Sveti paused, as if detecting objection in Vera’s face, but in truth Vera was fascinated by what she had just heard. She had studied John Dee’s historical role in angelology extensively—from his angel conversations to his extensive classical and biblical library—and knew that he was the only known human after Mary who survived the act of summoning an archangel. But, like everyone else, Vera had always believed Dee’s Enochian script to be a hoax.
Sveti continued. “This list of the seeds Noah carried on his ark is most likely a fragment of a larger catalog. The entire record must have been enormous, ranging in the hundreds of thousands.”
Vera thought of the pages of flowers in the album, thousands of petals pressed behind paper. “Why the interest in Noah’s plants in particular?” she asked. “Have you connected the seeds in this list with flora in existence today?”
Azov looked circumspect, as if weighing whether he should disclose a long-held secret. “As you know, Vera, I have devoted my life to the mysteries of Noah and his sons. At the heart of this is an obession I am reluctant to admit to—my own El Dorado, if you will.” He glanced at Sveti, as if looking for support, and continued. “I have been trying to replicate the medicine of Noah, the one cited in the apocryphal Book of Jubilees.”
She had expected Azov to offer some insight into the vagaries of antediluvian geography; she had hoped that he might give her some understanding of the flowers in Rasputin’s album. Never had she imagined how momentous this visit would be for her career, for angelology itself, possibly for all of humanity. “Thus the evil spirits were precluded from harming the sons of Noah,” Vera said, reaching into her bag for Rasputin’s album.
“It is the most cryptic—and therefore the most ridiculed—text in the ancient canon,” Azov replied. “Of course, the project has been a challenge from the beginning—there is no description of the formula in Jubilees, and only a few references are made to the medicine in ancient literature, but I believe in it.”
“Perhaps,” Vera said, pulling out the album full of flowers, “you are not alone.”
• • •
Azov studied the pages of the album, pausing to puzzle over the equations written in the margins, his expression changing from confusion to wonder. He narrowed his gaze. “Where did you find this?”
“It was given to me by a retired angelologist named Nadia Ivanova,” Vera said. She could see his excitement growing as she explained the jeweled egg that had led them to the 8mm film featuring Angela Valko, which in turn brought them to Nadia and Rasputin’s album of flowers.
Azov shook his head in disbelief. “I was beginning to think I was a lunatic for spending the last thirty years working on this, and then something happens and I see a glimmer of reason to what I’m doing, and I know I’m on the right track. You know that Nadia’s husband, Vladimir, was a friend of mine.”
“He was in Angela Valko’s film,” Vera said. “I had no idea you two knew each other.”
Azov smiled. “Angelologists behind the Iron Curtain relied on very old friendships, some made before the revolution. My network is made up of the children and grandchildren of tsarist agents. Vladimir was a good friend. He was able to transmit messages to me even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, through a network of old contacts. But what strikes me most powerfully about what you’ve just told me is this: I briefly worked in the service of Angela Valko. I know her research well. Indeed, I contributed in some ways to her findings.”
Vera was silent, her surprise upon hearing this information overwhelming.
Azov continued. “Unfortunately, the Soviet Union didn’t allow me to travel, and so I never met her in person. But we were in continual contact for a couple of years in the early eighties. She was extremely particular about what she wanted, and I found the instructions strange, to say the least. When she was murdered in 1984, I feared my contributions to her work were to blame. Her father, Raphael, assured me that everyone in the society was grappling with the same guilt. The reach of her influence and collaboration was that vast.”
“You knew Raphael Valko as well?” Vera asked.
“I know him still,” Azov said.
How Azov’s society connections had eluded her all these years was something that Vera wanted to understand. She’d always thought of him as a genius in exile, and yet he seemed to be at the very center of everything that mattered in angelology. “It is most likely that, when she contacted you, Angela Valko was working to decode the contents of this album.”
