The Lost Testament

9

That evening, Husani fired up his home computer and began to do his own research. Within a very short time, it was clear to him that almost all of the papers in the case were in Italian.

He identified an online translation service, and converted some of the words into Arabic. That didn’t help much, except to confirm what he had first suspected: the pages must have been randomly chosen, and what was typed on them was of absolutely no importance. Most of the phrases he translated had very obviously been taken from various sorts of business correspondence, letters, draft contracts, price lists of goods and the like.

But at least Husani could now discount the papers and get to the item that excited him. He turned his attention to the parchment, placing it on the table in front of him and angling a couple of bright desk lights towards it so that its surface was clearly visible.

In the much better lighting then available to him, he found that a few more of the letters and words were visible. And it was possible, he knew from talking to other traders who tended to specialize more in this kind of relic, that other examination techniques, such as bathing the object in infrared and ultraviolet light, could sometimes reveal text that remained invisible to the naked eye.

Husani knew that whatever value the object had must be determined by the text that would be revealed: it was the information that was important, not the parchment itself. The message, not the medium.

He took a few clean sheets of paper, a pencil and an eraser, positioned his desktop magnifying glass on its mount over the first line of words on the parchment and began to carefully copy out every single letter that was clear enough for him to identify. Where he could see that a letter existed but was unable to determine what it was, he marked the paper with an underscore because that, he hoped, would help him when it came to trying to translate the Latin. And the writing, he was still quite certain, was Latin.

He worked his way down the sheet of parchment, filling in those letters he could easily identify, then started again from the top and repeated the process, this time concentrating on the gaps in the text. Then he did the entire process once more, just to make absolutely sure that he hadn’t missed anything. Only after he had completed this did he begin looking at the words and letters he had written out, to see if he could make sense of any of it.

At first glance, he wasn’t hopeful.

He had managed to transcribe only a dozen or so words at different points in the text, and for three of those he wasn’t entirely certain that all the letters were correct. All the other words he had tried to decipher had at least two illegible letters, and in some cases all he had been able to ascertain was the approximate number of letters in the word, and nothing more.

It was, he supposed, a start, and he decided he would begin working with what he had. Using his pencil again, he circled the handful of words on the paper that he was reasonably certain he had transcribed correctly, then turned back to his computer and opened up a Latin dictionary.

Ten minutes later, he looked down at the result. No two of the words were consecutive, and they had appeared at widely separated points on the sheet of parchment, so he wasn’t expecting to make much sense out of them. At best, he hoped that the translations from the Latin would give him an indication of the subject matter of the text.

Altogether, there were nine words in addition to the two words that Mahmoud had already partially deciphered and which he had believed were parts of proper names. None of them appeared to be particularly helpful. In the order in which they appeared on the parchment, the translated meanings were: ‘down’, ‘along’, ‘fighting’, ‘battle’, ‘soldiers’, ‘street’, ‘house’, ‘ran’ and ‘cloak’. And there was another word which he couldn’t make any sense of because it didn’t appear in the dictionary — could that be another proper noun, perhaps the name of a town or other location?

It looked to him as if it was a description of a skirmish, possibly between a Roman legion and some unspecified enemy, but exactly who that enemy might have been, and where and when the conflict had taken place — because he had never heard of any town or country that sounded like the proper name he thought he’d discovered — he had absolutely no idea.

But Husani believed that it was worth pursuing. If the skirmish was important enough, then commercial organizations such as museums and even the history departments of universities might be interested in acquiring it, as well as the antiquarians and collectors of relics around the world who were his usual bigspending customers.

Clearly, what he needed to do was get far more of the text deciphered. And he had a good idea how that could be done, and exactly who could help him.