“Ms. Kent… This place is… it’s… it’s like some kind of massive underground library…”
Amanda’s flashlight illuminated row after row of shelves lined with books and manuscripts. I caught glimpses of hieroglyphs, lost symbols and ancient languages inscribed on the spines, most of which I couldn’t even read. These books were extremely old… more worthy of a museum than a library. Why were they hidden away down here?
Amanda approached the shelves and shined the light directly at the books to get a better look at them. With the narrow light beam focused on the books I found myself suddenly plunged into an impenetrable darkness. I literally couldn’t see my own hand in front of my face, or anything else outside of Amanda’s narrow beam. Someone could be standing right next to me in the darkness and I would never know they were there. I shivered at the thought.
Amanda suddenly gasped in surprise as she read one of the titles: “The Margites? …But… that’s impossible…”
I had no idea what she was talking about, but I took a step towards her and...
“OWWW!!”
My knee painfully struck against something solid hidden in the darkness. Amanda quickly passed her beam directly in front of me and I could see that I had stumbled right into a massive wooden table covered with tools, boxes, books and loose papers.
“Are you ok, Ms. Kent?”
“I’m fine… just banged my knee. It’s so dark down here.... I wish we had another flashlight.”
“Let’s stay close together. If one of us gets hurts I don’t know how we’re going to manage to climb back up my rope to get out of here.”
Amanda cautiously came towards me, illuminating her path and the large table. I could now see that the table was surrounded by disassembled shipping crates. The floor crunched and squeaked as Amanda’s converse shoes stepped on foam packing peanuts that were scattered everywhere.
“I think we just found your shipping crates, Amanda.”
“We’ve found much more than that. You should see the titles of some of these books… Shakespeare’s Cardenio...Inventio Fortunata... Battles of Yahweh…”
“Did you say Cardenio? That has to be a hoax… Cardenio is one of the lost works of Shakespeare.”
“All of them are lost works... The Margites is said to be one of Homer’s first works, predating the Iliad and the Odyssey. Inventio Fortunata is a lost manuscript that documents the first expedition to the Arctic and ‘The Discovery of the Fortunate Islands.’ These books are priceless! You were hoping to find the Lost Arc of the Covenant, Ms. Kent… well… these books are the literary equivalent! That is… assuming that they’re real…”
I had to agree with Amanda on that last point. This didn’t make any sense and I wasn’t quite ready to believe that these books were authentic. Maybe the books were just carefully constructed counterfeits… part of some elaborate literary hoax perhaps? It seemed highly unlikely that so many lost works would be found all at once and in such an unlikely place. My Regional Manager Ms. Pryor and her hired crew were either rounding up ancient texts and manuscripts from around the world and hiding them under the library, or they were assembling a very clever set of counterfeit works designed to… to… what? … what possible purpose could this serve if they were all fake?
“Even if these are real, they would have to be translations or replicas of the original editions The Margites would be thousands of years old and would have disintegrated under these storage conditions.”
Amanda nodded: “But if these translations are somehow authentic, then they are still worth a very large fortune and the scholarly value would be immeasurable. I just can’t believe that these are legitimate, but I don’t know why your Regional Manager would go through all of this trouble to commission or acquire so many elaborate forgeries.”
“I was just thinking the same thing… Ms. Pryor is clearly up to something… but what?”
The flashlight beam passed slowly over the items scattered on the tabletop. I stood beside Amanda and together we searched for some sort of clue that might provide us with more explanation. It looked to me like someone was in the process of cataloging one of the items from this strange collection, probably something that had arrived in Rachel Fox’s shipment that Amanda had been tracking and that had lead to my unpleasant evening with Matteo during the previous night.
I noticed sticky notes attached to the pages of a thin manuscript. I picked it up and held it in front of Amanda’s light so that I could read the interior cover. The manuscript was titled Transcription of Astynome’s Diary.
Amanda shook her head: “Hmmm… Astynome… I’m not familiar with that name.”
“I am… In Homeric fiction ‘Astynome’ is more commonly known as ‘Chryseis’… My surname ‘Chrys’ is a derivation of hers.”
“What an odd coincidence… ”
I shrugged since I had no rational explanation for it either. I began to flip through the manuscript, marveling at the beautiful maps and illustrations that were carefully replicated by whoever had prepared this document. It certainly looked authentic. I got sucked into reading it as Amanda continued to search for clues.
“Amanda, this is another lost work... It’s a history of the Trojan War from Astynome’s perspective. The Iliad is the principle work that provides most of what we now know about the Trojan War, but Homer wrote it 400 years after the war had ended. This diary is a firsthand account of what actually occurred… or so it claims.”
