opened a drawer, and removed a cloth sack, which he tipped gently onto the table. The contents were as small and white as pearls. “These are an ancient variety of vegetable. And these,” he said, taking another small sack from a drawer, “are peonies, but unlike any peony seen in the modern world. I grew one fifteen years ago—the flower was as big as my head, pale purple with streaks of yellow on the petals, utterly beautiful.”
“Surely these seeds would have been completely destroyed if they were among the objects of the settlement,” Vera said. “Even anoxic water would damage them. You could not have found these in proximity to the tablets.”
Azov said, “The seeds were not recovered from the settlement. We found them inland, stored in a dry, cold space under the ground, a place that may have been built by Noah as a storage center for them but was later used as a Thracian burial mound. We found a map of the storage rooms among the tablets. After the water rose and Noah was forced to leave the first settlement, he traveled into what is now northern Greece but was once Thrace. By that time his sons had begun their migrations, founding the new civilizations of the world, and Noah was a tired old man nearing his thousandth year. Noah’s journey inland, meanwhile, had consecrated the land he’d moved through as sacred—priests, monks, and holy men walked that path for centuries after his death to pray and purify themselves. This island was used as the starting place of such pilgrimages. The bodies of saints have been transported and laid to rest on the island. In fact, Saint John the Baptist’s body was entombed here. His headless body lies in the sanctuary of the monastery.”
“But keeping the seeds safe has been our primary purpose,” Sveti said. She gestured toward the filing system. “Azov can pursue his study without threat of intrusion, and he has his work cut out for him: Many of these seeds remain unidentified.”
“Have you grown all of them?” Vera asked, trying to mask her almost childlike desire to see such an exotic garden.
“Some of them, yes; others, no,” Azov said, “The seeds are limited. I watch over their storage; I make sure they are not exposed to light or water; I keep potential thieves away—and that is all. There are many of us appointed as guardians of one kind or another. Our work is relegated to simply standing at the gate, keeping the Nephilim—and others who wish to do harm—away. I couldn’t bear the idea of inadvertently killing the seeds, or, worse, losing them to the enemy due to incompetence. Recovering and protecting them is one thing; growing them is another.”
“You’ve clearly succeeded in creating a working system to classify them,” Vera said. But is it really possible that the seeds could be viable after more than five thousand years?”
“In geological numbers, it isn’t such a long time,” Azov said. “It has been a mere seven thousand years since the Black Sea flooded. Any basic history of botany will show that prehistoric plant life flourished hundreds of millions of years before this, and these seeds were remarkably durable. The atmosphere we breathe developed because of the oxygen released by massive groupings of leaves. Many species of dinosaurs existed solely by eating plants, and so we must conclude that the majority of the planet was covered in vegetation. The cache of seeds we’ve recovered is surely only a tiny fraction of the actual pre-Deluge flora, most of which died. It is miraculous that these seeds remain, but when you think of the amount of plants that went extinct, you will see that these seeds are the exception. The seeds that remained viable were the strongest seeds, the most resistant to the elements.”
Vera followed Azov and Sveti into another cramped room. Azov’s laboratory was a mixture of modern equipment and an old-fashioned angelological research center—an antiquated computer sat among plants on a glass-topped desk, emitting a soft glow over a set of bronze scales. There was a statue of Mercury and a series of glass containers, a velvet divan stacked with papers, and a bookshelf stretched across an entire wall. Vera could see, at first glance, herbal encyclopedias; books of chemistry; French, German, Greek, Latin, and Arabic dictionaries; the collected works of Dioscorides. The hunch she’d had upon first walking into the room was confirmed: This was the home of a workaholic of the first order.
As if reminded