The Tomb of Hercules_A Novel

by Andy McDermott

  “There’s nothing else on the paper?” Chase asked. “Hidden messages or anything?”

  “What you see is what you get,” said Sophia. “Something as simple as invisible ink was the equivalent of quantum encryption in Plato’s time, so there’s nothing else to uncover. The clues must be in the words themselves.” She checked her watch. “Which you now have six minutes to find.”

  Nina turned her attention back to the parchments, scanning through the text as quickly as she could. Words hidden within words … but which words? She read faster, the ancient, mottled ink almost becoming a blur as her eyes sped over each page.

  But she knew she would find nothing that she hadn’t already discovered. If there was a cipher, its key was not contained within the text of Hermocrates. Either it was to be found in some other source not in her possession, in which case she had absolutely no chance of working it out…or there was no cipher.

  “I know that face,” said Chase, for the first time in a while sounding hopeful.

  Nina looked up at him. “Hmm?”

  “That’s your crossword face, when you’ve just cracked a clue. What’ve you found?”

  “Yes, what have you found?” said Sophia, taking a new interest. Corvus turned in his seat, watching Nina closely.

  “I…I’m not sure yet. But I think I’ve been looking at the problem from the wrong angle. The reference to words being hidden within other words, I just assumed it was a cipher—specific individual words from the text combining to form a message.” She shuffled through the parchments to the first page. “But what if it’s not? The clue to finding the map on the back was quite literal—so maybe this is too. ‘The words of our friend Hermocrates reveal still other words within’ …And ‘erubescent glass’ …erubescent, red glass, colored glass …”

  She looked up at the cabin roof. Above the front seats were windows in the ceiling, there to give the pilot a clear view of the rotor blades. They were tinted green to act as a sunscreen. Nina leaned forward and held out the page so the light of the sun overhead fell upon it. The entire page changed color to a garish emerald shade, the muddy tones of the ink becoming a darker brown.

  Nina practically jumped from her seat. “I’ve got it, I’ve got it!”

  “Got what?” Chase asked, confused.

  “I need something red, red plastic or glass.” Nina looked around the cabin. “Come on, come on!” she snapped at Sophia. “Make yourself useful, find something!”

  Sophia frowned, but did as she was asked. “Joe, hand me my bag. The blue one.” Komosa reached behind her seat, lifted out a traveling case and passed it to her. She searched through the contents. “Here,” she said, handing Nina a binder. “Will this do?”

  “Perfect,” said Nina, snatching it from her. The binder contained pages bearing translations of Hermocrates from Greek to English, but she discarded them. The binder itself, with a cover of transparent red plastic, was what she wanted.

  She placed the first sheet of parchment inside the binder, then held it by one of the windows, trying to get as much direct light onto it as possible. Beneath the plastic, the reddish-brown text almost vanished, its color absorbed by the red filter to leave nothing but a faint shadow.

  But something else suddenly leaped from the page in perfect clarity.

  Within the ghost words of the original text, individual letters stood out, what had previously seemed like discolored ink turning almost black …

  “That’s what the line about seeing the world through erubescent glass meant,” Nina said, awed. “I thought the darker spots were just impurities in the ink—but they must have been added after the main text was written. Red glass was incredibly rare and valuable in Plato’s time, so very few people would have been able to find the hidden text. Somebody traced over the letters with a watered-down blue ink to hide a message, words within words. It could have been octopus ink, I suppose, or maybe—”

  “They could have done it in ballpoint for all I care,” said Sophia impatiently. “What does it say?”

  “Notebook, notebook.” Nina snapped her fingers. Chase couldn’t help but smile slightly at Sophia’s aggrieved expression as she passed Nina a notebook and pen. “Okay, let’s see…”

  Somewhat awkwardly thanks to the handcuffs, she wrote down each highlighted letter in turn, a sentence in ancient Greek characters gradually taking form. “Well, that’s a promising start,” she said, translating it in her head. “It says the entrance faces the dawn.”

  “Land by the eastern face of the mountain,” Corvus told the pilot. “What else?”