Azov opened the album and turned through the pages, his eyes falling over the flowers. “I knew that she was creating a chemical compound,” he said. “She didn’t disclose the nature of the compound, only that it required ancient ingredients. I was so young then, and my work in the field had just begun. Looking back, I suppose my willingness to participate in her rather unusual experiments made me useful to her.”
“Now that you have the full story of why she contacted you,” Vera said, “what do you think?”
Azov removed the folded piece of paper upon which Angela Valko had scrawled the famous passage from Jubilees. “This passage has been dismissed so often in the past that it was difficult for Angela to believe its importance. I’m the one who made her take it seriously. Jubilees is one of the books of the Bible that the founding fathers considered to be in the canon of angelological studies. The Book of Jubilees—like the Book of Enoch—was not included in the Bible, although scrolls were circulated among theologians and it had influence upon the texts that eventually became the Bible. The discovery in Qumran of the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed that Jubilees was read and revered just after the time of Christ. It is essentially a list of holidays and religious commemorations, but there is one very important element to the text that has great significance to my work, and one passage in particular that relates to the battle between humans and Nephilim.”
Sveti recited it as if on cue: “And Noah wrote down all things in a book as we instructed him concerning every kind of medicine. Thus the evil spirits were precluded from harming the sons of Noah.”
“It refers to the Book of Medicines,” Azov said. “At least, that is a modern name for it, one invented by angelologists. But it is an accurate description for the writings mentioned in Jubilees. They contained Noah’s observations and his reflections about the destruction of human civilization during the Flood. As you have seen, Noah wrote of his mission to preserve the earth’s fauna and flora. He recorded the technical details of protecting and mating the animals, the process of planting and harvesting the seeds. Sveti and I have also found allusions to a medicine, or elixir, that disarms the Nephilim. That is why the Jubilees passage is something we take very seriously.”
“Disarms?” Vera asked. “How exactly does one disarm them?”
“It’s my supposition that the medicines mentioned in Jubilees would produce the effect of human vulnerability in Nephilim. They would lose their angelic powers. They would be prone to human illness and human mortality. And they would die as human beings die.”
“That sounds more like a poison than a medicine to me,” Vera said.
“The formula given to Noah was of divine origin,” Sveti said. “The logic involved is not one we would recognize.”
“And you’ve made this text the basis of a lifetime of research?” Vera said, unable to mask her incredulity.
“It’s true,” Azov said, smiling slightly, “that the information in Jubilees is obscure at best. The Book of Medicines is—for all intents and purposes—an angelological Holy Grail.”
“There have been many angelologists who abandoned important work for this,” Sveti said. “If one’s motives are not kept in check, pursuing the writings of Noah—the Book of Medicines mentioned in Jubilees—can result in pure madness. In this respect, chasing after Noah’s formula can be as dangerous as our enemy. This is why the pursuit is officially discouraged at the academy.”
“So the truth was deliberately hidden to keep scholars away from Jubilees?” Vera
asked.
“In a word, yes,” Azov replied. “The academy once sent scholars to the great libraries in search of Noah’s writings. They offered rewards for information. This alone guaranteed a deluge of quite convincing fakes. Raphael Valko once told me he saw dozens of them passing through the academy in his days as a student. There’s a long tradition of this cycle. In the Middle Ages there was an abundance of copies and, eventually, fakes coming out of convents and monasteries. So the council halted the practice of pursuing it, and Jubilees was ignored for centuries. Then, in the sixteenth century, the occultist John Dee claimed he had a copy. He’d always believed that Enochian would be the medium for the Book of Medicines, and he conveniently claimed to have had the language dictated to him by angels. Whether he actually discovered the Book of Medicines or forged it is open to debate. Consensus has tended to rest on the latter, though the debate is moot because no copies from Dee’s library—fake or otherwise—have turned up.”
“The search was revived in the late nineteenth century after the Book of Enoch was rediscovered,” Sveti added. “Scholars believed that if Enoch could be rehabilitated, there was a chance that we could re-create the Book of Medicines—whether by revisiting Jubilees or by excavating a copy of the work itself.”
