelled, seeing her move. No sooner had he said it, she lost her balance, falling onto the nearest tomb.

  “Valeria.”

  Valeria had grabbed hold of the tomb. Her right foot was dangling over the side, the rest of her body on the lid.

  One slip and she would fall onto the circle.

  Ben took a deep breath and removed another pellet from his pocket. “Shine the torch.”

  Valeria did her best, adjusting the light with her dirty fingers, giving Ben the best possible chance. He took a deep breath and threw the third pellet, again narrowly missing the circle. For the first time he realised the outer circle was padded with something, causing the pellets to come to a standstill as opposed to skidding on.

  He took a deep breath, preparing for the next throw, knowing it had to be perfect. If it were short, it would come to a dead stop.

  He raised his arm and then followed through. He saw the pellet flying through the light and disappearing, coming down somewhere on the floor. He moved the light, aiming at the centre circle.

  He’d made it with one throw to spare.

  Cortés was the first to enter the hotel room. He sat down on the bed, his fingers moving quickly through the pages of the diary. He scanned the first page, then the next.

  Then he placed the book down on the bed.

  “You read,” he barked at Pizarro. “You read the English better.”

  Pizarro picked up the diary and started on page one. The writing was faint; even for an Englishman, reading it was difficult. He turned the pages and saw diagrams, recognising the churchyard on St Lide’s.

  “Get me a magnifying glass.”

  Ben held his breath as the familiar noise reoccurred, only this time much louder than before. A heavy scraping sound was coming from his right. The wall that contained the sentence ‘a blank wall is a fool’s writing paper’ was vibrating, wobbling; he feared it was about to collapse.

  Ben looked at it, almost in disbelief. In his career, he had seen similar things, but never in this part of the world.

  The wall opened as if it was a door.

  Valeria stepped forward.

  “Stop. Stay where you are,” Ben said, moving quickly toward her. On this occasion she obeyed, waiting for him to approach. He placed his hands on her shoulders and guided her toward the door. Even in the torchlight, making out specific details was difficult. All he could see was a long square-shaped void.

  For all he knew, it continued indefinitely.

  He edged closer to where the wall opened up. The floor behind seemed firm; he felt it with his hands and found a nice solid foundation. There was a second wall less than a metre away in front of him and space on either side. To his right he could vaguely make out an object on a stone ledge.

  Valeria was waiting behind him, shining the torch directly at his face. Seconds later he returned, carrying a small chest, almost identical to the one Valeria had found not three hours earlier.

  “Oh my,” she said, coughing on inhaling dust. The lid was covered in cobwebs, and the lock badly corroded.

  “Here, hold this,” he asked of Valeria, who took the box in her hands. Ben removed a Swiss Army knife from his pocket and selected the largest blade.

  Immediately it broke.

  “We must take it back home,” Valeria said. “I have tools back at the lighthouse.”

  Standing less than twenty metres away, Colts watched from partial shelter as Ben and the Spanish waitress squeezed out of the gap in the mausoleum wall and ran towards the lichgate. Though it was getting dark, rain pounding down all the more heavily, their carrying of the metal chest was impossible to disguise.

  Colts considered following them but stopped, thinking things over.

  If Ben and the waitress were working together, technically they were now on opposite sides.

  39

  Twenty minutes later they were back at the lighthouse, cold and soaked to the bone. Ben accepted Valeria’s offer of a shower while she dried his clothes on the radiator, making do for the time being with a T-shirt and a woman’s dressing gown.

  Valeria was standing by the table, holding the same pair of metal cutters she had used on the box containing the trumpet. She opened the jaws, lined them up with the hinges and snapped through them one at a time.

  Eureka.

  Ben did his best to lift the lid, succeeding after a long battle with the corroded seal. A puff of dust rose from the interior as the lid came free, catching Ben square in the eyes. Blinking and rubbing his eyes, he placed the lid down on the table and inspected the interior of the box.

  As with the box that contained the bell, there was an object within, wrapped in a white shroud.

