He paused again, as if wanting my permission to continue. I waved my hand - a small conciliatory gesture implying an emotion I didn’t feel.
‘What do you know about her thesis and the “device” she was researching?’
I simply looked at him, not wanting to commit to anything. But he didn’t need any encouragement.
‘I told Isabella that her thesis sounded too improbable, and that if she continued with this subject she would risk not being taken seriously. I genuinely wanted to protect her, but I wasn’t entirely honest.’ He sighed. ‘I had come across some evidence of the astrarium myself, many years before. While researching in the Louvre, I discovered a small stone naos - a boxlike shrine - that dated from the late Thirtieth Dynasty and had been found at Hierakonpolis. It was covered in hieroglyphs that no one had yet translated. It appeared to be a prayer to Isis asking for her blessing for a skybox that was to be given to Nectanebo II. It was a skybox that could write your destiny and shift mountains and the naos makes reference to the skybox’s prediction of Nectanebo’s own death date. We don’t know what he did in response - tried to destroy the astrarium? Used the prediction for his own advantage? I believed the device Isabella was researching might have been the skybox referred to.’
Despite myself, I inhaled sharply. Yet more evidence of the astrarium’s power. ‘Quite possibly,’ I replied carefully, trying to hide my feelings. I wanted Silvio to continue talking without revealing too much myself. ‘Isabella herself had several pieces of research referring to the astrarium as a skybox - though I don’t understand why she maintained it was Ptolemaic when in fact it was far older.’
‘She might have told you that, but trust me, Isabella had a strong sense of how old the astrarium might actually be. It was around this time that she started having nightmares.’
I remembered Cecilia’s description of Isabella’s involvement in some of Giovanni’s bizarre experiments. ‘You know about the dream?’
‘I do, and I can’t tell you how much I grew to hate her grandfather, a man I never even met. There is some dark history there.’
I sank into a chair, defeated by the knowledge that, again, Isabella had been unable to confide in me, that others had known so much more.
Professor Silvio sighed. ‘I made Isabella my research assistant, and then I seduced her. At first it was a calculated move, but then, to my great horror, I fell in love. I promise you that part of the story was not calculated—’
‘You appropriated her work and published it yourself?’ I interrupted.
I didn’t want to hear about the affair. His confession felt like a transgression into a past that Isabella had kept secret - a decision I felt I should respect regardless of my own emotions.
But he was not to be swayed. ‘I even thought of leaving my wife for her,’ he went on.
Resigned to having to listen to Silvio unburdening himself, I helped myself to a whisky. He spoke about an angrier, younger Isabella, an Isabella I had glimpsed on occasion but certainly not known.
‘She embodied everything I had once aspired to - she was gifted, disciplined, she didn’t care about the professional protocols, the stratagems of academia that had castrated me. Being with her broke all the rules that had crippled me over the years, all of them.’
‘You stole her work?’ I repeated, wanting him to at least acknowledge his treachery.
‘She was a young woman and a foreigner. I didn’t think the academy would take her seriously. At least, that was my excuse to myself. I didn’t appropriate all of it - just a few bits here and there. She never forgave me.’
‘So is that why you’re here - for absolution? The confession of a dying man?’
‘No. I need to see it with my own eyes, I need to know it exists.’
‘See what?’ I played dumb but I had no intention of showing him the astrarium.
‘Please don’t be disingenuous, Mr Warnock.’ Silvio smiled indulgently. ‘Two days ago I received a phone call from the British Museum. After a somewhat heated exchange I told Mr Wollington that I couldn’t help him with his inquiries. A day later I swear I was followed in my car. Wollington has some unsavoury allies. For a few years he worked for Prince Majeed, a rather unpleasant individual with a penchant for torture and an unfortunate fascination with ancient artefacts that have theoretically occult attributes. Let me put it this way: hugely ambitious, Majeed would believe in the power of such a device and he would go to any lengths to obtain it. I suspect you have the astrarium. And, if that is the case, you are indeed correct that you have acquired some dangerous and powerful enemies. Let me help you.’
Still unwilling to give anything away, I couldn’t help but ask. ‘How?’
