“We should photograph everything before any books are moved,” Alex warned. “Then go about meticulously cataloging each volume.”
Igor nodded, letting Alex take the lead. “I’ll spread the word to the others.”
Igor crossed to his colleagues, a group of archaeologists, five men and a woman. No one was older than forty. After much gesticulating and some stern looks Alex’s way, the team set off into the chamber, hauling in their gear. Like Alex, the team was dressed in dark bluecoveralls and wore safety helmets topped by battery-powered lamps. The group started setting up tripods, measuring the room, and taking photographs, not only of the chests, but also the vault’s walls and doors.
Alex respected their thoroughness.
Another did not. Clearly impatient with such meticulous work, Vadim waved to Alex. The student waited beside a trunk, one that had been left open by his friends. It stood to the left of the door, out of the way of the bustle.
“Come see,” Vadim urged him.
“Don’t touch anything,” Alex warned. “The books will be very fragile.”
Vadim scowled, but in a good-natured way, as if the young man was tolerating a scolding grandfather. “?? ????????. I would not let anyone touch anything. We only peek in trunks,da? No more.”
“Very good.”
Alex crossed to the open chest, trailed by Igor, whose eyes glinted with curiosity.
Inside the trunk, rows of leather spines were cradled within oak racks. It appeared more trays lay below the topmost one, stacked one atop the other.
Alex waved the beam of his helmet’s lamp over the upper collection. He read a few of the titles. “Plato’sTimaeus and Critias...Aristotle’sDe Partibus Animalium...Ptolemy’sAlmagest.”He leaned closer. “That looks like a Byzantine copy ofCorpus Hippocraticum.”
The books were centuries, if not millennia, old. And all well preserved.
Alex rubbed an ache in his chest as his breathing tightened with excitement.
“Neveroyatnyy...” Igor mumbled with awe, plainly equally amazed.
The archivist reached and hovered a finger over the leather-bound volume ofCorpus Hippocraticum. The book was a collection of sixty ancient Greek medicinal works, attributed to the physician Hippocrates. But it was not the subject matter that most interested the man.
Igor turned to Alex. “AByzantinecopy, you said.”
“MaybeByzantine,” he cautioned, knowing what the archivist hoped this meant.
“If so, it could be evidence that these trunks, these books, came from the Golden Library.”
Alex glanced over to the archaeologists as they labored across the room, whispering in Russian to one another. He knew the hope that theyallheld.
For centuries, hundreds of men and women—historians, explorers, adventurers, thieves—had been searching for the Golden Library, a treasure trove of volumes hidden away by Ivan the Terrible and lost after his death. But it wasn’t even Ivan’s collection. It was his grandfather—Ivan the Great—who had gathered together that vast library during the fifteenth century. A majority of it came as a dowry when the emperor married his second wife, Sophia Palaiologina, a Byzantine princess, who carried the collection with her after the fall of the Byzantine Empire. It was said to hold the most treasured volumes of the Library of Constantinople, including manuscripts from the ancient Library of Alexandria.
Alex looked enviously across the arc of chests. According to records, the Golden Library contained documents written in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Egyptian, even Chinese texts from the second century.
“If we could ever find it,” Igor extolled, “just think what we might uncover? I read how a nineteenth-century historian—Christopher von Dabelov—claimed to have seen a list of the library’s titles. That list included all hundred-and-forty-two books of Titus Livius’sHistory of Rome. Only thirty-five of those volumes still exist today. Dabelov also noted an unknown poem written by Virgil. And a full version of Cicero’sDe Republica. Can you just imagine what such a discovery would mean?”
Alex tried to temper Igor’s enthusiasm. “I know of Dabelov’s account. It’s highly suspect, likely a fraud. In fact, the Golden Library may no longer exist. It could’ve been burned or destroyed long ago.”
Igor shook his head, refusing to accept this. “Ivan the Terrible valued that collection, hiring hordes of Russian translators to work through the library. It is well documented that he purposefully hid the collection somewhere underground—either in Moscow or elsewhere. There are stories that he discovered mystical texts that would grant Russia greatpower. So firm was this belief that many of the scholars working on the translations quit and fled, fearing Ivan would use black magic found in those books to wreak great harm.”
Alex cast him a skeptical gaze.
Igor shrugged. “No matter the truth of such legends, it is well known that Ivan believed the future of Russia was tied to that library. If he truly put such stock in its collection, he would have hidden it well and not let it be destroyed.”
Vadim interrupted their discussion, likely indifferent to the esoterica of lost libraries. He pointed into the trunk. “Look. Something shine in there. Down deeper.”
Alex leaned closer, following his finger. “What do you mean?”
“Under the top books.” Vadim stepped in front of them. “I show you.”
