Wayward Son (42 page)

***

In 160 BC, Cain finally determined it was safe to end his solitary existence, and he returned to the Silk Road. With its steadily increasing traffic from all parts of the world, the Silk Road now reminded Cain of a picturesque version of Alexandria, elongated and rural, where mountains reared their majestic crests and time had slowed down.

As in the great Egyptian city, he met scores of intriguing travelers from every conceivable culture. He sharpened his multilingual abilities as well as his commercial talents. The Silk Road, many times longer than the Nile River, became his nomadic home, and he easily disappeared into its cosmopolitan fabric. Living in thriving towns along its southern and western span, Cain continued to marry and raise families, but he inevitably abandoned them all. With no permanent home, he buried his wealth in dozens of secret hiding spots along the famous trading route. As on the Nile many centuries before, he was constantly on the move, following the calling and curse of his immortality.

***

Eventually arriving in Syria 150 years after leaving China, Cain deemed it a good place to try to commercialize a process he had first seen long ago in his great wandering—the fusion of intense heat and sand. Experimenting with blast furnaces, new tools, and different types of sand, he set up a glass factory and presciently retained an ownership interest in its output. The locals were expert craftsmen and responded well to his tutelage. With their distinctive shapes and hues, some of the blown-glass pitchers manufactured there were nearly crystal-clear, and they soon became wildly popular with Mediterranean traders. With the injection of colorful minerals and pigments, glassmaking now became an art form, and the price of the wares soared.

Just before dusk one evening, Cain entertained a group of Egyptian traders at his manufacturing plant. During contract negotiations over pitchers of beer, they delivered devastating news: the Great Library of Alexandria had burned to the ground during a war between Emperor Julius Caesar and a rival. The Romans were fighting for control of Alexandria when dozens of ships in the harbor were set ablaze, and flames aided by strong winds jumped ashore. The library caught fire and all of its contents were incinerated.

Two hundred years of accumulated knowledge was now a pile of ash and rubble.

After hearing the tragic story, Cain excused himself from the party and went out for a walk. He felt ill. For fifty years he had been a contributing scholar at the Great Library, and now all of his maps, detailed charts, and translations of ancient cultures were obliterated. He would never again be able to walk the halls of the Great Library and read the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Plato, or Archimedes. All of the irreplaceable knowledge contained in the medical school and astronomy labs was lost. It was a disaster.

Cain leaned against a tree and placed his head in his hands. He had planned to contribute to the Great Library again one day, but now that was impossible. Was there nothing humans could build that would last forever? The pyramids were still standing after more than two thousand years, but even their sealed treasures buried under millions of quarried stones were still vulnerable to industrious grave robbers and foreign conquerors. After all, the pyramids were sitting aboveground in plain sight.

It was then his concentration was interrupted by an accounting scribe who had dutifully followed him outside. He also had news to report.

“Sir, please excuse me for sneaking up on you,” he said, noting Cain’s startled look, “but as ordered, the small shipment of glass we sent to Babylon to test the market price has returned with full payment.”

He handed Cain a papyrus scroll with the transaction numbers. Cain’s moist eyes bulged when he unrolled it and saw the figures.

“What? This can’t be right—it says the blown glass fetched more than its weight in gold!”

“Yes sir. The Persian royalty eagerly purchased almost all of it! Our men reported that the farther they traveled from here, the more kings and queens along the Silk Road would pay!”

A golden sun was just about to set, and the rays struck the interior of Cain’s warehouses. He stared at the papyrus ledger in his hands and glanced back over his shoulder to see crates full of sparkling blown-glass products stacked high inside his plant. In anticipation of the arrival of Egyptian customers, he had increased production significantly. These merchants intended to purchase his entire product line, albeit at a substantial discount from the prices in Babylon.

