The Exodus Quest

III

Knox was blasting warm air into his shoes when the mobile finally rang. 'It's me,' said Augustin. 'Sorry I missed your call. Troubles of my own. Where are you?'

'Hermopolis. Long story. Listen, was that you flying that plane over Peterson's site?'

'You saw that? Yes. And we've found the site, too; we've found everything, the mosaic too.'

'You fucking beauty.'

'I haven't had a chance to study it yet, but I can send you a photo. This number, yes?'

'Please.'

'Any news of Gaille?'

'Not yet.'

'You'll find her,' said Augustin. 'I know you will.' He paused, searching for the right thing to say. 'I don't believe in much, but I believe in you two.'

'Thanks, mate,' said Knox, unexpectedly touched.

The photograph came through shortly after, but the mobile's screen was too small for him to make it all out, so he turned on the Toyota's interior light, fetched a pen and notepad from the box of supplies in the back, sketched out the figure inside the seven-pointed star, then added the clusters of Greek letters. But hard though he stared at it, it made no sense. He punched the dashboard in frustration. He'd imagined that everything would fall into place if only he could find the mosaic. He'd been wrong.

The notepad was too small to make it easy on his eyes. He went back to the box for some sticky-tape and a cheap pair of scissors, then drew the figure and each of the seven clusters of letters on separate sheets and stuck them to the Toyota's windscreen in the rough pattern of the seven-pointed star. Such heptagrams had been favoured symbols of the alchemists, who'd believed it had taken seven stages to convert the leaden soul into the golden sun. He dredged up what little else he knew about them. They'd been a talisman against evil, a symbol of God, of the divine form. The divine form. Wasn't that what Augustin had called hermaphrodites? When everything came from one thing, that one thing must by definition be both male and female. Atum masturbating into his hand. The Androgyni. Adam Kadmon. His thoughts drifted uselessly to a halt.

He began switching the clusters of letters around on the windscreen, looking for patterns, anagrams. But then he heard an engine rumbling nearby and hurriedly switched off his interior light. A truck prowled into view, turning this way and that, using its beams like twin searchlights to illuminate great swathes of the sugar cane. They swept past where he was hiding, throwing thin bars of yellow light over the pages, settling for a moment on two of the clusters,?? and??, before moving on once more. If he hadn't had divine forms on his mind, no way would he have spotted it, but???? transliterated into English as thedi; and theoeides was Greek for the divine form. A third possible link to a single concept all within one diagram. Could it really be coincidence?

The headlights vanished as the truck drove on. He gave them twenty seconds or so before his impatience grew too much for him and he turned his interior light back on. His spirits dipped as he saw that the two clusters?? and?? weren't adjacent, but then he realized they were connected by the unbroken line that made up the seven-pointed star. He jotted down the cluster at which the central figure was pointing, then followed the line all the way around.