Gallo thought about the wheezy, disembodied voice that had greeted her. In Greek mythology, Tyndareus was a king of the Spartans. He was also the stepfather to Helen of Troy, as well as to the demigod Pollux. The name was too distinct to be a coincidence.
“And what exactly is it that Mr. Tyndareus wants? I mean aside from the translation of a three thousand year old poem.”
Kenner frowned. “I suppose there’s no point in being coy about it.” He crossed his arms as if preparing to give a lecture. “Mr. Tyndareus is a believer, and what he believes is that there is more than a shred of truth in the myths and legends of the ancient world. He approached me several years ago, not long after George discovered the Argo manifest, and he commissioned me to find the underlying truth about those myths. Specifically, the stories about Herakles.”
“That hardly constitutes a rationale for kidnapping,” Gallo retorted.
“If his motives were academic, that would be true. However, his reasons for wanting to know are purely self-serving. He is quite advanced in years. He wishes to find the means to delay or perhaps even avert his own death.”
“Well, who wouldn’t want that?” Gallo tried to fill her voice with disdain.
Kenner’s eyes narrowed. “We both know that’s not as preposterous as it sounds, Augustina. I’ve seen the proof with my own eyes. I know that you and George have as well.”
There was no point in challenging the assertion. “There’s one thing that I still don’t understand. Why did you take Queen Hipployte’s girdle?”
Kenner’s smile was all the proof she needed that his claim of being an unwilling conscript in Tyndareus’s plan was pure fiction. “Let me show you.”
He clicked the computer mouse to minimize the window with the page from the Heracleia, and brought up a photo of the belt. Gallo immediately saw that Fiona’s description had been spot on. The black leather had been elaborately tooled, with a rectangular border adorned with strange figures and a large central illustration that looked familiar. “Is it a map?”
“Not just any map.” Kenner traced his finger along the squiggly line at the right of the image, which bowed outward in the middle before looping back and angling away in a south-easterly direction. “Don’t you recognize that?”
Gallo consulted her mental map of the Mediterranean region. The bulge might have been intended as a primitive rendering of the Turkish peninsula, but the continuous landform depicted on the other half of the map looked nothing at all like the Greek Isles. She shrugged.
Kenner’s finger moved up and tapped what looked like the narrow mouth of a large fjord. “This is the Strait of Gibraltar, if that helps.”
The hint opened Gallo’s eyes. What she had taken to be a small inlet was actually the entire Mediterranean Sea. The bulge below was the northern half of Africa and the opposing landform was the coast of the Americas.
It was a map of the Atlantic rim, made almost 2,500 years before Columbus.
“Are you familiar with the Piri Reis map?” Kenner asked.
The name rang a bell, but Gallo shook her head.
“In 1513, a Turkish admiral named Piri Reis drew a map of the world, which included an astonishingly accurate depiction of an ice-free Antarctica—three hundred years before the continent was even discovered and long before satellites gave us a look beneath the ice—along with a detailed map of the entire coastline of the Americas. He claimed to have been informed by ancient charts dating back to at least 400 BC, which had survived the destruction of the Library at Alexandria and had been handed down through various institutions of the Muslim world.” He tapped the screen again. “This is a nearly perfect match to the Piri Reis map.”
The longer Gallo looked at it, the more obvious it became. She could distinguish the triangular protrusion that was the coast of Brazil, the recessed outline of the Caribbean Sea, even the dangling phallic shape of Florida, reaching out toward but not quite touching the Yucatan peninsula. The map also showed mountain ranges and inland basins in relief, but aside from a few cryptic lines occupying the open ocean between the continents—it might have been letters in some unknown language, or something else entirely—there were no labels on the map itself.
She glanced at the outer edges again and realized that the figures shown there were a stylized version of Minoan Linear A, almost identical to the figures carved on the Phaistos Disc.
Fiona would know how to read that, she thought, and then she almost started visibly as she realized what the other inscription was.
The Mother Tongue.
She doubted Kenner had any idea what those mysterious lines signified. She suspected that without a working knowledge of that all-but-extinct language, the map and all its revelations were essentially worthless. The Mother Tongue would keep the secrets of the map far more effectively than the Herculean Society ever could.