Wayward Son (40 page)

Later Cain reflected that he had always known this moment would come.

Sitting alone with the emperor, looking into his anxious, twitching face, Cain simply couldn’t think of any more excuses.

“There are no such herbs, Majesty. Indeed, there were never any herbs.”

“How could that be? Your cure was miraculous. Medical science held no explanation for it.”

Cain locked eyes with the emperor. “I lied to you, Majesty.”

CHAPTER 52

Ercolano: Present Day

JUAN CARLOS WAS HARD at work on an alternative rescue plan. After deciphering 90 percent of the door code, he sat in front of his laptop, contemplating the Google Earth view of the site. Rummaging in his backpack for his Magellan handheld GPS unit, he entered the precise latitude and longitude coordinates of the chamber’s huge bronze entryway. Checking his watch every five minutes or so, Juan Carlos hurried through some calculations.

The apex of the chamber’s dome should have stood around eighty to ninety feet above ground, he figured from Silvio’s photograph of the fresco. This was just about the height of the pyroclastic flow let loose by Vesuvius in AD 79. As near as he could make out, the chamber had been constructed in what was today a sparsely forested area slightly to the north of the Villa dei Papiri. With luck, perhaps he could find the top of the dome with a metal probing rod.

“But even then, could I possibly punch through the dome in time?” he muttered to himself. As he continued to worry about Amanda’s plight, Juan Carlos could not resist the backward pull of memories…

***

He first saw Amanda at Q’s Billiard Club in West LA. It was mid-December seven years earlier, only a few days after he had led UCLA soccer to the conference championship, scoring two goals in a 3–2 victory. That game seemed a lifetime ago, but it still brought a smile to his face.

Tall, dressed in jeans and a light and dark blue sorority sweatshirt to fend off the sixty-degree Southern California “chill,” Amanda arrived at Q’s in a flurry of glossy blond hair and the expiring sigh of a European-style moped. Juan Carlos watched from a window table, with half a burger and a few stray nachos in suspended animation on his plate. His soccer buddies were quaffing beers and flirting with the girls, but for Juan Carlos the center of attention lay at the curb, twenty feet away. A vision in two shades of azure made her way to the entrance, having left her helmet on the back of the moped. He stared out the window and whistled under his breath,
“Muy caliente!”

As usual on a Friday night, the bar was crowded, and she quickly disappeared in the ruckus. Gordon Miller, a tall, affable teammate, sauntered by the table.

“So who were you looking at, J. C.?”

“Pigeons, Gordo, just pigeons.”

“I didn’t know you Spanish guys were bird lovers,” chided the slightly inebriated goalkeeper. “She’s a Kappa, right?”

“I think so. Glad I noticed her before you did,” he smiled back at his friend, who rolled his eyes and rejoined the other guys.

Juan Carlos nursed the remainder of his meal, with the whirls of blond hair dancing in his mind. Half an hour later, cheers split the air from the billiards area. He decided to investigate. Threading through the crowd, he discovered that the blond moped girl was not only his center of attention, she was everyone’s. As he watched, she calculated all the angles under a gaudy red fixture that brilliantly illuminated the table in the center of the room. Then she executed a devastating six-ball run, only to end ingloriously when she scratched the cue ball.

Dozens of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority sisters let out a sigh of agony. All wore the same two-tone sweatshirt as Amanda. As Juan Carlos filtered the buzz, he gathered that the crowd had assembled for the semifinals of an intersorority nine-ball tournament. The best-of-five match was tied at two games apiece, but with Amanda’s scratch, only the nine ball remained. With the cue ball in hand, Kappa’s chief rival, Alpha Delta Pi, was now going to win, barring a miracle.

On opposite sides of the table, the blond and her playing partner, a buxom, olive-skinned Kappa sister, exchanged a farewell.

“We almost had it, Laura. Hey, next time! I’m outta here. Big test day tomorrow. Have fun!”

And then she was gone. Juan Carlos gave chase through the crowd, still thinking of what he might say to her. But he was delayed by some fans who recognized the Bruins’s top scorer. When he made it to the curb outside Q’s, the moped was in full sputter. Just before it sped away, he noticed a Spanish flag decal on the rear fender.

