The Emperor Awakes (25 page)

‘But what Plato, Aristotle and Euclid and Descartes all teach us is to question, always to question and seek higher knowledge and that is what serves humanity better and leads to the greater achievement, exploration, experimentation and then invention and creativity. Because art is also part of this circle of curiosity and the succour of the soul and the mind.’

‘And yet what we have found so far in respect of the last Emperor is next to a church or a mosque, both religious establishments. So science and religion do go hand in hand as a force for good, a force for bringing people together, even if it, sometimes, draws them apart.’

Ptolemy raised his arms to silence them.

‘Well done. You have found the bridge and you are now ready to cross it. Farewell.’

Based on his earlier offer extended to them, Aristo really expected he would try to detain them, but apparently he misjudged him. Nevertheless, they should be cautious.

‘Giorgos, don’t drop your guard. We are not out of the woods yet. Let’s get that manuscript and get out of here.’

King Ptolemy I Soter, Pharaoh of Egypt, or rather his ghost, was gone, but only next door to his palace to join his physical self, who, during this episode, had continued to converse with Hieronymus and a new guest, Eliagos, from a place called Smyrna, fresh from a meeting with Stephanos, a dangerous deployment of time-hopping.

‘Eliagos, I have a gift for you. Our conniving friends next door are smarter than I expected. But right now they are vulnerable, because by solving my riddle, they believe that they are out of danger. They are simply too precious to let them get away, don’t you think?’

Ptolemy’s face turned into a mask of mirth and sardonic pleasure.

* * *

The air went cold and foul, and Giorgos and Aristo started to find it hard to breathe. There were sounds of running feet coming from the other end of the hall and approaching quickly. Aristo looked at Giorgos.

‘I think we have overstayed our welcome.’

Aristo didn’t know how he knew, but something directed his hand to touch the bust with the likeness of the Emperor.

They found themselves underwater surrounded by ruins, columns, statues, huge blocks of marble, a forgotten underwater ghost city. Aristo indicated upwards. They both desperately needed air. They broke through the surface of the Alexandrian bay blue sea.

They emerged on a beach, near the port and the old quarter of Alexandria of the present day.

‘Aristo, judging from the location, I think those ruins underwater must be what’s left of the Royal Quarter of the Ptolemies. Looking at the city, we are clearly in modern times, but I can’t tell whether it’s the same time and year we left.’

‘Let’s find out before we do anything else. At least it’s good to see we are back into our normal clothes.’

And then they saw it in front of them. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

‘At least now we know it’s sometime after 2003 when the Library opened its doors.’

They saw lots of places with the current date. They breathed a sigh of relief. They seemed to be back in their own time and probably at the time they were about to enter the Library before forcibly evicted to another era. They again went through the front entrance, silently hoping for the real thing this time.

Yet, with only the slightest hint of hesitation, they entered, once more, the venerated space. A space suffering with split personality disorder, a space that played on two time dimensions; conventional library by day that doubled as a portal to other days and lives of others by night.

CHAPTER 28

Alexandria, Egypt
Present day

Once through the door, a huge space that resembled a cavern opened up in front of them. In contrast to the bombardment by noise running rampant outside, the library was a different solar system, with the merest of hushed sounds, not near enough to register on the Alexandrian decibel scale.

Giorgos and Aristo hadn’t even spent two minutes in silent awe of the hungry-to-share-knowledge beast that sucked them in, when Aristo’s mother, Elli, materialised in front of them.

‘Mother. How did you …?’

‘I wanted to be the first to hear what you’ve seen. And I see a familiar bulge in your side pocket. Is that a gift for me?’

Aristo had totally forgotten about the manuscript he obtained in an Alexandria of another age. Well, it was an eventful trip after all, to say the least. He patted the outside of the pocket she indicated and then put his hand inside and brought it out. He handed it to her with a flourish. ‘A gift from Ptolemy with his respects to the queen of his heart.’

Elli took the manuscript and smiled at her son’s joke. ‘Have you studied this?’

‘We’ve had no time. We had to get out of there in a hurry. I think Ptolemy had decided to keep us. He had praised our intelligence earlier and wished we could have stayed there in his service. I initially thought he was joking, but then I sensed his cold intent. That’s why I could not be more surprised when he left without even a backward glance. Nevertheless, I remained uneasy. I was alerted to the first sign of danger when we heard what sounded like lots of feet on a purposeful and synchronised walkabout. That was not the sound of relaxed visitors. The sound of those feet declared its intent and left no doubt of its deadly precision and efficiency in dealing with tiresome intruders.

‘It was not an empty threat, an attempt to frighten us. The danger was not the figment of a hyperactive imagination. What was facing us was a real danger, a declaration of war. I knew what was coming was an effective sentence as slaves of the exalted almighty Ptolemy, unquestionable and unchallenged ruler of all Egypt and its dominions. My suspicions were confirmed when we saw at the far end of the cavernous main hall of the library a bunch of Ptolemy’s men approaching. We knew they were coming for us.’ Giorgos and Aristo then proceeded to tell her about their adventure.

‘I’m glad you are safe.’ Elli pointed at the manuscript with her forefinger. ‘Do you know what this is?’ Giorgos and Aristo both shook their heads. She continued without waiting for a response. ‘I wonder why Ptolemy let this slip through his fingers. Maybe he didn’t know its significance. Then again maybe he did and it was a rouse to lull us all into a false sense of arrogance, of complacency that comes with easy success, hoping that we would become careless and expose a weakness he could exploit.

‘Or, perhaps, he wanted us not to believe that he would let such a precious object go unless it was a fake and pay it no notice. Another possibility is simply that if he let it go then it is indeed a fake.’ Elli realised she was thinking aloud. She paused and shook off the speculation. ‘Anyway, these, I believe, may be the missing seven pages of the Book of the Pallanians.’ Both Giorgos and Aristo went to stand next to her to have a look. ‘Of course, to confirm my suspicion, I will need to take it to someone who would know.’

