Solomon’s Jar

by Rogue Angel

  Another man rushed her, bellowing, club raised to crush her skull. She turned and charged past him, catching him with a forearm high on his chest that dumped him hard on his back and left him stunned and breathless. She stiff-armed a second attacker.

  Annja moved through the crowd of attackers in a controlled frenzy, allowing her training and reflexes free rein. Rather than block, she dodged, ducked and weaved. In preference to kicking and punching she grabbed and swung or simply pushed. She kept moving through her assailants, directing blows away from her, thrusting men into one another. Then she heard Aidan shouting angrily to the men to keep their hands off of him and she turned to glance back.

  The move undid her. Strong arms thrust beneath her armpits from behind. Huge hands clasped the nape of her neck. She was lifted kicking off the ground, knowing the bronze-bearded giant, Petros, had caught her.

  A man closed with her from the front, empty handed. She raised her knees and kicked him hard in the gut with both feet. He flew back, out of her sight beyond the ring of torches that had walled her in with barracuda suddenness. She became aware of various smells. Indifferently washed bodies, wool steeped in sweat, grease, sea salt and fish scales, garlic, decaying teeth, and resinous Greek wine and Albanian beer that smelled like formaldehyde, all mingled to cause a bit of sting for the eyes. She also sensed an edge of fear.

  Then Nomiki himself was before her, bandy-legged and mysterious as Pan in the shifting of dark and torchlight. A snarl of hatred bared his brown and jumbled teeth. A blade protruded from his hand, with torchlight sluicing along it like the premonition of blood.

  Annja kicked the knife from his hand.

  Nomiki fell back with a curse as she kicked him in the face. But then her leg was seized, followed by the other, and more men piled on than she could kick away with all her strength.

  She realized she had made a potentially fatal mistake. She’d been holding back when her opponents were not.

  Petros’s monster hands thrust her head forward, intending to snap her neck. Her neck muscles strained, popped, seemed to groan aloud as she fought his strength. She would not give in. She couldn’t win, but that meant nothing to her resolve….

  A voice cried, “Stop!”

  It called out in English. It was a male voice, high-pitched, harsh with an accent and something more. As it penetrated Annja’s fog, in which she had been aware of almost no sound since the fight began, it must have penetrated the consciousnesses of the mob swarming over her. The men actually did stop and paused in their sinister intent.

  A man hobbled forward, using a broken oar as a sort of crutch. The men at the back of the mob surrounding her fell back with torches in hand like an inadvertent honor guard, producing an illuminated aisle for his approach.

  Nomiki stood before Annja rubbing his jaw. He spit what looked suspiciously like a fragment of brown tooth onto the slate shingle at his feet. “Spyros?” he croaked.

  At first glimpse Annja had thought the newcomer was an ancient, so hitched and painful were his movements. Now she realized the hair surrounding his head like a clumped and matted halo was dark. His naturally lean features were drawn further by pain as though stretched on a frame. His dark eyes were pits of sorrow, black in the torchlight.

  Someone barked at him in Greek. He replied in a low voice, more dead than deliberately soft, it seemed to Annja.

  “But Spyros,” Nomiki said with a touch of whine in his voice. “They killed your mates.”

  “No,” the lame young man answered in English. “They did not. Now go.”

  Petros protested. The young man’s face twisted as if he had been struck. “Enough killing! Enough pain. Spare my soul more burden! Go!”

  He cried out again in Greek, his tone desperate, yet angry rather than pleading. Annja felt the self-righteous energy of the mob drain away. Where they had been a pack of raging predators half a minute before, now they were just normal men, rapidly feeling themselves overtaken by shame. Like a clot of muck being washed from a deck with a hose, the erstwhile lynch mob began to come apart, and then flowed away down the beach in separating streams, as if the men were too ashamed even for one another’s continued company.

  Aidan knelt on the shingle by the Athanasia’s red hull, fists down like a sprinter’s on the line, breathing heavily through his mouth. Annja knelt beside him. “You’re hurt,” she said.

  “You oughta see the other guy,” he joked through split and puffed lips. “Actually, the other guys look splendid, if you leave aside the effects of hard living and doubtful hygiene. I never laid a finger on them. Not for want of trying, though.”