  “I don’t know, that’s all I’ve got so far,” Nina told him testily. “I’ll need to keep working on it.”

  “You’ll have to do it on the move,” Sophia said. “We’re here.”

  Everyone looked ahead. Before them was a small rocky hill, a darker mound against the unending pale grays and browns of the dunes.

  “That’s not exactly a mountain,” observed Chase, sounding let down. “It’s more like a zit. I thought Hercules would have something a bit more impressive.”

  “Unlike some men, I doubt Hercules would feel any need to overcompensate,” said Sophia dryly. “Besides, I’m sure that the contents of the Tomb itself will be rather more impressive.”

  The helicopter moved into a hover at the bottom of the hill’s eastern face, landing in a vortex of dust and grit. The other choppers followed it down.

  “Spread out,” Corvus ordered over the radio. “There is an entrance somewhere—find it.” Armed men in desert camouflage jumped from the helicopters to begin the hunt. He turned back to Nina. “Dr. Wilde, keep working. I want as much information as possible about the interior of the Tomb by the time the entrance is located. Once it is found, I’m afraid you will have to work on the move.”

  “Why the rush?” Chase asked. “It’s not like this is a race—nobody else even knows where the thing is.”

  “I doubt that you would understand, Chase,” said Corvus, voice full of scorn. “You are a small man, with small and insignificant dreams. But when you have a dream like mine, and stand on the verge of seeing it become a reality … you too would not want to wait.”

  “Hey, I have dreams that I want to see come true an’ all,” Chase told him. “Had one last night, in fact. You were in it. And so were you,” he added, nodding to Sophia, “and Joe Ring-Tits there.” He smiled coldly. “And I had a baseball bat. With nails in it.”

  “Oh, do be quiet, Eddie,” Sophia huffed. She turned to Nina. “This is one of the reasons why I left him. He would never shut up. I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

  “If everyone would shut up, I might be able to concentrate,” said Nina, annoyed.

  With the power off, the temperature in the cabin rose quickly. Nina was the only one who didn’t notice, focused entirely on picking out the letters hidden among the text. She was on the ninth page of parchment when a call came in from one of Corvus’s men over the cabin speaker.

  “Sir, this is Bertillon,” he said excitedly. “We found it, about two hundred yards to the north behind the tall rock.” Everyone looked to see a weather-worn stone pillar protruding from the hillside.

  “Excellent,” said Corvus, stepping out of the cabin and donning a wide-brimmed sun hat. Komosa climbed through the rear door and held it open for Sophia, then dragged Chase from his seat and threw him onto the hot sand. Nina reluctantly followed, clutching the Hermocrates manuscript.

  She squinted at the surrounding landscape, the glare of the sun against the ground dazzling her. Stinging sweat beaded around her eyes. Apart from the rolling dunes, which stretched to the horizon in every direction, the low hill was the only landmark to be seen.

  The nearest town, Nina knew from the satellite images used at Corvus’s château to pinpoint the location of the Tomb, was almost a hundred miles away. Nobody came out here without a very good reason. While it was not the hottest desert on earth, the Grand Erg was still desolate and unforgiving.

  A good place t
o hide a great treasure…

  Corvus’s men returned to the helicopters to collect more equipment as their leader headed for the distinctive rock, the others following. Nina found herself drenched in sweat in barely a minute. She asked Sophia to let the sweltering Chase take off his jacket, but as she’d expected, the request was rejected—with a degree of pleasure.

  They reached the rock and found a smaller boulder lying half buried next to it. The gap between them formed a passage some four feet wide, which led deeper into the hillside. Corvus’s man, Bertillon, peered out of the shadows within as the group arrived. “It goes back quite a way, sir. And there’s something you should see. We’re not the first people to come here.”

  Using flashlights, they entered the tunnel mouth. “Not very impressive,” sniffed Sophia as she shone her light around the chamber inside.

