The Tenth Saint (16 page)

“One day, a passing tribe of men came upon the tree and stopped to get their fill of its delicious fruit. As he sat beneath the canopy to avoid the sun, their leader got an idea. Since the tree was so wide and always provided fruit and shade, they would claim it as their own. They could slaughter the animals that frolicked in its branches for food. They could make wine out of its flowers. They could puncture its trunk and let the water run so they would never thirst. Why should they take the long road across the desert, always searching for food and water, when everything they needed was right there? They decided to colonize the tree of life.

“Years passed. The tribe still lived under the shade of the tree, only they had created an entire village. They stopped dwelling in the desert because it was so much easier to take from the tree. Every winter, they would cut more and more of its living branches so they could make fires. They plucked the leaves and used them to make roofs for their houses. In the summer, when the air was hot and the creatures were thirsty, they made gash after gash in the trunk so they could extract every drop of water. Each spring, they would pick all the fruit to sell to passersby, instead of letting them take what they needed as they had always done in the past. That way they amassed chickens and goats and oranges and grain. They were rich and fat and had everything they ever needed, even bird’s milk. But one day the sun burned hotter than any other. In all their years dwelling in the desert, the tribesmen had never known such heat. It burned hotter every day, as if the sun were coming down from the sky and scorching them with its rays. The branches had been plucked of their leaves, so the tree could not provide shade. Without shade, the ground grew so hot the water beneath the tree’s roots dried up. The tree could no longer make fruit or provide water for the tribe. Its branches became the color of ash. Its trunk withered. Livestock perished. Locusts swept in and ravaged the tribe’s grain reserves. The people died of thirst and hunger. And still the heat would not relent. It got so bad the tree of life, dry and barren as it was, caught fire. The tribesmen panicked. They scattered like ants in a flood, leaving the tree to burn to the ground. They disappeared in the heat waves of a mirage and were never seen again. And the tree and all the creatures it sheltered and sustained were no more.”

Without the traditional Western expectation of a happy ending, the Bedouins cheered for Gabriel. He could tell it wasn’t the story itself they liked but rather the telling of it. To his delight, he had kept them engaged and, when he’d occasionally flubbed up a word, amused.

They pushed and taunted him in a loving, playful way, and Gabriel reciprocated in a show of appreciation and acceptance. As the frolicking quieted down, he noticed Hairan in the distance, sitting alone and silently observing the spectacle with a smile.

If only the old man knew how much he’d taught his young acolyte.

The night before the tribe reached the camel festival, spirits were high. The goums had been traveling for several fortnights to reach Ubar, where tribes from all corners of the Syro-Arabian Desert gathered once a year to trade their animals and goods. Gabriel had heard that Ubar was a prosperous place, the land of milk and honey, full of fascinating strangers with exotic habits. He knew it was a highlight for the Bedouins, the just reward for the hardships they had to endure the rest of the year. They were so close—only a few kilometers away—that Gabriel could practically smell the myrrh and taste the plump dates reportedly lining the streets. In anticipation, the Bedouins sat around the campfire, drumming and toasting with palm wine.

But Gabriel was not in the mood to celebrate. His intuition had been telling him for some time that forces in the universe were stirring. He’d sat in solitude night after night searching for answers. On this night, a full moon floated like gossamer in a filmy sky. An opportunity for enlightenment and change, the Bedouins always said. The prospect filled Gabriel with hope. He was sitting in waking meditation, studying the sky and stars for omens, when Hairan approached. Gabriel looked at the old man without any hint of surprise, almost as if he’d been expecting him.

“Come with me, Abyan. It is time.”

Without the desire to know what it was time for, Gabriel followed his teacher to the eastern edge of camp, noting that the choice of location was not random. In the Bedouin tradition, the east was the source of all life and everything sacred. It was also where leaders looked for direction and wise men sought guidance.

Hairan stopped on a sand dune and invited Gabriel to sit opposite him. The shaykh pulled out of his sack a gourd and a mortar. In silence, he removed the top of the gourd and poured a dark liquid onto the sand.

Even by the full moonlight, Gabriel could not recognize the substance, but he was all too familiar with its strong smell. Blood. He hypothesized that it was from an antelope the men had killed for food a few days back, for the Bedouins did not make blood sacrifices. In fact, in all the years he had traveled with the tribe, he had never seen blood used—not in daily life, not in ceremony. His logic told him he should be uneasy, but his heart was surprisingly calm. He trusted these people, trusted Hairan. Whatever was about to happen, he accepted as part of the order.

Hairan kneaded the blood into the sand, making a thick paste. Chanting softly in a tongue Gabriel could not comprehend, the old man smeared the paste over Gabriel’s eyes, then his own. With all thoughts of the West tucked in some inaccessible corner of his mind, Gabriel surrendered to the rite. The night wasn’t cold, but his skin was like goose flesh and he trembled. He could feel his forehead, now beset with the lines of hardship and advancing age, tighten as he tried to concentrate. The sweet, sharp smell of burning resin crystals filled the air. The smoke was thick, heavy. Gabriel let it fill his nose, his lungs. He felt weightless. The chill on his skin was replaced with a flush that warmed his face and weighed down his eyes. He began to drift, though not quite to sleep. It was a state he had never entered before. His mind’s eye was a gray screen, a hollow womb.

