The Key

41

Flight TK 7121

The soft cabin light and subtly raised temperature conspired with the hum of the engines to send the passengers on Flight TK 7121 to sleep. All the airlines employed the same tactic: feed them quick then dim the lights and whack up the temperature. But Liv didn’t trust herself to sleep. She was scared that her nightmare would return and she didn’t relish the thought of waking up panicked and screaming at thirty thousand feet; so she drank coffee, and she read.

She began working through the book, searching for any other illustrations that matched the symbols she had written on her hand. The symbols on the Sumerian cylinder seal that had prompted her to buy the book were close, but not an exact match. She was hoping there might be further examples in the book, ones closer to the word she had heard. She wasn’t quite sure what she would do with this knowledge if she found it, but she was used to dealing with facts, so facts were what she was seeking.

She found what she was looking for in the middle of a chapter called ‘Lost Languages’.

It was on a page showing fragments of recovered stones from the ruins of various ancient libraries. Halfway down, tucked into the fold, was a picture of a broken tablet. Only the top half was visible, just three lines of swooping symbols. The very first ones jumped out at her. She held her hand flat against the page, comparing what she had written with the ones on the tablet.

They were identical.

She took her pen and carefully underlined the symbols on the photograph and wrote ‘ the key? ’ in the margin next to it.

The caption told her the tablet was written in the same proto-cuneiform script that had first drawn her to the book. It had been found at the site of the ruined Library of Ashurbanipal in a place called Al-Hillah in modern-day Iraq. She underlined this too then turned to the beginning of the chapter and started scanning the text until she found further mention of the language. Proto-cuneiform script is the oldest recorded form of writing and the precursor of all modern forms of written text. Sometimes referred to as ‘Malan’, after the tribe that originated it, or ‘the lost language of the gods’ because the ancients believed it was a gift to mankind from the gods themselves, it was used only by the high priests of ancient Sumerian society as a means of recording the most sacred of events. This restricted its spread and usage and ultimately proved to be its undoing. During the Elamite invasions around 2000 BC the Sumerian temples were destroyed and the priests put to death. Knowledge of the language perished with them and what few texts remain have proved insufficient to attempt any kind of comparative reconstruction of its meaning. Progress has further been hindered by the centuries-old system of acquiring and archiving many possibly useful examples of proto-cuneiform by the Institute of Ancient Writings based in the Citadel in the historic city of Ruin.

Liv felt a chill despite the superheated cabin. Even now, as she was flying away from the place at more than six hundred miles an hour, it seemed she still could not escape its influence. She flipped to the index and looked up ‘The Institute of Ancient Writings’. There was a whole chapter devoted to it. She turned to it and speed-read, hungry for the knowledge it contained. The Institute of Ancient Writings was set up by the monks of Ruin in the fourth century BC, its origins coinciding with the first writing systems emerging from the ancient lands of Mesopotamia — ‘the land between two rivers’.

An illustration on the opposite page showed a modern map over which the boundaries of Mesopotamia had been drawn. It stretched between the rivers Tigris and the Euphrates all the way up through Iraq and northern Syria to southeastern Turkey and the foothills of the Taurus mountains where the Citadel had stood even then. The Institute’s original mandate was to gather and collate all written knowledge so that it could be studied and preserved. The belief was that this knowledge, passed down by storytellers through the oral tradition, had been gleaned by those closer to creation — and therefore closer to God — so its preservation was seen as a sacred duty. As time moved on, however, and other ancient civilizations grew and prospered, they too wished to preserve knowledge as well as study and copy the works that had already been preserved. But the Citadel, ever known for its secrecy and silence, denied all access. In response, the great emerging civilizations built their own libraries, starting with the Library of Ashurbanipal and progressing through the Royal Library at Alexandria, and the Library of Pergamum (see separate chapters). For a time these libraries grew and prospered, but as the civilizations that supported them crumbled and fell, so the libraries were either destroyed, looted by invading armies, or — in an ironic twist of fate — their contents acquired and transported back to the one library that still remained intact: the great library of Ruin.