  Despite her protests he started to rise. When his determination became obvious she helped him stand and let him lean half surreptitiously against her. His body was warm, flushed perhaps by effort and fear, against hers.

  Aside from bruised cheeks and puffy eyes he didn’t seem badly hurt. Apparently all that had struck him had been fists, not wood or steel. Not that fists alone couldn’t do severe damage.

  “You’re Spyridon, then?” Aidan said to the young man who stood before them, leaning on his crutch and panting from the effects of his own passionate outburst.

  “I am.”

  The young Englishman forced himself by visibly painful degrees to stand fully upright. Not for the first time, Annja was surprised by his toughness. He looked so boyish and—tender, perhaps, not soft exactly, she thought. But he had steel in his spine.

  “We owe you our thanks,” Pascoe said.

  “Thank you,” Annja added.

  But the wild-haired head shook decisively. “You owe me nothing,” Spyros said. “I do it for me. I am doomed. I hope to not be damned.”

  He turned and stumped off. Bats swooped overhead, taking flittering tiny insects as they followed him up the darkened beach. A gibbous moon was rising across the waves. Pollution haze or something else stained it red around the rim, like dilute blood.

  They followed. “How did you know we weren’t who your friends thought we were?” Pascoe called after him.

  “You tourist couple, very nice,” he said over his shoulder. “Who killed my crewmates—not nice.”

  “Might be some holes to that logic,” Annja said to Aidan, quietly.

  He shrugged. “Roll with it, I say.”

  Spyros led them to a rough shelter at the south end of the beach, masked from view by some large rocks covered in brushy arbutus and fragrant bay. Knocked together out of planks and tarpaper, it was little more than a lean-to. He lowered himself painfully to the ground, set aside his broken oar, gestured for them to sit. Annja and Aidan looked at each other, then perched side by side on a chunk of driftwood perhaps eight feet long that seemed to serve as a sort of boundary for the young man’s living space.

  Rummaging around in litter piled beside the shelter Spyros made a little stack of newspaper and dry twigs, broke some small bits of driftwood onto it and lit a fire from a plastic lighter. By its uneasy orange light he dug in a mound of reeking cloth Annja realized must be his bed. He came up with a bottle, upended it. She smelled the turpentine-like scent of cheap ouzo as it ran down both sides of his narrow stubbled chin.

  In the firelight she studied him as he drank. He had a triangular head and hunted-fox eyes. He was wiry to the point of emaciation. His eyes were sunken deep in pits of blackness.

  At last he lowered the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “What you want with Spyros?” he asked. He sounded sad. An undercurrent in his voice, the way he held himself, ever poised as if for flight, the way the firelight flickered from eyeballs turning restlessly this way and that spoke eloquently of a fear that nagged with ceaseless rodent teeth.

  “You were part of a crew that dredged an ancient jar from the sea,” Aidan said without preamble. “Is that correct?”

  Spyros nodded. He looked even less happy. “King Solomon’s Jar,” he said.

  “Why do you say that?” Annja asked.

  “When it came up in our nets it look l
ike nothing but big lump. Like lava, but green, you know? But Ioannis, my brother-in-law’s cousin, he scrape some corrosion away with his knife. Beneath was yellow metal. Brass.”

  Next to her Annja felt Aidan shudder at such desecration of an ancient artifact. She felt some of the same thing. She couldn’t muster quite the same outrage. For some reason she found herself seeing different points of view with a lot more clarity and empathy these days.

  Isn’t that kind of an occupational impediment for a champion of good? she wondered. It would make sense for her to start to see everything in black and white.

  But that would be too easy, she thought.

  “Once he clean up some, in the brass we saw drawings.” Spyros said. “Engraved, very fine, but we could just see them. Almost like letters, but not like any letters I see. Not even Chinese. Not Egyptian hieroglyphs.” He shook his head.

  “Then Georgios, our captain, he get very excited. He had seen writing like that in some book he read once. He said it was used to write the name of spirits. He said it meant we had found jar of King Solomon himself, that he used to put spirits in.

