01 Babylon Rising (10 page)

As Isis’s eye traveled over the dear, familiar forms, beginning with a bloated fertility goddess from the Neander valley in Germany and ending with a graceful Sumerian moon deity, she felt a tear welling up and quickly blinked it back. The little figures were a precious legacy from her father, another Dr. McDonald and one of the most eminent archaeologists of his day, the result of a lifetime’s digging around the Mediterranean and Near East.

“For my own little goddess, worshiped and adored above all others,” he’d said when he’d presented her with the big, square cardboard box done up with ribbons. To her thirteen-year-old eyes, the little figures, some missing an arm or a little hand, all grooved and pocked with the dirt and dust of civilizations long disappeared, were better than any Barbie doll. The gift marked the beginning of her own passionate commitment to the secrets of the past.

Unfortunately the goddesses were not the only legacies of his obsession that her father had passed on to her. There was also her name.

She supposed there were girls called Freya who had never been teased at school. She knew a Greek paleontologist called Aphrodite who didn’t seem in the least self-conscious about it. And wasn’t there that tennis player called Venus? No one gave her a hard time because she was named after the Roman goddess of love. But
Isis Proserpina
was a different matter. It was like being born with a circle of stars around your head. Or writhing snakes instead of hair. It made it rather hard to blend in.

At the little Highland school it had been
Issy
or
Posy
, both of which she loathed. Why couldn’t she be a Mary, Kate, or Janet like the other girls? In the museum, in the haven of her office, at least she was able to insist on
Dr. McDonald
. But with friends it was a little trickier. Which was perhaps one reason, she supposed, she didn’t really seem to have any.

She drummed her fingers—narrow, elegant, with nails bitten down to the quick—on the desk, impatient for the promised pictures of the scroll. A watched kettle and all that. She frowned.

Professor Michael Murphy had seemed something of an oddball. Very concerned with Biblical prophecies. Babbling on about the Book of Daniel. But the scroll did sound intriguing. Could be a forgery, of course, or just turn out to be something rather mundane—a three-thousand-year-old shopping list or a form for a hyena permit. God knows, those Babylonians could be a bureaucratic lot.

Over the years, as her reputation as a philologist had grown, the trickle of ancient enigmas in need of her language skills had become a steady stream. If you dug up a shard of pottery with a puzzling inscription or discovered a scrap of papyrus covered in a meaningless scrawl, eventually you would turn to Isis McDonald. And nine times out of ten, even if it
took her six months and she nearly drove herself to distraction in the process, she would solve the riddle, crack the code, or unravel the linguistic knot that had had the rest of the experts stumped. It was her unique gift.

Her father, happily watching her career begin to bloom as his faded, had speculated that it was a matter of memory rather than expertise. Surely only someone who had been an Egyptian priestess in a previous existence could have such a facility with their sacred hieroglyphics. Ridiculous, of course. But it was the sort of silly thing he said toward the end. Probably just his funny archaeologist’s way of saying how much he loved her.

She blinked the memory away as the screen began to fill with images of the scroll, and she turned with relief from the troubling world of emotion to the much more straightforward one of ancient Babylonia.

What she saw instantly got her attention. And kept her staring at the screen and scribbling furious notes for the next two hours.

He was jolted back into the present by the phone.

“Professor Murphy? Dr. McDonald. I’ve been reading your scroll.”

He gently put the Bible aside. “Good to hear from you. And please, the name’s Michael. Though most people make do with Murphy.”

There was an awkward pause.

“Well, Mr. Murphy, it seems you were right. We’re definitely dealing with the Biblical Brazen Serpent—”

“But the scroll dates from a period a hundred fifty years
after
the Serpent was destroyed.” He could sense her frowning at his impatience. “I’m sorry. This thing has got me wound a little tight. Please go on.”

“Well, the scroll appears to be a sort of diary written by a Chaldean priest named Dakkuri. As far as I can make out, the Serpent was indeed broken into three pieces, as in the Biblical account, but someone apparently forgot to put the pieces out with the trash. The pieces must have been stored in the Temple, and when the Babylonians came to sack Jerusalem, they found them somewhere in the Temple and obviously thought they were worth taking back home.”

