“Ambar’s home,” said Muktar. “In Ahmed’s bed. My friend, we send for the doctor. An American doctor. A doctor without a border. He is five hours away only.”
Thaddeus looked around at the whitewashed adobe walls. The sun slanted through the open window onto the handcarved wooden table next to the bed. “Patch me up, a quick fix until I get to the doctor. I must find that letter. More bad men, better armed and better trained, are coming.”
Ambar entered the room. Her dark eyes bore into Thaddeus. He couldn’t blame her. She’d almost been killed this morning. His presence had triggered the attack on her peaceful, isolated village. Muktar rose from the crude wooden chair at his bedside. She sat stiffly on it. She smoothed her skirt over her knees, and placed a parcel on her lap. It was wrapped in a blanket, an intricate Moorish weave of reds, browns and yellows faded with age.
Without a word, Ambar carefully unfolded the blanket. A musky odor, no stronger than a tease, emanated from the folds. Within lay a gold embossed leather folio, burgundy in color, about the size used in Morocco’s finer restaurants to hold menus. It was tied shut with a leather cord. Ambar took the utmost care in untying the knot, but the cord deteriorated in her fingers and a piece of it fell to the pounded earth floor. The folio was old, that was clear, but by the way Ambar handled it, age was the least of its value.
Thaddeus squeezed Muktar’s wrist. “Help me up,” he said, restraining a groan of pain as he raised his shoulders. Muktar grabbed an embroidered pillow from the head of the bed and propped it under him.
Ambar opened the folio’s cover. Inside was a paper, pressed stiff and brown with age. “I see this paper only one time before,” she said, in Arabic, her voice hushed. Muktar translated. Thaddeus’s Arabic was passable, but he wanted to understand every nuance. “It is passed down through generations of my family. My ancestor wished it. It is only to be given to a Christian who is worthy.” She frowned, hesitating, her eyes searching his. “For five hundred years, no Christian is worthy.”
He stopped himself from snatching it from her. “You’ve had this paper all this time,” he said. “All this time that I’ve been searching.” He had interviewed all the villagers and asked them for any local history about a marooned missionary. “I asked you, Ambar,” he said. “You said nothing.”
Her expression was unyielding, her voice steady. “My ancestor wished it to go only to a Christian who saves the life of a Muslim,” she said. She spoke further, but Muktar hesitated in his translation. “To make good, to make equal,” he held his two hands out, raising one while lowering the other, “the past.”
“To restore balance,” Thaddeus said. Muktar nodded.
She held the paper towards him, and placed it on his open palm. The paper quivered. He was trembling. He tilted the paper towards the daylight fighting through the dust motes from the open window. The writing was faded but legible, with the smudges and scratches of quill dipped in indigo. The flowing artistry of penmanship was from a time when people cherished letters, the only form of communication between distances. “Latin,” he mouthed the word, his throat too parched to speak. He blinked and squinted, struggling to focus as he read the date, “14 February, 1586.” His gaze rushed to the signature at the bottom. “Juan de Salvatierra,” he read.
“It is the letter you seek,” Muktar said. “Truly, it is destiny, as you say.”
He couldn’t think straight. The sinuous Latin script swam across the page. “Ambar,” he said, “where did you get this?”
“The priest who wrote this,” she said, “was called Juan de Salvatierra. He washed upon the shore here, after the wreck of his ship, the San Salvador, five hundred years ago. He asked my ancestor to be his messenger. He asked Abd al-Aziz, which means servant of the strong. Abd al-Aziz made a vow to the priest to deliver his letter. The holy man was dying. He could not deny him.” She unwrapped another layer of the woven blanket from the parcel on her lap and removed an object from its folds. She narrowed her eyes. “The priest made him take this, as payment, to keep his promise. This, he did not need to do. We do not profit from the death of one we take into our care.”
By God, it was the crucifix. Ambar dangled it from its golden chain. It glinted in the morning sun. He handed Salvatierra’s letter to Muktar and reached towards her. “May I?” he whispered, his throat dry. Ambar let the crucifix and its gold chain fall onto his palm. His hand dipped with the weight of it.
