The Oracle Code

45



Museum of the University of Athens

Plaka, Athens

Hellenic Republic (Greece)

February 21, 2013

Lourds woke with his face on his arm and under the amused study of Corporal Rahimi, the young soldier who loved zombies.

“This is fantastic.” Rahimi chuckled. He looked up past Lourds and talked to someone else in the room. “You should come watch. It is like watching the dead come to life again. I expect any minute for him to get up and start stalking around, saying, Brains! Brains!“ He held his arms out before him stiffly to illustrate.

Someone behind Lourds laughed, and he recognized Marias’s baritone rumble. “I don’t speak Dari, my friend, but that translates quite nicely with just the pantomime.”

Rahimi took a stage bow.

Lourds sat up too quickly and felt his senses swirl sickeningly. Then the world snapped back into place properly. “Very entertaining.” He glanced around the room and discovered that he was the last to rise. He’d been asleep at Marias’s desk with the scrolls and their translations before him.

Captain Fitrat sat quietly in one corner with a cup of tea. Salih sat on a window ledge that gave him a view over the front of the museum. Marias had exchanged his suit for khaki trousers and a blue shirt. He looked more like the scholar Lourds had met in the Vatican’s Bibliotheca.

At the time, Marias had been researching a paper on the Apostles’ lives during the earliest days of Christianity in ancient Greece and Turkey. Lourds had been digitizing some of the ancient manuscripts in one of the ongoing projects for the Bibliotheca. As a result of Marias’s needs and Lourds’s knowledge and the fact that both of them liked to prowl bars in the evenings and play soccer to let off steam, they had formed a lasting friendship.

Lourds glanced at his watch. It was twelve minutes after seven. He’d been asleep for no more than three hours. He could distinctly remember checking the time at four-something. After that, things got fuzzy.

“Did you go home?” Lourds looked suspiciously at Marias.

“Only long enough to shower and get a change of clothes. The others had grown stale.”

Lourds groaned. “Don’t talk to me about stale clothing.”

“Captain Fitrat had talked about waking you and taking you to my house, but I know you too well. If we had woken you, you wouldn’t have gone anyway. You’d simply have gotten back to work on that scroll.”

“You’re probably right, my friend,” Lourds said.

“Of course I am. It’s what I would have done in your place.” Marias walked around to his side of the desk. “I, too, have dreamed of one day finding Alexander the Great’s tomb.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve never mentioned it.”

“It wasn’t something that seemed possible.” Marias studied the scrolls and smiled. “Now it does. Why did you think we ran into each other so much in Egpyt researching the Library of Alexandria?”

“The destruction of the Library covers a lot of territory historically. The Romans. Queen Zenobia of the Palmyrene Empire. And what the Romans didn’t destroy, the Muslims under Caliph Omar did.”

“True, but for me the quest has always been about the tomb of Alexander.” Marias grinned sadly. “I was not the one hoping to find some vestiges of the Library itself.”

“They’re out there. There’s no way a Library that massive could have had everything within its walls lost forever.”

“I know, and I hope that one day you find them.” Marias tapped the pile of scrolls. “But for the moment, we have these, and if we get lucky, we will have Alexander’s final resting place as well.”

Lourds smiled. “Is that coffee I smell?”

“It is, and I could get you some. Or I’d be delighted to take you and your entourage to breakfast if you’d like to wait a few minutes. There is a little place not far from here that makes an excellent Turkish coffee. They use fresh beans and serve it cok sekerli, so sweet it will make your head swim. It should be a sin, really.”

Lourds looked at Captain Fitrat. “Breakfast?”

“If we have not been found so far, I think it should be safe.”

Marias smiled. “Excellent.”

***



Café Trident

The café sat on the ground floor of a three-story building in the heart of old downtown Athens. A canopy blunted the early morning sun, and a breeze danced through the trees left growing in front of the building. A low retaining wall followed the zigzag street on one side, and a larger stone wall held a cluster of trees on a short promontory. Within just a few steps, a person could go from the shops to a small patch of wilderness.

Since the streets were so narrow in the old part of the city, they’d had to park the cars a couple blocks away and walk. Lourds enjoyed the hike because it reinvigorated him. It didn’t replace the need for sleep, of course, but his blood was moving well again, and his brain was functioning on all cylinders.

They took a table in the back of the small café, and the middle-aged woman proprietor had smiled at the young soldiers. Lourds didn’t know if it was because they were good-looking young men for the most part, or if she knew they would bring big appetites.

Counting the seven young soldiers, Captain Fitrat, Marias, and himself, there were ten at the table. It would definitely constitute a big ticket.

Marias rubbed his hands together. “I take it none of you gentlemen other than Thomas has been to Greece before?”

They all shook their heads.

“Ever had Greek food?”

A few had.

“May I order for us?”

All accepted the offer.

Lourds listened as Marias produced an order for a selection of foods. Usually the Greeks had a late breakfast after starting their day with coffee or hot chocolate to get them going. Then, at about ten or so, they ordered pastries and pies stuffed with feta cheese and eggs, yogurt, spinach, custard, or minced meat.

When the woman went away yelling orders to the cooks in the back, Marias turned back to the group. “You will love the bougatsa. It’s rolled so thin you can read a newspaper through it, and the custard Mrs. Tselementes makes is phenomenal. Trust me, you will enjoy breakfast.”

Lourds reached into his backpack between his feet and took out his journal. He turned to the last few pages where he’d been making notes and started reviewing them. By the time he’d finished, Mrs. Tselementes had returned with their coffees.

