Valley of Thracians (30 page)

Years had passed since that foggy night
when her husband had joined Vlady and Boris on their museum heist, and now
Hristo was long gone, victim of a freak tragedy in the Italian Alps. She
remembered when Vlady informed Boris that he had finally found a buyer for the
Thracian artifact, which led to its being dug up from its hiding place in the
family’s backyard. Scott, who had been called on to deliver the item to the
buyer in Varna, had somehow pulled a fast one on all of them. In the three
years of being held as her captive in the mountains, the American had never
divulged what he had done with that precious bag.

It was all her fault! She cringed as she
recalled Boris’s harsh words accusing her of doing this intentionally to harm
him. She gingerly touched the scar wounds on her wrist, the visible
self-inflicted result of her failure to learn where the bag was located. There
was only one way to redeem herself, she realized, and that was by assisting Vlady
now. They needed to capture and drug Scott until he spilled the secret of the
treasure’s location. Sitting in the front seat of Vlady’s car, she touched the
medicine kit that was resting on the floor between her legs, reassuring herself
that she was ready with the necessary supplies.

A short while back they had passed the
road signs announcing Sevlievo and Gabrovo, yet they continued eastward. They
had been traveling for hours, both of them tired and restless after long
stretches of open highway with little traffic. Occasionally Katya glanced at
Vlady, as if to ask him if what they were doing was right. He offered nothing
to reassure her, no excuses or further explanations. His silence stated clearly
that there was no turning back.

The car ahead of them was exiting the
highway, and Vlady slowed down to match its speed.

Chapter
52

As Sophia drove the car toward their
destination, she realized that she didn’t recognize the road at all. The
villages and towns of the countryside were strangely unfamiliar, and her
American passengers certainly couldn’t provide any sort of guidance. They
passed the turnoffs to Sevlievo and Gabrovo, but her mind went blank at the
names. She felt as if she were driving on autopilot with the vehicle steering
itself, leaving her no control over gears or brakes. Even though they had
determined their destination before leaving, she held the steering wheel
tightly in her hands, captive to its whims. Only the full blast of sunlight in
her face gave clue to the fact that they were traveling east. Instead of
concentrating on the road and the task at hand, Sophia was thinking of other
things, other times.

Her thoughts drifted to the Thracian
sites of her country, for she knew the tombs and treasures of this ancient
people like the back of her hand. She had led university field trips to the
Tomb of Sveshtari in northeastern Bulgaria and joined colleagues on the ascent
to the acropolis at Peperikon. Her participation on these expeditions was
frequently requested due to her vast knowledge of Thracian funeral and burial
customs and her particular expertise in Thracian etymology. Her ability to
precisely identify and date the relics of this ancient people was in high
demand.

Recently she had been called upon to
authenticate an inscription discovered at a burial site in the Valley of the
Thracian Kings. On a tiny stone slab, at about two centimeters in height and
carefully inscribed, a series of Greek characters formed a long word that was
apparently not from that language.

“Is this ancient Thracian?” asked the
archaeologist in charge of the excavations.

“Let me see,” she replied, looking
closely.

What was known about the language of the
Thracians? Although spoken throughout the Balkans and in Turkey before the rise
of the Greeks, the common belief among linguistic scholars was that the
Thracians did not enjoy a high literacy rate, and this would account for a lack
of written texts in their language. A significant number of Thracians were
Hellenized, and the few words that could be attributed to them were transcribed
in Greek or Latin letters.

Remarkably, only four Thracian
inscriptions of any length had been found in modern times, the most significant
of them being a gold ring discovered in the village of Ezerovo in1912. Dated to
the fifth century BC, the Greek letters on this ring formed words that bore no
resemblance to any known language.

In her studies, Sophia learned that
there were more than twenty conjectured translations for the text carved onto
the tiny Ezerovo ring, but none of them was universally accepted. The reading
of the letters was not difficult—even Sophia was able to decipher them, but
their division into words, and what those words meant, was uncertain. As the
ring was found alongside a miniature golden spoon, a round bronze mirror, and a
broken bronze bracelet, the widely accepted assumption was that it had belonged
to a rich, noble Thracian.

