The Blue Hackle

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “Yes. He was hinting about making a grand offer, if he liked what he saw—we both knew he was talking about the Coffer. I would have hated to let it go, but then, it doesn’t have the family history the Flagon does. And it might well be the most expensive, even priceless object we’ve got. It could be Dunasheen’s salvation, no pun intended.”

  “Priceless?” Alasdair asked. “Pun?”

  “It’s an ossuary, isn’t it?” asked Jean. “Without its lid. People would bury their dead, then come back later, gather the bones, put them in a chest and re-bury them.”

  “A Jewish burial practice at the time of Jesus,” said Fergie.

  Alasdair looked sharply around at him.

  Jean’s glee was deflating beneath an all-too-familiar weight in the pit of her stomach. She’d hoped Fergie’s odd notions would be more digestible than some of the others she’d tried to swallow this past year, but if he was heading where she thought he was heading, dyspepsia was going to be the least of her worries. “There are several famous examples from that era. One contains the heel bone of a crucified man. Others have intriguing inscriptions, although the most famous, supposedly naming Jesus and his brother James, is pretty much assumed to be a fake.”

  Unfazed by that caveat, Fergie switched on a lamp and angled the long side of the chest toward it. “This one’s inscription is more than intriguing. Have a look.”

  To the accompaniment of The Chieftains’ “The Rocky Road to Dublin,” Jean dropped to her knees, not in prayer, but to see the gouges and scratches straggling across the face of the stone. All she could make out at first were the tiny grains of the rock, a micro-miniature field of stars. As above, so below—but that was a phrase from magical tradition, not Judeo-Christian.

  Barely aware of Alasdair’s warm breath on her ear, Jean squinted and tilted her head back and forth until at last, in the lamplight raking the side of the chest, she either saw or imagined she saw lettering, not in Hebrew or Aramaic but in Latin. “Well, it could be the INRI inscription, the words of the indictment placed above Jesus’s head on the cross, telling onlookers what he was convicted of doing. Or, in his case, of claiming, according to authorities such as Pontius . . .” Bones rattled in the ossuary of her memory. “. . . Pilate.”

  “Eh?” Alasdair’s question rippled through her hair and set her earring to swinging.

  “It’s Latin, Isus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. At least, I think I can see Isus Nazarenus. I’m guessing at Rex Iudaeorum, because that’s usually what comes next.” She looked up at Fergie, hovering like a tartan-swathed blimp above a sports stadium. “If this had been found in the Holy Land, with proper provenance and documentation, and examined by scientists and peer-reviewed, then it could be an early occurrence of the INRI phrase, carved on the ossuary in the days when Christianity hadn’t separated from Judaism. Or it could even be independent confirmation of the Biblical account of the crucifixion, but that’s a leap. A leap of faith.”

  With the aid of Alasdair’s large, strong hand, she regained her feet and brushed at the bits of dog hair clinging to her dress. “Even though it has no provenance, no documentation, and has never been reviewed,” she went on, “I can see Greg wanting this for—for his museum.”

  “Ah,” said Alasdair, his keen hearing picking up the chalky rattle of her memory. “But surely that’s natural cracks in the stone. Your eyes, your mind, they’ve got a tendency to apply order to random shapes. See early astronomers thinking they were viewing canals on Mars.”

  Fergie’s laugh split the difference between a knowing chuckle and a rapturous giggle. “Early astronomers didn’t have the telescopes we have now, just as early archaeologists didn’t have the microscopes and other equipment. But you haven’t quite got it, Jean.”

  “I’m usually not quite getting it,” she returned.

  “What if the words carved on the chest,” Fergie stated, “on the coffer—coffin, eh?—are Isus Nazarenus Ignis Salvator.”

  Jean peered again at the scratches and gouges. “I don’t see—well, Alasdair’s right, you see what you want to see . . .” Which is what Sanjay Thomson had said about Fergie. An intelligent lad, Thomson. “Ignis Salvator? Fire Savior? Savior, sure—aha, that’s your pun, Dunasheen’s salvation. But why fire?”

  “Therein lies a tale. Sit down, be comfortable.” Fergie gestured toward two wingback chairs beside the fireplace, their fabric faded and frayed.