“I suppose you didn’t have any momentous breakthroughs while I was napping?” Lourds sipped his coffee carefully. It was hot and sweet, exactly as Marias had promised.

“No, you and I had agreed on the basics of the story Callisthenes tells. Figuring out that the key was Pittacus’s quote on Delos was genius.”

“Not really. From the description in the scroll, it couldn’t have been any place other than Delos. Aristotle took Alexander there to discuss the beginnings of the Delian League.”

“And in hopes of converting Alexander’s curiosities about other cultures into a force that would serve the Hellenic leaders.”

“Yes.”

Marias smiled. “But that deduction wasn’t so easy. Not one in a hundred scholars would have caught the reference to the ‘land where the dead do not rest.’ Much less been able to struggle through that language. You had more of it than I did. I only confirmed what you believed through other records.”

“You had some insights that I didn’t. We both got the references to the Oracle at Delphi, but I didn’t catch the reference to Hades. At least, not in the context that you did.” Lourds frowned. “Still, though, the idea of Aristotle worshipping Hades seems rather...unsettling.”

“Why?”

“The God of the Dead? Doesn’t seem a likely choice.”

Corporal Rahimi hummed the theme song from some horror movie that Lourds only vaguely recognized. A couple of the other soldiers cracked up, and Captain Fitrat shushed them all with a stern glance.

Marias held up a finger. “Hades was not the god of the dead. That’s a popular misconception. He was god of the underworld. When the three primary Greek gods, and there you will have people split over the fact that there were twelve major Greek gods, got together to divide up the world, they drew sticks.”

“Right. Hades got the shortest stick. I remember the story.” Lourds held up the placard he’d found on the table. The placard had a brief myth on it, of how the herb mint came to be. “He also had a very jealous wife.”

“Well, listen to the story again, and this time pay attention. The land belonged to Gaia, so they could not take that. The rest, however, was up for grabs. Zeus won first choice and claimed the skies. Then Poseidon took the seas. Hades was left with the underworld, the caves and the forgotten places, and all the minerals that came from the earth.”

“But, according to legend, Hades is where the dead go.” Corporal Rahimi looked embarrassed to have interrupted. “Excuse me. I did not mean to intrude.”

“No intrusion.” Marias smiled, obviously delighted to be speaking to an audience of more than one. “The dead were merely a byproduct. They had to go somewhere. The true god of death in Greek mythology was Thanatos. He was the son of Nyx, the Night, and Erebos, the Darkness. His twin brother was Hypnos, sleep. Thanatos was considered one of the negative figures in Greek mythology. But Hades was not.”

Lourds nodded. “He was simply the ruler of the underworld.”

“Exactly.”

“But, according to the legend we translated, Aristotle took Alexander to the Oracle at Delphi, and it was prophesied that he would be a great leader. In order to accomplish that feat more easily, Aristotle made a deal with Hades.” Lourds tapped the section he had copied from the text. “‘And so to secure my master’s place as a champion upon whom the world would find vengeance or succor, his teacher took him and a bargain was struck to get him the sword, the shield, and the armor that he carried into battle.’ And Callisthenes doesn’t mention Hades by name, just as the beloved master of the three-headed dog.”

“Of course. Even the Greeks didn’t often use the name of Hades. They were fearful of meeting the god of the underworld too soon. Death wasn’t a thing to be feared, but the underworld was a place filled with gloom and despair. But how many three-headed dogs can you think of in mythology?”

“Just the one. Cerberus.”

“Then it has to be.”

“But that means Aristotle worshipped Hades? I’m having trouble wrapping my head around that.”

“No, Thomas. You’re a master linguist, but you don’t know all there is to know about Greek culture and mythology.”

“Which is exactly why I came to you, as I recall.”

“You did the right thing.” Marias grinned. “Aristotle didn’t have to worship Hades. He only had to offer some form of tribute in order to ask a boon of him.”

“But there is no temple to Hades that I know of.”

“There was one. In Elis. And the temple there was open just one day out of the year. Only the priest was allowed inside.”

Corporal Rahimi leaned back in his chair. “Creepy.”

Marias smiled. “Yes, it was.”

“Is it still there?”

“The temple?” Marias shook his head. “Look around this country. There has been devastation everywhere over the years. The temple of Hades at Elis was one of those losses. The temple of Zeus lies in ruins there too. Elis is also the birthplace of the Olympic Games, and a cook named Koroibos of Elis won the very first stadion race to become the first Olympic champion. All of that is gone.” For a moment, sadness lingered in the professor’s eyes. “But getting back to the point. The cult of Hades was not well thought of, even in those times. People knew that you had to offer tribute to all the gods, but you chose the one or ones you wanted to watch over you. No one wanted to choose Hades to look over them because they felt they would see him far too soon as it was.”

Lourds thought about that. “Would Hades have access to enchanted weapons?”

“He had his helm of invisibility, called the Helm of Darkness, which he loaned to various gods and goddesses and heroes in Greek mythology. But you have to remember, Thomas, everything eventually ended up in Hades. So, if you want to be fanciful and believe that Hades once gave Aristotle weapons and armor to give to Alexander, Hades could have done it. They could have belonged to other heroes and tales that have been lost. Or we could simply know them by other names.”

Lourds nodded and looked at his notes. “‘And he that shall hold the weapons and armor that once belonged to my lord, to him shall go the power to rule the world.’” He leaned back and sighed. “That’s pretty heady stuff.”

“Yes, and I’ve been thinking. You and I have exhausted our knowledge of the cult of Hades, but there is one man who might be able to help us.”

“Professor Ian Westmoore. I had thought of him. Is he still in Berlin?”

Marias smiled. “Does Germany still have beer?”