The Barbary Pirates (25 page)

“So perhaps he engineered this. Which means he might have known this aqueduct and tunnel intimately.” I studied the cave mouth the water was pouring out of. “Not big enough to hide a ship-burning mirror, however.”

The other two watched me ponder, not sure if I was onto something or deliberately misleading them. I wasn’t sure myself, but I enjoyed that they were forced to trust me as much as I distrusted them. “Well. There was a line on the map that angled at this stream. I don’t have the slightest idea what it meant, but I think it might be worthwhile to take a look inside. The very fact that Roman soldiers would most likely
not
look inside a giant water pipe intrigues me.”

“You’re going to climb in that hole?”

“Yes. Hand me a lantern when I get up to the entrance.”

“How do we know you aren’t going to try to run away through the tunnel?” Aurora asked.

“Because your henchman holds my son, my dear. Your perfidy, your greed, your cruelty, and your ruthlessness are all keeping me perfectly in place.” I smiled sweetly and hopped over the low wall to splash across the thigh-deep pool to the little waterfall. As I expected, it was slippery, but by working up one side I was able to pull myself the ten feet up to the tunnel mouth, black as a nun’s habit. I squatted, water running past my boots, and called back to the others. “Now, a lantern!” I don’t like underground places, but I do have a certain expertise. There’s pride in having a skill besides cards, women, and wine.

Dragut handed me up a lamp and I began duckwalking into a passageway four feet high. Water splashed to my knees. The tunnel seemed wholly unremarkable, carved for the sole purpose of delivering what I was wading through. I was exploring because I didn’t know what else to do.

I left daylight behind. The others shouted but I ignored them, squatting and thinking in the dark. It was good to be by myself for a moment. But this cave crawl seemed pointless—until I saw a sign in the lantern light and my heart jumped.

A fat Templar cross, etched into the stone. No Archimedes did that, two and a half centuries before Christ was even born. Some medieval knight had crawled in here, too.

For what?

Now I went more slowly, looking carefully. The limestone was slick, cool, and featureless. Finally I saw a glow ahead. Was the aqueduct ending already? No, there was a shaft of light from above. I awkwardly made my way to it, thighs aching, and looked up. There was a carved crevice in the rock about one foot wide, extending across the ceiling of the tunnel. It rose, a vertical pocket like the sheath of a sword, toward the surface of the plateau we’d stood on earlier. At the top, stones had been placed to close most of this shaft so that the opening to the sky was only a foot square, too small for people to fall into or climb out of. So why make the pocket so big? There was nothing in it.

I crawled on and in a hundred feet there was another slit, same as the first, carved upward in the ceiling. And another, and another. I counted six before finally stopping. The shafts served, I assumed, to equalize air pressure and encourage water flow in a channel that barely sloped. They also let in light for maintenance. Yet each one had been hollowed to enormous size and then closed back up at the top. It made no sense.

Unless it did, to Archimedes.

I reversed course and crawled back out the tunnel, skidding down the waterfall and landing in its pool with a splash. I climbed out, soaking, dirty, and puzzled.

“You took a long time.”

“It’s a long tunnel.” I poured water out of my boots. “There are man-made crevices in there that might have hidden something.” I drew a circle in the sand, and lines across it. “Suppose you divided the mirror into sections, like a pie. Perhaps you even cut each section into two or three lengths.”

“Not cut,” said Aurora. “They were hinged, to catch and focus the sun.”

“The result would be narrow slices. There are air shafts in the tunnel in which the pieces of a dismantled mirror might have been hidden.”

“Might?” Dragut asked.

“There’s nothing there now. I did see a Templar Cross chiseled into rock. This medieval order you want to emulate got here ahead of us, I think. We may be too late.”

“No,” Aurora said. “Then why hide a map in such a secret place on Thira, and make a signet ring marking it? The knights found the mirror but had to conceal it again, until their investigations were completed. Perhaps they didn’t know yet how to reassemble it, or were waiting for a military base to deploy it from.”

“Perhaps they decided it was such a terrible invention it ought never be deployed.”