“There is one thing all who see the Book of Jubilees can agree upon,” Azov said. “That the passage Angela Valko slipped into the album is one of the most tantalizing in all of our ancient sources on the Nephilim. Whereas human beings were susceptible to sickness and disease, and human beings died before their one hundredth year, the Nephilim were not prone to sickness. Human women died in childbirth while the Nephilim reproduced without pain and lived to be five hundred years old. The advantages of angels over humans were legion. The Book of Medicines was meant to level the playing field.”
“And now I have brought you the volume that Angela Valko considered to be the real McCoy,” Vera said. “Tell me, am I correct in deducing that the symbols written on these pages by Rasputin are of the same alphabet as the script on Noah’s tablets?”
“You are correct,” Sveti said, smiling. “How an uneducated, drunken charlatan like Rasputin came to discover Enochian is a mystery I can’t even begin to solve. But I believe it is worth considering this volume to be a possible iteration of Noah’s Book of Medicines.”
“You believe it’s authentic, then?” Vera asked, feeling her ambition grow by the second.
“Come with me,” Azov said, gesturing for Vera to follow him. “We’ll answer that question together.”
• • •
They made their way down the lighthouse, following the twisting stairway of the tower. At the bottom of the stairwell, they took a rocky path down the slope of the island, descending between two hills. On the left sat the crumbling stone structure, perhaps of the Roman temple Sveti had mentioned earlier. Vera looked over a crest of rock to the dock and saw that the motorboat was gone. She glanced across the bay, taking in a vista of the dusky blue water, searching for the boat. It wasn’t anywhere to be found. She would be at the mercy of her hosts if she wanted to leave the island.
Sveti led them into the single-story remnant of what had once been a much larger building. The space was low ceilinged, with slits in the wall that allowed shafts of weak light to fall into the room. An impressive number of air tanks, diving suits, lamps, and fins were stacked up along one wall. A mattress lay on the floor, a wool blanket folded neatly over it, with a hot plate and a miniature refrigerator nearby, attesting to Azov’s presence in the room both day and night. The crumbling walls had shed a fine dust over the floor, leaving them slippery. The entire structure had the appearance of a ruin, the light fixtures crude, as if the building had been wired for only the most basic functionality.
“Our large diving center is farther south,” Azov said, gesturing to the air tanks. “This equipment is for personal use. When I want to go down myself, I take the boat and my diving gear and spend time with the lost world. I can’t visit the ancient settlement often—we need to be dropped by boat about thirty-two hundred feet off the coast of Faki. But simply going below the surface of the water is unimaginably relaxing.” Azov sighed. “Not that I have much time for such things. Come, I’ll show you my collection.”
He led them through a narrow hallway and into a cold, windowless room. Sveti lit a match and brought it to a series of taper candles whose brass holders rose from a rectangular wooden table, the surface of which displayed various tools and glass vials. Soon the room glowed with a warm light. Along the wall, rising from floor to ceiling, stood an elaborate metal case with thousands of tiny drawers.
“My filing system,” Azov said.
“For what?” Vera asked, wondering what would fit into such small spaces.
“For our collection of seeds,” Azov replied. “We have recovered close to two thousand varieties.” He went to the cabinet, opened a drawer, and removed a cloth sack, which he tipped gently onto the table. The contents were as small and white as pearls. “These are an ancient variety of vegetable. And these,” he said, taking another small sack from a drawer, “are peonies, but unlike any peony seen in the modern world. I grew one fifteen years ago—the flower was as big as my head, pale purple with streaks of yellow on the petals, utterly beautiful.”
“Surely these seeds would have been completely destroyed if they were among the objects of the settlement,” Vera said. “Even anoxic water would damage them. You could not have found these in proximity to the tablets.”