Looking up at the half-moon overhead, Cain wondered what astronomical price the glass would fetch if he carted it all to Xi’an, the extreme eastern point of the Silk Road. Enough time had passed, and it was safe to go back there again. Furthermore, he had heard reports that the Han dynasty was very stable and experiencing a new age of remarkable prosperity.

Rolling up the scroll, and jovially slapping it on the back of his now promoted scribe, Cain made his decision. Later that evening, the surprised glass merchants from Alexandria were bitterly disappointed.

Their sole supplier, and the most valuable commodity in the world, were headed to China.

CHAPTER 55

Xi’an 49–2 BC

WHEN HE ARRIVED BACK in Xi’an, Cain found the city changed considerably from his time there during the reign of the First Emperor. Back in those days, Xi’an had the flavor of an improvised capital. Now, more than a century into the Han dynasty, bureaucracy ruled. But Cain was no stranger to bureaucrats, having witnessed layers upon layers of Egyptian officialdom firsthand.

He discovered that Kwok-se’s old estate was for sale. Perhaps for sentimental reasons, he paid an exorbitant price to the owners who had, in turn, purchased it from the last of his old friend’s descendants. Lining the pockets of the estate agents in charge of the sale allowed him to avoid objections to his foreign origins.

“Now you can relax,” he told himself. From the sale of blown glass to the imperial dynasty, Cain had more money than he would ever need, and Kwok-se’s estate afforded complete privacy. At last, he could surrender the nomadic life without misgiving. The main veranda, the old venue for tea with Kwok-se, was his favorite spot. By day and by night, he passed many hours simply staring at the river, pondering things past, present, and to come.

Even in such idyllic surroundings, however, Cain never entered into a haven of true spiritual repose. Memories sometimes delighted him, but other times they gnawed at him. There was little purpose in his life, he felt. And Xi’an, despite its picturesque local color, served as a reminder of the most bizarre irony in his whole experience: the obsessive quest of the First Emperor for immortality, and the dismal culmination of that quest.

How could he achieve serenity? Could he ever see his fellow human beings, or himself, in even half a redemptive light? These gnawing questions brought him to the edge of despair. His existence just seemed to drag on.

***

One evening in 31 BC, while standing on the veranda gazing at the sky, Cain called aloud upon God.

“For what have you made me? What would you have me do?” The frost of his breath ascended toward the stars, but quickly dissipated, bringing to mind the grain sacrifice God had rejected in his youth. Characteristically, no answer was forthcoming.

However, several nights later in a dream, Cain was haunted by the grievous story of the Alexandrian Library in ruins. Yet, he awoke the next day with a fresh insight. He recalled how, after the death of Tanith, he had found comfort and a sense of value in his role as a bard, preserving history through oral tradition. Now, so many centuries later, how much more was he, and he alone, equipped to preserve and convey the great arc of human endeavor? By the time he finished breakfast, the aftermath of a bad dream had been transformed into a compelling obsession: Cain determined that he would use his flawless memory to recreate and archive as many of the Great Library’s contents as possible

In a mere five years he had completed his transcriptions of the Homeric epics, as well as the plays of Aeschylus, including dramas authored by that master tragedian after Cain had left Athens for Persia. Having read them in the Great Library, he could recall them word for word. He also transcribed everything of Sophocles and Euripides, as well as a number of other tragedians from the golden age of Greek drama.

He then moved on to history, philosophy, science, and mathematics, with special attention to the theorems and doctrines of Pythagoras. Cain considered that these would be especially valuable for posterity, since Pythagoras wrote very little and his teachings were known almost exclusively from oral tradition.

Cain did not confine himself to texts, however. There was much to be known from drawings and scale models. He busied himself with sketchings for a scale model of Noah’s ark, and also with reproducing the drawings he had made in Egypt for Menes and Ramesses. Then he turned to maps and charts. Cartography, after all, had been one of his most beloved vocations, both in Alexandria and in China.