  “We laughed at him, even if he was captain. He reads too much! But he was so serious. He got angry that we laughed, so angry he threaten to heave Ioannis over the rail into the sea. Vasilios, he was our mechanic, he thought he knew too much because he lived for a time in America. He said if there were ever spirits in the jar, they were not there now, for there was no stopper. Georgios, he say that not matter. He knows someone pay much for the jar!”

  For a moment the young man sat cross-legged staring into the fire. “I grew up with Vasilios,” he said. “He was a year older than me, bigger. He stayed bigger when we grew. He used to catch me, rub mud in my hair, laugh and laugh. But it was just fun. He was my friend.”

  He looked up. “So we sailed to Haifa. A Jew met us in a launch, an Israeli. Doctor from Ministry of Antiquities. Ehud Dror his name. He was man who studies old things, a scientist, you know—what is word—?”

  “An archaeologist,” Pascoe said in a tight voice.

  Spyros nodded. “That’s right. Archaeologist. From the government. Georgios does business with him before. Sometimes we bring other things up in our nets, you know? Old things. And he paid us well, just like the captain say. American dollars.”

  He took another pull from his bottle. For a moment he sat staring into the small pale flames of his fire.

  “Then a month ago,” he said, “a lifeboat broke loose in a bad sea. It broke my ankle. I was in hospital. I have to use this—” he held up the sawed-off oar “—because the crutch the health service gave me keeps folding up. But at least they did not give me saltwater injection and call it antibiotic.”

  He drew a deep breath, as if nerving himself to go on. “My nephew Akakios took my place. It was his first voyage—he was sixteen. He could not believe his luck.”

  Emotion choked him. He tipped his head and drank again. As he lowered the bottle, Annja saw firelight glisten in a tear track down his cheek.

  “It happened just offshore,” he said, “when Athanasia returned with the catch that evening and dropped anchor. It killed them all. Akakios, Ioannis, Vasilios, Pavlos, Stamatios, Georgios the captain. It took them all.”

  “It?” Aidan asked gently.

  Spyros wept openly now. He shook his head as he spoke—as if denying himself hope, not denying the tragedy that had haunted his every waking thought, his every dream, since it happened. That was something he had no power to deny.

  “A devil,” he sobbed. “A devil killed them.”

  Glancing aside, Annja saw Aidan’s face working in an effort to restrain his skepticism from emitting a sarcastic blurt. “Surely it was a man. Or men,” he said.

  “A man who did such a thing,” Spyros said, “must be a devil. Or have a devil in him.”

  A driftwood chunk shifted, fell into the fire. Yellow sparks flew up. Aidan jumped, then cursed under his breath.

  Annja leaned forward. “Why do you blame yourself, Spyridon?”

  Disconsolately he shook his shaggy head. “I should have been there to meet my fate with them. Instead my nephew died in my place. And I must live knowing that I have cheated death—cheated the devil. And death and the devil, they always collect their due.”

  They sat a moment in silence. The night had settled in around them. Tree frogs trilled softly. The stars shone overhead.

  “I have one question, Spyridon,” Pascoe said. “How did word of your discovery get out? This Dr. Dror certainly made no official announcement.”

  “Oh, no. It was my nephew. Akakios used the Internet. He wrote about it there after some of the other crew bragged to him. I think his friends online thought he make it all up.”

  “But somebody took him seriously,” Annja said.

  Miserably, Spyridon nodded. “May the saints forgive me,” he whispered brokenly. “I never believe in them. Saints. But they are all I have now.”

  “But what happened wasn’t your fault,” Annja said.

  “We were cursed,” the young man said almost matter-of-factly. “It was a holy artifact, but not meant to be…troubled. We did wrong to bring it up. And I did wrong by escaping punishment.” His voice sounded hollow.

  “And soon the devil who took my friends will find me!” He upended his bottle and emptied it with a gurgle. Then he threw it into the night. It smashed on the shingle.

  Annja rose and moved toward him. He stared up at her with empty eyes. She took his hands.

  “Spyros, listen to me. You can’t hide from evil in a bottle. You know that, don’t you?”

  He looked away. “Man cannot hide from devil at all.”

