“Yasin,” the man replied.
Williamson squatted down and grabbed the side handle of the crate. “Wanna help me with this, Yasin?”
Tariq translated the request and the goat herder’s face exploded into a smile. He squatted down, grabbed the other handle and heaved the crate up so enthusiastically Williamson was nearly knocked over. “Whoah there, tiger,” he said, lifting his end and steadying himself until they were carrying the burden equally. “Why don’t we start at the gate,” he said, leading the way. “See if we can’t get that sucker down before the new guys arrive.”
71
The unaccustomed sound of plastic on plastic buzzed through the abbot’s private chambers as the phone shivered and shimmied across the keyboard of the open laptop, drawing all eyes to it. Thomas walked across from the huge fireplace, picked it up and opened the message.
“Well?” Athanasius appeared too, crowding over the phone to try and see what message it had brought. Gabriel lay on the bed, still strapped down. Thomas angled the phone so they could both see the screen as a photograph of the dark stone appeared on it. Another downloaded, this time showing the reverse side.
“The Starmap,” Athanasius whispered, a smile curling the edges of his mouth. The smile faltered. “It’s too small,” he said, moving his head back and forth to try and focus on it.
“Give me a second,” Thomas said, “I thought this might be a problem.”
He opened an application on the laptop then selected a different stripped wire from the doctored USB cable and touched it to a contact point at the base of the phone. After a few seconds the mouse arrow on the laptop screen turned into a spinning wheel and a command box opened asking if he wanted to IMPORT ALL IMAGES?
“Could you hit enter please,” Thomas said, looking up at Athanasius. “My hands are somewhat occupied.”
Athanasius did as he was asked and a progress bar tracked the slow transfer of data from the phone to the laptop. No one breathed or moved, least of all Thomas, who was literally holding it all together. The progress bar vanished and two new icons appeared on the desktop. Thomas let go of the phone, clicked them open and two images of the Starmap appeared on the screen. He enlarged them and arranged them so both were visible next to each other.
“That’s Malan,” Athanasius said, pointing at the image with the block of text forming the inverted shape of the Tau. He translated as he read:
The Key unlocks the Sacrament
The Sacrament becomes the Key
And all the earth shalt tremble
The Key must follow the Starmap Home
There to quench the fire of the dragon within the full phase of a moon
Lest the earth shalt splinter and a blight shalt prosper
marking the end of all days
“That’s the second prophecy, the one that led us out into the desert — where the prophecy was fulfilled. Only the last line doesn’t make sense in the light of what actually happened.”
“What did happen?” Athanasius asked, leaning forward and studying the screen.
A jumble of images flashed through Gabriel’s mind. Liv falling to the ground, the flame pouring from the drill tower and turning to steam as the oil turned to water. “We did return the Sacrament within the full phase of the moon. And the fire was quenched. So I can’t understand why the blight still prospers. We need to know what else it says on the stone.”
Athanasius studied the second image, tracing the constellations of Draco, Taurus and the Plow.
“There’s more than one language here,” he said, “and they’re not Malan. This little block of text next to Taurus is some kind of protocuneiform. Perhaps it relates directly to this extra star drawn in the constellation of Taurus, just there, between the bull’s horns. It says something like ‘The Sacrament reaches home, a new star is created and a new king or ruler reigns or rules over the end of days.’”
He scanned the rest of the symbols and ran his hand over his head. “There are pictograms or possibly ideograms here that could be from different sources. They represent concepts and ideas rather than individual words and must be interpreted rather than read. But to understand them properly one would need to know the context and time in which they were written. There is a bird here for example that could be an eagle. In Egyptian hieroglyphs the eagle represents the letter A, but in Aztec it means the sun. So you see how easy it would be to misinterpret this message.”
“We can safely assume the tablet originated in ancient Mesopotamia,” Gabriel suggested. “That’s where we found Eden and that’s where all the other references to the Sacrament point.”
“Indeed, but without knowing exactly what era and in what region it was written I would only be guessing at its meaning. However, there is one person in the Citadel who has spent his life studying pictograms like these. I feel sure he would not only be able to tell us exactly where and when this was made just by looking at it, he would also be able to translate it.” He glanced at Father Thomas and they exchanged a troubled look. “Unfortunately, he is not a man who is likely to want to help us. He’s the chief librarian — Father Malachi.”
72
Dragging the branches away from the track proved much harder than Shepherd had anticipated. The drop in temperature had frozen them to the ground and he had to tug hard to get them free before he could haul them away. On top of this his shoes were made for city streets, not trudging through thick snow, and they gave him little grip or insulation as he slipped and stumbled through the snow, until he was sweating despite the cold.
It took him nearly twenty minutes to create a gap in the tangle of branches wide enough for the Durango to pass through, stopping only once when he heard a knocking sound coming from somewhere above, like someone hammering nails into wood. After a pause it came again, three distant bangs that echoed in the woods before the silence flooded back. By the time he had finished, night had bled into the forest and it had mercifully stopped snowing. The moon had risen too, shining bright behind thinning clouds and casting a silver light over the forest. Shepherd could no longer feel his feet or the ends of his fingers and could almost hear the tinkle of ice forming in the air he breathed out then falling to the ground.
He made it back to the car and whacked the heater on full, stamping his feet and holding his hands in front of the vent, not caring about the pain as his veins opened up and the blood flowed through his flesh again. The readout on the dash said the temperature was now minus eight and he could well believe it. He had intended to defrost himself a little then hike up to the cabin, but the job of clearing the branches had proved how ill-equipped he was to spend much time out in the cold. He also remembered that Douglas’s cabin had been a fair trek up the track, much too far to attempt in his city shoes. He could leave it until tomorrow, maybe get some better boots from somewhere in Cherokee, but who knew what the weather was going to do in the night and whether he’d even be able to get here again. It would also mean going out and dragging the branches back into position so no one would know he had been there. There was a third option, but the ghost of Franklin rose up in his head to repeat the last words he’d said to him: