Dr. Seraphina bit her lip, as if contemplating how to go on, but I urged her to continue. My curiosity about Gabriella was as strong as Dr. Seraphina’s, perhaps stronger.
“Yesterday, as you recall, I planted The Book of Generations among the treasures we are sending away for safekeeping. In fact, The Book of Generations is not going to be shipped off to the United States—it is too important for that and will remain with me or another high-level scholar—but I placed it there, with the other treasures, so that Gabriella would come across it. I left the book open to a certain page, one with the family name Grigori in plain sight. It was essential for me to catch Gabriella by surprise. She had to see the book and read the names written upon the pages without any time to mask her feelings. Equally important: I wanted to witness her reaction. Did you notice it?”
“Of course,” I said, recalling her violent outburst, her physical distress at the names she had read. “It was frightening and bizarre.”
“Bizarre,” Dr. Seraphina said, “but predictable.”
“Predictable?” I asked, growing even more confused. Gabriella’s behavior was a complete mystery to me. “I don’t understand.”
“At first the book made her simply uncomfortable. Then, when Gabriella recognized the name Grigori, and perhaps other names, her discomfort transformed to hysteria, to pure animal fright.”
“Yes, it is true,” I said. “But why?”
“Gabriella displayed all the characteristics of someone who has been discovered in a devious plot. She reacted like one tormented by guilt. I have seen it before, only the others were much more adept at hiding their shame.”
“You believe that Gabriella is working against us?” I asked, my voice betraying my astonishment.
“I cannot know for certain,” Dr. Seraphina said. “It is likely she is caught up in an unfortunate relationship, one that has gotten the better of her. Any way one looks at it, however, she has been compromised. Once one begins a life of duplicity, it is very difficult to escape. It is a pity that Gabriella has made an example of herself, but it is an example, one I want you to heed.”
Too stunned to respond, I stared at Dr. Seraphina, hoping she would say something to ease my anxiety. Although she did not have proof of her suspicions, I did.
“The rooms below the school are completely off-limits, their entrances sealed for the safety of us all. You must not reveal to anyone what you found there.” Seraphina went to her desk, opened a drawer, and held up a second key. “There are only two keys to the cellar. I have one. The other was hidden by Raphael.”
“Perhaps Dr. Raphael showed her the location of the key,” I ventured. I remembered the words that had passed between Dr. Raphael and Gabriella that morning, and I knew that this was indeed the answer, one that I did not have the heart to relate to Dr. Seraphina.
“Impossible,” Dr. Seraphina said. “My husband would never reveal such important information to a student.”
I was deeply uncomfortable by what I now suspected to be Dr. Raphael’s intimate relationship with Gabriella, and I was equally uncertain about the nature of Gabriella’s crimes, and yet, to my chagrin, I felt a perverse pleasure at having gained Seraphina’s confidence. Never before had my teacher spoken to me with such seriousness and camaraderie, as if I were not merely her assistant but a colleague.
Therefore it was all the more difficult to contemplate Gabriella’s deceptions. If the impressions I had formed were correct, not only was Gabriella working against the angelologists, but in her involvement with Dr. Raphael she had betrayed Dr. Seraphina personally. Whereas I’d believed that Gabriella had been distracted by a man outside our school, I now knew that her affair was more insidious than I had previously expected. In fact, Dr. Raphael might even be working with Gabriella against our interests. I knew that I must tell Dr. Seraphina, but I could not bring myself to do so. I needed time to understand my own feelings before revealing what I knew to anyone.
Finding it necessary to talk of other matters, I broached the topic that had brought me to her office.
“Forgive me for changing the subject,” I said softly, gauging her reaction. “There is something that I must ask you about the First Angelological Expedition.”
“That is why you came to me this morning?”
“I spent most of the night studying Clematis’s text,” I said. “I read it many times, and each time it left me more uncertain. I couldn’t understand why the account bothered me, and then I realized why: You have never spoken to me of the lyre.”
Dr. Seraphina smiled, her professorial serenity returning to her manner. “It is why my husband gave up on Clematis,” she said. “He spent over a decade trying to find information about the lyre—searching libraries and antique stores throughout Greece, writing letters to scholars, even hunting down the relations of Brother Deopus. But it was no use. If Clematis found the lyre in the cavern—as we believe he did—it was either lost or destroyed. Having no means to come into possession of it ourselves, we have agreed to keep silent about the lyre.”
“And if you had the means?”
“There would be no more need for silence,” Dr. Seraphina said. “With the map we would be in a different position.”
“But you do not need a map,” I said. All my worries about Gabriella and Dr. Raphael and Dr. Seraphina’s suspicions evaporated in light of my anticipation, and I took the pamphlet in my hands and opened it to the page that I had been puzzling over. “You do not need a map. Everything is written here, in Clematis’s account.”
“Whatever do you mean?” Seraphina said, eyeing me as if I had just confessed to a murder. “We have gone over every word of every sentence of the text. There is no mention of the cave’s precise location. There is only a nonexistent mountain somewhere near Greece, and Greece is a very big place, my dear.”
“You may have gone over every word,” I said, “but those words have misled you. Does the original manuscript still exist?”
“Brother Deopus’s original transcription?” Dr. Seraphina said. “Yes, of course. It is locked in our vaults.”
“If you give me access to the original text,” I said, “I am certain that I can show you the location of the cave.”
Devil’s Throat Cavern, Rhodope Mountains, Bulgaria
November 1943
We drove through the narrow mountain roads, climbing through mist and tall, clipped canyons. I had studied the geology of the region before embarking upon the expedition, and still the landscape of the Rhodope Mountains was not as I had pictured it. From my grandmother’s descriptions and my father’s childhood stories, I had envisioned villages enclosed in an endless summer of fruit trees and vines and sun-baked stone. In my childish imaginings, I had believed the mountains to be like sand castles in the onslaught of the sea—blocks of crumbling sandstone with flutes and runnels bitten from their pale, soft surfaces. But as we ascended through sheets of fog, I found a solid and forbidding mountain range of granite peaks, one layering upon the last like decaying teeth against the gray sky. In the distance, ice-capped pinnacles rose over snowy valleys; fingerling crags grasped at the pale blue sky. The Rhodope Mountains loomed dark and majestic before me.
Dr. Raphael had remained in Paris, making preparations for our return, a delicate procedure in light of the occupation, one that left Dr. Seraphina to head the expedition. To my astonishment, nothing whatsoever appeared to have changed in their marriage in the aftermath of my conversation with Dr. Seraphina, or so it seemed to me, who studied them with avid attention until the war descended upon Paris. Although I had prepared myself for the disruptions the war would bring, I could not have known how quickly my life would change once the Germans occupied France. At Dr. Raphael’s request, I lived with my family in Alsace, where I studied the few books I had carried with me and awaited news. Communication was difficult, and for months at a time I heard nothing at all of angelology. Despite the urgency of the mission, all plans of our expedition had been suspended until the end of 1943.
/> Dr. Seraphina rode in the front of the van, speaking with Vladimir—the young Russian angelologist I had admired from our first meeting—in a mixture of broken Russian and French. Vladimir drove fast, riding so close to the edge of the precipice that it seemed we might follow the swift slide of the van’s reflection, slipping down the glassy surface never to be seen again. As we ascended, the road narrowed into a sinuous path through slate and thick forest. Every so often a village appeared below the road. Clusters of mountain houses sprouted in pockets of vale like hardy mushrooms. Beyond, in the distance, the stone ruins of Roman walls grew from the mountain, half buried in snow. The stark, foreboding beauty of the scene filled me with awe for the country of my grandmother and father.
Every so often, when the tires fell into a snowy rut, we unloaded and dug ourselves out. With our thick wool coats and rugged sheepskin boots, we could have been mistaken for mountain villagers stranded in the snowstorm. Only the quality of our vehicle—an expensive American K-51 radio van with chains wrapped about its tires, a gift from the Valkos’ generous patron in the United States—and the equipment we placed inside, carefully secured with burlap and rope, might give us away.