Another ancient Thracian inscription,
known as the Kjolmen inscription, was discovered in 1965 on a stone plate above
a grave in the northeastern village of that name. This inscription, consisting
of fifty-six letters, was a bidirectional text known as a
bustrophedon
,
in that one line ran from left to right, while the next line contained reversed
letters running right to left. According to the translation offered by a
prominent linguist, this inscription read:

Ebar (son) of Seza(s) of 58 years lived
here. Do not damage this (grave)! Do not desecrate this deceased, for this (the
same) will be done to you!

Most of the ancient Thracian texts discovered
so far related to their funerary customs. Knowing a few words of the defunct
language had been a required part of her studies, although this hadn’t been a
particularly difficult task as there wasn’t much material to consider. Some
scholars claimed that a total of only twenty some words could be accurately
ascribed to the ancient Thracians, while others argued that the recognized
glossary actually consisted of more than a thousand words, however, many of
these were personal names or geographical locations. All that modern science
knew about the Thracian tongue was based on inscriptions discovered at the
burial sites and the few words that had made their way into Greek texts.

“Let me examine the lettering,” Sophia
said to the archaeologist at the Valley of the Thracian Kings burial site. She
examined the stone, carefully wiping away the centuries-old dust. “It reads
Muka-kakaes
,
which is a two-component name,” she explained. “It means ‘man of the clan’, or
alternatively, it could be translated as ‘son of the clan.’”

“Fascinating!
So the person buried here was most definitely a member of a Thracian tribe.”

She recognized the Thracian origin of
the letters and shook her head to confirm this conclusion. Discovered at a
burial site that had been partially ransacked during antiquity, the letters
were all that bore testimony to the clan that lived in this land more than two
millennia before. No additional words were available to shed further light on
the ancient tribesman, his people, or their customs. The language of the
Thracians, like the Thracians themselves, had vanished from the face of the
earth.

“Veliko Tarnovo.”

“What?” Sophia asked, jutted out of her
Thracian thoughts.

“The sign said Veliko Tarnovo,” Simon
said, pointing out the car window as they neared the central Bulgarian town
predetermined as the day’s destination.

“Oh, yes,” Sophia replied. She snapped
to attention and steered the vehicle toward the exit she had almost missed.
Thoughts of the vital undertaking ahead, which would challenge her vast
knowledge and expertise, intensified with the urgent necessity of finding the
ancient artifact. As she left the highway, she barely glanced at the rearview
mirror and its reflection of the car pulling off the road behind them.

Chapter
53

Unable to keep up with his grandson’s
eager pace, Simon stopped to catch his breath and take in the scenery from the
drawbridge. A lion captured in relief above the city’s shield on a stone pillar
marked the beginning of the passage, which led through a series of gates. Ahead
was the citadel hill, capped by a domed structure set alongside a singular
tower, possibly a church’s belfry. The historic site was protected by low
fortress walls, and the valleys to its sides were deep. Red-roofed structures
perched precariously on the distant slopes above the twisting course of a dark
river far below.

“This is the fortress of Tsarevets,”
Sophia explained when they got out of the car in the center of Veliko Tarnovo.
“It served as our capital during the Second Bulgarian Empire of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries.”

“I remember visiting here,” Scott noted,
impatient to cross the bridge and begin the ascent to the citadel. The
stone-walled fortress was very familiar and certainly had been one of the
highlights of his travels in the country. “I have a feeling this could have
been what Lance was referring to when he wrote that he hid the gym bag at one
of our favorite places.”

Resting on the drawbridge as his
grandson forged ahead with Sophia, Simon recalled his latest phone conversation
with Daniel. His son’s words continued to damper the excitement of reuniting
with Scott. Daniel was clearly upset with how his father was handling things.
He argued that Simon wasn’t doing enough to get past the bureaucratic red tape
at the embassy. When he learned that Scott’s return to the States was being
delayed, Daniel stated emphatically that he had already started pulling
strings. The last thing Daniel told his father was that he had contacted his
congressman, extracting a promise to speed up the passport process.