“And when the pieces got to Babylon, this priest, Dakkuri, put the pieces of the Brazen Serpent back together?”

“I think so, yes. But that was just the beginning. I think Dakkuri believed this Serpent had far greater value than as a handsome bronze sculpture.”

Murphy’s mind was racing ahead. “So, what you’re saying is that the Babylonians heard the stories in Jerusalem about the Serpent’s healing powers when Moses first made it and they felt it was worth letting Dakkuri see if he could get it working again.”

Isis was not pleased with Murphy’s interruptions, and she realized she would have to be just as pushy if she was ever going to get through her piece. “Actually, Professor Murphy, my point is that I think Dakkuri tried to use the Serpent as part of a cult.”

“You mean Dakkuri had his Babylonians worshiping the Serpent just like the Israelites in the time of Hezekiah?”

“Not many of them. The scroll seems to indicate that there
was some kind of priestly inner circle led by Dakkuri that surrounds the lines of power that are drawn from the Serpent symbol.”

“And then doesn’t it look like the Serpent-worship turned out to be a big mistake for the Babylonians, as it did for the Israelites back with Hezekiah?”

“Well, there is some reference to trouble with the Serpent, but there’s some damage to the scroll at a crucial point.” Isis made it sound as if this were due to carelessness on Murphy’s part.

He let it pass. “It looks like that trouble, as you call it, was big trouble. The king symbol is there, which could mean that Dakkuri’s cult of the Serpent was banned by Nebuchadnezzar himself, right?”

“Yes, I’m sure you don’t need me to teach you your Bible, Mr. Murphy,” Isis said smugly. “According to the Book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar built a great statue with a golden head, a likeness of the one in his famous dream. And all the princes from far and wide were ordered to bow down and worship it at certain times. When they heard the sound of the cornet, the flute, the harp—let me see, what else?”

“Sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer,” said Murphy without hesitation.

“Thank you. Yes,
psaltery
and
dulcimer
—how poetic the King James can be. Takes me right back to Sunday mornings in our little kirk in Scotland.” The memory seemed to derail her for a moment, but she quickly got back on track. “Anyway, the long and the short of it was, God made the king mad as a March hare as a punishment for his arrogance, and when he finally
regained his sanity, Nebuchadnezzar got the message that idol-worship was evil. So he banned it.”

“Right, and, of course, the ban would have included the cult of the Serpent.”

“So I would imagine.”

Murphy tried to put it all together in his head. “So this priest—Dakkuri—gets the order to stop worshiping the Serpent, to get rid of it.”

“But I’m beginning to think this Serpent is rather hard to get rid of. Nobody who possessed it ever wanted to just melt it down and recast it.”

Murphy bolted out of his chair. “Yes! That’s it! The reason for the scroll. Dakkuri isn’t taking the trouble to write all this down just to let people know he’s been a naughty Serpent-worshiper. No. He made it look as if he broke it again and got rid of it, as ordered by Nebuchadnezzar. He wasn’t stupid. But he hid the three pieces, and that’s what he’s telling us in this scroll, isn’t it, Dr. McDonald?”

“Better than that, Mr. Murphy. I believe what Dakkuri has written here is not just that he hid the pieces, but the beginnings of how to find them.”

Murphy sank back in his chair as if he had been deflated by her last comment. “What do you mean, ‘the beginnings of how to find them’?”

“The last part of the scroll is really in two parts. Part one continues Dakkuri’s report of events. It looks like he picked three of his acolytes to scatter the Serpent pieces far and wide within the Babylonian empire.”

“But does he tell us where they went to hide the pieces?”

Isis was getting good at talking past Murphy’s interruptions. “That’s the second part of the end of the scroll. It looks like Dakkuri was setting up a kind of high priest’s scavenger hunt for the Serpent pieces, and the last lines are a key for where to find the first piece. Then it looks like he’s indicating that once you find the first piece, that will lead to the rest of the Serpent.”

Murphy stared at the blow-up of the scroll in front of him. “And based on this pattern here, the curve with the ridges at the bottom, this first piece must be the tail, right?”

“The tail of the Serpent gets my vote.”

“Dakkuri sure went to a lot of effort to save this Serpent, yet made certain that it would be awfully hard for somebody to find the pieces.”