The Venerable Clematis of Thrace would have envied our halting pace. He had made the journey on foot, his supplies carried by mules. I had always believed the First Angelological Expedition to have been much less hazardous than the Second Expedition—we were endeavoring to enter the cavern in the dead of winter, during a war. And yet Clematis faced dangers we did not. The founders of angelology had been under greater pressure to mask their efforts and conceal their work. They lived in an era of conformity, and their actions would have been under constant scrutiny. As a result, advances came slowly, without the great breakthroughs of modern angelology. Their studies brought them laborious progress that, over the centuries, created the foundation for all I had learned. If they had been discovered, they would have been declared heretics, excommunicated from the church, perhaps imprisoned. I knew that persecution would not have stopped their mission—the founding members of angelology had sacrificed much to further their cause—but it would have caused severe setbacks. They believed that their orders came from a higher authority, just as I believed that I had been called to my mission.
While Clematis’s expedition had faced the threat of theft and the ill will of villagers, our greatest fear was that we would be intercepted by our enemies. After the occupation of Paris in June 1940, we had been forced to go into hiding, a move that postponed the expedition. For years we’d prepared for the journey in secret, collecting supplies and gathering information about the terrain, sealing ourselves in a tight network of trusted scholars and council members, angelologists whose many years of dedication and sacrifice assured loyalty. Security measures changed, however, when Dr. Raphael found a patron—a wealthy American woman whose reverence for our work drove her to assist us. Accepting the support of an outsider, we opened ourselves to detection. With our benefactress’s money and influence, our plans moved forward even as our fears grew. We could never know for certain if the Nephilim had detected our intentions. We could not know if they were in the mountains, following us each step of the way.
I shivered inside the van, feeling ill from the violent lurching as we made our way over ice and uneven roads. I was aware that I should have been frozen from the lack of heat, but my entire body tingled with anticipation. The other members of our party—three well-seasoned angelologists—sat nearby, speaking of the mission ahead with a confidence I could hardly believe. These men were much older than I and had worked together for as long as I’d been alive, but it was I who had solved the mystery of the location, and this gave me special status among them. Gabriella, who had once been my only rival for this position, had left the school in 1940, disappearing without so much as saying good-bye. She had simply taken her belongings from our apartment and vanished. At the time I believed that she had been reprimanded in some fashion, perhaps even expelled, and that her silent departure was one of shame. Whether she had gone into exile or gone underground, I did not know. Although I understood that my efforts had earned me my place on the expedition, I was left with doubts. Secretly I wondered if her absence was why I had been selected for the mission.
Dr. Seraphina and Vladimir analyzed the detail of our descent into the gorge. I did not join their discussion however, so lost was I in my own nervous thoughts about our journey. I was acutely aware that anything at all could happen. Suddenly every possibility arrayed itself before me. We might complete our work in the gorge with ease, or we might never return to civilization. One thing was certain. In the next hours, we would win everything or lose everything.
With the wind howling in the distance and the faint roar of an airplane droning overhead, I could not help but think of the terrible end Clematis had met. I thought of the doubt that Brother Francis had expressed. He had called the expedition party a “brotherhood of dreamers,” and I had to wonder, as we emerged at last at the peak of the mountain, driving past a crag of ice-covered granite, if Francis’s assessment did not hold for us so many centuries later. Were we chasing a phantom treasure? Would we lose our lives to a fruitless fantasy? Our journey could be, as Dr. Seraphina believed, the culmination of all that our scholars had striven for. Or it could be the very thing Brother Francis had so feared: the delusion of a group of dreamers who had lost their way.