Amanda moved closer to read along with me. Her curiosity was peaked as well. “Interesting… I’m somewhat familiar with The Iliad… but what does your namesake have to say about what happened? Anything that could help us explain what all of this is about?’
“Basically, Astynome says that Homer was very close, but he missed a few details… Astynome was from Chryse, an island not far from Troy, and her father was a Priest of Apollo named Chryses. Chryseis actually means "Daughter of Chryses", which is why Homer and so many other historians and writers refer to her as such, rather than by her given name of Astynome. Anyways… it says here during the ninth year of the Trojan War Astynome was captured by Achilles, leader of the Greek army, during a battle at Chryse and given to the Greek King Agamemnon as a trophy of war. Her father Chryses collected a large ransom and presented it to the king and begged for his daughter’s return, but Agamemnon refused.”
Amanda grinned: “Astynome must have been quite the looker to catch the king’s eye so quickly.”
“Well, it does say that King Agamemnon definitely preferred Astynome to his current wife… but anyways, the king refused the ransom and sent Chryses on his way. Chryses turned to prayer, calling upon Apollo to help him get his daughter back. It says here that for nine days Apollo visited a plague upon the Greek soldiers and killed thousands of them.”
I felt Amanda nudge me with her elbow and I could sense her smiling: “Wow… That’s a heck of retaliation for a kidnapping… Apollo didn’t pull any punches…. Maybe he had a thing for Astynome also.”
“Ha! So on the tenth day of the plague, King Agamemnon gave in and returned Astynome to her father. But the king thought he still deserved a trophy, so he demanded that Achilles give up his trophy wife to replace Astynome. Achille’s trophy wife was named Briseis and he was madly in love with her. Achilles was repelled by the king’s greed and the loss of Briseis, so he retired as leader of the Greek army for a while which led to many defeats for the Greeks in his absence.”
“Astynome stirred up all kinds of trouble it seems... What a mess! So what happened to her after she went back to her father?”
“Well, it turns out that she was pregnant when she returned to Chryse and eventually gave birth to a son.”
“Agamemnon’s fault obviously... If he was the father of the child, that would make Astynome’s son a Greek prince.”
“Actually, according to the diary, she was untouched by Agamemnon. Astynome swears that she never had sex with the king.”
“Well… then how did she explain her pregnancy?’
“In this diary she claims that her son was actually fathered by… oh my gosh… Apollo!”
Amanda laughed: “She had sex with a God? Way to go Chryseis!”
I grinned and shook my head… it did sound a bit farfetched. “So any way…Chryseis named her son Chryses. Shortly after he was born, he was abducted by a woman named Pyrrah. The rest of the story tells of how Astynome followed Pyrrah across the globe until she eventually tracked them to a remote tropical island. There’s actually a map here in the manuscript showing the route that she took and how to get to the island… and look… there are all kinds of sticky notes attached to this page. It looks like our bad guys might be interested in this location.”
This caught Amanda’s attention and she leaned in closer to look at the map.
“Look! That’s Rachel’s handwriting! Hmmm… a map to a mysterious island... Maybe this is where she’s headed next…”
It seemed plausible. Amanda and I huddled together in the darkness, examining the map under the narrow beam of the flashlight. We were both so intent on our discovery that neither of us heard the person sneaking up behind us under the cover of the shadows.
“You weren’t supposed to see that.”
I screamed in panic and very nearly fainted with fright. Amanda had enough presence of mind to whirl around and swing the flashlight at the figure behind us, but I could see that she was too late. He was already in mid-strike, swinging something that looked heavy and solid in his hands. Amanda spun herself directly into the path of the man’s swinging club. It bounced off of her forehead, snapping her head back violently. For a moment Amanda stood wobbling on her feet with a surprised look on her face. I could see that her eyes were slowly rolling up into the back of her head. A soft moan escaped from her parted lips as her eyelids began to flutter. The flashlight slipped from her weakening grasp and spiraled to the floor. Amanda’s assailant slipped an arm behind her back, allowing her to melt limply against the support of his body as she passed out into his arm.
All of this happened in a matter of moments. By the time I stopped screaming, Amanda was already out cold. I realized that I was going to be next so I instinctively reached for a heavy book to use as a makeshift weapon, but my assailant was too fast. He struck again with the club, smacking the side of my head and sending me spinning into the darkness…
I never felt myself hit the floor.
Amanda Jones and Rachel Fox are the OC's of
and are used with permission.While Ms. Kent doesn't realize it, she just read a transcript of her own diary. For those of you following my ongoing art and stories, you may have caught on to the fact that Astynome/Chryseis is much more than just Ms. Kent's namesake. Plus you just learned a little bit more about the son of Apollo... and the true identity of his mother.
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