And if that were the case, then there was one very obvious location that sprang into his mind.
There was also, he supposed, trying to rationalize and justify his deduction, a piece of what might be described as negative evidence as well. By simply using the word templum, meaning the temple, rather than one of the other fifty or so words in Latin that could be employed to refer to a place of worship, and by not specifying where that temple might be located, the author could have been alluding to the best-known such structure of his time. Khaled had spent some years in Britain and, to take a modern example, if most citizens there heard a reference to ‘the abbey’, he guessed that most of them would immediately assume that the speaker was referring to Westminster Abbey because that was the most famous such structure in the United Kingdom.
And although the mediaeval world was geographically diverse and well separated, culturally and religiously it was a very small place and he was reasonably confident that most people in Europe and the Middle East in those days would know exactly which temple the author of the inscription would have meant.
Khaled turned back to his browser, thought for a few seconds, then entered an entirely different search string and scanned the list of pages that had been generated. At the top of the third screen was a hit that he thought seemed promising, and this time the page of information that was shown after he’d clicked the link was precisely what he was hoping to see. He now knew — or at least he hoped he knew — what the author of the inscription must have been referring to.
He read it all twice, then picked up his mobile phone and called Farooq.
They needed to move quickly, but the good news was that they didn’t have quite as far to go as he had expected.
32
‘What?’ Bronson asked.
‘I think that could be it,’ Angela said, quickly jotting down a series of letters. She turned back to her laptop, accessed a website and typed rapidly. Then she nodded in apparent satisfaction.
‘What?’ Bronson asked again.
Angela pointed to one of the words in the latest version of the inscription that they had produced.
‘See this word here?’ she asked, and Bronson nodded. ‘Frequency analysis suggests that the word is “siruf”, and that’s not a word in Latin that I know. In fact, it’s not a word that any of the online Latin dictionaries recognize. But if you reverse the letters it turns into “furis”.’
‘I’m none the wiser,’ Bronson said.
‘No, but you are better informed, my dear. “Furis” might not be a Latin word that you’ve ever encountered, but I know what it means. It’s the Latin for “thief”. And look at this’ — she pointed at another sequence of letters — ‘that is “sirotpecretni”, which again is not a Latin word, and it doesn’t even look like Latin. But write it backwards and you get “interceptoris”. “Interceptor” is now an English word with an entirely different meaning. But originally it was a Latin word, and it meant a usurper. I think the person who prepared this inscription used Atbash with a code word or words added to the alphabet to make decryption more difficult and then as a final refinement he reversed the ciphertext in its entirety, writing every word backwards. In fact,’ she added, ‘I probably should have guessed that that was a possibility, just because we’re talking about an inscription.’
‘Why?’
‘Because most people are right-handed, and if you’re carving something on a piece of stone you’ll naturally hold the chisel in your left hand and the hammer in your right. If you do that, your left hand obscures what you’ve just carved if you work from left to right, but not if you work from right to left. This is why we believe that some languages, like Hebrew, run from right to left because most of the early examples were inscriptions of various sorts. The language got established by being carved in that way, and nobody ever bothered changing it to run in the opposite direction.’
Their coffee grew cold as they reversed the inscription, transcribing it letter by letter, Angela reading out each one in reverse sequence while Bronson wrote out the text.
‘There don’t seem to be any breaks between these words,’ he said. ‘Or if there are, you’re not telling me where one word ends and another one starts.’
‘That’s because as far as I can see there are no breaks in the inscription and I’ve seen nothing like an interpunct anywhere in the text, which is more or less what I expected.’
This time it was Bronson’s turn to look puzzled.
‘An interpunct was a small dot or occasionally a tiny triangle that was used in ancient and classical Latin script to separate words,’ Angela explained. ‘But it fell out of use round about AD 200, and after that Latin was written in what was known as scripta continua — basically, continuous script without any spaces — for about the next half a millennium. After that, the custom of inserting spaces between words was used.’
‘But if you think this inscription is mediaeval, wouldn’t you expect to find spaces?’
‘If this were a regular inscription or piece of Latin text written on parchment, then I would absolutely agree with you. But this inscription looks to me as if it was a copy of a piece of earlier text and, more importantly, we know it was encrypted. If the scribe or mason who produced it had included spaces to separate the words, that would have made deciphering it easier, which would have defeated the object of the exercise.’
Deciphering the Latin was the first step. Once they’d completed that, or at least the first part of the text, because the section written below a faint but a distinct line that ran across the middle of the inscription defied all her efforts, Angela spent another fifteen minutes or so using an online Latin — English dictionary to translate the text. Then she sat back in her seat, read through what she’d written, and glanced at Bronson.
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘And what does it say, obviously?’ Bronson asked.
‘Oh. Well, not as much as I was hoping, frankly, and certainly not what I was expecting. And that lower part of the inscription still appears to be complete gobble-degook, so I guess that will need some other code words or something, maybe even a different decryption method, before we can read what it says. The section I have translated seems to be a condemnation of some unnamed man. It refers to him as “the thief” and “the usurper” — the two words, oddly enough, that I first recognized in the text when we realized how it had been encrypted — but his identity is never confirmed. It’s almost as if the author would have expected anybody reading it to know precisely who he was talking about. A bit like Christianity today, I suppose, where a church could be referred to as the “house of the lord”, and nobody would be in any doubt which particular lord was meant.’
‘That would be a reference in a positive sense,’ Bronson pointed out, ‘but from what you’ve said this is definitely a negative reference, maybe something to do with the forces of evil, with the Devil, perhaps. After all, in most religions if you accept the existence of God, logically you must also accept the existence of God’s counterpart, the Devil. Without the threat of going to Hell, how could the priests persuade their flock to do what the Church wanted them to do? Could that be it?’
Angela shook her head.