She ignored me. “If the mirror had been reassembled and used, there would be a medieval record of it. If it was destroyed, there is no need to draw a hidden map. If it was shipped away to another city, they would not have drawn Syracuse. It’s here. I can
feel
it here.”

“Not at Euryalus, the abandoned Greek fort: we searched there,” said Dragut.

“No, some place more accessible than that, from which the mirror might be more easily shipped. Yet somewhere it would never be disturbed. Somewhere sacred, somewhere sacrosanct, somewhere unsuspected.” She walked to the edge of the ancient theater and looked at the city below. “Somewhere like a temple to Athena, the Greek version of Egypt’s Isis, built in 480 B.C. after the Greek victory over the Carthaginians at Himera. The continuity of temple into cathedral would appeal to the Templars. Why else mark its location with a cross on the map?” She turned to me. “Ethan, I think our weapon is hidden in the city’s cathedral, its duomo.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“How will you ever get it? Or get it out of town?”

“I told you to ponder how we might slip by Castello Maniace,” Dragut said. “How can our ship get safely away?”

I shrugged. “Any lateen-rigged corsair is going to be a primary target. You need a decoy. No—you need a second ship, a Sicilian ship, with your own as a false target. You’ve got to allow the Sicilians to sink the
Isis
, so you can escape with the other.”

He considered and nodded. “Sly. See? We
are
becoming partners, Ethan Gage.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The piazza in front of the Syracuse cathedral is one of the loveliest
in Europe, elongated and artfully irregular, its slope following the natural contours of Ortygia. Its border is fine three-story stone-and-stucco buildings that provide a harmony of grand entrances, high windows, and iron balconies. The façade of the duomo itself is a baroque confectionery of pillars, statues, arches, scrolls, angels, eagles, and enough additional architectural frosting to decorate a wedding cake. The cathedral’s side is much plainer, a largely blank wall interrupted by the old Greek pillars of what had been in turn a pagan temple, Christian basilica, Arab mosque, and ever-evolving cathedral.

Inside, the hodgepodge continued: Greek columns, Norman arches, and baroque side chapels. A circular window with a thick-limbed cross, reminiscent of the muscular signature of the crusading knights that I saw in the aqueduct cave, shone in the sturdy wall above the vestibule. I had a feeling most any prayer would work in here, thick as the place was with the ghosts of intertwined faiths.

“What this place, Papa?” Harry and Osiris had rejoined us.

“A sanctuary.” I hoped it really was.

“What’s a sanry?”

“Where bad people go to be better, and good people go to be safe.”

“Are we bad?”

“Not you, Harry. You’re a good boy.”

He nodded solemnly. “And safe.”

A few old women sat in the pews, waiting for the confessional and the one person, the priest, who had to listen to them. An old man desultorily swept dust with a stick broom from one corner to another, and then back again. Except for its mix of architecture, the duomo seemed grand but unexceptional.

“The mirror must be long gone, Aurora.” Without even thinking about it I whispered.

“Then your little family will be destroyed.” Crossing herself with holy water—an act of blasphemy, given her character, that I half expected would be answered with a bolt from heaven—she played the English tourist again, slowly circuiting the side aisles while counting pillars and arches. She sauntered as if a cathedral was her most logical environment in the world, and smirked at me as she did it. Every intimacy had become an act of reprisal.

But even she had respectfully murmured, I noticed.

Light filtered in through small stained-glass windows, its dim glow supplemented by votive candles burning as offerings to the saints. The place had that church smell of old wood, wax, dust, incense, and water used to mop down the flagstones.

“There is no crypt, I asked the priest,” she whispered as we followed along. “We can see the roof beams ourselves, eliminating an attic. The walls are as thick and plain as a fortress. But this sacred site is what the Templars would have chosen, I’m certain of it. The spirit of a dozen religions is here. The knights would applaud the continuity of faith. But where, Ethan? Where? You’re the one with the knack for finding old relics.”

My only knack is for getting into awkward situations like this one, but I didn’t say that. I wandered about with Harry looking for who knows what, struck by how the Norman plainness contrasted with a central white altar that seemed spun out of sugar. The three other chapels were jewel boxes of marble and gold. Castles and cathedrals are where men put their energy, I’ve found: war, and the afterlife.