Azov said, “The seeds were not recovered from the settlement. We found them inland, stored in a dry, cold space under the ground, a place that may have been built by Noah as a storage center for them but was later used as a Thracian burial mound. We found a map of the storage rooms among the tablets. After the water rose and Noah was forced to leave the first settlement, he traveled into what is now northern Greece but was once Thrace. By that time his sons had begun their migrations, founding the new civilizations of the world, and Noah was a tired old man nearing his thousandth year. Noah’s journey inland, meanwhile, had consecrated the land he’d moved through as sacred—priests, monks, and holy men walked that path for centuries after his death to pray and purify themselves. This island was used as the starting place of such pilgrimages. The bodies of saints have been transported and laid to rest on the island. In fact, Saint John the Baptist’s body was entombed here. His headless body lies in the sanctuary of the monastery.”
“But keeping the seeds safe has been our primary purpose,” Sveti said. She gestured toward the filing system. “Azov can pursue his study without threat of intrusion, and he has his work cut out for him: Many of these seeds remain unidentified.”
“Have you grown all of them?” Vera asked, trying to mask her almost childlike desire to see such an exotic garden.
“Some of them, yes; others, no,” Azov said, “The seeds are limited. I watch over their storage; I make sure they are not exposed to light or water; I keep potential thieves away—and that is all. There are many of us appointed as guardians of one kind or another. Our work is relegated to simply standing at the gate, keeping the Nephilim—and others who wish to do harm—away. I couldn’t bear the idea of inadvertently killing the seeds, or, worse, losing them to the enemy due to incompetence. Recovering and protecting them is one thing; growing them is another.”
“You’ve clearly succeeded in creating a working system to classify them,” Vera said. But is it really possible that the seeds could be viable after more than five thousand years?”
“In geological numbers, it isn’t such a long time,” Azov said. “It has been a mere seven thousand years since the Black Sea flooded. Any basic history of botany will show that prehistoric plant life flourished hundreds of millions of years before this, and these seeds were remarkably durable. The atmosphere we breathe developed because of the oxygen released by massive groupings of leaves. Many species of dinosaurs existed solely by eating plants, and so we must conclude that the majority of t
he planet was covered in vegetation. The cache of seeds we’ve recovered is surely only a tiny fraction of the actual pre-Deluge flora, most of which died. It is miraculous that these seeds remain, but when you think of the amount of plants that went extinct, you will see that these seeds are the exception. The seeds that remained viable were the strongest seeds, the most resistant to the elements.”
Vera followed Azov and Sveti into another cramped room. Azov’s laboratory was a mixture of modern equipment and an old-fashioned angelological research center—an antiquated computer sat among plants on a glass-topped desk, emitting a soft glow over a set of bronze scales. There was a statue of Mercury and a series of glass containers, a velvet divan stacked with papers, and a bookshelf stretched across an entire wall. Vera could see, at first glance, herbal encyclopedias; books of chemistry; French, German, Greek, Latin, and Arabic dictionaries; the collected works of Dioscorides. The hunch she’d had upon first walking into the room was confirmed: This was the home of a workaholic of the first order.
As if reminded of the task at hand, Azov said, “Vera, the album. Sveti, did you bring the seed list?”
Vera gave the album to Sveti, watching her reaction carefully, as if something in her expression might tell her the meaning of the Enochian symbols etched onto the page.
“You understand it?” Vera asked.
“I do, for the most part,” Sveti said. “Written around these flower specimens are ingredients and proportions varying in number and volume.” She stopped at something Vera had missed earlier, a mostly blank page with what appeared to be a heart drawn at its center.
Intrigued, Vera asked, “What is this symbol?”
Azov took a pen from his desk and drew a similar heart on a piece of paper. “This shape was derived from the shell of the silphium seed, which was tapered at one end and cleft at the other. It eventually became known as a symbol of love, a heart, one of our most powerful modern symbols. Indeed, the heart’s association with romantic love could be said to have stemmed from the use of silphium as an aphrodisiac in ancient Cyrene.” Azov glanced at the album, as if to verify the symbol, and continued. “When I was in contact with Angela Valko, there was one plant in particular she was looking for, but she was never able to name it. I wonder if this heart symbol was the element she was trying to decipher.”