by Tom Fox
At this moment, however, those eyes were different. Within them was something Thomás had rarely seen there.
Concern.
‘What is it, Thomás?’ he asked. ‘Your heart . . . it is deeply upset.’
Thomás swallowed. ‘Yes, Father, I am disturbed.’
‘Try to calm yourself.’ The priest laid a hand on his shoulder. A disarming warmth descended through the fabric and eased into his bones. ‘Tell me what’s troubling you.’
Rumours of gun attacks came to Thomás’s mind again. The police barricades he’d passed on his way here. But he shoved them aside.
‘It’s the prophecy, Father,’ Thomás blurted out. He felt that his eyes had gone glassy. Perhaps there were tears welling within them. They may have been tears of joy. ‘The prophecy . . . the hand of God. All the things that have been revealed to us in bits and pieces over the past months, they’ve all come together. Just like you said.’
He could feel Father Alberto’s grip tighten on his shoulder. ‘My son, calm yourself. You’re overcome.’
‘They’ve found it!’ Thomás exclaimed. ‘The whole of it!’
‘You’re speaking in riddles, Thomás. Tell me what you mean.’
Thomás reached into his trouser pocket and dug out his phone. He slid his finger effortlessly across its screen and brought it to life. A web browser was already open, an image centred on the screen.
‘They’ve found it!’ he exclaimed again, handing the phone to the priest. ‘A tablet, written in some ancient script. Apparently it was unearthed a month ago, but they’ve just announced it today, with parts of it translated. Father, it’s a tablet of prophecy, and it confirms everything you’ve been telling us would come!’
Father Alberto stared at the small screen of Thomás’s phone. As he scrolled through the news article his features grew tighter, his eyes narrower.
‘You know what’s been going on outside today,’ Thomás added, his words finally delivered more softly, filled with wonder. ‘It’s the first of the miracles.’
‘This text calls them plagues,’ Father Alberto countered, reading.
‘Its translators can call them whatever they want,’ Thomás answered. ‘The first was revealed to us months ago, and now we find it’s written right there,’ he pointed towards the display, ‘on a tablet produced who knows how many centuries ago. And it’s happened. Right here, outside.’
Thomás beamed. This was reality, and it was overwhelming.
‘That tablet,’ he added, ‘confirms what we already know.’ He reached forward and gently wrapped his fingers in an embrace around the priest’s hands.
‘The Lord has begun to act. And this wonder is only the first.’
14
Beneath the Apostolic Palace
‘The tablet was discovered one month ago, almost to the day,’ Major Hans Heinrich said, presenting the details in as dry and concise a manner as any report Angelina had ever heard. He was a man who cut to the chase, approaching the present topic with professional detachment. ‘The discoverer was a civil archaeologist by the name of Manuel Herrera, of Spanish origin, who’d been working on the HSBC building site near San Clemente.’
Angelina knew the site, chiefly through the roadworks that had been causing traffic delays in the neighbourhood for months.
‘As is usual in central Rome, the government requires a survey to be performed whenever new building works are approved. This is land where every square metre of earth has history beneath it, and it’s a matter of routine to investigate what ruins and artefacts might lie underneath a plot of soil before foundations are laid and concrete poured.’
‘There’s always something.’ The interruption startled Heinrich as well as Angelina. It was the first time Ben Verdyx had spoken since they’d arrived in the room. ‘You shouldn’t belittle the need.’
‘I had no intention to belittle—’
‘Those digs reveal all sorts of things. We’ve found pottery, libraries, the foundations of houses, even whole churches, buried under our feet. The Vatican Museums are filled with things “found beneath the streets”.’
Despite her circumstances, Angelina felt a surprising comfort at Ben’s words. It was reassuring to hear an historian revel in history, even when he’d just been abducted at gunpoint.