Intrigued, he returned to the bar and sought out Laura, who recognized him instantly. After a brief bit of chitchat about the game, Juan Carlos cut to the chase.

“So, does your playing partner have a boyfriend?” he asked, smiling broadly.

“Are you kidding?” Laura countered. “She’s a total bookworm who rarely gets out at night…”

***

Juan Carlos arrived late for his morning Classics lecture. To his consternation, the only vacant seat he could spot from the rear of Lenart Auditorium was in the front row. His spirits improved, though, when he reached the aisle and sat down in a hurry, right next to the girl he’d first noticed at Q’s a month before. Her long blond hair was up in a bun, and she wore reading glasses and no makeup. Amanda, he thought, somehow managed to look both sexy and studious at the same time.

“So what’s up with that Spanish flag decal on your moped?” Juan Carlos murmured to Amanda in Spanish as he sat down next to her.

Her reply came fluently in his native tongue. “I like the Spanish flag,” she said. “Actually, I like a lot of Spanish things,” not bothering to look up from her laptop at the late arrival.

There was no time for Juan Carlos to ask another question, as just then the guest lecturer took the podium.

“Good morning, my name is Dr. Archibald Walker, and I am from the Getty Museum…”

The polished speaker launched into his presentation, “Technology and Ancient Artifacts,” with a flamboyant prop: an impossibly thick scroll which was about four feet wide, supported by a richly stained and polished wooden dowel with ornate handles.

“As you are all doubtless aware,” Walker’s flowing baritone captivated the audience, “the Dead Sea Scrolls are one of the landmark discoveries of twentieth-century archaeology. The texts shed momentous light on a broad range of long-debated issues, including the dating of a stabilized Hebrew Bible and the relationships between early Christianity and Judaism.”

“Do you think I could borrow a pen?” whispered Juan Carlos to Amanda, again in Spanish.

“Sure, I’ve got an extra one. Here you go.” Keeping her attention on Walker, she reached into her backpack and handed over one of her ballpoints. Their exchange, however, did not escape the lecturer at the podium.

“If you two would like the microphone, I’d be only too happy to surrender it,” Walker quipped dryly.

Acutely embarrassed, Amanda shook her head apologetically.

“I am only jesting,” Dr. Walker said. “Actually, I recognize this young man in the front row from his teenage years. He is the grandson of an old friend of mine in the profession, Dr. Silvio Sforza, who now directs the Museo Archeologico Nazionale. Juan Carlos’s job in archaeology is assured, unlike the rest of you!”

The audience tittered ambivalently. Obviously, Dr. Walker was ignorant of Juan Carlos’s soccer prowess. Amanda finally took notice of her seatmate.

“Now, where was I?” Walker asked rhetorically. “Ah, yes, the Dead Sea Scrolls. If I could ask you two to render me a little assistance?” Once again, he gestured to Amanda and Juan Carlos and beckoned them toward the oversize scroll at the edge of the stage.

“These incredible manuscripts have come down to us in many shapes and sizes. Most of their fifteen thousand fragments are tiny. Several of them, however, are immense. The Temple Scroll, for example, measures nearly thirty feet in length. Recently, though, many scholars have come to believe that even this manuscript may be dwarfed by a granddaddy. Experts hazard the theory that a yet undiscovered scroll, measuring ninety-eight feet—a figure arrived at by extrapolation from text density data—contains the entire Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures. What would such a monster scroll look like?”

Motioning for Amanda and Juan Carlos to take hold of the ornate dowel, Walker grasped the end of the lengthy, blank white sheet. “If you two would kindly unfurl this for me.”

With little choice in the matter, both students proceeded down the aisle toward the rear of the auditorium with Walker’s prop. It was their joint baptism in fieldwork, they joked later.

Holding up a smaller scroll, crowded with tiny characters, Dr. Walker continued the lecture.

“Try to get a mental picture of tiny inscriptions consuming the entirety of the scroll your two gracious classmates have revealed before you. I submit that the accomplishment of storing the volume of data these larger scrolls contained was, in that time, as revolutionary as the first supercomputers. And consider the task of backing up the data! I believe you may now begin to appreciate, in a fresh way, the magnitude of the scrolls’ discovery…”

After the lecture, Dr. Walker summoned Amanda and Juan Carlos to the stage to thank them for their help. Juan Carlos greeted him respectfully, as befitted an old family friend.