‘You know the astrarium is missing its other half, the object that will make it spring into life. Perhaps if I show you this I will convince you of my sincerity.’
He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an object about four inches in length, packaged in tissue. He unwrapped it to reveal a fork-like object with a finely cast stem of iron-like metal. It reminded me of a tuning fork. It had an animal carved at one end and two long prongs at the other. I took it from him and examined the animal: it was a falcon with a tiny human face - the minute head of a Pharaoh.
‘It is the Was. The key,’ the professor said, watching my face carefully. ‘But the portrait isn’t of Nectanebo II, this is Ramses III. One of the many pharaohs associated with the Exodus. And engraved on the device there should be two cartouches: Ramses’s, and Nectanebo’s cartouche carefully stamped below it.’
I struggled to contain my excitement. All the archaeological pieces were suddenly beginning to fit together to give the astrarium its history. The desire to snatch the key away from the professor was almost overwhelming. Sensing my emotional turmoil, Silvio moved slightly away from me.
‘Oliver, it’s vital you understand what the key actually means. The falcon at the tip symbolises the Ba of the Pharaoh, his soul-bird. You see, the astrarium wasn’t only designed to protect the Pharaoh’s living destiny; it would also protect his spirit in the afterworld.’
Would it have protected Isabella’s Ba too, I wondered. Then I felt surprise that I’d even considered such a far-fetched notion.
‘How did you find it?’ I asked the professor.
‘I stole it.’ The brief tug of connection snapped and I almost dropped the Was.
‘You stole it?’ I echoed.
‘From a colleague - an English archaeologist who taught for a semester at my college. She was someone whom Isabella greatly admired.’ Silvio bowed his head as if waiting for me to strike.
‘Amelia Lynhurst?’
‘It is not something I am proud of.’ He sighed, his expression full of shame. But it was impossible to excuse the ambition of his younger self. He would have destroyed Isabella if he’d felt that he had to, and that was unforgivable.
‘And how did Amelia come by the key?’
‘On a dig some years before. She’d never made the find public.’
‘Was the dig at Behbeit el-Hagar?’ I asked, remembering the younger Amelia in the group photograph I’d found in Isabella’s poetry book. The professor nodded, looking impressed.
‘So at last the mosaic is beginning to make sense, Mr Warnock.’
‘But why there?’
‘Behbeit el-Hagar is the birthplace of Nectanebo II - another piece of the mosaic.’
‘Did Isabella know you had the key?’
Silvio looked at me, his face drained of colour. ‘It is the most appalling thing I have ever done. It was after she’d left me - I thought I could use it to bribe her to come back, but she had already met you.’ He paused. ‘It is guilt that brings me here. Without the key, the astrarium is nothing. I should have given it to her.’
He sank into a chair and buried his face in his hands, his scalp glimmering palely through his thinning hair. He looked completely defeated and it was almost hard not to pity him. But even without pity, the fact was that I needed him now. This was a crucial moment in my search and he held the key - quite literally - for me to move forward. I could see no other way to get him to produce the Was. I reached for the rucksack.
‘Wonderful! It is so sublime in its design. I can barely bring myself to touch it. Do you understand what this means for the three great religions? This instrument was most likely held by Moses thousands of years ago - a Jewish, Christian and Islamic prophet. It was used in one of the great turning points of biblical history - the parting of the Red Sea. It is a living miracle. I can’t actually believe I am seeing with my own eyes.’ Professor Silvio’s face was flooded with a kind of religious ecstasy I recognised from watching my mother when I’d been a child. It was the blind surrender of the faithful, an illuminous transportation into the spiritual that had always made me uneasy.
‘We don’t know that for sure.’ Despite my own pounding excitement I was determined to stay grounded.
He ran his shaking hands lightly across the top of the mechanism. ‘I never thought I would live to see it.’ He leaned closer. ‘You see these three discs?’
I nodded, anticipation clawing at my throat. The astrarium had begun to disturb me, and now, with the key about to activate the mechanism, its power over me felt even stronger.