In their great passion to understand the details of the Venerable Clematis’s account, Dr. Raphael and Dr. Seraphina had overlooked a most subtle fact: Brother Deopus was a Bulgarian monk of the Thracian region who, although trained in the language of the church and fully capable of taking down Clematis’s words in Latin, was also most certainly a native speaker of the local language, a variation of early Bulgarian forged in the ancient Cyrillic of St. Cyril and St. Methodius in the ninth century. The Venerable Clematis was also a native speaker of early Bulgarian, having been born and educated in the Rhodope Mountains. As I read and reread Dr. Raphael’s translation that fateful night four years before, it had crossed my mind that in Clematis’s maddened retelling of his descent into the cave, he had perhaps reverted to the comfort and ease of his native tongue. Clematis and Brother Deopus surely would have communicated in their common language, especially when speaking of traditions that would not translate easily into Latin. Perhaps Brother Deopus had written these words in Cyrillic, his native script, riddling the manuscript with early Bulgarian words. If he had felt ashamed of such inelegant literary execution as this—for Latin was the educated language of the time—he may have recopied his transcription into proper Latin. Assuming that this had occurred, it was my hope that the original version had been preserved. If Dr. Raphael had used this copy to assist in his translation of Brother Deopus’s transcription, I could check the words to be sure that no errors had occurred in rendering the Latin into modern French.
After coming to this conclusion, I recalled reading in one of Dr. Raphael’s numerous footnotes that the manuscript had contained the stains of faded blood, presumably from Clematis’s injuries in the cave. If this were indeed the case, Deopus’s original manuscript had not in fact been destroyed. Given the opportunity to look upon it, I would doubtless comprehend the markings of Cyrillic scattered through the text, a script I had learned from my grandmother, Baba Slavka, a bookish woman who read Russian novels in their original and wrote volumes of poetry in her native Bulgarian. With the original manuscript, I could extract the Cyrillic words and, with the assistance of my grandmother, find the correct translation from early Bulgarian into Latin and then, of course, French. It was simply a game of working backward from the modern to the ancient languages. The secret of the cave’s location could be discerned, but only if I could study the original manuscript.
Once I’d explained the circuitous path my mind had taken in coming to this conclusion, Dr. Seraphina—whose excitement over my speculations grew as I spoke—brought me straightaway to Dr. Raphael and asked me to explain my theory again. Lik
e Dr. Seraphina, Dr. Raphael approved the logic of the idea, but he warned that he had taken great care in translating Brother Deopus’s words and had found no Cyrillic in the manuscript. Nonetheless the Valkos brought me to the Athenaeum vault, where the original manuscript was kept. They both slipped on white cotton gloves and gave me a pair so I could do the same. Dr. Raphael lifted the manuscript from a shelf. After unwrapping it from a thick white cotton cloth, Dr. Raphael placed it before me so that I might examine it. As he stepped away, our eyes met, and I could not help but remember his early-morning encounter with Gabriella, nor could I help but wonder of the secrets he had kept from everyone, including his wife. Yet Dr. Raphael appeared as he always did: charming, erudite, and utterly inscrutable.
The manuscript before me soon absorbed my attention. The paper was so delicate that I feared damaging it. Sweat had streaked the ink, and flecks of blackened blood marred a number of pages. As I had expected, Brother Deopus’s Latin was imperfect—his spelling was not always accurate, and he tended to muddle his declensions—but to my great disappointment Dr. Raphael was correct: No Cyrillic letters were to be found in the transcription. Deopus had written the entire document in Latin.
My frustration might have been overwhelming—I had hoped to impress my teachers and secure my place on any future expedition—had it not been for Dr. Raphael’s genius. Even as I began to give up hope, his expression filled with exuberance. He explained that in the months that he had translated Deopus’s section of the manuscript from Latin to French, he had come across a number of words that were unfamiliar to him. He had speculated that Deopus, under extraordinary pressure to reproduce Clematis’s words, which must have been spoken at a maddening pace, had Latinized a number of words from his native tongue. It would be only natural, Dr. Raphael explained, as Cyrillic was a rather recent development, having emerged with systemization merely a century before Deopus’s birth. Dr. Raphael remembered the words well, and their place in the account. Taking a paper from his pocket, he uncapped a fountain pen and began to write. He copied a series of Latinized Bulgarian words from the manuscript—“gold,” “world,” “spirit”—forming a list of fifteen or so.