Angelopolis A Novel

The Fourth Circle

GREED

Burgas, Black Sea Coast, Bulgaria

Vera watched the sky as the plane descended. The flight from St. Petersburg to Burgas had been four hours of relentless turbulence, the Cessna twisting in sharp currents of air. Nevertheless, she had fallen asleep the moment the plane took off. The dips and jags of the plane blended into the liquidity of her dreams. She couldn’t remember what she dreamed but felt a weightlessness at the back of her mind, distant yet vivid.

The airport was a small, regional outpost with a single jet parked on the tarmac. She took in the concrete building, the swaths of muddy lots around the airfield, the barbed wire spiraling at the top of the chain-link fence. She had never been to Azov’s Black Sea outpost before and had seized this opportunity to see for herself what the great expeditions to Bulgaria—the first taken in the twelfth century and the second during the Second World War—might have been like. She found that the airport looked tired, run-down, as if it were recovering from a long, abusive winter. The sky, however, was filled with a lingering spring light. Vera slid on her sunglasses and followed the other passengers.

She was greeted at the end of the runway by a pair of security guards and ushered through a mesh gate, where a black Mercedes jeep waited, ostentatious and anonymous at once. She hadn’t been asked for her passport: Her presence in Bulgaria would not be registered. Officially, she had never entered the country.

A woman with black hair and deeply tanned skin greeted her from the driver’s seat. She introduced herself as Sveti and told her that Bruno had called hours before about Vera’s arrival and her requirements while in Bulgaria. She said, “If you’re hungry, help yourself.”

Vera opened a wicker basket filled with cucumber and tomato sandwiches, an egg and feta cheese pastry Sveti called banitza, stuffed grape leaves, bottles of Kamenitza beer and Gorna Banya mineral water. She couldn’t imagine eating much after her morning with Nadia but nonetheless spread a cloth napkin on her lap and took a sandwich.

“We are currently outside of Burgas,” Sveti said, pulling away from the airport, the tires kicking gravel as she turned onto a paved road. “About twenty-five minutes from Sozopol. Once we arrive I will take you to the Angelological Society of Bulgaria Dive Center, where we will meet with Dr. Azov. Our outpost has been here for years, but somehow we’ve managed to stay off the radar. He’s been doing work nobody could dream existed. And yet the rest of the world has never come calling before. You are the first foreign angelologist in ages to visit us.”

Vera stared out the window as they drove through the city of Burgas, gas stations and a McDonald’s marking the way. They passed dour concrete apartment buildings, a Lukoil station, and any number of makeshift fruit-and-vegetable stands. Traffic was sparse, and Sveti took full advantage of the open road, driving faster and faster. As they made their way south, the two-lane highway swung out to the water’s edge, skirting the jagged coastline. They passed a shipping yard filled with industrial barges and clusters of houses that seemed ready to tip into the water. The Black Sea glinted in the sunlight, an enormous pool of green-blue, still and calm as a sheet of glass. The peculiarity of the color, Sveti informed her, was due to a certain variety of algae that bloomed in the spring. Normally the water was a steely gray, a shade more in keeping with its dark name.

“We’re nearly there,” Sveti said, turning off the highway and onto a winding road that overlooked the water. A village rose before them, perched high on a promontory.

“Sozopol was once called Apollonia,” Sveti said. “The Greeks traded from the port, and it became an important outpost on the Black Sea. Obviously much has changed since then: the Romans came, and then the Ottomans, and then the Russians. I’ve been visiting this place since I was as a child, when Sozopol was a small fishing village where families vacationed every summer.” Sveti slowed on the winding road. “Then the village itself was contained on an arm of land that reaches into the Black Sea. Since that time there has been massive development. Hotels and clubs have sprung up on every vacant piece of land. A modern section of the town has taken over the opposite side of the bay. It used to be a kind of paradise. Now, well, now it is like everything else: all about business. At least it is still quiet in the spring.”

They drove along a harbor, past sailboats and fishing vessels, reams of net hanging from the sides. Sveti stopped the jeep, cut the engine, and jumped out, gesturing for Vera to follow. She stretched, feeling the sunlight on her skin. Suddenly the cold drafts of the wind from the Neva seemed a world away.