“Last I spoke to Silvio he told me you were across town at USC?”

“I transferred last fall, sir. A more highly regarded classics department here,” the young man replied.

“And a better soccer team,” Amanda added loyally. She had finally put the pieces together. He was the chiseled midfielder who’d torn off his jersey to celebrate UCLA’s win in the championship game that Amanda and her sorority friends had attended last month.

So this athlete was also, apparently, a budding classicist? Amanda’s interest was piqued. Walker interrupted her train of thought by handing his business card to both of them. “As a token of my appreciation, I’d be delighted to give you a tour of the Getty Villa. Feel free to call anytime.” The two expressed their own thanks and departed the stage.

“So when did you acquire your fondness for ‘Spanish things’?” Juan Carlos asked playfully while they were strolling to the rack where her moped was parked.

“I lived there for a year when I was fifteen,” she replied.

“Ever go to Italica near Seville?”

“My dad and I traipsed all around there. I loved the great amphitheater and all the other treasures of Roman history. The three emperors who were born in Italica certainly left quite an imprint.”

“My grandfather Silvio took me there once. And also to Mérida, in Extremadura.”

“To Mérida? Really? I’m jealous!” Amanda grinned at him. “The cosmological mosaic there must have been awesome! I’ve only seen pictures.”

“Yes, and their theater is also pretty special,” he replied.

The two chatted happily, playing an archaeological version of “Do you know?”

“When I was growing up,” Amanda told him, “my dad would bring home artifacts from land sites being cleared for oil refineries all over the world. I started my own little museum.”

“Does your dad still travel a lot?” he asked.

“Constantly. Right now, he’s in Nigeria, near Port Harcourt. Not too many Greco-Roman sites nearby.”

“You must miss him.”

“It’s okay. I do get a little blue sometimes. I’m glad I’m in Kappa. My sisters don’t let those moods last very long,” she said with a smile.

His eyes brightened. “May I see you again?”

“Are you sure you’re not too busy?” Amanda responded in a teasing tone. “I understand you spent quite a while chatting up my friend Laura at Q’s last month!”

“Now listen…” he started to protest.

“Don’t worry. Laura told me all about your conversation. Actually, I have a couple hours now before my class in Greek language. Wanna go for a cappuccino?”

CHAPTER 53

China, 210 BC

“PEOPLE NEVER LIE TO me, Philo.” The emperor glared menacingly at his guest.

Cain’s voice trembled slightly as he began his confession. “Majesty, when you noticed my wound’s rapid healing, your eyes did not fool you. Rather, I deceived you with my explanation. The cure’s source lay neither in medical science nor in alchemy. It had deep roots in my own past.”

“Then Kwok-se misinformed me? He presented you as a cartographer from the West!” the emperor thundered.

“And so I was when Kwok-se traveled to Alexandria. Your childhood friend did not lie to you. Indeed, I have been many things, in many places.”

The emperor leaned forward, intrigued by Cain’s admission. “What are you saying?”

“Long, long ago, my God cursed me for slaying one man—my brother.”

Before Cain could continue, the emperor broke in.

“Is
that
all you are worried about? I have killed many members of my own family, and massacred millions of enemies besides! I have ordered scholars and tomb laborers buried alive. Why do you think I have built the terra-cotta army to defend me against their spirits? Unifying China has come at a price, my friend!”

“The curse of my God is different, Majesty,” replied Cain. Making sure he had the emperor’s full attention, he spoke words that had never been heard by another human. “God has condemned me to a life of immortality.”

Qin Shihuangdi was incredulous. “
Condemned
! How can eternal life be anything but a blessing of untold value?”

“I have been alive, Majesty, for literally thousands of years. Long before the Great Pyramids of Egypt were built, I wandered the earth’s continents. You know me as a cartographer, but I have had many professions: merchant, architect, astronomer, athlete, engineer, and epic bard. Once, I even ruled an empire almost as powerful as yours. But, whatever my station, life for me has been a continual struggle to come to terms with the curse. I have never discovered those terms.”

“You are saying then, Philo, that you already possess the immortality I seek?”