Cardinal Giotto Forte’s diminutive, slightly rotund figure did not approach the height of the two Swiss Guards, but there was an immediate deference in their demeanour which suggested he was, without question, the man in authority.
‘The lines of text at the top of the tablet were sent to you at my specific instruction, less than two days after it was unearthed.’ He spoke directly to Ben, who gazed back in obvious recognition of the figure who was speaking, but equally obvious confusion over his words.
‘Cardinal Forte, I, I . . .’ Ben stuttered for clarity. ‘I don’t understand. What would something like this have to do with your office? Or, moreover, with me?’
‘The second question might be the easiest to answer.’ Giotto Forte gave a nod towards Major Heinrich, who in acknowledgement of the unspoken command brought the Cardinal a chair. The encrimsoned man sat with a grunt, his frame too wide for the small wooden seat.
‘The text was provided to you because you’re the only resident expert within Vatican City on Akkadian script. It took us a bit of phoning around the various colleges and halls to find you – but it turned out you were, literally, right beneath our noses.’ The wit of his reference to the underground expanse of the Vatican Secret Archives, whose precise extent was unknown but was estimated to include more than eighty kilometres of underground tunnels and storage stacks, seemed to please Cardinal Forte. No one else in the room joined in with his smile.
‘The long and the short of it,’ he continued, bringing seriousness back on to his features, ‘was that we wanted to know what it meant, and you were the man for the job.’
Ben’s gaze had slipped gradually away as the Cardinal offered his explanation. His eyes settled on a point buried somewhere in the floor, memories more vivid than vision.
‘I remember translating it,’ he muttered. ‘The text was given to me as a scan of a hand-penned copy.’
‘At the time, we didn’t feel it pertinent to disclose any more details to you,’ Forte continued. ‘Usual practice around here. When we don’t know what we’re dealing with, caution is the ruling principle.’
‘Over an ancient tablet?’ Angelina protested.
‘A presumption!’ Cardinal Forte answered back, energetic and commanding. ‘You presume it’s old, just as we did. But one can never know. There have been plenty of recent discoveries of “ancient” documents, scrolls, fragments of papyrus and the like, which have turned out to be forgeries. Antiquity can be faked, though these days it’s immensely difficult to do. The Vatican has no interest in making a fool of itself by announcing an ancient find until we’re absolutely sure that’s what we’ve got. Have to look into the text. Into the materials, that sort of thing.’
Angelina sat back, her head offering only the slightest nod of acknowledgement. The Cardinal might be a pudgy cleric with an overbearing attitude, but he wasn’t wrong. The past years had seen too many cases of fraudulent ‘discoveries’ coming into the mainstream, the most famous being the so-called ‘Gospel of Jesus’s Wife Fragment’ published, to immense worldwide fanfare, by one of the most eminent scholars in religious studies. It had been lauded as the find of the century, had made scholarly journals and public media; but in the end it had been a reporter who had chased down its provenance and discovered it to be a hoax. It had cost the scholar her reputation, and the venerable institution that had tenured her slipped dramatically down the rankings of international scholarly respect as a result. Angelina could understand why the Vatican would be anxious not to follow suit.
‘But there was nothing terribly unusual about the four lines I translated,’ Ben said, sitting a little taller. ‘I remember working over the glyphs. They appeared to be the introduction to some sort of prophetic oracle – a series of predictions, woes, that sort of thing. Hardly out of the ordinary for an ancient document emerging from a myth-laden culture.’
‘Once you sent back your translation of those initial lines,’ Cardinal Forte said, his jowls bobbing as he nodded his head, ‘we came to the same conclusion. A newly discovered collection of prophetic utterances, from a quarter of antiquity that produced them like snow from heaven. Interesting for the scholars in due course, but hardly something cataclysmic to the reputation of the Church or the broad understanding of history. And your lack of criticism of the text,’ he added, ‘led us to believe it was authentic Akkadian. I’m told it’s a difficult language to forge.’
‘Extremely,’ Ben confirmed, ‘since so few people know it well enough to use it creatively, and since the whole corpus of Akkadian literature is essentially known.’
‘Your work reassured us. We released the full imagery to our various scholarly offices, to let the tablet go through the normal process of cataloguing and registering, then be released to the scholarly world in due course.’ He paused. ‘I only wish we’d sat on it a little longer, now. Once that process starts, so many hands get involved that it’s hard to stop. I’m told the imagery was published on some scholarly website earlier today.’
‘Why call it off?’ Angelina asked. The Cardinal, however, did not look at her. Instead, he kept his eyes bolted on to Ben’s.
‘Dr Verdyx, do you remember what those first lines you translated were?’
Ben pondered only a second, his memory refreshed by the photograph in his hands. ‘Something about a plague of death coming upon whoever would discover the prophecy. That sort of thing. Typical introductory remarks to this kind of document.’
‘Correct,’ the Cardinal confirmed. ‘More precisely, your translation read . . .’ He reached into a deep pocket in his cassock and pulled out a folded piece of paper which he opened and held at eye level. ‘“He who lays claim and discovers these words shall die swiftly and most terribly.” Does that sound familiar?’
Ben nodded in the affirmative, and Angelina peered down at the photograph as the Cardinal read. Translating Akkadian on the fly wasn’t really a skill that any scholar possessed, but as the words were read they appeared to match the impressions she could see in the clay’s first lines.
‘Those were the words that ultimately brought all this to my attention,’ Major Hans Heinrich reintroduced himself into the conversation.
‘I . . . I don’t understand,’ Ben confessed, passing his gaze back and forth between the Cardinal and the Guardsman.
‘The words may have felt standard when you translated them,’ Heinrich continued, ‘but three days later, the prediction, or prophecy, or call it whatever you want, that you interpreted from that tablet – it came true.’
Neither Ben nor Angelina had the faintest idea how to respond. Too much new information was passing through their minds to process it all, and for a few seconds they simply gaped in silence.
It was Angelina who finally burst the bubble.
‘What on earth is that supposed to mean?’ she asked. She found she felt more comfortable addressing Heinrich than Forte. Her antipathy towards religion harboured a more refined dislike of the male-centric clergy that ruled it, and though the Cardinal had been nothing other than respectful and businesslike since he’d entered the room, he was still an embodiment of so much that Angelina despised. ‘Prophecies on ancient clay tablets don’t just “come true”.’
‘That is precisely what Cardinal Forte thought,’ Heinrich answered with an incline of deference towards his superior, ‘and why he passed the text to us.’
‘I may be a believer,’ Forte inserted, ‘but I consider scepticism a healthy dimension of faith. Questions should come before accepting answers.’
‘And when a man dies,’ Heinrich continued, ‘we all become sceptics. The man who discovered the tablet, the Manuel Herrero I spoke about before, died four days and eleven hours after he first found the tablet underground. The precise cause of death, some sort of virulent pathogen, is still undetermined. But suffice it to say that it was, in the words of your translation, Dr Verdyx, both “swift” and “most terrible”.’
Ben sat fixed in his chair, his face immobile.
‘You’re right, of course,’ Heinrich continued, ‘and His Excellency is also right: prophecies from the ancient world are like water in the sea. They’re everywhere you look. But when one is unearthed and its first foretelling “comes true”, to my mind that smacks of fraud, not history. All the more so when it amounts to a prediction of what very well may be murder.’
Heinrich allowed his pace to slow slightly. His gaze arced sternly between Ben and Angelina.
‘It was the moment that we found out about Herrero’s death that the two of you became suspects.’