Vera glanced up at the village. It rose behind the harbor, displaying a warren of narrow streets. She studied a house poised upon the hill. The construction appeared to be ancient—the first floors were built entirely of stone, windowless, as if to resist the onslaught of water, with a wooden second floor that overhung the stone base. There was a small terrace laden with strings of drying peppers, bundles of herbs, and wet laundry. An old woman stared down at them, a pipe hanging from her lips, her hands crossed over her chest, incurious as to what was happening below.

Within minutes of their arrival a motorboat arrived at the water’s edge. Vera and Sveti climbed aboard, took seats, and held tight to a metal railing on the boat’s edge. The driver turned the wheel and the boat angled away from Sozopol as they headed into the calm waters of the Black Sea.

“The research center is on St. Ivan Island,” Sveti said, pointing to a landmass in the middle of the bay, where a lighthouse sat at the highest point.

“The island was inhabited by Thracians between the fourth and seventh centuries B.C., but the lighthouse—or an early version of it—wasn’t constructed until the Romans arrived in the first century B.C. The island was considered holy, and has always been revered as a place of mystical discovery. The Romans would have found temples and monastic chambers built by the Thracians. To their credit, they preserved the nature of the island: A temple of Apollo was built and St. Ivan has remained a place of contemplation, ritual, worship, and secrets.” Sveti said, “We’ll dock in a few minutes, which leaves me just enough time to give you an update. As I understand it, you are well acquainted with Dr. Azov, but perhaps it is best if we start from the beginning.”

“No need,” Vera said. “I know that Azov has occupied the center on St. Ivan Island for over three decades—since before I was born. His outpost was created in the early eighties, when a body of research pointed to the presence of well-preserved artifacts under the Black Sea. Before this, angelologists stationed in Bulgaria worked near the Devil’s Throat in the Rhodope mountain chain, where they monitored the buildup of Nephilim and, of course, acted as a barrier should the Watchers escape. But as information came to light about the significance of the Black Sea—of Noah and the sons of Noah, in particular—Azov petitioned for an outpost here as well.”

“Clearly you’ve followed his work,” Sveti said. “Yet I wonder if you or your colleagues are aware that we are, at this very moment, working on the most exciting recovery project of the decade.”

“I assume that almost anything with Dr. Azov behind it would be of that nature,” she said.

Sveti smiled, as if pleased to have found a fellow Azov admirer. “I don’t have to tell you, then, that Azov is doing something that no one in the history of our field has done before. This center was founded so that we could conduct on-site exploration of artifacts pertaining to Noah and the Flood.”

Vera looked past Sveti to the island. She could make out the details of the lighthouse, its smooth stone spiraling around and around until it reached a series of windows at the top. Looking back toward the shore, she saw the village rising in the distance, as if emerging from the sea.

“So this is where the Nephilim got their second start,” Vera said.

“Over the years there have been many conjectures about what might lie underneath our waters—the lost civilization of Atlantis being one of them—but the most interesting theory, popular since the fourth century, is that Noah’s Ark landed on Mount Ararat, on what used to be the coast of Turkey.”

“But that’s a thousand miles away from here,” Vera said.

“True,” Sveti said. “And it’s no longer even close to the edge of the Black Sea. Scholars have always believed the actual recovery of objects from the ark to be impossible for this reason. A little over a decade ago, however, academics at Columbia University, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, published a book that changed the nature of investigations about the Flood. They believed that the myth of the Flood—which can be found in nearly every major mythological system, from the Greek to the Irish—had originated from a cataclysmic event that occurred roughly seventy-six hundred years ago. They posited that, as glaciers melted, water from the Mediterranean breached the sill of the Bosporus, and a deluge of water gushed over the land, wiping out ancient civilizations and creating what is now the Black Sea.”

Vera remembered when the book was published. Azov had mailed her articles about the controversy. “Serious scholars of the region agreed that the Bosporus had been breached, but they thought the scale that Ryan and Pitman proposed was completely off the mark. If I recall correctly,” she added, “their theories were attacked as unsubstantiated.”