The crucifix was magnificent, about two inches high by one wide of solid gold. Each of its cross bars was tipped with three tiny pearls. The Christ figure hung in such a way as to make the arms look upraised in victory, rather than weak with death. His face was pained, His expression sad but accepting. Below His feet was an uncommon skull and crossbones crafted out of ivory. Above His head, the typical inscription, INRI, was engraved on a golden scroll. INRI was the Latin acronym for Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, the banner written in Hebrew, Latin and Greek which Pilate ordered placed on Christ’s cross to show his “crime.”
Thaddeus turned over the crucifix. Its back was enameled with primary blues, reds and greens, clearly an Iberian influence. He could make out what looked like a spear, and the words “Lux et Veritas.” “Light and Truth,” he translated from the Latin.
“My ancestor try his best to keep his vow,” Ambar said. “He travel to Rome and to the Vatican. He is an Arab, and he fight many bandits and hateful people on the way. The Swiss Guards do not let him pass through the gate. They threaten him. He show the Guards the crucifix and the letter. They yell and point to him their swords. They accuse Abd al-Aziz of stealing the letter and crucifix from the priest. One guard go to kill him. Abd al-Aziz fight them. He escapes.”
“Your ancestor was the one in the Vatican guard’s report I found about an Arab with a stolen crucifix and a letter,” Thaddeus said. “So I was right. He returned here.”
Ambar nodded. “For many years, the letter and crucifix is the burden of my family. We wait all the time for one worthy. Professor Thaddeus, you are that man. The letter and the crucifix are yours now.”
The room spun dizzily around him. “I’ve got to get these to safety or your ancestor’s courage will have been for nothing.” He pushed up on his elbows, only to collapse onto the bed.
Ambar’s hand gripped his shoulder, her craggy fingers surprisingly strong. “I will do it,” she said in English. “I will keep my family vow to Salvatierra to deliver his dying message. Where?”
Blackness flooded towards him. Like Salvatierra, his mission could not end, even if he should die here, alone, so far from home and family. “To my daughter,” he said, “before it’s too late.”
CHAPTER 9
Salvatierra made a quick sign of the cross. They would now reap what they had sown in this new world. It was a world not full of gold, but abundant in a native people that the Spaniards, not the jungle, had forged into savages. These savages formed the human chain ringing the perimeter of the clearing. They tensed when they saw him, crouching, strengthening the links. Each began stomping his bare, calloused feet on the pounded earth in a slow, threatening rhythm, injecting an unholy life into the skeletons marked in blood on their bare, brown skin. But still, he could not keep his gaze from wandering beyond this threat of brutal death, or worse.
For there he saw what he had suffered through days and death to find. A magnificent temple towered above the far side of the clearing. The temple filled the canyon pass, fifty feet wide and one hundred feet high. It was buttressed against the steep canyon walls, its central roof a series of pyramidal steppes. On either side of the temple, trees and vines clung upon a cliff that extended deep into the jungle to his right and left, like a fortress wall built by God. The man they sought, and the Breastplate, waited within that temple.
Young Elias crept to his side. He gripped the blunderbuss, careful to keep it aimed towards the ground. “Is it true, Father Salvatierra, what the stories say, that beyond this temple is the Garden of Eden? Perhaps the Breastplate will sho
w us the way to paradise.”
“I fear it is not a portal to Eden,” he said, “but the gates of hell.” The temple completely blocked the pass to the valley beyond. The only entrance into the pyramid was a tapered opening into a narrow, dark tunnel. The two geometric carvings above and to each side of the stone lintel that topped the entrance were stylized eyes, threatening all who would be bold or impudent enough to enter. The entrance was the icon’s mouth. From the look of the worn, wet rock, it had once poured forth the life-giving waters of a small river from the hidden canyon that lay beyond. Now, no more than a trickle dribbled through the mouth to moisten the clearing. The river bed, winding into the jungle to their right, had dwindled into a muddy waste. Somewhere, deep inside the temple, the river had been dammed. Above the front of the temple, the rocky outcroppings on either side of the pass were rounded smooth and bare of vegetation. “The temple is the face of a demon,” he said, “and those rocky outcroppings the shoulders of its wings.”
