Paris
Avery did go to Paris, but she did not go to the American embassy. When the train arrived shortly after midnight, another Uber car waited to transport her to a neighborhood in the heart of the city. Despite the late hour, for which she apologized profusely, Avery was welcomed into the home of Pierre and Colette, a pleasant middle-aged couple who rented out their extra bedroom through Airbnb, and treated to her first night’s sleep in a bed since she couldn’t remember when.
The next morning, after coffee and croissant, she said her goodbyes and set out on foot to her ultimate destination, the Louvre Museum, and specifically, the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musees de France, located beneath the sprawling museum complex. There, she was greeted by a slender man with thinning silver hair. “Are you Dr. Halsey?” he asked in English.
Avery replied in the affirmative, and in French, which seemed to please him. “You must be Dr. Lahanier.”
“I am. And let us dispense with this doctor-doctor nonsense.” He extended a hand. “Call me Jean-Louis.”
“Avery.”
“Please, this way to the laboratory. I am quite eager to see this puzzle of yours.”
Jean-Louis Lahanier was the researcher in charge of the Centre’s radiology and imaging department. Avery had only learned of the Centre the previous evening. She had spent the three-hour train ride to Paris searching the Internet for evidence to support a connection between Leonardo da Vinci and the Brazen Head of Albert Magnus. While she hadn’t found the proof, she had come across Dr. Lahanier, a former medical practitioner who had found a way to combine his passion for art history with his technical knowledge of radiography, to discover secrets hidden beneath painted masterpieces. His x-rays had revealed, among other things, earlier paintings under Leonardo’s most famous painting, the Mona Lisa. The Centre’s high energy X-ray equipment would give her a look inside the Brazen Head, and Dr. Lahanier would be able to tell her exactly what she was looking at, and whether it was something Leonardo might have constructed. She had emailed him, hinting at the possibility of a working Leonardo machine sculpture and requesting an appointment, and he had responded immediately and enthusiastically with an invitation to meet at the Centre.
He led her into a large utilitarian workspace which had been divided into two separate areas by a partition of thick glass. Beyond it stood several large pieces of equipment that looked like a cross between the X-ray machine used by her dentist and something from an episode of Star Trek.
“You’ll want to stay on this side of the glass,” Lahanier said, “assuming of course that you wish to have children someday. Does the item require any special handling?
Avery winced a little, both at the thought of her ticking biological clock and with guilt for her rough handling of the Brazen Head thus far. “I don’t think so,” she said, setting the backpack on a table and unzipping it.
As soon as she revealed the artifact, however, Lahanier’s demeanor changed. After only a mere glance at the Brazen Head, his smile slipped, and his gaze snapped to Avery. Without a word, he strode to a nearby wall-mounted telephone and picked up the handset.
Though she didn’t understand what was happening, Avery knew she had made a mistake in coming to the Centre. Adrenaline pumped into her bloodstream, and her brain began flashing a desperate warning.
Grab the Brazen Head and run!
But she did not run.
Instead, she took three quick steps across the room and firmly depressed the hook on the telephone before the radiologist could finish dialing. “Let me explain.”
Lahanier’s eyes flashed with something that almost looked like terror. “I do not want to hear your explanation, Dr. Halsey.”
I guess we’re back to that doctor-doctor nonsense, she thought. “You obviously know what that is,” she said, ignoring his protest.
“I do. I know its rightful owner very well. I also know what you did to him.” He paused a beat, then straightened as if offering a formal surrender. “I am no hero. I will not attempt to restrain you. If you leave the Brazen Head here, I promise not to call the authorities.”
Avery took a deep breath, trying to silence her racing heart. “It’s not what you think.”
“I know what happened in Zurich. I know that Maxim Loew is in the hospital and that someone stole the Brazen Head of Albert Magnus. And now you have brought it here. What is incorrect in my thinking?”
“You know Max?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Yes, I did take the Brazen Head, but I didn’t hurt Max. I took it to keep it safe from the men who were trying to steal it.”