  “But the evil has passed you by! Don’t do the devil’s work for him by drinking yourself to death,” she said.

  He looked up at her. She took his face in both hands. “Don’t you see? You were spared for some purpose. You’re alive. Stay alive. Find your purpose. Follow it. Shame the devil and honor your friends and relatives.”

  Sincere as she was, her words sounded lame in her own ears. Yet a strange thing happened. She felt a sense of strength, as if a golden radiance shone within her. She felt a tingling, then, in her palms, a sense of flow as from her to him.

  He stared at her a moment longer. He sighed, and she had to steel herself not to grimace at the rush of breath redolent of stale wine and long uncleaned teeth. At last he began to weep, great heaving sobs. She hunkered down beside him and put her arm around his shoulder, feeling awkward.

  Aidan sat across the fire from them, gazing at her, blue eyes thoughtful. She mentally dared him to say something flippant, modern, cynical and biting. But he didn’t. He only watched.

  At length Spyros cried himself out. Annja held him a few minutes longer as he relaxed against her. Eventually he began to snore.

  She eased him down beside the fire and pulled a blanket over him. The night was still warm but she had no idea whether it would stay that way. Better a filthy blanket—the same one he used every night, anyway, it seemed—than to let him get cold. She stood and kicked the small fire apart and smothered the embers as best she could with brittle plates of shingle and some dirt she was able to scrape from beneath it. Aidan came to help. She brushed back a stray lock of hair and smiled at him.

  Then they stood away from the gently snoring Spyros. “You think he’ll be okay out here?” she asked.

  “He’s done well enough so far,” Aidan said. “And anyway, would you want to try something with him, after what happened to us earlier? I don’t doubt someone’s been watching the whole time.”

  “Oh.”

  He looked up at the stars. “Do you really think it’ll work?”

  “What?”

  “What you said to him. Did to him. There was something that passed between you. I felt it, but I don’t know what it was. Do you think it’ll help him, then?”

  “I have no idea,” she said. In thoughtful silence they walked back toward their rented car.

  21<
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  “Do you know,” Aidan said as rain pattered down on the broad-brimmed hats he and Annja wore, “there are some most splendid Neanderthal sites in the region of Mount Carmel?”

  Haifa was a somewhat gray industrial city in north Israel, tucked between the mass of Mount Carmel and busy Haifa Bay. An overcast sky occasionally spitting rain onto steaming streets may have unfairly emphasized the grayness. If the city lacked the melodrama of Jerusalem and the self-conscious quaintness of Jaffa, it felt less sterile than Tel Aviv. And it also lacked something of the tension you felt in the air like an unseasonable chill in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, despite the city’s proximity to Lebanon and the Golan Heights. Its residents, Jewish, Arab and foreign, seemed to have their minds mainly on business.

  Although she knew the Old Testament used the fifteen-hundred-foot Mount Carmel as something of a standard of beauty, Annja found its gray limestone palisades a bit on the forbidding side. The green terraces of the Baha’i World Center overlooking the town were nice, though.

  It was late in the morning. Wearing their usual inconspicuous garb, Aidan a blue chambray shirt and jeans, Annja a light tan cotton blouse with black-and-white streaks like Japanese brushstrokes and khaki cargo pants, they walked a little-trafficked street on the northern side of the industrial and waterfront district known as the lower city. The buildings were mostly one-story offices and shops. Though they had the low, boxy profile and dust-colored stucco of the basic adobe structures you saw at these latitudes around the world, they looked like modern cinder-block construction, with edges too raw and angles too sharp for mud brick.

  “It’s a little hard to believe,” she said to him. “It’s just, on the whole, we could be on the outskirts of Phoenix right now, if it weren’t for the humidity. And come to think of it, Phoenix is pretty humid, thanks to irrigation and all those swimming pools.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” He had a Borsalino hat or a good imitation on to protect against the weather, the brim low over his blue eyes—a pricey-looking hat, and if real, possibly one of the few affectations she’d been able to discern. His eyes lacked something of their customary glitter today, she’d noticed. He had been subdued since the campfire conference with Spyridon on Corfu.