Then, suddenly, faces. Covered with black cloth, all but the eyes. Marching somberly, without purpose, without direction. Strangers, one after another, appearing and vanishing like souls departing. Except for one woman, who stood motionless before him. A gust of wind ripped the veil from her face. She was pale, ghostlike. She lifted her eyes, and he came face-to-face with those sapphires he knew so well. The woman wore Calcedony’s face but had the detached demeanor of a wraith. She lifted a cloaked arm, pointing toward something.

A city on a mountain. A kingdom in the clouds. He walked toward it, knowing not where his feet took him. Treacherous steps led him up a vertical slope, and he clawed his way to the top. There he came to a stone gate, inscribed in the Bedouin dialect with these words: “Men’s fate is written in stone, but they have gouged out their eyes and cannot see.”

Everything went white.

Gabriel awoke in the fetal position, his skin burning and covered with sweat.

Hairan sat in lotus posture opposite him, his manner as calm as the sea on a summer day.

Gabriel wiped the sweat and blood-mud from his face, trying to make sense of what he had just experienced.

“You must go, my friend.” Hairan’s voice was like a velvet blanket, gentler and more peaceful than Gabriel had ever heard it.

“Go … where?” Gabriel began to fear he had done or said something in his trance state that had offended Hairan and the tribe.

“Go … to the city in the mountains.”

Gabriel looked at him wild-eyed. He could not utter a word. How did he know?

Hairan continued. “She calls you to the great kingdom. It is what you must do. What you carry inside, you must take there. And there you shall leave it.”

A violent sob left Gabriel’s throat. His face was twisted with the kind of pain no potion could heal. Hairan’s words hadn’t even registered on his consciousness. His thoughts were populated with images of his one true love.

“Is she there? Tell me, for the love of everything you hold dear. Where is she?”

“No,” Hairan whispered. “She is not there. She dwells in a different world, which you will never enter.”

The chief’s words cut to Gabriel’s core. He knew in his deepest heart it was true: he would never see Calcedony again. He dropped his head to his knees and sobbed.

Hairan was as unyielding as a hunk of stone. “Do not despair, Abyan. Your quest is bigger than her, bigger than you. You have been chosen to take the rare journey. Now is not the time for tears; it is the time for courage.” He repeated: “What you carry inside, you must take to the great kingdom. And there you shall leave it.”

Drained, Gabriel composed himself and let the weight of Hairan’s statement settle over him. “I don’t want to leave the tribe. My place is here now.”

“There is nothing left for you here. You must go. You must walk through the stone gate.”

“How do you know about the city in the mountains, the stone gate?”

“I have seen what you have seen. That is how I know this is your fate.”

The two men exchanged a lingering glance. There were no more secrets. Gabriel knew what he had to do. At last, he was at peace.

That night on the top of the dune, Gabriel slept alone under the stars.

By daybreak, he was gone.

Eleven

T
ranslating the inscriptions using the Sheba Stone was a far more complicated business than Sarah had imagined. The obelisk-shaped monolith, which stood ten feet tall and six feet wide, was inscribed from top to bottom with writings that apparently praised the life and rule of the Queen of Sheba. Six different dialects from the region were used in the inscriptions, but they weren’t organized according to any method familiar to Sarah. A single passage might contain as many as four dialects, perhaps in an effort to encrypt the texts or to have parts of the passage read by certain tribes and not others. Whatever the motivation, the system was infuriating to Sarah, who, though more than two weeks into the process, was getting nowhere.

Day and night she sat next to the Sheba Stone, staring, bewildered, at the text and trying to ascertain some sort of pattern. She was far from a breakthrough and questioned what she was even doing there. For all her talent for language, she felt out of her league.

She stared at the stone blankly, debating whether to leave everything with the church and go back to London, maybe try to salvage what was left of her career. And if she couldn’t do that, she could always go to America, where blemishes on one’s reputation were far more easily forgiven.

As attractive as it sounded to be rid of this mess and start over, however, she couldn’t do it. The same force that had propelled her from the moment she’d found the tomb was still at work, pushing her to take the next step despite her trepidation.

She needed Apostolos’ help, but he was as elusive as a leopard in daylight. Whether he was purposely avoiding her or was consumed by his own work, she did not know. But she could not do this without him, so finally she decided to seek him out.

One morning she found him in the courtyard, filling the birdbaths with water and sprinkling crumbs from bread he had tucked into his robes. On a stone bench he sat so placidly Sarah could not bring herself to invade his peace. Instead, she watched him from the opposite corner of the courtyard. Under his fringed umbrella, he wrote into a notebook, periodically looking up as if for inspiration.

She waited a long while before finally approaching. ”Good day. I see you like to write.”

Flustered by her sudden presence, he hurriedly closed his notebook and slipped it into the folds of his garment. “It is nothing.”

She sat next to him. “I have been meaning to seek your counsel. You are the only one who holds the knowledge I need.”

He looked into the sun, squinting. “Others have sought this knowledge in the past. They were not to be trusted.”

“I am not them.”

“The word of the tenth saint is sacred. It is not to fall into the wrong hands.”

She spoke softly and slowly. “I know how important he is to your faith. I respect that. But what if his message is important to all of mankind? Should the knowledge remain with few when it can help many?”

Apostolos fell silent. He looked down and fidgeted with the rosary beads wrapped around his bony wrist. Sarah recognized his unwillingness to take the conversation any further and decided to let him be. She could not push him, for she needed him to be an ally. She would have to find another way to gain his trust.