‘Dr Verdyx, you misunderstand,’ the Swiss Guardsman continued. ‘That these digs find things is precisely the point. While the bulk of what is unearthed is usually inconsequential to all but the hyper-enthusiasts – generally it’s simply surveyed, itemised and catalogued and the sites are approved for building – on this particular occasion something was found that has proven entirely . . . consequential.’
‘A tablet.’ The words came from Angelina’s mouth, echoing the Guardsman’s announcement from a moment before. She was anxious to know what kind of object had prompted all this. The shock of how she’d arrived here was giving way to her own historical draw.
‘Precisely,’ Major Heinrich affirmed. ‘Mr Herrero discovered a small tablet buried at a depth of approximately two metres beneath the current topsoil level. It is manmade, of a reddish clay common – as I’m sure you will soon agree is of the utmost relevance – to the whole of what is today southern Iraq.’
Angelina felt something within her swell: an interest and excitement that rarely any more had occasion to emerge. To her left, her peripheral vision caught a new straightness in Ben’s posture as well.
‘I say it’s called Iraq today,’ Heinrich continued, ‘because in the ancient world it was known as—’
‘Mesopotamia.’ Ben cut him off.
‘Babylon,’ Angelina added. Their faces turned towards each other and once again their eyes met. This time, fear had given way to wonder.
‘Both answers are correct,’ Heinrich confirmed. ‘The lands of ancient Babylon, the heart of the kingdom of Mesopotamia, one of the greatest realms of the ancient world – the fabricators of legend, of laws, and of their own unique language. Which is of the utmost relevance, as impressed upon the tablet are twenty-seven lines of slightly decayed, but by and large well-preserved, ancient Akkadian script.’
Fire now shot fully through Angelina’s system.
‘Akkadian?’ The word burst out of her in tones of excited disbelief. ‘You discovered a new Akkadian document?’ The irony of referring to anything in the long-dead language as ‘new’ was not lost on her. Akkadian, old even by the time it had become the principal language of Mesopotamian society, was linked to a culture that died out almost three thousand years ago. Even if limited examples of ritualised Akkadian continued to be crafted after the Babylonian language’s decline in the eighth century BC, the most modern of its texts dated to no later than AD 105, which meant that anything written in its uniquely captivating script was at the very least over 1,900 years old.
‘So it would seem,’ the Swiss Guardsman answered.
‘Can . . . can we see it?’ Ben asked the question with such hesitancy it was almost inaudible.
‘Of course you can,’ Heinrich answered, nodding towards his colleague who immediately walked towards a table at the back of the room, on which a briefcase lay open.
‘For you, Dr Calla,’ Heinrich continued, gesturing towards Angelina, ‘this will be something entirely new. But for you, Dr Verdyx, I believe you’re about to discover you’ve seen part of our mysterious tablet before.’
A glossy A4-sized photo-printout was handed to Angelina by Wachtmeister Wüthrich, and she gazed at it with abject wonder. Her day thus far had been inexplicable. Now, it seemed all but impossible.
In the course of her years of study, Angelina had read every Akkadian text that existed. She’d always taken pride in that fact, though the catalogue of materials wasn’t precisely vast. This wasn’t Latin or Greek, or even Aramaic or classical Hebrew, all of which had veritable libraries of volumes that could consume even the most adept scholar’s entire life. The assembled Akkadian collective could fit on a reasonably sized bookshelf, which amounted to a ra
ther different scenario. She’d been able to go through the whole received history of Akkadian literature, multiple times. She’d been exhaustive.
But Angelina had never seen this text before.
Printed at the bottom of the page, beneath the photograph, were a few of its pertinent details. The tablet was oblong, twice as tall as it was wide at approximately forty-eight centimetres by twenty-four. The twenty-seven lines of text ran from what looked like approximately a centimetre from its left edge in neat, though slightly downward-slanting lines, to a margin roughly the same distance from the right side. Its rough-hewn edges suggested it may have come from a larger panel, though the text appeared to be self-contained.
‘This is a photo of just one side,’ Angelina said, looking up to Major Heinrich. ‘Do you have others?’