  “There’s more back here, ma’am,” said Bertillon, moving deeper. An archway marked the entrance to a second chamber, the air cool and still. Nina immediately identified the architecture as ancient Athenian in design, still elegant despite the wear of millennia. They were almost certainly in the right place, then, but what else would they find?

  “Oh wow,” she gasped as she saw the awesome sight for herself.

  Sophia stopped next to her, playing her flashlight beam over the huge object. “All right, I admit—that’s impressive.”

  It was a statue, a stylized representation of a lion close to twelve feet high and almost as wide, blocking the end of the chamber. Its mouth was open in a silent roar, one clawed paw raised as if to strike, the other flat on the stone floor.

  Beneath that paw was a body.

  “Dead a long time,” Nina said, kneeling for a better look. The crushed corpse was little more than a dusty skeleton, desiccated scraps of skin clinging to it. “A thousand years, at least. Maybe even longer.”

  “What happened to him?” asked Corvus, shining his light at the lion’s mouth, which was almost eight feet off the ground. While the statue itself was stone, its teeth were tarnished bronze… with faint stains of blood still visible on them, more having gushed down the lion’s jaw as if it had bitten somebody’s arm off.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” said Chase, nodding at the heavy stone paw that had flattened the luckless explorer. “Clarence here squashed him. The thing’s a booby trap.”

  Everyone quickly stepped back to a respectful distance from the statue, and all eyes turned to Nina. “I think it’s time you told us what else you’ve found in your translations,” Sophia said, resting a hand on her holstered gun.

  Nina flicked back through her notebook. “I guess this is the Nemean lion—the first of the ten trials of Hercules.”

  “Ten?” Sophia raised a dubious eyebrow. “I thought there were twelve.”

  “It depends which version of the legend you read. In the earliest tellings from ancient Greece, Hercules only had ten trials, and the order in which they took place varied according to who was telling the story. The only constants were that the first task was always slaying the Nemean lion, the hide of which Hercules used to make his impenetrable cloak, and the second was killing the Lernaean hydra, where he obtained the poison for his arrows. The final task was always the same as well—defeating Cerberus, the guardian of the Underworld.”

  “So to get into Herc’s tomb, you’ve got to reenact his challenges?” asked Chase. Everyone looked at him. “What? I’m right, aren’t I, Nina?”

  “He is,” Nina confirmed, nodding. “That’s what was hidden in the text of Hermocrates—it tells you what the challenges are, and also which direction to go through the labyrinth, which is supposed to represent the Underworld, to reach them.”

  Sophia regarded her with suspicion. “But not how to beat them?”

  “It wouldn’t need to. The trials of Hercules were as familiar to every ancient Greek as the stories of Cinderella or Robin Hood or…or Star Wars are to us. Any self-respecting Athenian would already know how to beat them.” Nina indicated the lion’s mouth. “Hercules defeated the Nemean lion by reaching into its mouth and pulling out its insides. My guess would be that there’s some kind of trigger in there that you have to release to open the way into the next chamber.”

  Komosa tentatively clambered up on one of the lion’s paws and shone a light into its mouth. Close up, it was clear that the lower jaw was separate from the main body of the statue itself, able to hinge open and shut. “She’s right,” he said after a moment. “There’s a lever in here, looks like bronze.” He leaned back, directing the light into the gap between the two paws. “And there’s another passage down here.”

  “Whoever tried to enter the Tomb obviously got past the first challenge, then,” said Nina. “But not all of them survived.” She glanced at the crushed skeleton. “This guy got stomped, and judging from those stains somebody else lost an arm trying to reach into the lion’s mouth.”

  Corvus gave her an incredulous look. “Are you saying that the statue moved?”

  “Yeah. You set off a trap somewhere, and the lion rolls up the passage, the mouth bites, and the paws go up and down to try to gore or crush you. In fact …” She backed up, running a toe over the floor of the chamber until she found a section that was slightly lower than those around it. It shifted under her touch. “Here. See? This is loose—it’s probably what sprung the trap. Step on this, and you get shut in, with the only way out being …”

  “… to beat the challenge in the same way that Hercules did,” said Sophia thoughtfully. “Assuming they haven’t all been beaten, could any of the traps still be functioning?”

