‘Stop talking! Just dig.’
‘I am digging.’ He removed about a tablespoon of sand and laid it carefully up on the bank. ‘Why don’t you put the knife down and come and tell me about this treasure.’
‘Do you think I’m stupid?’
Barthrop had let him swim across, so Aleksey didn’t think he was the brightest bulb in the box. ‘You knew it was here? Somewhere on the island—like Colter did?’
‘I didn’t know the exact location, or I’d have insisted on being allowed to dig.’
‘Good luck with that then. The guy who owned it before me has some fun friends.’
‘I have the right to examine any land in Cornwall as the—’
‘Then howdidyou know about it?’ He put another small pile of sand next to his first.
‘Ow!’ He looked up sharply. Miles’s neck was bleeding.
‘Dig faster.’
For the first time, Aleksey saw something behind the tree where the other two were standing. He couldn’t imagine why Barthrop wanted fuel cans—other than the obvious reason—but bent more genuinely to his work. ‘You don’t seem the kind of man who’d kill for gold. A shard of pottery, maybe.’
‘Mock all you like. You know nothing. You have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘So tell me. What is this about?’ He’d uncovered some of the collapsed timbers and stooped to pull them out, heaving them to one side. One splashed into the pond. For a moment, he was frozen in horror, as he saw in his mind’s eye the mouth of the huge shark rising out of the water to seize it. He shuddered and bent to pull up another. It wasn’t wood this time, however. It was bone. A rotten leg came away in his hand, and he fell back on the bank. ‘Fuck.’ Sharpie.
‘Whatisthat!’
Aleksey snorted quietly at the man’s panicked gaze as he tossed the bones to one side. ‘It’s the last Emperor of the Aztecs. The legend goes he was buried with his treasure.’
‘He was burned! That’s the whole point.’
‘Well, in that case, I think it’s one of the angels that lived here when the treasure was first buried here. Maybe this was the site of the abbot’s house, here on the smaller island. And this chamber was his cellar.’
‘Dig!’
‘Ow. Could youpleasestop getting so agitated?’ Barthrop was staring at the leg, blood now dripping onto the collar of Miles’s t-shirt where, in his panic, the little man had cut the boy.
Gritting his teeth at the sight, deciding not to give the more prosaic explanation of the corpse, Aleksey continued, ‘Maybe it’s the body of Praise-God Barebone. He’s the man who buried the treasure here in the first place. Maybe the angels who lived here sensed the evil of it, the curse he was attempting to avert, and so they were the ones to accept it and sanctify it. I’m not sure relics of the faith are that strong, given what was done to own this. They tied him to a stake, didn’t they? The last emperor. And burned him for hours, just so they could take his gold and all his great wealth, using the excuse he wouldn’t convert from his god to theirs.’
‘What are you talking about? It wasn’t because he wouldn’t covert. It was because of his library. Don’t you see? It’s not a treasure of gold and silver; it never was—oh, there were probably coins and other valuable pieces stolen by the Spanish, which the Frobishers drained over the years.But this is the great missing library of the Aztecs. They had the entire history of their empire in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica recorded on codices—thousands of years of pre-history. They had mathematical knowledge we don’t understand even today! Don’t you get it yet?This is Randal’s proof—of his theories! That’s how I know it existed. Randal was convinced his entire theory would be proved one day—that this was the site of the capital city of Atlantis, right here, before the cataclysm at the end of the Younger Dryas destroyed that world. That his ancestors, who survived the flood, his mythical race of giant men, set off around the world to seed it with civilisation. And the Aztecsknewthis. They’d inherited the knowledge from the Olmecs, the Maya, the Toltecs, the Mixtec, all that history being passed down; it’s all here: the missing codices. It’sQuetzalcoatl’s Inheritance—history, religion, astronomy, mathematics, genealogy, science.The knowledge he brought with him from Atlantis. He wasn’t a god; he was a man from here.’
‘You are entirely mad.’
‘You fool. Do you really think men ever fight for wealth, land, power? They don’t. They fight for how they want tothink, what they want tobelieve. Belief makes reality—my idea is right and yours is wrong; my religion is the true faith, yours is superstition. We have to stop people being able to think what they want. Don’t you see what this knowledge would lead to, what ideologies it would help to ferment? No, if we all think the same there will be no more wars, no endless religious squabbles, no race supremacy theories, no nationalism—no countries. Nothing to kill or die for.’
‘You’ve been listening to the wrong music. Try some dizzy dancing. It’s better for you.’ He’d cleared all the loose rubble away now. He could see huge caskets. They gleamed. They appeared to be made of gold with inlaid turquoise stones. ‘So, what, this is just books? All this for books?’
‘Scrolls, yes. Bark. Deerskin.’
‘And you want them for your museum? You killed Orlando Frobisher because—why did you kill him? Would he have wanted books?’
‘Want them! I don’t want them! I never wanted them found! I stopped Randal finding them. I discredited him, had him entirely cancelled. He died a broken old man, stumbling around his library, muttering about white giants. No one would write to him, let him speak anywhere. He was banned from his own department! It was my greatest achievement. Totally discredited. Then that damn telescope surfaced, and it all started up again. Colter would have found it. I had to stop him.’
‘Yeah, well, you did.’
‘Open one of those. Use the shovel.’
Aleksey did as he was bid, bringing the blade down upon the clasp. He was fairly sure that if either deerskin or bark had been buried here for nearly five hundred years, scrolls that had already reputedly been overtwelve thousand yearsold, there wouldn’t be much left of them, so he put his back into the task.