“So you say.”
“The bomb in Provence yesterday,” she blurted. “That was the Immortal trying to get it.”
Lahanier’s expression changed again, softening as the terror giving way to something else. Comprehension, Avery thought, or maybe even belief. “The Immortal,” he said cautiously. It was not a question.
“You’ve heard of him?”
“I belong to the Council of Rome,” Lahanier said, as if that explained everything. In many ways, it did.
Avery took another breath, and launched into her own explanation. Without revealing her affiliation with the Myrmidons, she told him the whole story, from the discovery of the Immortal’s coded messages to her escape from Salon de Provence. Lahanier gradually relaxed, and when she took out the notebook with the timeline, he motioned for her to return to the table where the Brazen Head rested, still half inside the backpack.
“Interesting,” he said as he scanned the notes. Then he reached into the pack and took out the head, holding it up and turning it over to inspect it, just as Victor Bridges had done. “This is not like anything Leonardo ever designed.” He met her gaze again. “Let’s have a look inside it, shall we?”
Relieved that the radiologist seemed to have decided to trust her, Avery nodded.
Lahanier donned a lead apron and then took the artifact into the glassed-in room where he placed it into one of the machines. After a few minutes, he returned, carrying the Brazen Head in both hands.
“Is that it?” she asked.
“That’s it.” He placed the head on the table and then fetched a laptop which he used to bring up digital images of the scans. The photos had the same ghostly quality as medical x-rays, but there was no mistaking the inorganic nature of the subject. Beneath its bright brass skin, the Brazen Head looked like the inside of a windup alarm clock.
“I do not think Leonardo designed this,” Lahanier said again after clicking through more than a dozen photos. “However, I see some similarities with some of his sketches. This one here...” He pointed to what looked like a large hollow space beneath the mechanisms and topped by a coil that might have been a spring. “This reminds me of his design for the architonnerre. It was a cannon, powered by steam, although the idea is as old as Archimedes.”
“Steam?” Something about that stirred Avery’s memory. She tried to bring it to the surface.
“This could be a reservoir or perhaps a boiler,” Lahanier went on. He traced the coil with a fingertip. “This tube seems to travel from it to the nostrils. Perhaps to act as a relief valve.”
“Steam,” Avery said again, still trying to grab ahold of the memory. And then it came to her.
Oh, I remember that old thing... My da brought it home when I was just a wee lass. He put him on the mantel, but it made such a horrible racket we had to move it.
“It is steam powered. Heat. We have to heat it up. Do you have a Bunsen burner?”
“First,” Lahanier cautioned, “we must fill the reservoir.”
Avery nodded in understanding. When Adelle Walker’s father had placed the Brazen Head on the mantel, the heat rising from the fireplace had caused the air in the reservoir chamber to pressurize, activating the slumbering automaton. What she had mistaken for “a horrible racket” had in fact been the automaton speaking.
Now, decades later, the reservoir was dry. In order to make it work again, they would need to refill it. “How?”
Lahanier pointed to the x-ray image again. “Perhaps if we introduce water through the nostrils.”
He dashed over to a storage closet in one corner, returning with a jug of distilled water and a long-necked funnel. With growing excitement, Avery took the Brazen Head and turned it upside down, holding it steady while Lahanier dribbled water into the automaton’s nose. “I would judge the capacity to be about half a liter,” he said. “But we want to leave some room. Three hundred milliliters should be enough to test our hypothesis.”
Avery could feel the artifact growing heavier as it filled up. For a fleeting moment, she worried they had jumped to the wrong conclusion and were now inadvertently destroying the eight-hundred-year-old device, but she just as quickly dismissed the thought. This was the only possible explanation. Its flat-bottomed design that looked so much like a kettle was not an accident.
“That should suffice,” the radiologist announced, setting down the jug. “Turn it over. Carefully.”