“They were at the time. But then Robert Ballard, the American oceanographer and nautical explorer who’d made his name by discovering the Titanic, began to explore the Black Sea with submarines and advanced equipment. Even skeptics had to wonder if they weren’t onto something. What the world at large did not know was that Ballard was actually working under the advisement of Dr. Azov. And, as it turns out,” Sveti said, handing Vera a finely wrought topographical map, “there is something much, much better than the ark below the Black Sea.”

“So the Ryan-Pitman theory of the Flood is correct,” Vera said. “The land under the Black Sea was once inhabited.”

“Exactly,” Sveti replied. “Only, after years of research, we now believe that the Flood did not occur in one grand cataclysmic deluge, as the mythology from the Bible to Gilgamesh describe. Rather the water rose in small increments over a vast span of time. The Bosporus broke bit by bit and the waters flowed into the basin over a period of decades, subsuming the villages as it rose.”

“Forty days and forty nights were more like forty years,” Vera said.

“Or even longer,” Sveti said. “In our explorations we’ve discovered that the first wave of flooding caused a massive migration from here to here.” Sveti moved her finger along the map in Vera’s hand. “You can see the present-day shoreline of the Black Sea drawn in a solid red line. The dotted line you see about two inches inside—and then the next dotted line you see two inches from that, and the third three inches from that—these are ancient shorelines.” Sveti pointed to the innermost dotted line, then the middle one. “The second wave of the Flood caused another migration—and the construction of new villages—and so the pattern continued over the course of many decades. Many of the oldest villages on the Black Sea coast, such as Sozopol and Nessebar to the north, were built generations after the settlement of the present shoreline. The villages under the sea are, obviously, ancient. Thousands of years older than anything we can find above water.”

“I see the scholarly significance of this discovery,” Vera said. “But what does it have to do with Noah and his sons?”

Sveti smiled, as if she had been waiting for that precise question. “It has everything to do with them.” She took the map from Vera and folded it. “As you will soon see.”

• • •

As the boat veered toward land, Vera climbed to the prow, feeling the wind rushing against her body as she tried to get a better view. The island was covered in long wild grasses that shivered in the breeze. Seagulls swooped and circled, as if scouring the scrub for mice. From such a close proximity, the lighthouse seemed to tilt away from the land, a trick of perspective that allowed her to see a man standing at a small red door, gazing out at the boat as it approached. The driver cut the engine, and the boat slowed and slid alongside a long wooden dock.

She climbed out of the boat and followed Sveti over the dock and up the uneven terrain. The lighthouse loomed ahead, its stone surface ragged with age, rubbed and eaten through by saltwater and wind. A great iron casement sat at the top of the tower, protecting the enormous spotlight from the seagulls. A helicopter was perched on a paved circle, its bulbous plastic windshield awash in sunlight. The man Vera had noticed earlier was gone, but the red door had been left ajar.

“Come,” Sveti said. “Follow me. Azov will be waiting inside.” She turned and led her up the winding, rough-hewn steps of the lighthouse, following the spiral to the very top.

Vera could hear voices behind a door. Sveti pushed the door open, the bottom scraping against the stone floor, and they walked into a bright, circular observation room, which had windows that gave a panorama of sea. The afternoon sunlight was brilliant and warm, glinting off the emerald water. A scattering of fishing vessels floated in the distance. The lighthouse was removed from the real world, peaceful, and she tried to imagine what it would be like to wake up every morning in that room, to rise and look over the sea as the sun rose.

Azov sat at the head of a table piled high with mollusk shells, slabs of wood, and a glass jar filled with odd-shaped beads. He was in his midfifties, with gray-flecked black hair and a matching beard. He watched Vera with affection as she stepped into the room. Standing, he switched off a radio, and gestured for Vera to sit.

“I have to admit,” Azov said, smiling at Vera, “that I was surprised to get the call that you were coming on official business. We’ve been all but ignored by your colleagues. The society in Berlin has extended some support, but other than that, nothing.”

