Kismet frowned. “You said a serpent devoured it.”
“Indeed. But in this instance, the serpent was actually a metaphor for the priesthood of the cult of serpent worshippers. They seized the seed by violence, perhaps even slaying Nimrod, and fled.”
Kismet nodded slowly. “So that is what you are after: the Seed that belonged to Japheth.”
“The Japhetic Seed is still out there somewhere. There are too many legends of men who have discovered the power of eternal life for me to believe otherwise.”
“Everyone wants to live forever,” Kismet argued. “That’s why the quest for immortality is central to religions and folklore. Some people are desperate enough to try crazy things to find the Garden of Eden, the Philosopher’s Stone, or the Fountain of Youth.”
“Curious you should mention that.” Leeds flipped to the back of the Bible and withdrew a folded sheet of parchment. “The Fountain of Youth is rather a pet hobby of mine. There are in fact several legends of such a place on nearly every continent, though the quest of Ponce de Leon is perhaps the one with which people are most familiar. Did you know that most scholars reject the idea that Juan Ponce de Leon, the first Spanish governor of Puerto Rico, was actually looking for such a fountain?”
“I had a professor who maintained that Ponce de Leon was really looking for a cure for impotence, and not a true source of eternal life. Sixteenth-century Viagra.”
If Leeds even heard him, he gave no indication. “There are of course contemporary accounts that verify his interest in finding a rejuvenatory pool, though in most, we find him looking for an island in the Caribbean. It is only in the memoir of a man named Hernando D’Escalante Fontaneda, written in 1575, that we find mention of Ponce De Leon searching for the Fountain of Youth in Florida. He wrote: ‘Juan Ponz de Leon, giving heed to the tale of the Indians of Cuba and Santo Domingo, went to Florida in search of the River Jordan…that he might become young from bathing in such a stream.’
“Fontaneda was a remarkable man. He was, as a youth, shipwrecked on the Florida coast in the year 1549, and captured by Calusa Indians. The Calusa sacrificed all the other survivors of the wreck, but Fontaneda survived, and lived with them in captivity for nearly twenty years. He was eventually freed, and for several years thereafter, served as a guide and translator for Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the Spanish governor of Florida. During that time, he spoke often of a great treasure pit in a Calusa village — gold and silver plundered from wrecked Spanish ships. Fontaneda boasted that, with a hundred men, he could seize the wealth of the Calusa leader, but just three years after winning his freedom, he returned to Spain to reclaim his ancestral lands. A few years later, he recorded the account of his time in captivity. On the subject of Ponce De Leon’s River Jordan, he wrote: ‘I can say, that while I was a captive there, I bathed in many streams, but to my misfortune I never came upon the river.’”
Leeds paused and Kismet wondered if that had been his cue to applaud. To fill the uncomfortable silence, he nodded and said, “Interesting.”
“Even more interesting is this letter.” Leeds removed a folded sheet of paper from between the pages of his Bible. “It was written by Andrés Rodríguez de Villegas, the colonial governor of Florida from 1630-32, to King Philip IV of Spain. Evidently, the letter was handed over to the Inquisition and eventually found its way into the Vatican’s secret archives, which given its nature, comes as little surprise.”
Kismet again noted how precisely Leeds spoke, as if reading from a teleprompter. He expected the silver-haired man to start reading the missive aloud, but to his surprise, Leeds proffered the document.
It was obviously a photocopy, printed on a crisp sheet of twenty pound bond paper. Someone had scrawled an English translation under each line of quill pen written Castilian Spanish. Kismet scanned the first few lines verifying that the translator had stayed true to the original text, and then focused his attention on the English translation:
“Most Powerful Lord,
“In my last letter to you, I wrote of the man Henrique De Moresco Fortunato, who has been residing in Saint Augustine for more than a year. I was suspicious of Fortunato since he could give no account of how he came by his extraordinary wealth. It was said by some that Fortunato might perhaps secretly be a descendant of Hernan Fontaneda, who as a boy was captured by Indians and later served my predecessor some sixty years past. Fontaneda often spoke of an Indian treasure hoard the location of which only he knew. It was my belief that Fortunato had learned of its location, and procured the treasure for himself, so I took it upon myself to investigate. Little did I imagine what Fortunato, drunk on wine, would reveal to me.”
Kismet paused. His eyes flashed over the name that kept repeating. “Henrique Fortunato,” he muttered. “Henry Fortune?”
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Kismet?”
He looked at Leeds, jarred out of his reverie. “Sorry.” He looked down the letter reading silently until his eyes caught the place where he had left off.
“‘I am not a son of Fontaneda,’ he told me. ‘I am the very man.
“‘I, Hernando Fontaneda, was a captive of the Indians for seventeen years, and in that time I learned of many things, the mundane and the profane, which I dared not share with my fellow Spaniards. The treasure of Carlos, the Indian King, was the least of my discoveries.
“‘You have heard of the pool of life, and the River Jordan, sought by Ponz de Leon but never found. It exists. I have seen it with my own eyes. There is a cavern where fire dances upon the surface of the water, as if at the very mouth of Hell. The water, if you dare touch it, will impart renewed vigor. An old man will grow young and vital. Do you not believe me? How many years do you think I have? Thirty? I was born nearly one hundred years ago.’
“All this and more, Fortunato revealed to me. I know not if he spoke the truth. If he is not Fontaneda, then how do I explain his great wealth? But if he is the man he claims to be, then he has committed the gravest of sins, seeking life eternal apart from the grace of our Lord. Worse, he has found it.
“I ordered his arrest, intending that this was a matter to be investigated by the Holy Inquisition, but he fled, overpowering all who stood in his path with uncanny strength. He has since fled the city, escaping into the lands of the Indian. His property has been seized, yet the goods taken represent the barest fraction of the wealth I believe he possesses still.
“'With an additional five hundred arquebusiers, I may be able to hunt the man down; send me a thousand, and I assure you it will be done.”
Kismet glanced back up to the middle of the letter and reread Fortunato’s statements.
“What do you think of that?” inquired Leeds, his icy gaze probing.
Kismet shrugged. “You said that was in the Vatican archives? How’d it end up there?”
“I would surmise that the Church wanted to suppress any mention of the Fountain, for the very reason Rodriguez wrote in the first place. Eternal life, apart from the grace of God, would have been a most egregious sin.”
Kismet handed back the letter. “So what are you doing here, chasing after Gilgamesh?”
“The letter is but one piece of a greater puzzle. I do not know if Fortunato was in fact Hernando Fontaneda kept unnaturally young by some mysterious pool. He may simply have been a drunkard, spinning a tall tale. I cannot stake my search upon a single questionable account. Nor can I entirely dismiss such an account out of hand.
“I do sincerely believe that the first step in my journey lies in understanding what became of the Seed after it was taken from Nimrod. Those who worshipped Nimrod would have pursued the priests of the serpent cult to the ends of the earth. They might have ended up in the Americas, but they could just as easily have taken their prize to Asia or deepest Africa. Serpent gods exist in almost every ancient culture and are universally viewed as a symbol of eternal life, except in the Judeo-Christian mythos, where they are associated with evil.”