‘There is nothing inscribed on the back,’ he answered, ‘and no other tablets were found along with this one. The search was thorough. It appears to be a complete document.’
She acknowledged his response with only a nod, returning her attention to the vivid photograph. Whoever had cared for the tablet after its discovery had been careful and thorough. Its surface was cleaned, each runic impression clear and visible. The lighting was similarly well composed, rendering the impressions vividly offset against the surface.
Angelina’s lexical memory was already speeding back to life. She hadn’t had occasion actually to translate Akkadian in – hell, it felt like far longer than it probably actually was. Years. It wasn’t like new documents just popped up every day. Still, despite the fact that she no longer had regular cause to delve into ancient linguistics, some skills never really left a person. Hers hadn’t completely atrophied, and they returned with a thrill that momentarily overpowered her perplexity at everything else about her day. For an instant, Angelina was no longer in an underground room with papal guards, but was instead back in the Sapienza University library, an ambitious graduate student brimming with enthusiastic curiosity. Now, as then, she watched as each phrase and clumping together of runes gradually formed into meaningful phrases that in her mind were forever linked to the mythology of the cultures that had produced the language. She could feel the flood waters of Gilgamesh’s great deluge sweeping over the legendary Mesopotamian landscape. The great walls and ziggurats of Ur, the pillars and gardens of Babylon in Sumeria. All the worlds of which this language was the witness, the legends of which it was the only remaining voice – though those myths and legends had worked their way across cultures and into other traditions as well – they all came rushing through her consciousness as she was swept into the task of translating.
But as with so much else in this day, things quickly began to feel uncomfortable.
A few lines down, one set of triangles and dashes filtered its way through her storeroom of lexical memory and became a clear word: ‘river’. It could refer to the Tigris, of course, or the Euphrates – the traditional rivers of Mesopotamian lore, the latter so much the standard in Akkadian literature that it could regularly be referred to without mentioning its name, in the same way that citizens of Washington, DC could refer to ‘the Hill’ without needing to specify Capitol Hill, or financiers in London could refer to ‘the City’ without further qualification.
But another river was more vivid in Angelina’s mind today.
Then another rune, with its lines arrayed more perpendicularly and without as many cross-hatches, resonating with action: ‘run’. Though, even as Angelina found herself whispering its meaning aloud, she realised it was set into the future. ‘Will run.’
The river will run . . .
A prophecy. Trembling once again, she somehow knew that the next rune would speak of blood, even before she looked at it.
Ben Verdyx’s examination of the photograph was undertaken amidst a wholly different interior atmosphere than Angelina’s. He was only a few metres away from her, still sitting on the chair to which he’d formerly been bound, but his thoughts had him in entirely another world.
I’ve seen this tablet before.
The thought was impossible. Clearly he’d never seen it in his life. The artefact was entirely new to him – not only its contents and shape, but even its very existence. This was the first moment he’d heard such a treasure from the distant past had been so recently unearthed.
But he had seen it before. Or, properly speaking, part of it.
‘These four lines, here at the top,’ he finally blurted out, pointing to the upper edge of the image and leaning towards Heinrich, ‘I know this text.’
The Major said nothing, but a slight nod of a shining forehead confirmed he’d expected this recognition.
‘You knew about this?’ Angelina demanded, Ben’s surprising statement perhaps the only thing in the world that could have drawn her focus away from the image in her hands.
‘Not the actual tablet. But these lines . . . I’ve read them before. Transcribed, in the absence of any context.’
‘How is that possible?’
‘Because I gave them to you,’ a new voice announced. It came as the door on the far side of the room slid open and a man in flowing black robes, offset at the waist by a sash of vivid crimson, stepped towards them.
‘I gave them to you, and with that act, things began to fall apart.’
15
Outside – central Rome
The alteration of the waters had started the change in the atmosphere of the ancient city, but it had been the gunfire that had transformed strange into fearful. The waters ran red and people were curious, confused. But then gunshots sounded in the city’s streets, not in one location but two, almost simultaneously, and the people became afraid.