“Scholars in Russia are always interested in making progress against the Nephilim,” Vera said, struggling between the loyalty she felt toward her employers at the Hermitage and the deep respect she had for her mentor. “We are working toward the same end.”

“A prudent answer, my dear,” Azov said, clearly proud of Vera’s diplomacy. “Come, give me a kiss. I’m thrilled that you have finally come to visit me here, where I am most in my element.”

Vera stood and went to Azov. As she kissed his cheek she felt anxious to seem every bit the accomplished angelologist she had become. She turned to the artifacts piled on the table. “These must be your finds from the bottom of the Black Sea.”

“Correct,” Azov said, picking up a piece of pounded copper. “These objects are from a settlement that was begun within the first four hundred years of the postdiluvian period, during Noah’s lifetime.”

“That seems like quite a few lifetimes,” Vera said.

“Noah lived to be nine hundred and fifty years old,” Sveti said. “By the end of this period, he would have been middle-aged.”

“We located the village a little over twenty years ago,” Azov continued, “and have been doing underwater excavation since then. It hasn’t been easy, as we don’t typically have the kind of equipment and resources that high-profile exploratory divers have, but we’ve managed to pull up a number of intriguing objects to support our most recent hypothesis.”

“Which is?” Vera asked.

“That Noah was not only charged with protecting the various species of animals, as is believed in biblical lore, but that he was protecting the plant life of the planet as well. His collection of seeds was extensive. When the rain stopped, he cultivated and preserved these plants for future generations, making certain that the precious cellular energy of ancient times was carried forward,” Azov said.

Vera toyed with the latch on her satchel, wondering if she should wait to give Azov Rasputin’s album. She was keenly aware that the plants pressed inside represented a similar kind of energy, and that Azov would find them fascinating.

Sveti stood, went to a cabinet, unlocked it, and removed a fat spiral notebook, the pages wrinkled, as if they’d been drenched in water and dried in the sun. “There are multiple tales of what happened to Noah after the water levels descended,” she said. “By some accounts he planted grapes and produced wine. By other accounts he became the most significant farmer in history, planting all the seeds himself. Others believe he distributed the seeds to his sons, and that they took them to different continents, where they planted and cared for them.”

“The regeneration of the world’s flora and fauna would have taken thousands of years,” Vera said. “I thought it was just a myth that he did it alone.”

“Of course,” Azov said. “But within myth there is often a seed of reality.”

Azov stood and, taking Vera’s hand, led her to a giant glass case against the wall. The case was empty save for pieces of driftwood of various sizes resting upon the shelves.

Azov pointed to the pieces of wood. “These are tablets that we believe belonged to Noah. They were discovered by Ballard’s team on an underwater ridge off the coast of the Black Sea, on what was once the shoreline of an ancient freshwater lake that existed before the Bosporus broke. The settlement there was later subsumed by a second level of flooding, perhaps as large as the first flood, and was destroyed. We posit that Noah left the settlement too quickly to take the tablets. He may have lost them during the second flood, or he may have left them on purpose; there is no way to be certain. He traveled to the border of what is now Turkey and Bulgaria, and here he planted the seeds and raised the animals that he had carried in the ark. It was here, on our coastline, that the new world began.”

“Or was dispersed,” Vera added.

“Exactly,” Azov said. “Noah’s sons—Shem, Japheth, and Ham—migrated to different regions of the world, founding the tribes of Asia, Europe, and Africa, as we all know from our beginning tutorials in angelology. We also know that Japheth was killed by the Nephilim, and his place on the boat was taken by one of their own, thus ensuring that the creatures continued to exist after the Flood.”

“What was not known,” Sveti cut in, “is that Noah kept records of everything—the Deluge, his journey on the ark, records of his sons’ wives and children, even records of the propagation of the animals he herded. He had seen one world pass away and another begin. He had been chosen by God to live while the rest of the world perished. It only makes sense that he would write about what he had experienced.” She opened the notebook she’d pulled from the cabinet. “My work before I began this project was in ancient languages, and so it has fallen to me to assist Azov in his attempt to understand the contents of Noah’s tablets. This page,” she said, indicating a script that Vera found inexplicably familiar, “is a copy of the words found on that tablet there.” She pointed to a fragment of wood lying in the case. “It is a record of the seeds Noah carried onto the ark.”

