The History Mystery by Ana María Machado Read Free Book Online

together at the computer, and Sonia asked again, ‘So, go on, tell me, what was this mysterious message you got?’
    â€˜Well,’ said Pedro, ‘it was in those weird fancy letters, with the first letter on the page written very big and surrounded by all these detailed illustrations in gold and red and blue.’
    â€˜Gothic,’ said Will, the medieval expert. ‘That kind of writing is called gothic script. And the way the first letter on a page is all coloured and illustrated – that’s called an illuminated initial.’
    â€˜But what did it say ?’ Sonia asked.
    â€˜It started with two sentences that I remember exactly,’ said Pedro. ‘“To you I will tell it. I am not who everyone thinks I am.”’
    â€˜ Cool! ’ said Sonia. ‘A mysterious character. But it could easily be part of the game. If nobody can hack into a CD, then the message must already have been part of it, no?’
    Will spoke then. ‘I thought the same, at first, but we soon saw that it couldn’t be.’
    â€˜That was what I thought too,’ Pedro went on. ‘But the very next thing in the message was an apology for butting into our game and interrupting what we were doing. The message explained that there was no other way, because they needed to communicate with us and simply using the internet wasn’t working.’
    â€˜That made us realise it couldn’t be part of the game,’ Will interrupted. ‘I mean, come on, like anyone would talk about the internet in a medieval game? So I wanted to close it down and get on with the game, but Pedro wouldn’t let me. And then this whole stream of other letters started appearing like mad, page after page. The guy was telling this big long story, and he wouldn’t let us play on.’
    The boys told Sonia that the message’s mysterious author introduced himself, saying that he wasn’t actually the wizard they had seen in the game moments before. He was just an assistant who was still learning the secrets of alchemy. But he studied a lot, and he could read and write and knew Latin.
    â€˜He was explaining the whole time that he could read well and quickly,’ said Will. ‘He said that he was used to reading, that he had studied in some monastery, but that at that time almost everyone was illiterate.’
    â€˜The Brainy Hacker always says stuff like that,’ said Sonia, as if she were talking about an old friend. ‘And then?’
    â€˜Then he said that a long, long time before, on a day on which the wizard was performing one of his experiments looking for the Elixir of Youth, there was a little accident.’
    â€˜Wait a minute,’ said Sonia. ‘This elixir – what’s that? I thought alchemy was about the Philosopher’s Stone?’
    â€˜Yes, that’s right,’ said Will. ‘The Philosopher’s Stone was a mysterious substance that could turn everything it touched into gold, and it was a stone, of course.’
    â€˜Hence the name,’ Sonia added with a grin.
    â€˜Yes,’ Will went on, ‘and the alchemists were always experimenting to see if they could find the powerful substance of which this stone was made. They hoped that one day someone might find the stone among some treasures in the East or something. But the other thing they were interested in finding was the Elixir of Youth, which was a liquid. The Stone and the Elixir were different things, but some scholars believed that the discovery of the Stone would be a first step towards finding the Elixir. Among the aims of alchemy were the discovery of the Stone and the Elixir, and also other things, such as the Machine of Perpetual Motion.’
    Sonia was beginning to be sorry she’d asked. She hadn’t really wanted a lecture on alchemy.
    Alchemy was not very highly thought of any more, Will said, but in fact the alchemists of old had done a lot of important research.