“That’s the reason we’re here now,” Jack said. “Let’s get down to business.”
After a quick coffee on the patio, Jack led them into his office. Almost the entire length of the old drawing room was occupied by a massive wooden table, its gnarled oak surface made from timbers reputedly salvaged from the ships that had brought the Norman invaders to England. Every time Jack sat at the table he felt the power of his own ancestry, as if his forebears who had plotted wars and voyages of discovery from this very table were keeping him ghostly company and egging him on. Now, instead of nautical dividers and parchment charts, the table was covered with the instruments of twenty-first-century exploration, computer workstations and communications consoles. To these Maria added a large black manila folder, which she laid at one end of the table. At the other end Jack raised a video screen linked to a laptop he had opened up beside the folder.
Costas arrived breathlessly after a rushed visit to the engineering complex, and Jack closed the door behind him and dimmed the lights. Maria and O’Connor sat down at the end of the table, with Jeremy on one side and Jack and Costas on the other.
“There was something I didn’t tell you on the phone, the reason why I wanted to show you this in person.” Maria spoke slowly, her hands laid flat on the closed manila folder. “Father O’Connor was in Oxford when I arrived from Hereford the night before last, and I took him immediately into my confidence. He is the world’s leading authority on what you’re about to see.”
Just as Maria was about to raise the cover of the folder, O’Connor put his hand on hers. “What we discuss here must remain secret,” he said quietly. “The time may come when this story will be headline news, but until then even the slightest leak could jeopardize everything. And I’m not just talking about archaeology. Lives are at stake here, perhaps countless lives.”
He released his grip and looked at the others, who all nodded in turn. Maria glanced at him again and then lifted the cover, folding it back to reveal a protective sheet of tissue paper over a hard white board. She slid away the paper and they saw the image that had transfixed her in the lost chamber of the cathedral the day before. Costas let out a low whistle as he and Jack stood up and craned over for a better view. The vellum, about three feet square, had been rolled out and pressed under a transparent polyurethane sheet. Even after seven hundred years in the dusty cathedral chamber the ink was still dark and clearly preserved the outline of the map.
“Fantastic,” Jack murmured. “I haven’t seen the Mappa Mundi for ages, but this is all familiar. You can clearly make out the T-shape of the Mediterranean and Red Sea dividing the continents, with Asia at the top and Jerusalem in the centre. And Europe and Africa are even labelled correctly.”
O’Connor nodded. “I’ve no doubt this is Richard of Holdingham’s exemplar. His sketch made in Lincoln and then copied and embellished by the illuminator in Hereford. Now look at the lower left corner.”
Jack had already seen the delicate lines of text and drawing Maria was pointing at, but had wanted to take in the whole map first. Now he peered closely at the image beyond the western rim of the world, an image so different from the dedication inscribed in this place on the finished map.
“My God, they really are runes,” he said excitedly. “I’m a little rusty, but this must be it.” He pointed at the smaller of the two inscriptions and glanced at Jeremy, who nodded and recited from memory.
“Harald Sigurdsson our King with his thole-companions reached these parts with the treasure of Michelgard. Here they feast with Thor in Valhalla and await the final battle of Ragnarok.”
“Ragnarok is the mythical battle at the end of time, when the warriors in Valhalla will seek final glory,” Maria said. “The second inscription and the drawing are virtually identical to the Vinland Map, showing the coastline discovered by Leif Eiriksson beyond Greenland around the year AD 1000. Sigurdsson was the family name of Harald Hardrada. The implication is that Hardrada and his companions reached America a generation or two after the first Vikings blazed the trail.”
“With the treasure of Michelgard, of Constantinople,” Jack murmured excitedly. “That’s why we’re here. I only wish I knew what he’d taken. It’s hardly likely to have been a shipload of classical bronzes.”
“Look closely at those runes,” O’Connor said. “Then you’ll see the real reason we’re here.”
Jack scanned the text from the bottom up, from the clearer ink of the lower lines to the more faded inscription above. The symbols seemed to be a standard version of the futhark, the Norse runic alphabet named for its first six letters. He could see nothing exceptional until he came to the faded symbol at the beginning, a symbol that had been drawn slightly larger, like the first letter of an illuminated manuscript.
He took the magnifying glass offered by Jeremy and leaned over to peer closer. “That’s definitely an odd one,” he said. “It looks like the futhark symbol for the letter F, with the arms angled up on the right side, only here it’s got three arms instead of two and it’s repeated symmetrically on the other side.”
Jeremy shook his head impatiently. “Forget runes for a moment. Think outside the box.”
Jack looked up and stared at Jeremy without expression and then looked down again. Suddenly his mouth opened and he nearly dropped the magnifying glass. “The menorah.”
“It was Jeremy who first noticed it,” Maria said after a silence. “I was completely wrapped up in that extraordinary map.”
“An understandable distraction,” Costas said, smiling at her.
“My father’s ancestors were Sephardic Jews,” she replied quietly. “Expelled from Spain by the Christian king not so long after your Crusaders were trying to save the Holy Land. One of the great ironies of history.”
Jack slowly sat back, his face a picture of stunned incomprehension. O’Connor pulled the laptop towards him and loaded a CD into the drive. “Forgive me for jumping in,” he said, “but if we’re talking about the menorah, we need to know something of its history. It so happens that the mystery of the lost Jewish treasure of the Temple is another special passion of mine.”
4
Moments later a spectacular vision of ancient Rome appeared on the screen at the far end of the table. In the foreground a perfectly proportioned marble arch towered several stories high, its eroded surface embellished with relief carvings. Jack, Costas, Maria and Jeremy could make out trophies, banners, laurel wreaths and winged victories standing on globes. In the background loomed the vast tiered facade of the Colosseum.
“The most enduring legacy of the Flavian dynasty of emperors, Vespasian and his sons, Titus and Domitian,” Father O’Connor said. “The Arch of Titus straddles the Sacred Way in the centre of Rome. The Colosseum was financed on the spoils of the Jewish War and inaugurated by Titus in AD 80. It was built next to the Colossus of Nero, a monstrous gilt-bronze statue that gave the amphitheatre its name.”
“But not until the medieval period,” Jeremy interjected. “The name Colosseum first appears in the Venerable Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum in the eighth century AD.” He looked sheepishly at the group. “Another of our finds from the Hereford library.”
“The Jewish War,” Costas said. “Another excuse for rape and pillage on a colossal scale?”
“It was pretty ghastly, even by Roman standards,” O’Connor replied. “Probably a greater proportion of the Jewish population was annihilated in the war of AD 66 to 70 than during the Nazi Holocaust, either killed in battle or put to the sword in an orgy of retribution that lasted for another three years. But the story’s more complex than you might think. The Jewish state had enjoyed an unusual degree of autonomy under Rome, and there were close links with the emperors. King Herod Agrippa of Judaea was educated in Rome and was a friend of the emperor Claudius. A generation later the Jewish historian Josephus became a confidant of Vespasian, having switched sides to Rome during the rebellion. He has a bad reputation because the Jews never forgave him, but his writings are invaluable as the only eyewitness account of the war and the triumph in Rome in AD 71.”