Twenty years later, in 2 BC, he had virtually completed the archive. Now, his challenge was how to preserve it. Mindful of the First Emperor’s great mausoleum, he considered subterranean caves, but he rejected that idea because humidity levels underground would eventually ruin the texts, if not the other artifacts. What he needed was a damage-proof repository that would still preserve the texts.

While reviewing a detailed map of the Mediterranean coastlines, a solution for the site of his archive came to him. He recalled the volcanic mountain he had seen long ago to the south of Rome. He had heard that it was now called Vesuvius. The mountain lay within the territory of the Romans, who had become the masters of the Mediterranean and most of the western world. If he acquired land near this mountain to establish his museum, would it not turn out to be the safest location for his treasures? For, when the volcano eventually erupted again, the ash would seal everything indefinitely, affording Cain the opportunity to play another unique role—the arbiter of the moment in the future when all these treasures of history could be “discovered” and revealed to the world.

***

Reflecting on his labors in retrospect, he realized that gradually, almost imperceptibly, the project had afforded him the serenity that seemed so elusive a quarter of a century before. He recalled his dream of the ruined library, and also the clear, chilly evening on the veranda when he had called upon God for a direction in his life.

Had God answered after all?

As he pondered the question, he came to realize that his archiving work had rooted him in the same place far longer than any previous era of his life after the flood, save for his stay in the prison at Babylon. Why this blessed relief from a lifetime of wandering? If these endeavors, however unwittingly, were gaining him favor with his Maker, could he somehow obtain a reprieve from his infernal existence?

Then, it hit him: he would offer all this excellent work to God. Perhaps the one who had rejected his original, ill-fated offering would now accept this archive of humanity’s achievements as a substitute and remove his curse at last.

Cain lowered his head.

“Eternal One. You have made me a vagabond on this earth for eons. Until now, I have known no peace. Yet here I bow before you with the product of all I have learned and done during that time. If my very best work is acceptable in your sight, I give it now to you. Do with it as you will.”

Accustomed as he was to silence in response to his infrequent petitions, Cain nevertheless yearned for an intelligible answer.

The next night, as he was finalizing his constellation maps, he noticed a strange object in the heavens. Using his telescope to study the western sky, he was astonished to see a brand-new celestial body that shouldn’t have been in the constellation Leo. It certainly hadn’t been there the night before. On the brightness scale devised by his old friend
Hipparchus in Alexandria
, the star—or whatever it was—rivaled the planet Jupiter. Cain decided at once to observe the star carefully and to consult his Chinese astronomer friends.

It was now late fall, and the skies were usually clear. Night after night, he viewed the new star, which, if anything, was becoming brighter than ever. He rejected the idea that it was a comet. Comets moved in orbits, and this celestial body appeared to remain in the same position.

After several weeks of observations, he made up his mind. It was time to begin the journey west to the archive’s ultimate home, but he would investigate the strange star along the way. By his calculations, it appeared to be in a stationary position directly over the eastern Mediterranean seaboard. Surely it was being observed by astronomers in that region. Longing to know more about the
star
, Cain decided to sell the estate, pack up his entire archive of historical treasures, and organize hundreds of camels and attendants into a caravan that would take him over four thousand miles to the city of
Antioch
.

CHAPTER 56

Antioch: 1 BC

CAIN ARRIVED IN ANTIOCH after an eight-month journey along the Silk Road, which by now was extremely familiar to him. Oddly, as he passed through Kashgar, the strange object in the night sky dimmed, and weeks later it disappeared altogether. This development did not diminish his curiosity, however, but rather increased it.

He determined that Antioch was the most suitable staging point for an investigation of the mysterious star. The city was now a great urban center. It had been originally patterned on the grid plan of Alexandria and lately adopted by the Romans as the hub of their operations in the East. In fact, as a center of culture and science, it was now said that Antioch had surpassed its rival city in Egypt. Situated on the west coast of Asia Minor bordering the northeastern Mediterranean Sea, Antioch was now a major trading port of the Roman Empire.