James Becker - The Messiah Secret

The third grimoire she looked at was the Liber Juratus , also known as The Sworne Booke of Honorius , the Liber Sacer and the Liber Sacratus , a medieval grimoire written in Latin that dated from the thirteenth century. The original text had vanished long, long ago, but two fourteenth-century copies had survived, and the vast British Museum database had a scanned copy of the Latin text, as well as a copy of the only known English translation of the work.

Angela’s Latin was reasonable, so she’d carried out a full scan of the Latin text using the search string thesaurus mundi , which she thought was close enough to the expression ‘the treasure of the world’. That produced no results, so she altered the search term to arcarum mundi , and that generated two hits, not as part of any spell, but just in a passage that described a number of hidden relics. The author of the grimoire imbued one of these lost objects with the most extraordinary abilities, claiming that it could confer incredible power on its owner. From what Angela had found out so far, she had assumed that the hidden treasure was simply gold or silver or some other object of high intrinsic value, but the passage definitely suggested that whatever it was had magical properties.

The book also hinted that although the object’s hiding place was still unknown, it was most likely somewhere in the Middle East. According to Angela’s quick translation, it was described as ‘hidden most cunningly in the gorge of the blooms’, a location that sounded close enough to the ‘valley of flowers’. Unfortunately, the grimoire gave no indication of the country in which the ‘gorge of the blooms’ might be found and, as far as she could tell, the writer was apparently copying the information from an earlier, but unnamed, source.

Although thesaurus translated as ‘treasure’ or ‘hoard’, and could also refer to a place where valuables were stored, like a ‘treasury’, the Latin word arcarum had a much wider and more general meaning. Depending on the context — which in Latin meant analysing the declension of the other nouns and the tenses of the verbs clustered at the end of the sentence — it could mean a box, a chest, a strong-box, a coffer, wealth, money, a coffin or a bier, or even a cell or cage. And there was one other possible meaning of the word that came as a complete surprise, and opened up both a whole new field of thought and a tantalizing possibility.

Excited now, Angela started checking texts that dated from the fifth to the tenth centuries AD, finding sufficient references to convince her she was on the right track.

She glanced at her watch: it was already after five in the afternoon. She copied all the documents and references she’d looked at on to a memory stick, copied them on to her laptop, which she shut down, then switched off the screen of her desktop PC — most of the museum’s computer systems ran all the time — and locked her office.

Chris was coming to her apartment that evening and they were going out for a meal together. She wanted to make sure she looked her best.

‘OK,’ Chris Bronson said, leaning back in his chair. They were sitting over an after-dinner pot of coffee in a small Italian restaurant a few streets away from Angela’s apartment in Ealing. ‘Let’s look at it like a police investigation. What’s your evidence?’

Angela leaned towards him, her brown eyes shining in the candlelight. ‘We know about Bartholomew’s Folly — at least, we know what’s printed in the Carfax Hall guidebook and what Jonathan Carfax told us. I also told you I recognized the reference to the “treasure of the world” on the parchment that old Bartholomew found, and I was right — the same expression was used on the Hillel fragment. In fact, both appeared to be copies of the same source document. The only difference was that the parchment Bartholomew found is written in Persian, and the Hillel piece is in Hebrew, but the text is virtually identical on both.’

Bronson nodded, happy to see Angela so excited. ‘What else did you find?’

‘I looked at a thirteenth-century grimoire — that’s a kind of ancient magician’s sourcebook of spells and incantations — and I found the same expression there. It even suggested the treasure was hidden in the “gorge of the blooms”, which is close enough to the “valley of the flowers” to suggest it’s referring to the same treasure, hidden in the same place.’

‘But you still don’t know which country?’

Angela put her hand on his. ‘No. That’s the downside. But I plugged away, going back through all the ancient texts I could find, because I thought there might be some really old source document that other authors had copied from over the centuries, and if I could find that, I hoped it might tell us where we should start looking.’ She paused, and Chris raised his eyebrows, so she continued.

‘I started with De Administrando Imperio . That’s a really long letter written in Greek by the tenth-century Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII to his son, the future Emperor Romanus II, telling him how to run an empire. As far as we know, it was never intended to be published — it was just a private letter. I found a single reference in that text to an important treasure that was supposed to be “hidden in the valley”, which I agree isn’t an exact correlation with the other references. I also checked the translation of a tenth-century geography book written in Persian and called Hudud al-Alam , which translates as “The Limits of The World”.’ She looked at Bronson. ‘Following me so far?’

‘Sort of,’ he said. ‘Just don’t question me too closely afterwards. And I hope you aren’t expecting me to remember any of this,’ he muttered.

Angela laughed. ‘Point taken. The Hudud al-Alam described what was then known about the entire world, and its author divided the world into three areas — Asia, Europe and Libya, by which he almost certainly meant the whole of Africa — and described the geography, the people, the languages, the food, and so on. In the section dealing with Asia, I found a phrase very similar to those I’d looked at before. One section referred to “the treasure of the world” and described it as being hidden in a place of stone located in a high valley.’

‘But still no mention of where the hell the place is?’ Bronson said, sounding frustrated.

‘No, and that’s probably because the author didn’t know either. It’s generally accepted that he was just regurgitating chunks of information he’d gleaned from earlier works. And I found similar references in other books that dated from the tenth century. I then went back about half a millennium to the sixth century and a man named Procopius of Caesarea. He left a manuscript known as the Anecdota , which means “unpublished things” and which is today normally referred to as the “Secret History”, and there’s a mention in that of a treasure hidden in the valley of the flowers. But, just like the other writers, he doesn’t give any helpful details, like in which country the valley’s located.’

‘So that’s it, then, is it?’

Angela smiled enigmatically and took another sip of coffee. ‘Not quite,’ she said, ‘because two interesting things have emerged. I told you about the grimoire, the Liber Juratus . There’s a theory that it was written by a small group of magicians and alchemists who had decided to incorporate their entire body of learning into a single volume. It’s a big book — ninety-three chapters in all — covering a huge range of topics. But one section is devoted to the finding of treasure, and whoever wrote that bit insisted that this particular treasure had some kind of magical powers.’