The Messiah Secret

‘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 Hudūd al-Ālam, 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 Hudūd al-Ālam 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 He left a manuscript known as the Anecdota, which means “unpublished things” and which is today normally referred to as the “Secret History”, and there’s a mention in that of a treasure hidden in the valley of the flowers.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.’

‘But he was writing a book about magic, so you’d expect him to say something like that, wouldn’t you?’ Bronson objected.

‘Well, the text of the grimoire was written in Latin, so when I did a search I had to use a Latin term, obviously. I tried thesaurus mundi first.’

‘A thesaurus? I thought that meant a word list.’

‘That’s what it means today, yes, just a list of synonyms and antonyms, but back then it meant a treasure or possibly a treasury. Anyway, that didn’t produce any results, so I tried a different Latin noun – arcarum – and that did find a reference.’

Bronson looked interested. ‘Go on.’

‘The word arcarum is more of a catch-all term than thesaurus, and to find out what the word means you have to analyse the context, which involves studying the sentence in which it occurs. One of the meanings was “money” and another one was “strong-box”, but there was a third meaning that hadn’t even occurred to me until then.’

‘Which was?’

‘“Ark”,’ Angela replied simply.

For a second or two Bronson just looked at her. ‘“Ark” as in Noah’s Ark, or “Ark” as in “Ark of the Covenant”?’ he asked.

Angela raised her hand. ‘Arcarum could mean “Noah’s Ark”, I grant you. But I don’t think we’re looking for the remains of a wooden boat on top of a mountain somewhere, Chris, do you?’

Chris leaned back in his chair and whistled. ‘Are you sitting here in this small Italian restaurant trying to tell me you might be looking for the Ark of the Covenant?’

‘And there’s something else. The authors of grimoires and other “magick” texts were very fond of using analogies to obscure the meaning of certain passages. It was a kind of rudimentary code – you needed to be educated in the craft to some extent before you could understand what they were talking about. For example, a very simple code would be for the writing to include something like “a box without hinges, lock or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid”.’

Angela looked at him expectantly, but Bronson just shook his head. ‘No idea,’ he said.