“These are Noah’s memoirs?” Vera asked.

Azov slipped on a pair of plastic gloves before reaching into the case and removing the tablet. “This piece of wood,” he said, “is one of over five hundred tablets we recovered from a village submerged 350 meters below the surface of the Black Sea. They were bundled together and stored in a casket. Carbon dating shows that it is nearly five thousand years old.”

“I’m sorry, but it is really difficult to believe,” Vera said, slipping on the pair of gloves Sveti offered before taking the wood from Azov. “Any organic material would disintegrate rapidly under water.”

“On the contrary,” Azov said. “The composition of the Black Sea created ideal conditions for preservation. It is essentially a dead sea. Although it was once a freshwater lake, saltwater from the Mediterranean spilled into it, creating an anoxic climate. The organisms that might eat wood or other degradable materials are absent. Artifacts that would have disappeared within a millennium are still intact, as if frozen in time. It is an archaeologist’s dream.”

Vera ran her gloved fingertips over the crevices. The tablet was light, made of a hard durable wood, with strange symbols stamped into it. Glancing at Sveti’s notebook, she realized that the symbols had an uncanny resemblance to the scribbling in Rasputin’s album. It took all of her restraint to refrain from confirming the match immediately. “So you are saying that you believe these tablets are not simply from that period of Noah’s life, but that they were written by Noah himself?” Vera asked.

Azov said, “These tablets were discovered among the items in the settlement, and we’re certain that the settlement was Noah’s home after the Flood.”

“What is your proof?” Vera asked.

“Carbon dating, the location of the settlement, identifiable personal belongings. And, most important, the tablets themselves.”

Vera turned the slab of wood over. It looked like something out of an Egyptian tomb. “If this is as old as you claim, it is simply incredible that it exists at all,” she said. Carved into the grain were more symbols, many of them partially washed away. “What is this alphabet?” she asked, trying to mask the growing excitement in her voice.

“It is a language called Enochian,” Sveti said. “It was given to Enoch by God, and Enoch used it to write the original story of the Watchers and the Nephilim. It is a common belief that a pre-Deluge lexicon—a universal language that contained the original power of Creation—existed. Some believe it was the language God used to create the universe, and that it was the language used by angels and Adam and Eve. If Noah was the last human being to carry antediluvian traditions to the new world, it makes perfect sense that he would have been versed in the language of Enoch.”

“Noah was a direct descendant of Enoch,” Azov added. “Which could explain how it was transmitted.”

Sveti continued. “Enochian script was revealed to an angelologist named John Dee in 1582, and was called Sigillum Dei Aemeth. His assistant, Edward Kelly, transcribed the script at the instruction of an angel, and went on to fill many volumes with it. It was considered by most angelologists to be a revealed language—authentic, but impossible to trace historically. Enochian script seemed, in the sixteenth century, to literally come out of nowhere. Of course, there are those who believe John Dee simply made it all up. Linguists have analyzed the language and concluded that there is nothing particularly remarkable about it. But if these tablets are authentic, they would not only verify Dee’s script as the language used by Enoch’s descendants, they would also support Dee’s claim that the language was not composed but revealed by God. The magnitude of such a discovery would be enormous.”

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 the 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.”

“Surely she would have known that the heart symbol’s origin lies in silphium,” Sveti said.

“Angela was a skeptic,” Azov answered. “Silphium is one of the most intriguing plants of the ancient world. Many modern botanists refuse to verify it, claiming that there is no proof that it even existed.”

“I get the feeling that you don’t agree,” Vera said.

“The plant has been extinct for over one thousand years, but you are right, Vera. I have no doubt that silphium existed. Whether it was the cure-all it was purported to be in ancient Mediterranean cultures, I cannot say. Indigestion, asthma, cancer—silphium was allegedly used to treat all of these maladies. Perhaps most important, the plant was believed to both aid in contraception and, as I mentioned, act as an aphrodisiac. It was considered so precious that it formed an important part of trading between Cyrene, now Libya, and other coastal countries, so much so that glyphs and coins were created bearing its image.”