Avery did so. She could hear the liquid sloshing inside it, and a couple drops of water ran out of the nostril hole, but otherwise, the artifact seemed watertight. Lahanier left again, disappearing into a side office only to emerge with an electric hotplate. Avery placed the head on the burner while Lahanier plugged it in, and together they sat back and waited.
And waited.
A few minutes passed, though it seemed longer, then a ticking sound began issuing from the automaton. Not the ticking of clockwork gears, but rather the sound of the metal flexing and expanding. Just when Avery was about to make a comment about watched pots never boiling, twin plumes of steam shot from the nostrils, like the breath of a living creature on a cold day, and then all of sudden, the Brazen Head came to life.
Its eyelids snapped open, revealing round eyes that looked like lenses of smoky quartz. Avery thought she saw flashes of light behind them, but couldn’t be certain. After another second or two, the mouth began moving, opening and closing as if chewing, but with almost exaggerated slowness.
And then it began to speak.
The sound was disjointed with tones and mechanical clicks that reminded her a little of the Khoisan language spoken by the indigenous tribes of the Kalahari region of Africa. Each phoneme was distinctive, like musical notes played on a pipe organ, but as it repeated the sounds over and over again, Avery thought she recognized the words.
Two words, spoken in Latin.
“Memento mori.” The weird mechanical-musical voice kept uttering the litany over and over, in a ponderous but insistent monotone. “Memento mori. Memento mori.”
“Remember that you will die,” Lahanier said, translating the words with a bemused look on his face. “I’ll confess. I had hoped for more, but perhaps that is the answer to every question.”
He was not wrong.
Memento mori. The expression was as old as ancient Rome, the philosophy the words embodied older still. According to one tradition, when a victorious general returned to the city in a triumphant parade, a servant would stand behind him whispering in his ear the words: Respice post te! Hominem te esse memento! Memento mori!
Look behind you! Remember that you are but a man! Remember that you will die!
It was a reminder that no matter what a person accomplished in life, how high they rose above others, all would meet the same fate in the end.
The humbling message had continued into the Christian era, embodied in art and architecture, often employing skull motifs—sometimes with literal skulls, such as in Capuchin crypt in Rome.
You will die.
Albertus Magnus had indeed created an automaton that foretold the future, the one certain future for every living thing on earth.
Avery shook her head. “No, that can’t be all there is. Maybe we have to keep listening.”
“Memento mori. Memento mori.” The message remained the same, but the words began to come more rapidly as the water inside boiled away, the pressure building with each passing second. The vapor streaming out of the mouth and nostrils of the Brazen Head was forming a cloud above the table.
“We will soon run out of steam,” Lahanier warned.
“Wait,” Avery cried. “I think I see... Turn out the lights.”
“The lights?”
“Do it.”
Lahanier shrugged and moved toward the exit where the switchplate was located. He flipped the switches, and the overhead lights went out. There were no windows in the underground laboratory, but the glowing screen of Lahanier’s laptop and the clock and various glowing red, green and yellow LED indicators on the machines in the lab kept the room from falling into total darkness. But there was another source of light in the room, one that could not be easily explained away.
The steam cloud around the Brazen Head was lit up like a hologram in a science fiction film, and the source of the light was the Brazen Head itself.
“The eyes!” Lahanier said, astonished. “They are glowing.”
Avery braved the hot vapor cloud for a closer look, confirming the radiologist’s observation. Light emanated from the smoky quartz lenses.
“This is not possible,” Lahanier continued, shaking his head. “A steam powered light bulb in a medieval clockwork automaton. I do not believe it. It must be a hoax.”
Avery did not share his skepticism. There were other ways to produce artificial light that might have been known to a scholar like Albertus Magnus. Ample evidence had been uncovered to indicate that ancient cultures understood and made extensive use of electricity. The Parthians had used acid batteries to electroplate temple utensils as early as the 250 BCE. Some believed that hieroglyphs in the Dendera temple complex in Egypt depicted a primitive light source that bore a striking resemblance to the filament of an incandescent light bulb. But she was not so much interested in what was causing the light as what it revealed.