  Acting more quickly than Ben, Valeria removed the item and carefully unfolded the shroud. What she saw amazed her.

  The object was made of stone, in the shape of a fish.

  She held it up, taking note of every characteristic. Like the lost trumpet, it was painted white, cut into shape with a precision instrument, and weighed about 9kg. There were engravings everywhere, each bringing out the features of the fish: the eyes, the teeth, the gills, the mouth…

  Standing alongside her, Ben inspected the object. Under no circumstances was he going to miss this opportunity.

  “Is there writing on it?”

  Valeria turned it over, searching for evidence of writing on both sides. She saw something engraved into the left side.

  “It says O L P.” She looked at Ben. “What does it mean?”

  “You said together they spell out where the treasure was taken. And the letters on the trumpet were H I N. It must spell Godolphin.”

  Valeria was thoroughly confused. “What’s this mean?”

  Ben shook his head, still trying to control his ever growing sense of frustration. Somewhere out there other people, a black archaeologist in the employ of the Duchy of Cornwall and at least four Spaniards, were looking for the same things. The thought made Ben nervous.

  Every second that passed, Chris remained in jeopar
dy.

  “You said together they spell out a name. The clues must lie in the others. What were they? A rose–”

  “A bell and a cup,” she interrupted, picking up the photocopied diary and turning pages at speed. “It’s all useless. Your ancestor knew nothing.”

  Ben bit his lip, again deciding against mentioning the bell. Suddenly Ben remembered the window. “There were diagrams,” he said, taking the diary and quickly flipping through the pages. “A window.”

  “A window?”

  “That’s right, a window. Made of stained glass. Apparently it was once housed in the church of St Lide’s.”

  Ben had reached the page he wanted. He looked at the diagram, searching in particular for the rose and cup.

  “Here.” He showed her the five items in the window.

  She followed his finger, her eyes bright. “How did he see this?”

  “He drew it. When he was there, visiting the church, he drew what he saw in the church.”

  Valeria’s heart was thumping. Seeing the image there on the page in front of her just didn’t seem real. “It is not correct. The diagram is wrong.”

  That piqued Ben’s interest. “How can you know? You’ve seen it?”

  She looked Ben in the eye. “When the island of St Lide’s was ruined, everything that could be salvaged was taken away. Many things arrived here on St Agnes. Including that window.”

  Ben raised an eyebrow. “It still exists?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Come. I show you.”

  The lighthouse was connected to the house via a door in the kitchen. The lights were presently not working as a result of recent power failures, leaving them no option but to proceed using torchlight.

  There were 241 steps between the base and summit of the lighthouse, Valeria counted them every time. Ben sprinted after her, amazed that anyone could run so fast in slippers. In the poor light, seeing features was difficult; everything was dark, occasional shapes passing by like a wisp of cloud, a blurry image to his eyes. Every so often they passed doorways, all brown oak, locked and capable of withstanding great force.

  Valeria stopped on reaching the third floor, removed a set of keys from her pocket and opened a large door. The room beyond was dark with faint gleams of moonlight penetrating the large windows, the only light apart from their torches. Valeria pointed her torch at a nearby cabinet and opened the padlock using the same set of keys. There were lanterns on the floor, battery operated. She picked up two and switched them on.

  The sudden onset of light caught Ben by surprise. Covering the walls in front of him, what he had initially expected to be nothing more than plain walls in need of redecoration, was a fine array of artwork, antiques, artefacts, the likes of which belonged in a museum.

  He looked at Valeria, speechless. “There must be over a hundred things here.”

  “Two hundred and twelve,” she corrected, lifting up a large clay pot that had been resting on a nearby table. “Here. Apparently once used by St Lide himself.”

  Ben was still struggling to come to terms with the contents of the room. On any other day the small bowl, reminiscent in his eyes of that used by Christ at the last supper, lying on the nearby table might have attracted his interest, but right now there was only one thing on his mind. Twelve stained-glass windows had been placed against the walls, kept secure and separated by strong wooden beams. While ten of the twelve were of equal size, each depicting scenes from the Bible, the other two were smaller and had clear relevance to the island’s history.