‘Where will you find such a person? Aren’t practically all Pallanians or anyone who would know dead?’

‘We will need to go and see Aggelos.’ Elli said with a sense of urgency.

‘Who is Aggelos?’

‘He’s a monk. More specifically the curator and keeper of the library and treasures of the Monastery of Pantokrator.’

‘On Mount Athos.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then let’s go there now.’

‘No. Aristo, you need to go to the site of ancient Pergamon in Asia Minor. From what you’ve told me, it seems that there is something waiting for us there. Katerina will be going with you. I have a feeling she will be of help to you there.’

‘What about Giorgos?’

Elli turned to Giorgos. ‘Giorgos, I want you to go back to Limassol. I want you to investigate the possibility of an impostor placed on the throne of Byzantium at the time of the fall to the Ottomans in 1453. If it proves to be true, I want to know who perpetrated such an audacious act and why. And I want you to gather all that you found in the tomb in Cappadocia. I want us to have a talk about that in the next few days. Aristo, we are all going back to Limassol and you will, immediately, leave with Katerina for Pergamon.’ She turned back to the manuscript and after a while she indicated on the page. ‘Do you recognise this passage?’ Both Giorgos and Aristo looked at what she was pointing. Aristo recognised it instantly.

‘If I remember it correctly, it’s word by word the passage that Katerina and I saw in Ayia Sophia in Constantinople.’

“The tears run from the tropical depth to the middle sea, and the land cries and the general takes the ancient throne for centuries now vacant, the one-man democratic city shines in agony and pleasure in equal measure, and the golden statue absorbs and consumes the liquid of life around it, but spits it out, unsatisfied, and runs to the glowing horn by the sea, on a golden lamb upon which rides the brother of the matriarch and the matriarch herself … but then changes course for the city that carries the name of the gift to the baby Jesus, now totally destroyed, but chosen to join them all … But beware …”

Giorgos did not take long to figure out the meaning of the cryptic passage.

‘I know what it means. The first part is Alexandria. The tears is the Nile flowing into the Mediterranean and the general is Ptolemy that becomes pharaoh after a hiatus of a few hundred years of Egypt being under Persian control with no longer a pharaonic dynasty ruling it. The second refers to Athens. In name a democracy, but in practice with Pericles it was the rule of the one man. The golden statue is the great statue of the goddess Athena on the Acropolis that could be seen for miles around. The third is Constantinople. The horn refers to the Golden Horn, the city’s natural safe harbour. The brother and the sister riding the golden lamb refers to the legend of Elli and the golden lamb that led to the legend of the golden fleece. The matriarch of the Symitzis family is Elli, which matches the name of the girl in the legend. A coincidence? Probably but unlikely. But how does it all tie in together? Is there something we must do or find at these places? Do they have something in common?’

They all read further down the manuscript. Giorgos was becoming increasingly excited.

‘Do you remember the three keys we got in Athens and what Plato said?’

Aristo nodded. ‘Yes, the keys to the three greatest Greek cities, to wake him with the blood of his lost child. The three cities: Alexandria, Athens and Constantinople. And the fourth must be Smyrna, the one that was totally destroyed in 1922. There must be in the first three cities a place where the keys must be inserted. About Smyrna, I don’t know. Smyrna was one of the gifts of the three wise men to baby Jesus. Perhaps I’m going on a wide tangent here. The passage said that Smyrna joins them. If you put the four cities on a map, I believe they roughly form a cross. Perhaps the cross is the Jesus connection. Get me a map. If you draw lines from each city and join them, I want to see where the lines meet.’

Aristo got the map and drew the lines. It’s an irregular parallelogram. The centre of it is here … That looks like …’ Elli completed for him. ‘No, I thought it might be Mount Ellothon, but it’s not.’ Aristo continued. ‘Or if we draw a line from Constantinople to Alexandria and another from Athens to Smyrna … or … the centre is … No, it doesn’t work either. It doesn’t make sense, even though it could be a lovely coincidence. What if there is a fifth location? Giorgos, do you remember what we saw in Alexandria? The panel that was supposed to have a name but was empty and we saw those images instead with a fifth line leading to somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean? But the line did not meet its final point of call, its destination. There must be a fifth location which, I would venture to speculate, could be the location of the last Emperor’s tomb.’

Giorgos shook his head. ‘Yes, but without a clue … without further information …’ Giorgos looked again at the passage. ‘But look. There is more. This here completes the passage: “… the power unleashed, beware that that is unleashed…it can only be controlled by the one”.’

‘The one …’ all three of them repeated almost in unison, phrasing it as a question. And then they continued together as if in awe and deep contemplation, ‘… the power…’

‘That must have something to do with the revival of the last Emperor. That is what the Ruinands want. They must think it would give them the weapon to defeat us at last. We must not let them. We must beat them in this race.’

But they had forgotten that there was a traitor in their midst, an operative in the pay of the Ruinands.

CHAPTER 29

Pergamon, Asia Minor
(Modern-day Turkey)
Present day

One moment they were walking between ruins, and the next the whole landscape had been transformed and Aristo was standing with Katerina admiring the gleaming roofs and buildings of the acropolis of Pergamon.

Its greatest treasure was the vast, painstakingly accumulated and jealously guarded collection of manuscripts written on parchment or
pergamene,
the sturdy material the city invented and gave its name, a material borne out of necessity, when the Ptolemies of Alexandria in Egypt banned the export of papyrus. The ban led to a severe shortage of writing material, rare and expensive as it was already, a problem compounded by the fact that Egypt was the only source of the stuff.