Simon sighed, wary of Scott’s insistence
at conducting this futile search for a long-lost parcel, far from the relative
safety of the Bulgarian capital. Ahead, Scott and Sophia joined ranks with a
tour group making its way through the second gate. Surely something would
trigger Scott’s memory, cluing him in as to why he and Lance considered the
historic site to be one of their favorites. And certainly this sign from the
past would guide them to the exact spot where Lance had hidden the bag.

Simon walked through the first
unimpressive stone gate and continued toward the next one. He adjusted his
baseball cap and leaned down to caress an aching leg muscle. His throat was
dry, and he was sorry that he hadn’t accepted Sophia’s suggestion that he carry
his own water bottle. He approached the second gate where a flash of fabric
caught his eye.

“Welcome to the ancient stronghold of
Tsarevets, home of Kaloyan, tsar of the Second Bulgarian Kingdom between the
years 1197 and 1207. It was Kaloyan who conquered many lands of both the
Ottomans and the Hungarians. It was Kaloyan who captured Baldwin, emperor of
the Crusaders’ Latin Empire who ruled from Constantinople. Kaloyan extended the
political power of the Bulgarians and is considered one of our greatest
emperors.”

The lines were chanted in singsong
fashion by an elaborately costumed marionette, almost life-size, sitting on a
cardboard throne alongside three other similarly dressed puppets propped up
against the shadowed inner wall of the gate. The bearded puppet, whose lips
moved in synchrony with the recorded words, wore a gold-plated shield over his
long red robe, and a round silver-foil crown rested atop his black hair. To the
side, temporarily at rest from the demands of string and wire, was a female
marionette, quite obviously the queen, regally gowned and crowned with
jewel-like plastic beads. Her heavily made up face was stiff and
expressionless.

A man stationed behind a black box to
the side pulled the strings, controlling his actors and playing their scripts
in turn. The man winked at Simon, instinctively knowing to play the tape in
English.

Simon took comfort in the shade and
smiled at the man and his costumed wooden charges.

“I will relate the tale of Baldwin and
the Bulgarian queen. While being held captive at Tsarevets Fortress, in the
tower just yonder that still bears his name, Baldwin fell under the charm of
our queen and tried to seduce her. When Tsar Kaloyan discovered this, he put
the Latin Emperor to death and turned his skull into a drinking cup. Kaloyan
defended the queen’s honor; yes, he defended the honor of all Bulgaria.”

Simon dropped a few coins into the
puppeteer’s upturned hat and continued through the gate. He walked past an
artist’s rendition of what the famous fortress had looked like when it served
as capital of the Bulgarian kingdom. The path continued to ascend, snaking back
and forth toward the hill’s summit. He lost sight of Scott and Sophia but
assumed they were heading to the top, to the most strategic place in the
fortress. Logic determined that the crest of the hill was the best place to
scout out the entire site.

Simon realized that despite the pressure
he was feeling in his legs, not exactly painful yet noticeable just the same,
he would need to hurry to follow them. He couldn’t afford to let this mystery
be solved without him. He needed to see what Scott would see, to understand the
purpose of this quest. He continued toward the summit, concentrating on nothing
more than putting one foot ahead of the other.

“Grandpa, I can’t believe you made it!”
Scott exclaimed when he saw his grandfather arrive at the white steps leading
to the church’s entrance. “I thought you would have waited for us at the
bottom.”

Simon didn’t reply for a minute. He
thanked Sophia for her offer of water and drank vigorously before speaking.
“What are those for?” he asked in a short breath, pointing at three enormous
bells set in wooden frames at the side of the path.

“There’s a sound and light show here
every night,” Sophia replied. “It uses lasers, dramatic lights, and music—and
those bells as well—to tell the story of Veliko Tarnovo’s fall to the Ottomans.
It’s really quite a fascinating show. We could see it tonight if you want.”

Scott looked around nervously, searching
for the clue that would redeem their visit to the medieval fortress. He took a
sip of water from his own bottle and paced back and forth across the plaza.

“There’s not too much here,” Simon
noted, impressed at the scenery but finding it strangely lacking. He wasn’t sure
if he could put his finger on what was missing.