  Smoothing his kilt beneath him, Alasdair sat, but his body language hinted at anything but comfort—he perched on the edge of the chair like a little boy outside the principal’s office. Jean sat down and, surprised to find her notepad and pencil still in her hand, scribbled an outline dense with question marks.

  Fergie posed on the hearth, in front of the flaming peat, hands folded behind his back and face almost feverish—not only from strong drink or the heat of the fire. “The Crusader Coffer. Perhaps it was brought to Dunasheen by Norman the Red’s father, who found it, like the Flagon, in Alexandria. Crossroads of the world, Alexandria, and famous for its catacombs, both pagan and Christian.”

  “True,” said Jean, and wrote listen on her page.

  “Perhaps the Coffer was brought by crusaders. Perhaps—well, this is a bit over the top . . .”

  “Is it now?” Alasdair murmured.

  “. . . perhaps it was left here on Skye two millennia past, by the Romans who sailed round the British Isles, the ones who left Roman coins here. They knew of Skye, Ptolemy of Alexandria wrote of it. Alexandria again, founded by Alexander, and your name’s the Gaelic version of Alexander, Alasdair.”

  “Like as not,” said Alasdair, “those coins were lost by some lad just back from a Grand Tour, no more than two centuries ago. Or it could be that your wee chest was brought here by soldiers serving in Palestine in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.”

  “No provenance,” Jean reiterated. “No documentation.”

  But Fergie was in full flow. He rocked back on his heels, kilt swaying. “You’re eager to get to the crux of the matter, understandably enough. Crux, Latin for cross, right? This is it, then: I not only believe the chest is an ossuary of the time of Jesus, I believe that it contained relics of Jesus Christ himself. Now, I know what you’re thinking.”

  “No, Fergie,” said Alasdair faintly, “you do not know what I’m thinking.”

  Jean was beginning to feel like a hostage, except she was trapped by courtesy and curiosity. With no choice but to play along, she squeaked, “Um, the, er, crux of the Christian faith is that Jesus was resurrected. There were no remains to put in an ossuary.”

  “Got it in one,” Fergie said with a sage nod. “We know from studying the Shroud of Turin that Jesus’s body discorporated in a burst of energy. That’s the only deduction you can make from the singe marks on the cloth. A remarkable event, one that we’d call a miracle. There’s no saying how many times a similar event may have happened over the course of history, but this is the one suitably documented.”

  It might not be logical, Jean thought, to use the Bible to document the Bible, but logic had left the building along with Gilnockie and Young.

  “The cloth that was pinned round Jesus’s head is in Oviedo, Spain,” Fergie said. “The bloodstains and singe marks on it correspond to those on the Shroud.”

  “Well, yes, they do,” conceded Jean, more to Alasdair than to Fergie.

  Slowly, expressionlessly, Alasdair reached out, placed the camera on the table, and let his hand fall to the arm of the chair.

  “No one knows how many other cloths were in contact with his body, stained with blood and sweat, when he discorporated. But one thing we do know. The disciples of Jesus were eager to gather relics of his time on Earth. They would have swept the stone slab where he was laid, the stone slab where the Shroud and the Oviedo cloth were found, and saved every loose thread, every grain of dust or ash.”

  “And,” Jean said on a long sigh, “put them in an ossuary labeled ‘Jesus of Nazareth,
fire savior.’”

  “Yes, yes.” Fergie grinned happily, his glasses glittering in the lights on the Christmas tree—or, more likely, in the lights in his eyes.

  A female voice on the Chieftains album launched into “O Holy Night.” Wrong season. This should all be going down at Easter. Or Pentecost, when tongues of flame, symbolizing the Holy Ghost, appeared on the heads of the Apostles.

  Alasdair’s own eyes went from fixed to positively glazed. “You’re joking. You’re having us on. You’re taking the mickey on account of Jean’s writing about, erm, weird stuff.”

  “No, not a bit of it,” Fergie assured him. “I want Jean to write about the Crusader Coffer. That’s a misnomer, I confess, but I had to call it something less, well, inflammatory, if you’ll pardon the expression. I want Jean to write about it because it’s weird. Because it’s uncanny. That’s the point. It proves the existence of a world beyond ours.”

  “Proves,” Alasdair repeated, his tone dripping despair.