  Ben compared the images in front of him with the diagrams in the diary. TF had drawn both. The first was of St Lide arriving at the island in a small basket. There were six people in the second, including a woman, standing against the backdrop of St Lide’s, with the other islands visible in the distance. As expected, the five symbols, supposedly replicas of the original five emeralds, were also depicted in different parts of the window, some floating, some being carried, some seemingly located under the ground.

  “What does it mean?” Ben asked, paying particular interest to the two he was still to see in real life.

  “The original settlers came on board a ship called the Santa Estella. Originally it had cast off from Spain to the New World,” Valeria explained. Looking at Ben, she continued. “No one knows why she crash.”

  Ben thought he had a pretty good idea. “Who made the window? Surely there was a point to its creation?”

  “I don’t know. The artist’s name is not recorded.”

  Ben bit his lip, convinced she was probably right. TF hadn’t mentioned it in his diary either.

  He guessed it was probably a Slater. If not a Slater, a Godolphin.

  He looked at the window, concentrating on the symbol of the fish located near the water. The next thing he noticed was the trumpet symbol, this time located near a lighthouse. Valeria was right.

  TF hadn’t included everything in the diary.

  The window confirmed an association between the trumpet and the lighthouse.

  “The trumpet was found here,” he said to Valeria, who was now standing alongside him. “You knew?”

  “Of course I knew. How could I not?”

  According to the window, the bell was located in a bell tower; Ben guessed TF found it on St Lide’s. While Valeria was getting excited, Ben’s thoughts turned to the other two emeralds. Without doubt there were landmarks in the glass, things that existed, or had existed once.

  He didn’t know the islands well enough to know everything.

  “Where is that?” Ben asked, looking at the eight-pointed rose, which was emerald coloured and seemed to be floating above an area of shoreline. “Is that Tresco?”

  “No,” she replied. “It’s St Mary’s. See, that is Hugh Town, near the Garrison Peninsula.”

  Ben hadn’t made that connection himself, but now that she mentioned it, things began to make a lot more sense. Geographically, St Lide’s, St Agnes and St Mary’s all formed a perfect triangle: St Lide’s being the furthest south with St Mary’s lying north-north-west and St Agnes west-north-west.

  “Where is it?” he asked, talking solely of the rose. “You’ve lived here nearly ten years. What area is that pointing to?”

  “If I knew the answer, don’t you think I’d have found it by now?”

  Ben bit his lip. “Chris’s life is in danger.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” Valeria asked.

  “I might have. Get me a map,” Ben replied.

  “It’s back downstairs.”

  “Wait,” Ben said, removing his phone from his pocket. He pressed the Internet symbol and tried to open Google Maps. The reception was poor but not useless. The webpage opened slowly, showing Ben a map of the Isles of Scilly.

  Immediately his heart jumped.

  “What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the screen.

  Valeria looked over his shoulder, trying to make it out. Ben increased the size of the area using his finger and thumb, identifying a large building exactly the same shape as the rose.

  “It’s the Star Castle.”

  “The what?”

  “The Star Castle,” she repeated. “It was the main home of the governors from the 1590s. It’s now a large hotel.”

  “It’s the exact same shape as the rose.”

  While Ben’s enthusiasm was going through the roof, Valeria was far more subdued. “No, Star Castle was built in the 1590s. You said yourself, the treasure was only found in the Civil War.”

  That was right, Ben conceded. He had said that. “There’s no way that can be a coincidence.”

  Valeria was out of ideas. “How about the cup and bell?”

  Ben looked again at the window, noticing the cup nearby, also somewhere on St Mary’s. He guessed somewhere else in Hugh Town.

  “What do you know about the Star Castle? Any treasures? Any legends? Ghost stories?”

  She shook her head, thinking. Suddenly her face burst into life. “The
re is a passage between the North Atlantic Inn and the castle. Apparently there was a dungeon used for wreckers and cavalier soldiers.”