“That’s true,” Sophia said. “Most of the
grandeur of Tsarevets Fortress has been destroyed. This church, the Patriarchal
Cathedral of the Holy Ascension of God, is actually quite new, constructed in
the 1970s and ’80s on the site of a fourteenth-century church.”

“I’m not seeing anything,” Scott said.
“Nothing that can shed light on the past.”

“Think of what you did here with Lance,”
Simon suggested, as he screwed the cap back onto the plastic water bottle.

“My mind is blank.”

“Maybe from the tower you’ll see
something,” Sophia said. “At least from up there you’ll have a view over
everything.”

“Something is bound to help you
remember,” Simon agreed.

They left the plaza and circled round to
the back of the cathedral. The bell tower, a rarity among Balkan churches,
according to Sophia, jutted prominently into the bright blue sky. High above, a
row of colorful pennant flags fluttered in the breeze. Only the shrill call of
a solitary lofty hawk disturbed the silence of the citadel’s summit.

“Let’s go up,” Scott said, continuing
toward the wooden door at the tower’s base.

“I’ll stay below,” Simon replied. “I
can’t make that sort of climb.”

“Simon, there’s a lift that goes to the
top,” Sophia said, extending her hand to assist him.

The elevator was operated by a short,
stubby man sitting inside it on a wooden stool. He welcomed them with an
outstretched hand and a toothy grin. Sophia spoke to him, and Simon immediately
understood that there was a demand for payment.

“How much?”

“Three leva a person,” Sophia replied.

Simon paid the money, and they squeezed
inside the cramped elevator as its operator shut the door. A motor jerked into
operation and then settled into a low drone as it lifted them from the ground
to the tower’s pinnacle three floors above the plaza.

Sweat broke out on Simon’s forehead. The
closeness inside the cage left him standing almost on top of Scott. He was
embarrassed that his arm was leaning into Sophia, and he moved backward, trying
to give her more space. The elevator operator hummed to himself—or was that the
motor? Simon shifted his weight from one leg to the other; the action resulted
in a nervous ting, causing him more discomfort. There was little air in the
lift, making it hard to breathe. The upward journey went on and on, and the
claustrophobic sensation was getting worse. Something caught in his throat; his
eyes began to tear. With a shutter, the elevator’s climb came to a halt, and
the operator swung a large metal lever. The door creaked open to a stream of
welcome daylight.

“Wow, look at the view!” Scott
exclaimed, bolting forward to a gap in the tower’s crenellations.

Simon leaned back against the elevator
door at the side of the narrow platform. His breath came in short gasps, and he
felt lightheaded. He couldn’t find the strength to join his grandson at the
battlement wall.

“Scott, I’m going back down,” he
wheezed. He stepped back into the safety of the small box, to the surprise of
its operator.

“Simon, are you okay?” Sophia asked with
concern.

“I’ll wait for you at the bottom,” Simon
stammered, and then the elevator doors banged shut.

Going down was better than going up.
Alone with the operator, Simon had more space, allowing him to stand
comfortably. It was still an ordeal, however, and he closed his eyes, silently
counting the seconds until they reached the plaza level.

The purr of the motor eased off, and
with a bump, the elevator stopped its descent. The operator reached for the
lever and pulled it slowly. The door opened.

Before Simon had a chance to step out to
the plaza, he was pushed backward with brute force. Two very impatient people
couldn’t wait for him to emerge from the lift. They shoved him repeatedly,
elbows bumping into his and limbs colliding. Simon felt a sharp pain in his
knee and someone stepped down sharply on his foot.

 
“Excuse me!” he cried out, reaching out to
protect
himself
. His baseball cap fell from his head
and came to rest on one of the lift’s levers. The operator sat motionless on
his stool, doing nothing to help Simon leave the elevator.

One of the intruders was a woman. Her
curly hair brushed against his face, an almost pleasant sensation despite the
circumstances. In the split second that they made eye contact, he witnessed a
crazed madness unlike anything he had ever seen. It was as if she could see him
and
see
through him—and as if she didn’t see him at
all. He didn’t have time to consider this strange impression, because to his
horror, he noticed the woman’s hand held high. She wielded a long syringe in a
menacing manner. Her mouth opened, and she cried something unintelligible as
she moved forward to strike.