  “I don’t know. I would have said no, until Eddie told me about the one in Tibet, which would have been much older than these. If the mechanisms were made of stone and metal rather than wood and rope, then maybe…”

  Sophia shone her light into Nina’s face. “Well, it’s a good thing you’re here to guide us through them. How far have you gotten?”

  “I’ve reached the sixth trial, and gotten the directions through the labyrinth up to that point as well,” Nina said, blinking in irritation. “I’d be able to work faster if, y’know, you took these damn things off of me.” She held up both hands, tugging the chain of the handcuffs taut between them.

  Sophia considered for a moment. “Release her,” she ordered at last.

  “Are you sure?” asked Corvus.

  Sophia smiled and walked over to Chase, running a hand along the shoulders of his leather jacket. “She won’t do anything stupid as long as we have him.”

  Corvus nodded. “Very well.” One of his men unlocked Nina’s cuffs. She rubbed her wrists where the metal had dug grooves into her flesh. “Now, let us proceed.”

  One by one, the expedition members slipped through the narrow gap between the lion’s paws.

  The passages beyond were indeed a labyrinth, a tight, dusty maze. Nina had already written down the directions, however, and progression was a simple matter of following the correct choice of left or right at each junction.

  The question had occurred to her of what would happen if the wrong path were taken, but she decided not to bring it up in case Sophia or Corvus decided to make Chase be the one to investigate.

  They encountered other tasks along the way, more stylized statues frozen midattack when the release switch was found by past tomb raiders, or jammed against the end of each chamber having killed those who had tried—and failed—to pass them. With nobody to reset the traps, they were rendered harmless once triggered … but that didn’t stop the party from negotiating each challenge with the utmost caution. Just in case.

  The Lernaean hydra: seven snakelike heads that had once shot poisoned darts taking the lives of three intruders, their skeletons twisted on the ground in the agonized contortions of death. The stone heads now lay broken on the floor, the statue decapitated. Not a literal interpretation of the myth, Nina knew, but she doubted that the Tomb’s builders could make metal and stone spontaneously regenerate.

  The Ceryneian hind
: one robber had been impaled on its imposing spiked iron antlers, but his companions had remembered how Hercules had hobbled the animal by shooting it in the leg. One of the statue’s legs was indeed hinged to act as the escape trigger—though the robbers’ tactic of pelting it with rocks until one scored a hit was not quite as impressive as the single arrow of legend.

  The Augean stables: according to myth, Hercules had diverted a river to clean out the stables, and the ancient map on the backs of the parchments had shown a small river running by the hill. This trial was one of intelligence rather than of physical prowess, requiring floodgates to be opened in a certain order to direct water down particular channels. Make a mistake, and those opening the gates would be swept away by the deluge—a pair of broken bodies crushed against a grill at the end of one channel showed the penalty for failure. But with the river long dried up, the expedition was able to traverse the room with no difficulty.

  The Stymphalian birds: a narrow passage sloped steeply upwards, tracks in the ceiling sending brass statues of giant hawks hurtling down to the bottom, talons and sharp beaks extended to gore anyone in their path. Two birds had reached the foot of the slope, hitting with such force that their beaks were embedded in the wall—one having first punched straight through the chest of an unlucky robber. Another hawk lay a third of the way up the corridor, its supporting hook shot out by an arrow. Even Komosa was impressed by the marksmanship.

  The Cretan bull: a giant with the crudest method of attack so far, having simply advanced down a tight passage to crush anyone in its path. It had been defeated by lassoing its horns and pulling down its head, a few bone-dry strands of rope still hanging from them.

  Two more had fallen victim to this last trap, having slipped and fallen under the huge rollers acting as the bull’s “feet” as they tried to pull down the head. Nina paused to examine them more closely. “These are more recent,” she realized. “The clothing, what’s left of it, I’d say was fifteenth- or sixteenth-century European. Even a failed attempt to get through the traps clears the way for the next set of robbers.”