relic, but he waved it away. Right now there were at least a dozen candidates for double-eyed beast—constellations named for dogs, wolves, dragons, monsters—but not one of them suggested that it and it alone was the one Copernicus referred to on the ribbon. “If I study this long enough, I bet I can figure it out.”
“Then my work here is done,” Dr. Billingham said. She slid the ribbon from the staff, pressed it into Becca’s palm, replaced the staff in the display case, snapped the case shut, and locked it away. “For the further meaning of your message, I suggest you all trot off to Hell …”
“… Enistic archives,” Rosemary finished. “The phrase the Athos Greek undoubtedly points to Hellenistic culture. You should start with section five in the reading room. Good-bye.”
The curator brusquely shooed them from the room by flicking her fingers toward the door, and they headed back to the atrium.
“That took a week,” Lily said, blinking her eyes as if coming out of a cave.
“But we have the message,” said Becca. “Now we just need to know what it means.” The truth was, the instant Becca had heard the words reading room, her pulse had sped up. As always, she had the Copernicus diary in her bag and knew it was as precious as just about any rare book anywhere. But the Morgan’s collection was world famous for a reason. Gutenberg Bibles, Dickens manuscripts, diaries, biographies, histories, artwork, political documents. The Morgan had them all.
“The Athos Greek,” she said. “Land of endless snow. Those are awesomely definite clues to who the Guardian might be. Greece is in the south of Europe, but endless snow sounds like the north. I’m sure the diary will tell us even more.”
“And I can’t stop thinking about the double-eyed beast,” Wade added, looking back at her as he had so many times since San Francisco. What that was all about, Becca didn’t know. “If I keep studying the star map, I might be able to narrow it down.” Then he started chewing his lip, that little thing he did when he was thinking.
Before entering the Morgan’s upstairs reading room, they were asked to stow their belongings—except for notebooks and computers—in special lockers outside the room and, interestingly, to wash their hands.
“Because of the oils,” Darrell said, wiggling his fingers. “The oils in our skin can damage original materials. Mom knows stuff like that.”
“And now so do you,” said Lily.
After they explained the basic reason for their visit—“Greek monasteries and monks of the early sixteenth century”—the young man who’d let them in gave them a brief tour of the holdings, and they each decided to take on a different aspect of the research. Wade unfolded his celestial map and sat his notebook by its side. Julian pulled down from the shelves a large photographic book on Mediterranean monasteries as well as several maps of the world and Greece for the exact location of Athos. Lily gave herself the task of scanning the five Copernicus biographies loaded on the new tablet, while Darrell hunted down a handful of books on sixteenth-century Greek history.
As they got to work, Becca stood staring at the filled bookshelves and glass bookcases, at the dozens of reference stacks, and at the lone, lucky, lucky librarian behind the counter, and she wondered how in the world she could ever get his job.
Imagine being the master of this room! I would totally live here.
“Becca, are you with us?” asked Lily. “Or lost in your own head?”
“Yes, yes,” she said. “I mean, no. I’m fine.”
She set down on the table in front of her a book disguised in a wrinkled copy of the London Times, knowing that the librarian would envy her if he only knew that, ten feet away, was the five-hundred-year-old diary of Copernicus.
Before running for their lives in San Francisco, Becca had discovered in the diary’s final pages a sequence of heavily coded passages along with a tabula recta, a square block of letters. When she’d discovered the right key word, the square had allowed her to decode a particularly difficult passage. That passage, among other things, had confirmed that the original Guardian of the Scorpio relic was a Portuguese trader named Tomé Pires. The clue had eventually led to them locating not the original relic, but a centuries-old decoy.
Then, just this morning, when the pain in her arm had woken her, she’d distracted herself by studying the other coded pages. As in San Francisco, where she’d come across a tiny sketch of a scorpion in the margin of a page, Becca had discovered a date written in tiny letters—xiii February 1517—and another drawing. It was so faint as to be nearly invisible.
At first, she’d thought the image—almost certainly sketched by Copernicus himself—was meant to be two diamonds touching end to end. But now the “double-eyed beast” of the scytale message suggested that the drawing was really of two eyes, and that the passage next to the drawing might tell the story of the Guardian whose name they were searching for. Either way, the first line of the double-eyed passage was impenetrable.
Ourn ao froa lfa atsiu vlali am sa tlrlau dsa …
Without the right key word, it might prove fruitless to try to decode it, but maybe she had to try anyway. Still, where to start? Ourn ao froa …?
“Becca, can you read Greek?” asked Darrell, holding an old volume bound in red leather. “This one’s about the lives of monks in the time period we want.”
“Sorry,” she grumbled. “I feel like I’m doing it now.”
“I can help,” the librarian whispered at the counter. He then showed Darrell to a scanner whose output was linked to a translation program. “I suggest you scan the book’s table of contents first, find the pages you think you want, then scan them. The translation will appear on this computer.”
“Perfect,” said Darrell.
After some minutes of quiet work, in which they all searched for anything that might connect to the scytale message, Julian sat back from the table. “First of all, there are over twenty monasteries in Athos. Some are like fortresses built on cliffs over the ocean. You have to climb these endless narrow stairs cut into the rocks. But it makes me wonder if Copernicus ever visited Greece. I mean, how did he meet the Athos Greek?”
Lily did quick word searches through the several biographies on the tablet. “Copernicus traveled, but it doesn’t look like he ever visited Greece. At least I can’t find any journey recorded in these books. So we’re back to square zero.”
“I think you mean square one,” said Wade. “But they’re pretty close together.”
“Um, yeah, until me,” said Darrell inexplicably. “It scrambles my brain, but I think I found something. It’s from a Greek book called something like Holy Monks of Athos. The translation is rough, but listen to this.”
He cleared his throat and read the words on the computer.