  Jean sent him a sympathetic look, which bounced ineffectually off the side of his face. Yes, her tolerance for this sort of bafflegab was a lot higher than his—especially when the person gabbing the baffle was one of his oldest friends. She didn’t feel threatened by this sort of free association, a gonzo tour of history and mythology. She enjoyed it the way Dougie enjoyed catnip. It was intoxicating, even if you did feel a bit foolish after you sobered up.

  The problem, as Alasdair would quickly point out, was not realizing this sort of thing was myth. Acting on it as though it was chemistry rather than alchemy, astronomy rather than astrology. A leap of faith could just as well be a leap of folly. Or both.

  Foolish. She looked up at Fergie’s guileless face. Foolish fire, ignis fatuus, was Latin for will o’ the wisp. A supernatural light leading a traveler from a sunburned land to his doom, while not saving a deeply rooted laird from his. Jean tried again. “Why is the inscription in Latin? Jesus and his followers spoke Aramaic.”

  “But within only a few years of his, ah, disappearance, St. Peter brought the faith to Rome.”

  “And the Romans wanted to get rid of this particular relic by dumping it here, at what they saw as the end of the world? Why didn’t they just throw it into the ocean?”

  “No, no, it’s the other way round. Early believers brought it here to save it from the Roman persecutions. The foundations of Dunasheen’s old church could have been laid hundreds of years before those of St. Ninian’s church at Whithorn in Galloway.”

  “Which is thought to be the first Christian foundation in Scotland,” said Jean.

  “Exactly. Whithorn’s attracted excavations, a visitor center—loads of attention. That just goes to show how holy mysteries lead to heritage conservation. I’ll not mention the worldwide interest in Rosslyn Chapel.” Fergie throttled back his grin. “But then, let’s not go overboard. The Coffer was brought here in the Middle Ages, I expect, along with the Flagon. No matter. Finding the Coffer is a miracle, in its own small way, for us here at Dunasheen. Dun na sithein, fortress of the fairies. Maybe my uncle wasn’t far wrong about the provenance of the Flagon, in a way.”

  Alasdair’s head fell forward and he covered his face with his hand.

  “In a way?” Jean prompted.

  “Suffice it to say now,” said Fergie, “that tales of fairies are based on an ancient race of people who were driven underground. By whom?”

  Jean didn’t bother answering, Celtic invaders armed with iron swords. She clutched her own weapon, her pencil, braced for the next blow. The fire popped. A clock ticked. A peal of bells sounded from the CD, foretelling the midnight bells of New Year’s Eve, soon to come.

  Again Fergie rocked back on his heels. “The Ark of the Covenant supposedly held a sacred stone that fell from the sky. The sacred stone in Mecca’s Kaaba fell from the sky. Tut-ankh-Amun’s pectoral is centered on a scarab cut from glass formed when a meteor, a stone falling from the sky, hit the Egyptian desert. Some versions of the Holy Grail story say it’s a stone that fell from the sky.”

  “Fergie,” said Jean, “please do not tell us the Fairy Flagon is the Holy Grail.”

  “Oh! Do you think it might be?” Fergie replied.

  Alasdair darted Jean a baleful blue look from between his fingers.

  Fergie laughed. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist a wee bit of a tease there. Of course it’s not the Holy Grail. That’s a legend.”

  “Never underestimate the power of a legend,” Jean told Alasdair rather than Fergie.

  Fergie was off again. “Although the shape of the Flagon’s handles is suggestive, isn’t it? Like wings. In Egyptian iconography, wings are protective and feathers mean truth. The feathered serpent is a major part of Mayan iconography. We talk about the winged flight of the soul. It was once customary to carve winged skulls on tombstones.”

  “Oh aye,” said Alasdair beneath his breath. “So it was.”

  “Wings, angels, flight, heaven is up, hell is down. Sacred stones fall from the sky. Early figures like Krishna, Buddha, Jesus worked miracles and beat death itself. All together, there’s only one logical conclusion. It’s staring us in the face.”

  Not Alasdair’s face, revealed as another work of stone when he lowered his hand and looked in appeal at Jean. She looked from the manger scene on the mantel to the dark lump of the Coffer to the pale, elegant Flagon, which seemed to glow against the dark backdrop of the bookcases.

  Bookcases holding books about alien astronauts.

  “You’re remembering the old science fiction writer.” Jean paused to clear her throat. “The writer who said that any sufficiently advanced technology would seem like magic to those less technologically advanced. Except you’re not thinking magic. You’re thinking miracle.”