Liv turned the page and discovered an eighteenth-century engraving depicting the Citadel’s great library. It showed dark caves and tunnels lined with books and tablets stretching away while monks holding candles wove between stalagmites to study the things no one else was allowed to. Beneath the engraving was a quote from a Dr Parnesius, an eighteenth-century Oxford historian, quipping that ‘while all roads lead to Rome, all books are read in Ruin’. In modern times, as museums have become richer and the competition to house rare items has grown, the Guggenheims and Gettys have set up their own archaeological archive departments. As a result a competitive black market in ancient texts has flourished, enabling such treasures as the Dead Sea Scrolls to come to light and remain in it rather than be locked away in the mountain fortress of Ruin. And while these discoveries have helped broaden our understanding of our prehistoric past, the oldest languages, such as proto-cuneiform, and the knowledge they contain remain unsolved. The only hope of decoding them would be the discovery of a key.

Liv stared at this last word. Coincidence or omen? Ordinarily, she wasn’t a strong believer in either, but nothing about her current circumstances could be described as ‘ordinary’. She put it to the back of her mind and did what she always did — she followed the evidence.

Turning again to the index, she scanned the ‘K’ section. There were several page references for ‘Key’. She turned to the main one. The most famous ‘Key’ in the history of ancient languages is the Rosetta Stone. Prior to its discovery in 1799 by Napoleon’s Commission des Sciences et des Arts our understanding of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics had faded from knowledge. Originally displayed within a temple, the stone was inscribed with a decree clearly intended to be read by all who passed. Carved in around 196 BC at a time when language was starting to proliferate, the decree was written in the three most commonly used languages of the time: Ancient Greek, Demotic script and Egyptian hieroglyphs. By comparing the known Greek it was therefore possible to work out the meaning of the other two ‘lost’ languages. The discovery of these ‘key’ stones — carved on the cusp of changing world history — are now considered to be the holy grail of archaeological orthography. The most sought after being the so called Star-stone, or Imago Astrum, mentioned in the dynastic history of Ancient Babylon as being the key to understanding all ancient knowledge and whose loss to the world is believed to be referenced in the story of the Tower of Babel. As the stone was lost, so was our ability to understand the earliest of languages. Many believe the Imago Astrum found its way into the vast collection of the Institute of Ancient Writings in Ruin. Some even believe it may refer to the legendary Sacrament itself.

There was a picture reference at the foot of the page. Liv turned to it and found herself staring at the same broken tablet that contained the symbols she had scrawled on her hand. She looked at them again, their hidden meaning taking on a darker hue after what she had just learned. She felt a sudden urge to remove the marks from her skin, as though this might cleanse her of whatever madness was infecting her.

Unclipping her seat belt, Liv placed the book on her seat then walked quickly towards the bathroom at the front of the plane, scratching her hand as she went, as if the symbols were somehow infected.

Dick squeezed his legs up and out of the vice-like grip of the armrests. His body creaked as it uncurled itself from the tortured prison of the cheap seat and he stood slowly, feeling the pop and crack of joints stretching back to their natural shape. As he reached his full height, his hair brushed against the ceiling. Up ahead the girl reached the top of the aisle and disappeared through the door into the tiny bathroom. He was already moving forward before the ‘Engaged’ light came on.

He had spent his time in the flight musing about two things. The first was what sort of book the girl was reading, the second was trying to figure out if there was a way of killing her on the plane without getting caught.

The message he had received at the airport had told him that the girl represented a clear and present danger and needed to be terminated with extreme prejudice. Dick loved all this military jargon: the operatic quality of the words and lack of equivocation in them. But ironically it meant that, in order to execute his task as quickly and as efficiently as possible, he would have to wait. So in the meantime he would satisfy himself with answering the first question that had been running through his mind.

He reached her empty seat and glanced down at the book. It was open at a page of photographs. She had underlined something on one and written in the margin. His eyes lingered on the curve of her handwriting. It was elegant and compact, just like her. He pulled his phone from his pocket, checking that the other passengers in the row were asleep then took a photo of the page. He also memorized the title of the book and was pleasantly surprised when he saw what it was. He stretched again for the benefit of anyone watching, then returned to his seat, arching his back to give the impression he was merely stretching his legs. Maybe when the time came he would take her somewhere quiet, so they could talk a while first. Somewhere — i-so-la-ted.

It was rare to find a pretty girl who liked language as much as he did.