“It’s projecting something.” The steam was too insubstantial to hold the picture, whatever it was. “We need a screen.”
Lahanier brought over a dry erase whiteboard, placing it in the steam cloud, and the image—if it could be called an image—appeared. He took a step back, and the picture resolved into a startlingly clear, bifocal projection of an amorphous shape—like an amber-colored amoeba—shot through with dark squiggles that resembled veins.
It could have been merely the naturally occurring pattern of imperfections in a piece of quartz or agate, except for the writing.
The script was archaic, difficult to read, but was nevertheless deliberate. Man-made.
“Caledonia,” she said, reading a line at the top of the amoeba-shape. “Scotia. This is a map of Great Britain. Scotland.”
And just like that, everything fell into place.
“Get a marker,” Lahanier urged. “Trace the image. Quickly.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Avery said. She took out the burner phone Jimmy had purchased for her and snapped a photo of the projection.
“Perfect,” Lahanier said. He set down the whiteboard and then turned off the hotplate. The projection dimmed almost immediately, but the Brazen Head’s recitation continued for several more minutes until the heat dissipated. When it, at last, fell silent, Avery breathed a sigh of relief. “No wonder Thomas Aquinas smashed the thing.”
She emailed the picture to Lahanier so that he could display it on the larger screen of his computer, and together they began scrutinizing the image. The outline wasn’t an accurate representation, but it was consistent with maps from the 13th Century. A closer inspection revealed other details.
“Those are the Roman border walls,” Avery said, pointing out a pair of jagged horizontal lines that looked like the crenellations on the battlements of a castle, which crossed the island. “Hadrian’s Wall in the south, and the Antonine Wall further north.” She pointed to a vein running near the latter. “This would be the River Clyde, and this tower shape must be Glasgow.”
“A map of Scotland,” Lahanier mused. “Inside a device built by a German monk. Why?”
“For this.” Avery pointed to a series of upward pointing arrow-shaped marks, almost certainly representing mountains or hills, just to the south of what she assumed was Glasgow. There was a distinctive mark on one of them, three concentric circles.
“It looks like a bull’s eye.”
“It’s called a roundel, but I think in this instance, you’re right. That’s where we need to go.”
“This map is crude,” Lahanier said. “That spot could represent an area of thousands of square kilometers.”
“It may not be to perfect scale, but those peaks have to correspond with real mountains. Hess figured it out. That’s why he flew to Scotland. Maybe he really did want to make peace with Britain... I don’t know, but he was trying to get there.” She snapped her fingers as another piece of the puzzle fell into place. “I think Leonardo went there, too.”
Lahanier shook his head. “Not possible. There is no record of him traveling to Britain.”
“But there are two years of his life that are unaccounted for—1476 to 1478.” She recalled the dates from her exhaustive research the previous night. In 1476, Leonardo, along with three other young men, had been formally accused of sodomy but subsequently acquitted. There was no mention of him at all during the two years that followed, until 1478 when, at the relatively young age of just twenty-six, he began receiving commissions as a master artist.
“What if he spent those two years abroad, looking for that?” She pointed to the roundel. “Lorenzo de Medici must have given him the Brazen Head. Maybe asked him to repair it, and when he did, he found this map. Maybe he discovered something there that enhanced his genius.”
“Enhanced,” Lahanier echoed. “I wonder. Leonardo told a story of how, as a boy, he discovered a cave in the mountains. He was frightened to enter, fearing that there might be monsters inside, but he was also curious, and his curiosity won out. I have always thought it was a sort of parable. A metaphor for not letting our fears prevent us from discovering greatness. But perhaps there is some truth to it, no?” He looked her in the eye. “But what did he discover?”
“I guess I’ll find out when I get there.”