But I saw no hiding places for mirrors. Just angels, saints, and miracles on the ceiling, everyone up there floating about in flowing robes and pointing portentously. If only real life were so weightless! I was tired of old legends, and would give this one up in a moment except for Harry. He toddled along holding my finger, awed by a place so big and shadowy. So I looked, counting the old Greek columns—ten on one side, nine on the other—and marveled at the craftsmanship of the artisans. One chapel had steps of rose granite, a silver altar that glowed like the moon, and velvet tapestries like the raiment of Apollo. High above, painted on the ceiling, were cherubs and bearded patriarchs, half of them looking like Archimedes. It was all quite grand and meaningless; I recognized no particular Christian story. My eye was about to skip on when I noticed the central oval in the design, highlighted by a small ocular window that let in a cone of light.

Cherubs floated there, four baby heads looking down on three more full-bodied angels. The trio looked as uncorrupted as little Harry, their naked bodies strategically draped with red ribbon. I’d seen the same in a hundred churches, and would have paid no more attention except for what they were holding. There was a sun in this painting, beaming down with yellow rays, and it was being caught by what looked to be a hand mirror or magnifying glass.

A mirror, radiating its own rays.

I remembered the ring Fouché had shown us, with a second dome on the inside and the letter “A.”
Angelus.
Angels. I squinted upward, trying to make sense of the scene.

A white-bearded notable of some sort was pointing with a staff toward a wall, or was he pointing beyond it? I looked down. On the rococo marble masterworks that made up the walls, I suddenly realized, was a most peculiar inlaid piece of art. A dagger was crossed with a palm leaf, represented by different shades of stone. Above was what looked to be a chalice, but a chalice with two eyes of the Greek kind—the solemn almond-type they painted on their ships—looking across in the same direction. Looking at what? I saw nothing in this chapel to hide a mirror. But then I remembered the chapel next door, where the old man was pointing. I walked to it. Unlike the first alcove, this one had a dome like an upside-down saucer, painted not with cherubs but adult angels smoky from centuries of soot. A dome like any other, except it had the diameter and depth of a parabola reminiscent of the shape Cuvier had guessed Archimedes’ mirror might take. I looked up. A dome to hide a fearsome weapon? Could it be?

I beckoned to Aurora. “Imagine,” I whispered, “if the Templars built the mirror into the ceiling, to hide it until the time was right for retrieval.”

“The ceiling?”

“Encased up there, bowl-side down. Look again at the signet ring.”

I showed her the cherubs and staff and eyes. Her face brightened as she paced rapidly from the one chapel to the other, and then back again. “Ethan, I think you have it!” she hissed.

“Too bad the Templars were clever enough to hide it in a place from which it could never really be taken. Built right into the skin of a sacred church, in the middle of Syracuse. Hidden in plain sight. They must have done it after an earthquake, when the duomo was being repaired. They put the entire power of the Church to work protecting their discovery, Aurora. Quite brilliant, really. Impossible to steal.”

“Sandwiched in a false ceiling,” she murmured.

“Yes. Well, we’ve done our best. It’s too bad, I’m sure the weapon is all very interesting, but the knights have always been a step ahead, haven’t they? Since it’s safely sealed away, can Harry and I go free now?”

“Young Horus?” She smiled. “But he’s going to help get this for us!”

The baroque chapel with silver altar and red tapestries had two low and
narrow doors at the back. Casting a quick eye about for any priest, Aurora darted to one, shielded herself with the rich fabric, and tried its latch. It was locked. So Dragut brutishly forced it, the pretty wood splintering in a wound that would have made Gabriel weep. A narrow passageway behind the main wall led sideways, toward the rear of the church. That would do us no good.

“The other. Hurry!”

The pirate snapped that latch free, too, and this time there was a spiral staircase going upward.

Aurora reached for Harry but he shrank against my leg. Frowning, she then beckoned to me. I hesitated, hoping we might be discovered and rescued by a mob of angry monks, but we’d deliberately chosen a time in the somnolent afternoon when no masses were scheduled. I picked up my son and quickly crossed to the broken door and the stone stairs.