Sveti examined the album page once more. “It is intriguing in this context, because silphium appears to be the single nonfloral ingredient in the formula, and the only one that is extinct.” She flipped through the pages of rose petals. “For example, there are over one hundred varieties of roses in the book. Clearly the formula would have required a distillation of rose oil.”

“But rose oil is so common,” Vera said. “Roses can be found everywhere.”

Azov said, “Now, yes. But after the Flood there would have been only a few seeds keeping the plant from complete extinction. Humanity has—over the millennia—cultivated and revived the rose. If we hadn’t, we would be living in a world without roses. The same can be said for all of the flowers listed in Noah’s catalog of seeds. It is through the human preference for flowers that many of these remain with us. It is a wonder that silphium, which was once so important, nearly died out.”

“Nearly?” Vera said. “I thought it was extinct?”

Azov smiled. “It is extinct,” he said. “Except for one or two remaining seeds.”

Vera stared at Azov, taking in the meaning of what he had said. If they had this plant, it would be possible to create the formula—whatever it was. “Is the silphium among your seed collection?”

“It’s here,” Azov said. He opened a tiny drawer and removed a metal box. He unfastened the catch and lifted a silk pouch. It was ominously airy, as if nothing at all were stored inside. He upended the pouch and a single seed—yellowish brown with specks of green—rolled onto the table. “There is only one left in my care,” Azov said. “The other seed was given to Dr. Raphael Valko in 1985.”

“Do you think he knew about this album, and about this formula in particular?” Sveti asked.

“It’s hard to say,” Azov muttered, as he paged through the book. “The scope of Angela’s work was no secret to him, and he certainly knew that she and I were in close contact before her death. But Raphael never mentioned her when I delivered the seed to him.”

“I fail to see what Raphael Valko has to do with any of this,” Vera said. “Though I have to confess, I am dying to meet him. Especially if he has some connection to this elixir.”

“The real question is: Can we mix this potion?” Sveti asked.

“And if such a potion will do anything at all to the Nephilim,” Azov said, returning his gaze to the album. “If we take the flower petals from behind the wax paper and grind them together in the correct proportions, and in the order designated in Rasputin’s equations, we would have the base for a chemical reaction. That leaves silphium, which we might be able to grow, although in minute quantities.”

“More difficult is the last ingredient,” Sveti said, pointing to a page in the album. “This calls for a metal that was not even verified to exist during Rasputin’s lifetime.”

“I know what it is that you’re going to say,” Vera said. “It is a metal that was used in great quantities before the Flood but had virtually disappeared after the death of Noah. It was given various names by Enoch, Noah, and others in the ancient world who had contact with it. It was rediscovered and classified by Raphael Valko, who renamed it Valkine.” Vera thought this over for a moment and said, “There hasn’t been a piece of Valkine available for more than sixty years.”

“If you exclude the Valkine lyre that was recovered in New York in 1999, then you’re right. The last person to have even a tiny amount was Raphael Valko himself. He came across significant quantities of the substance at the beginning of the twentieth century, when he took possession of one of the celestial instruments, a beautiful lyre that was believed to have been the very instrument Orpheus played. Before he found the lyre there were speculations about the substance that made up the instruments. Some angelologists believed they were made of gold, others of copper. No one knew for certain. And so Valko took a file and scraped shavings from the base of the lyre, analyzed the metal, and came to understand that it was an entirely unique material, one that had never been studied or classified. He named it Valkine. While the lyre itself was packed up and sent to America for safekeeping during the war, the shavings were his. He kept them for some years, and then, the story goes, he melted them down and made three lyre pendants.”

“Dr. Raphael Valko fashioned the pendants. He must have more of the metal, even if it is just a trace amount,” Vera said.

Azov stood and slid on a brown leather jacket. “There’s only one way to find out for sure,” he said, putting his hand on Vera’s shoulder and leading her from the room.