After the young Canadian history professor departed, Lahanier sat in the laboratory staring at the picture. When she had been there, with the Brazen Head chattering away as it projected the map from its eyes, it had been irresistibly exciting, but now that she was gone, taking the artifact with her, he was less certain of her conclusions.
The Head was real enough, and so also he supposed was the map, but what did that mean really? What proof was there that the Brazen Head was actually a medieval artifact, and not a modern forgery? The latter conclusion made far more sense.
Part of him wanted to believe the crazy story Avery had brought him, a part of him that had once traveled beneath the sea with Captain Nemo and fought alongside the Three Musketeers. It was a childish, nostalgic dream, and he was an old man.
Ultimately, he decided, it didn’t matter. Whether or not Avery’s implausible theory could be proved true, the fact of the matter was that she was involved in something illegal. He believed that she was not affiliated with the criminal mastermind who called himself the Immortal, and even accepted that she was trying to keep the Brazen Head safe, but that was properly a job for the police. Contacting the authorities was the right thing to do. And if the Immortal was still looking for her, she would need their protection.
His mind made up, he left the work table and walked to the wall mounted phone. He had just picked up the receiver when he heard the door behind him opening, and before he could turn to look, an unfamiliar voice said, “You need to hang up the phone, Dr. Lahanier. I’m going to need your undivided attention.”
As soon as she was seated on the Paris-London train, Avery went to work determining the location marked on the map revealed by the Brazen Head. The first thing she did was send a message request to Jimmy Letson, asking for his assistance. Although she was a crack researcher, Jimmy had a lot more computing power at his disposal, and would have much better luck pinpointing the location based on the scant evidence available. But she also knew that there was a seven-hour time difference between Paris and Washington D.C. where Jimmy lived. It wasn’t yet noon in Paris, which meant that the sun was not yet up on the East Coast. Even though she imagined Jimmy as a Red Bull-swilling insomniac, she knew he had to sleep too, so when the message did not generate an immediate reply, she started her own search for mountains in Scotland, south of Glasgow.
There were, she quickly discovered, a lot of mountains—hills actually seemed to be the preferred term—in the region known as the Southern Uplands. The uplands were a beautiful but rugged country, sparsely populated, cut through with rivers and valleys, and dotted with lochs. The primitive map didn’t match any of the features in a meaningful way, so Avery began looking at each of the distinct hill ranges one by one, hoping to discover some unique and distinctive attribute, relying more on history than geography to help narrow the search.
The region had been the site of some of the bloodiest battles in the wars between Scotland and England, but those had occurred nearly fifty years after Albert Magnus created the Brazen Head. She could find no evidence that he had ever set foot in Scotland, which meant that either the historical record of his travels was incomplete, or he had used the Brazen Head to pass on a bit of knowledge that he had acquired from someone else. Regardless, however, whatever lay at the designated location had to be something accessible to travelers in the Thirteenth Century. Possibly something going back as far as Roman times.
She felt a tingle of excitement when she read about a place in the Lowther Hills known to the locals as “God’s Treasure House in Scotland” because of its abundant mineral wealth. The gold found in the hills there was some of the purest on earth.
Could that have been the secret Albert Magnus had sought to preserve for the ages in the Brazen Head? Was there a secret mine? A treasure trove in the Scottish hills?
It didn’t feel like the right answer. None of the men associated with the Brazen Head had shown any inclination toward possessing riches. But maybe they would have been interested in less precious metals. Albert had been an alchemist. So had Nostradamus. And Leonardo, a sculptor, had worked extensively with metals.
The area was also known for deposits of lead, which would have been extremely valuable even in ancient times. The Roman conquest of Britannia had been motivated in no small part by its mineral resources—both precious and base metals. They had made extensive use of lead in plumbing—the word “plumbing” actually derived from the Latin word for “lead.” Lead and other substances would have been of great interest to men of science on the cusp of the Renaissance.
As she was writing this all down in the notebook, Jimmy responded to her message. After assuring him that she was still safe, she sent him the .jpg image of the map and told him what she was attempting to do.