“Demon’s wings,” Elias whispered. Truly, it looked like the shoulders of Satan lording over the jungle below.
Captain Diaz unsheathed his sword. “Stay alert, men.” With his left hand, he snatched his knife from its scabbard.
One of the tribesmen shouted with an anger as sharp as the bloodied Spanish sword he jabbed into the air. He wore the grand, red-feathered headdress of their chief. Salvatierra translated his words. “We followed the demon to defend his new empire. We waited to hear from the Almighty God of his golden Breastplate and the Tear of the Moon Emerald. The demon Contreras promised the elixir for our families to cure them when they became sickened with the madness. He, like all Spaniards, only speaks the lies of a snake. He has killed our hearts.”
Diaz grabbed the shaman who had guided them here. He pressed the point of his sword against the shaman’s throat. “Tell them I will kill their holy man if they attack us.”
The chief gestured toward the entrance, his expression grim. Salvatierra’s throat grew dry as he translated. “Enter the temple of the demon’s empire,” he said. “Find your tribe in the demon’s belly.”
The shaman spoke, his voice calm, unequivocal.
“The tribesmen will not attack,” Salvatierra translated. “They want us to take the devil, Contreras, from their midst. If they kill the Spanish demon here, his spirit will lay ruin to their land.” The shaman’s gaze turned to Salvatierra. “But we must not take the golden Breastplate. They will never let its power destroy others as it has destroyed them.”
Diaz turned and advanced toward the entrance into the pyramid, pulling the shaman with him.
Salvatierra crouched as he entered the dark, dank tunnel behind Diaz’s men. His shoulders brushed against the rough, stone walls. The men were swallowed into the belly of a beast which emitted an unholy odor that reeked like the breath of Satan.
“I smell blood,” Diaz called back, recognizing the coppery stink. “Act quickly to kill all but Contreras. They think they have us at a disadvantage, forcing us to enter single file. We will show them how men fight.”
The earth shook them with a sudden lurch. Salvatierra fell to one knee. He foolishly covered his head with his arm. The weight of the temple above him would surely crush him if it collapsed. The men rushed forward. They funneled into an inner chamber, their battle cries wrenching the space as they attacked. But, as Salvatierra emerged into the chamber, he saw that the battle had already been waged.
Salvatierra covered his mouth with his hand but the stench of stone dust and death lay thick in his throat. Contreras’s men, all, were beheaded. Their dismembered bodies bristled with dozens of poison blow darts. They lay strewn about like flotsam. Their decapitated heads, with eyes pried open wide with terror, lay piled in a ghastly pyramid, an echo of the stone temple which had become not their treasure house, but their tomb.
Contreras stood before them, arms outstretched. A shaft of sunlight speared him from a hole carved from the ceiling, as if God had thrust down his judgment. It shone upon a man red with other men’s blood smeared upon his body. It shone upon a face mad with evil. It shone upon the magnificent golden Breastplate.
Salvatierra fell to his knees. Blinded by the Breastplate’s brilliance, he could not look away. “Lord, come to me in this den of evil,” he prayed. “Speak to me through the stones for I fear what I must do.”
The twelve sacred gemstones emblazoned the Breastplate, three across, four down. The sapphire, once worn by Saint Edward, encompassed the totality of blue in the heavens. Babur’s Diamond sparkled with the brilliance of all the stars that shine on a cloudless night. The red of the ruby known as Urim was the sunset, the golden topaz of its partner Thummim, the dawn. In the center, it was as if the eye of God watched through the green cat’s eye Emerald the natives named the Tear of the Moon. The Turquoise nearly sang of Turkish armies vanquished long ago. The jacinth glowed as if it imprisoned the flames of hell. The agate, amethyst, beryl, onyx and jasper—all magnificent, radiant.