Isis found talking to Murphy brought into full play her twin drives of scholarship and competitiveness with smart men. “Not hard for somebody smart enough to work out his clues.”

Murphy felt every archaeologist’s bone in his body starting to quiver with excitement. “This means that we can find the Brazen Serpent made by Moses! Better still, if we do find the Serpent based on this scroll, it proves that it was still in existence during Daniel’s time!”

A particularly unladylike laugh escaped Isis’s mouth before she could stop herself. “Forget this ‘we’ business, Mr. Murphy. I can barely find things in my own office. I don’t go on expeditions. However, you are free to charge off in search of the first Serpent piece. Nothing could be simpler. So long as you know the location of the Horns of the Ox.”

HORNS OF THE OX
.

Horns of the Ox
.

Murphy kept replaying the phrase in his mind and marveled at the seeming ease with which Isis McDonald had come up with that site from the symbols at the very end of the scroll. As hard as he had stared at those same symbols, he had not come close to making that connection.

Of course, now that she had given him her interpretation, it seemed crystal clear. With more than a bit of both his professional and male pride rebounding, Murphy did note that here was where his field experience could put Dr. McDonald’s bookish linguistic skills into operation.

The Horns of the Ox would have to refer to a fairly prominent landmark reasonably close to the old Babylon. Dakkuri probably would have chosen a natural landmark as opposed to
a man-made one, because he could not have known how long it would be before this Serpent piece would be dug up.

For a few hours he pored over his map texts, but he realized that nobody knew the ancient landscapes better than his own wife. Her studies of ancient cities gave her an encyclopedic knowledge that he now needed.

Desperately.

Murphy finally tracked Laura down in the faculty lounge. “Honey, you’ve got to get out all your books and maps. I think I’ve found the location of the Serpent.”

“Murphy, really, you figured out where the Serpent is?” Instantly, Laura shed her counselor’s cloak and was one hundred percent archaeologist.

“Well, it was really Dr. McDonald. And it’s only the clue to where the first piece of the Serpent is hiding. According to her, the scroll is a kind of Chaldean treasure map, with the Serpent piece as the treasure.”

“How exciting!” Laura said. “But where is it?”

Murphy knelt down and showed Laura where he had written
The Horns of the Ox
and sketched out several rough pencil drawings of landscapes that could have inspired that nickname. They all had two high vertical points curved like horns, straddling a mound of land that could be seen as the ox’s skull. “This is about as far as I got. The truth is, I need your ancient-map-reading skills. It’s been a while since Dakkuri wrote down the directions, and I think the neighborhood’s changed a little in the meantime.”

Laura laughed. She took Murphy by the hand and they started off down the hall.

“I don’t know, Murphy,” she said, shaking her head. “Why is it men just can’t read maps?”

As soon as he’d shown Laura the partial translation of the scroll, she had gone into overdrive. Within minutes their already cluttered living room had become a stormy sea of paper, as maps, reference books, and computer printouts had been laid out on the floor. Laura sat in the middle of the chaos, grabbing maps, throwing them aside, scribbling furious notes while she hummed a tuneless ditty to herself.

As she put it, it wasn’t like looking for a needle in a haystack. It was like trying to reconstruct a two-thousand-year-old haystack, figuring out where each individual piece of hay had originally fit before being bumped around by a couple of millennia of winds, floods, and earthquakes—and then trying to find the needle.

Dakkuri’s directions—assuming Murphy and Isis had correctly deciphered the scroll—to the final hiding place of the Serpent’s tail had been pretty specific. Laura gave a more refined interpretation to Horns of the Ox than Murphy’s crude sketches, saying it most likely referred to a particular geographical feature—probably a curved ridge ending in two sharp promontories. Maybe with a big hump of rock or a prominent hill lying behind it—the “body” of the ox. And the whole thing was likely to be visible from some distance, so the surrounding area might well have been relatively flat.

But the landscape Dakkuri had had in his mind’s eye was ever-changing. Sea levels advanced and retreated, erosion
moved hills around like pieces on a chessboard, the courses of rivers and waterways could be diverted, turning desert into pasture and vice versa. And on top of that, earthquakes could shake things up like a kaleidoscope, totally changing the picture from one year to the next.