The Key

29

The airport bookshop was filled with all the usual things catering for the average bored airline traveller. Liv made her way to a shelf of phrasebooks by the checkout desk and scanned the titles, picking out any with an unusual alphabet. She wanted to prove to herself that the word she had heard in her head was merely an echo of something she must have picked out in amongst the babble of voices. If she could just find out what language it was in then she could board her flight without worrying the whole way home that she was hearing voices and going nuts. By the time she reached the bottom shelf she had eight books in her hand. She opened the first, an Arabic phrasebook, and turned to the K section, looking for the word ‘key’. She found it and compared the translation to the symbols on her hand. It wasn’t even close. She did the same with the other seven books, working her way through Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese. None of them matched.

Dammit.

She jammed the books back and turned to go then stopped as something caught her eye on the next shelf. It was a book with a picture of a tablet on its cover with faint markings on its surface. They were not the same as the symbols Liv had written on her hand, but they were close. She took it down and opened it, only to discover that it was not a phrasebook — it was a history book. The inside flap provided a second shock. The photograph on the cover was of a five-thousand-year-old Sumerian tablet inscribed with a long-dead language. So she couldn’t have overheard it in the departure hall. She flipped through the book in search of pictures of other ancient texts. She was about to give up and dash for the plane when she found something. It was a photograph of a carved stone cylinder with a hole through its centre. Beneath it was a broad strip of wet clay the cylinder had been rolled across, leaving a square of text behind made up of lines and triangles.

They looked exactly like the symbols on Liv’s hand.

The caption identified it as a cylinder seal, an ancient method of reproducing messages. By inserting a rod or stick through the centre it could be rolled over wet earth or clay to reveal the writing inscribed on its surface. Often these were spells, laid on the edges of fields to bring forth bounty. The message on this particular seal, however, was unknown. It was written in a form of script known archaeologically as ‘proto-cuneiform’ or more poetically as ‘the lost language of the gods’ because of its great age and because its meaning had been forgotten in time.

Great, Liv thought, now I’m hearing voices in a language that hasn’t been spoken in nearly six thousand years; so much for putting my mind at rest.

A tannoy announcement cut through the muzak calling for last passengers for Cyprus Turkish Airline flight TK 7121 to Newark.

She was out of time. She ran to the checkout, pulling the last of her Turkish lira from her pocket to pay for the book. She’d read it on the plane — always assuming she would still make it.