Even as Salvatierra was sickened, elation seized him at seeing the Breastplate. This was indeed the sacred Breastplate of Aaron, thought lost long ago in the fall of the Temple of Solomon. The power to communicate with God lay within his grasp.
“In God’s name, Captain Diaz,” said Salvatierra. “Do your duty.” The yearning to hold the Breastplate was unbearable.
“In the name of His Majesty King Phillip the second,” said Diaz, the words strong but his voice dry and weak. “I arrest you, Alvaro Contreras, for treason. You will surrender all bounty and you will return to Spain in chains aboard the Espiritu Santo to stand trial for treason.” The crew’s eyes revealed their desire to seize the traitor, but their revulsion held them in check.
Contreras raised his bloodstained hand. It held his Bible. He pointed it to a dark recess of the chamber and the entrance of a passageway carved through the canyon wall. Salvatierra could see the wink of gold, silver and Emeralds in the torchlit cavity at its end. The chamber they were in, but for this side tunnel to the treasure room and the passage back to the clearing, was a dead end. If the temple had been a portal to a Garden of Eden and a river of life, or to a hell beyond imagining, a wall now blocked them from it.
The men, giddy with the thought of treasure, or simply desperate to escape this horrid tomb, raced down the stone passageway to the treasure. Salvatierra could hear their cheers, and the captain’s voice. “We are rich, men,” his voice echoed. “This bounty will fill the coffers of the San Salvador.” It was his flagship, sister ship to the Espiritu Santo.
Only Elias and the shaman stayed behind with Salvatierra, Contreras, and the corpses. “Remove the Breastplate,” Salvatierra said to Contreras, “and give it to me.” Even he dared not approach the madman.
Contreras merely smiled.
Elias targeted him with his blunderbuss. “Do what the Father says.”
Contreras removed the Breastplate. He flung it away. It landed on the pile of lifeless heads with a sickening clank, toppling over the topmost head, sending it tumbling to the dirt floor. Contreras laughed.
Salvatierra raced to the Breastplate, holding back the bile as he lifted it, the metal warmed from the sunbeam and heavy in his hands. The wonder of the stones chased away earthly sickness. They were magnificent, but more. God forgive his unworthiness, he could feel their power.
Contreras’s cackle faded and he spoke. “Go ahead, priest,” he said. “Put it on. Wear the Breastplate of Aaron and become one with the Lord.”
His heart pounded, his lungs felt as though they were being crushed. He focused on his dream, a message sent from the Lord. “I must destroy it,” he said. Hot tears stung his eyes. A sharp buzzing pierced his ears.
“Destroy it? You would not dare commit such heresy!” Contreras advanced, pointing his Bible at Salvatierra like a deadly weapon. “The Breastplate is the work of God! With it, we can do more than save the souls of this savage land. We can save the world.”
“I saw the villages.” Salvatierra could not t
ake his eyes off of the Breastplate, but in his mind he conjured the image of the young mother murdering her baby. “In the hands of man, it can annihilate the world.”
“As after the great flood, the world will be born again,” Contreras said. “The gems of the Breastplate reveal the secret to my domination.” He pointed to the vast stone wall before him. “Don the Breastplate. Stand upon this platform. Call God’s light to shine upon you. You will hold the powers of the Heavens in the palm of your hand.”
The stream of sunlight piercing the chamber had shifted as the sun traversed the sky above. Its outer edge shone now on the grisly pile of disembodied heads, glinting on the gold earring of one man, and in the vacant blue eye of another. “I know the will of God.”
“Heretic! I have worn the Breastplate. I have spoken to God. He told me you were coming. I know you made a promise to the pope. You vowed to return the Breastplate of Aaron to a Christian land, to the Vatican.”
“Murderer, you cannot tell me of priestly vows.”
“The inquisitors will flail you alive if you defy the Vatican and destroy the Breastplate.”
Salvatierra snatched a knife from the scabbard of the headless body next to him. He could feel his will weakening. He had to act now. He pried the sardius, known as Urim, and the topaz, known as Thummim, from the Breastplate and stuffed the gems into his satchel.
The Seventh Stone Page 5