The Oracle Code by Charles Brokaw

Author:Charles Brokaw [Brokaw, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Charles Brokaw
Published: 2013-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

29

Safe House

Kandahar

Kandahar Province

Afghanistan

February 15, 2013

After the bath, Layla had excused herself and left the room. Lourds knew she didn’t want to step too far outside the boundaries of her culture while they were in her country. He respected that, but he resented it at the same time.

She had told him that she knew he wanted to work anyway, which was true, but he still felt that separation.

He sat at the desk with the scrolls spread out before him, next to the notes in his journal that he’d made while reading them in Herat. While going through the scrolls again, he referred to his notes and paid attention to repetitive narrative and how the scribe, Callisthenes, had put his writing together. Even though the coded section was different, some of the narrative architecture would be the same. Finding the thread to pull the translation together was going to be difficult.

Someone knocked on the door.

Lourds swung around in the chair, instantly wary. There was still no word on the men who had attacked them. “Yes.”

“Dinner is ready.” Layla spoke through the door.

“I’m on my way.” Lourds hadn’t realized until that moment that he was starving. He reached for his hat out of habit, then left it sitting on the desk. He let himself out and smiled at Layla.

“How is the work going?”

“Slowly. I’m breaking some of the code down, then I’m finding other sections of it to be impossible again.” He walked downstairs beside her.

“Another code?”

“I believe so. Callisthenes was apparently a careful man.”

“Perhaps he had a big secret to hide.”

“He thought so. In the other scrolls, he mentions that Alexander the Great’s final resting place has ‘the power to change the course of nations.’”

“How?”

Lourds grinned. “That’s one of the things that he’s most secretive about. He claims that Alexander was somehow blessed by the gods, that he had been given a great gift, and that the only way people would be safe was if Alexander took that blessing down into the underworld with him.”

“You mean, like Hades?”

Lourds shrugged. “That would be the literal translation.”

“Perhaps Callisthenes hated Alexander.”

“No.” Lourds ran a hand through his hair and felt the ache between his shoulder blades that told him he’d been working on the translation for far too long. “You’d have to read the scrolls, Layla. Callisthenes thought the sun rose and set on Alexander the Great.”

“Wasn’t he a slave?”

“Not a slave, exactly. More like an indentured servant. He was one of the historians Alexander had chosen to document his life.”

“There were others?”

“Yes. But we don’t know how many there were or who they happened to be.”

“Aristotle was Alexander’s mentor, and I know Aristotle wrote about nearly everything. Maybe there is some overlap with his writings and the scrolls you are translating.”

“So many things were lost when the Library of Alexandria burned, I can’t even tell you. Many of the treatises and books that Aristotle wrote were lost.” Lourds thought about that for a moment. “But Aristotle was Alexander’s mentor, and Callisthenes was convinced that Alexander’s relationship with Aristotle was part of the Great Blessing.

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