There was nothing obvious to connect the events. The most prevalent theory for the water’s altered colour had gradually settled on some freak contamination: a spill or a burst pipe. But it didn’t take overly creative minds to link together the ‘blood’ of the river, as purely coincidental as that colour might be, with the very real blood that had been spilled in the streets.
The waters had changed, and people had started dying.
One had been killed along the Tiber at the Piazza Pia. Another had been wounded and died en route to the hospital. A second barrage of gunfire had erupted at the Ponte Sisto. No deaths there, but three members of the expanded crowd had received injuries that had them in intensive care. The casualty count still had the opportunity to rise.
But the fear already was. The city was growing edgy. And the waters were still red.
16
Beneath the Apostolic Palace
Cardinal Giotto Forte’s diminutive, slightly rotund figure did not approach the height of the two Swiss Guards, but there was an immediate deference in their demeanour which suggested he was, without question, the man in authority.
‘The lines of text at the top of the tablet were sent to you at my specific instruction, less than two days after it was unearthed.’ He spoke directly to Ben, who gazed back in obvious recognition of the figure who was speaking, but equally obvious confusion over his words.
‘Cardinal Forte, I, I . . .’ Ben stuttered for clarity. ‘I don’t understand. What would something like this have to do with your office? Or, moreover, with me?’
‘The second question might be the easiest to answer.’ Giotto Forte gave a nod towards Major Heinrich, who in acknowledgement of the unspoken command brought the Cardinal a chair. The encrimsoned man sat with a grunt, his frame too wide for the small wooden seat.
‘The text was provided to you because you’re the only resident expert within Vatican City on Akkadian script. It took us a bit of phoning around the various colleges and halls to find you – but it turned out you were, literally, right beneath our noses.’ The wit of his reference to the underground expanse of the Vatican Secret Archives, whose precise extent was unknown but was estimated to include more than eighty kilometres of underground tunnels and storage stacks, seemed to please Cardinal Forte. No one else in the room joined in with his smile.
<
br /> ‘The long and the short of it,’ he continued, bringing seriousness back on to his features, ‘was that we wanted to know what it meant, and you were the man for the job.’
Ben’s gaze had slipped gradually away as the Cardinal offered his explanation. His eyes settled on a point buried somewhere in the floor, memories more vivid than vision.
‘I remember translating it,’ he muttered. ‘The text was given to me as a scan of a hand-penned copy.’
‘At the time, we didn’t feel it pertinent to disclose any more details to you,’ Forte continued. ‘Usual practice around here. When we don’t know what we’re dealing with, caution is the ruling principle.’
‘Over an ancient tablet?’ Angelina protested.
‘A presumption!’ Cardinal Forte answered back, energetic and commanding. ‘You presume it’s old, just as we did. But one can never know. There have been plenty of recent discoveries of “ancient” documents, scrolls, fragments of papyrus and the like, which have turned out to be forgeries. Antiquity can be faked, though these days it’s immensely difficult to do. The Vatican has no interest in making a fool of itself by announcing an ancient find until we’re absolutely sure that’s what we’ve got. Have to look into the text. Into the materials, that sort of thing.’
Angelina sat back, her head offering only the slightest nod of acknowledgement. The Cardinal might be a pudgy cleric with an overbearing attitude, but he wasn’t wrong. The past years had seen too many cases of fraudulent ‘discoveries’ coming into the mainstream, the most famous being the so-called ‘Gospel of Jesus’s Wife Fragment’ published, to immense worldwide fanfare, by one of the most eminent scholars in religious studies. It had been lauded as the find of the century, had made scholarly journals and public media; but in the end it had been a reporter who had chased down its provenance and discovered it to be a hoax. It had cost the scholar her reputation, and the venerable institution that had tenured her slipped dramatically down the rankings of international scholarly respect as a result. Angelina could understand why the Vatican would be anxious not to follow suit.