  Fergie applauded. “Yes! Well done, Jean! I must say, Alasdair, you’ve chosen yourself a very clever lady here.”

  Especially when you took into account Alasdair’s first wife’s own capacity for bafflegab —a calculation that, judging by Alasdair’s slightly crossed eyes, he was making. He opened his mouth, shook his head, closed it again, and waved his hand toward Jean. It’s all yours.

  No, it was all Fergie’s. “When you look at the stars,” he said, “at the vast array of the heavens, how can we be the only sentient creatures in existence? What if other cultures had head starts on ours, and explored Earth millennia ago, helping our own ancestors down from the trees and up into civilization? Fairies are racial memories of the inferior beings our ancestors once were, of the beings we can still be, whilst our deities are superior beings who came to us from the sky. There’s evidence all over the world. Look at the Maya tomb clearly depicting Lord Pacal as an astronaut, for example. Look at the faces on the Easter Island statues.”

  Well sure, look at the way an inkblot clearly depicted your mother-in-law. Jean tried to pull Fergie back to an object more solid than ink. Or moonshine. “Greg MacLeod may never have actually seen the Coffer, but you must have sent him photos.”

  “Oh yes, I did, to whet his interest. He offered to pay out of his own pocket to have it tested, inside and out. We have the residue of the ages in the tracks of the inscriptions. We have blood, ashes, scraps of cloth adhering to the interior walls. A shame the lid’s gone missing, but then, you have the symbol of the empty tomb, don’t you? Carbon-dating, DNA tests—they can do amazing things with tiny bits of DNA.”

  “Like on the C.S.I. shows?”

  “Well yes, I expect so, but I was thinking of medical equipment—Emma, mind you . . .” Fergie slumped, the light fading from his eyes, then pulled himself up again. “Finding DNA of Jesus Christ would set the world on its ear. Sequencing the DNA, proving it to be that of an alien—oh my. What a glorious moment in human history that would be. Proof, absolute proof.”

  “Of alien astronauts?”

  “Yes, yes, of course. But also of life beyond this earth, beyond this reality. It would prove the truth of all the world religions in one coup de foudre.” Pressing his lips togethe
r, perhaps to still their trembling, Fergie turned to lean his forearm on the mantelpiece and his forehead on his arm.

  It wasn’t done to show strong emotion, was it? Jean wondered vaguely if Fergie was on some kind of medication—although it seemed unfair to attribute such a formidable flight of imagination to an array of chemicals, or to try and ground it with another array.

  Coup de foudre. A lightning bolt from the blue. Like love at first sight, not something that had happened with her and Alasdair. Whether it had happened to Fergie and Emma didn’t matter, not now.

  Alasdair gazed bleakly at the silver buttons on the tails of Fergie’s formal jacket. It wasn’t done, either, to put your arm around an old friend suffering from lost love.

  Through the heavy panels of the door came the rumble of the drinks trolley.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Diana made her entrance to The Chieftains’ “The Mason’s Apron.” But blaming the convolutions of western history on the Freemasons, Jean thought, was about the only variation on a theme—on a vastly overused and overrated theme—that Fergie hadn’t played. Yet.

  Diana looked from face to face to the back of Fergie’s head. Her features, now lightly touched with cosmetics, set themselves sternly. “Father, Mr. Pritchard would like to see you in your office.”

  “Oh. Well then.” Fergie straightened. When he turned back around he was smiling bravely, although the glitter in his eyes was now less gloat than grief. With an admiring glance at the Coffer and the Flagon and an affectionate pat on Diana’s shoulder, he walked away down the hall.

  Alasdair rested his elbows on his thighs and contemplated his clasped hands against the tartan apron of his kilt. Jean closed her notepad and tucked it back into her bag. Even though her stomach had sunk into her knees beneath the weight of Fergie’s castle in the air, she managed to get to her feet and stay on them. “Beautiful dress,” she told Diana. “Is it the one in your mother’s portrait?”

  Diana smoothed the dark green velvet panels of her skirt, her throat and head rising from the satin shawl collar like the classical bust of a goddess. “Yes, it was her favorite. If we’d buried her, we’d have buried her in it, I suppose—I do beg your pardon, that was a morbid remark.”