The professor’s trembling fingers caressed the edges of the cogs. ‘These dials served to calculate the orbits of not just the Moon and Sun but also the five planets known in those times - Mars, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn. Those calculations were used to decide the most auspicious dates for religious festivals as well as for divining purposes. This is where the astrarium becomes an instrument of war. Quite possibly the astronomical calculations were made by the mythical magus Hermes Trismegistus (thrice great) who, in some accounts, was possibly a great physician and contemporary of Moses if those accounts are to be believed. But what are even more extraordinary are these symbols here. They are the Sumerian-inspired cuneiform characters of the Akkadians, a race that pre-dates the Egyptians but who were famous for their magic and astrology. The Ancient Egyptians called upon their craft also.’
Silvio peered down the shaft that formed the pivot for the cogs. ‘And, at last the gateway to power, the keyhole itself.’
The Was slipped effortlessly into the slot. We both stood there for a moment, suspended in awe. I was gripped with both fear and excitement, part of me waiting for the outcome of the cipher to manifest itself - for the astrarium to activate or emit a tone perhaps, the singing that Gareth’s translation of the cipher had referred to. But there was no movement and no noise. Then, almost involuntarily, I reached my hand towards the key.
The professor’s bony fingers locked around my wrist. ‘No! Don’t turn it until you have heard what I have to say.’
I stepped back from the table. Night had descended and the music outside was punctuated by the distant explosions of fireworks as the Jubilee celebrations reached their climax. There was a smell of fecundity in the air - the aroma of summer that had always made me so restless as a younger man, the sense that something exciting was happening elsewhere and I was compelled to go out and find it, whatever the risk.
I glanced back at the professor. The shadows under his eyes had deepened and his skin looked even greyer, as if he had aged even more in the last few hours.
‘I have stomach cancer,’ he said, ‘an advanced case. I have about two, three months, they don’t know exactly. Funny, the Ancients thought the stomach was the seat of all emotion. Perhaps they were right; perhaps I am dying because I have denied my emotions for so long.’
‘The facts, professor,’ I said coolly, resisting his obvious plea for compassion. ‘Something the geophysicist in me can understand.’
‘The facts? You have that wonderfully English capacity to make everything sound so dry.’
Silvio pointed to the three hands, each one longer than the preceding one, that rotated across the three dials, like the hands of a clock. ‘These mark three time periods - the Ancient Egyptian equivalent of day, month, year. If my translation is right, the hands are currently set at what I believe to be the date of the Battle of Actium.’
‘So the astrarium did belong to Cleopatra?’
‘From fragments of magical scrolls and reportage in grimoires that existed in the Mouseion, the great library of Alexandria, we know that the astrarium re-emerged three significant times in antiquity. Its construction in the Twentieth Dynasty when it was built for Ramses III. It was then stolen from Ramses’s court by Moses himself, who used it to divide the Red Sea. It then reappears in the Thirtieth Dynasty after the Isis priestess Banafrit found it hidden in an Isis temple in the very desert where Moses and his people dwelled for fourteen years. She brings it back to the Egyptian court for her pharaoh Nectanebo. It then disappears for a few hundred years, although its legend grows and scrolls are written advertising its great powers, until Cleopatra, who is then rumoured to have taken it to sea during the battle of Actium. But look here.’ Silvio leaned over the instrument. ‘If you turn the key, two smaller hands will appear - one made of gold, the birth-year hand; the other made of black silver, the death-year hand.’
‘The death-year hand?’ I repeated incredulously.
‘If you enter your birth date into the machine, it will calculate your death date.’
I took a deep breath. So that was what Isabella had wanted to do: try to change her death date.
‘But there is more to this instrument. It can bend time and events to serve your desires - actual and unacknowledged - fame, fortune, even self-destruction. That makes it very powerful but also very dangerous. Because, let’s be honest, how many of us know what we really want? One could describe it as a Faustian device, bringing a judgement of its own.’ Silvio smiled, half fearfully, half reverently.
I couldn’t believe that a device that was thousands of years old could have saved my wife’s life, never mind alter the outcome of events. Despite my scepticism I was fascinated. It had to be a metaphor - an object of wish-fulfilment that thousands had imbued with their belief over centuries, and thus made powerful in its own way.