“Is that all? Give me five minutes.”
Three minutes and thirty-two seconds later, he sent another message. “The most likely location for that spot is on a hill called Hart Fell, in the Moffat Hills Range.”
The Moffat Hills were actually next on Avery’s list, located to the east of the Lowther Hills. Before responding to Jimmy’s message, she scanned the Wikipedia entry to familiarize herself.
The range comprised several peaks that formed an inverted triangle, about ten miles on each side. The only populated areas in the region were two small towns; Moffat to the south of the range, and the village of Tweedsmuir to the north. There was evidence of occupation going back to the Bronze Age—fully preserved round houses and standing stones—but there was little in the historical record before the 17th Century. The most noteworthy thing about the Moffat Hills seemed to be its reputation as a spa. The naturally sulfurous and saline water bubbling up in Moffet Spa was reputed to have curative powers for various ailments.
“Healing water?” she mused. Was the map pointing the way to a fountain of youth? If so, it seemed to be a poorly kept secret, and hardly worth the effort.
“How sure are you?”
“As sure as I can be with what you’ve given me. It’s an eighty percent match. Unfortunately, I can’t really tell you what exactly lies at that spot.”
“Hopefully, I’ll know it when I see it.” She narrowed her search to Hart Fell.
Hart Fell, she discovered, was a moss-covered 2,651-foot high hill, overlooking a depression with the unusual name of Devil’s Beef Tub. Novelist Sir Walter Scott had described the hollow as: “A damned deep, black, blackguard-looking abyss of a hole.” It had gotten its name because the Johnstone clan, a gang also known as the Border Reivers—called “devils” by their enemies—had used it to hide stolen cattle. William Wallace reputedly used it as a meeting place from which to launch his attacks against the English. Maybe that’s what the roundel symbolizes, she thought.
Then she read something that made her sit up straight.
Hart Fell had gotten its name because of an association with the Arthurian wizard Merlin, who according to legend, could change himself into a hart—an archaic term for a stag.
It was generally believed that King Arthur, or the historic figure who inspired the legend, had probably been a 5th or 6th Century war leader, possibly a Roman or Briton, living in Wales and fighting against Saxon invaders. The earliest mention of Arthur was in a 9th Century manuscript that listed the battles of King Arthur, including one where he personally killed nearly a thousand men. Most modern retellings of the legend moved Arthur and his court at Camelot forward in time, to the Age of Chivalry, which not only added anachronistic trappings, like full suits of plate armor, but also conflicted with actual recorded history. Avery had a unique perspective on Arthurian lore as a result of her work with her brother on the Buccaneer investigations, but rather than give her insight into the real history of Arthur, what she had discovered was that the legend of Arthur was much bigger than just one man. Everyone, it seemed, laid claim to a piece of the legend, and in a way, it was probably true. Folklore from all over the British Isles had been woven together to form the tapestry of King Arthur.
The Scottish laid claim to Merlin, or as he was originally known, Myrrdin.
Myrddin first appeared in a Welsh poem from the 6th Century where he was described as the bard to Gwenddoleu, the king of the Welsh-speaking territories of southern Scotland and northern England. When Gwenddoleu was killed in battle, Myrrdin fled to the forests of southern Scotland, which seemed to mark his transformation from bard to seer and wizard.
According to one medieval source, Myrddin met often with Kentigern, a Christian cleric later canonized as Saint Mungo, the founder and patron saint of Glasgow, to discuss his baffling visions of the future, including a premonition of his own death.
While the Scottish tradition of Merlin was different in many respects from the classical version, Avery could not help but notice the common thread that linked Myrddin to the Brazen Head, Nostradamus, and even Rudolph Hess.
Prophecy.
Yet, there was an even more remarkable connection. In the legend, the place where Myrddin sought refuge following the death of King Gwenddoleu was Hart Fell, and specifically a small recess just below the ridge known as Merlin’s Cave.
“That’s it,” she whispered. “That has to be it.”