by D. J. Niko
“No one is on this side of the compound. The monks sleep elsewhere. We take oaths of celibacy, and …”
Sarah spared him the awkward speech and threw her backpack on the cot. “This will be just fine. You are very generous to allow me to stay here as your guest.”
“You have brought us something important to our faith. You were sent by God. For this you are most welcome.”
The next day, Sarah met the church’s leading scholar. Father Giorgis had described Brother Apostolos as a gifted linguist and a man of unwavering piety. Because of his flawless character, Apostolos had been selected above all other monks to guard the stone.
When she saw him in the courtyard, Sarah recognized him immediately. He was a diminutive young man whose eyes radiated serenity, but his prematurely furrowed face suggested a life of trials and sorrows. Bony fingers and delicate wrists protruded from the white robes draped several times around his slight body, covering everything except his face and hands. In one fist he carried a staff topped with a wooden cross and in the other a red umbrella with tattered yellow fringe. The monk treaded lightly on the ground, almost floating above it. He was so delicate it seemed a swift breeze could have carried him upward.
He stopped within ten feet of her and spoke softly in Amharic, eyes fixed on the ground. “Father Giorgis sent for me.” His speech was as spare as his appearance.
Sarah sensed a great distance between them, both physical and psychic. Still, she was intrigued by the fragile creature to whom something so grave had been entrusted. “I have come for the stone,” she replied in his native language.
“I speak English,” he said, still avoiding her eyes. Father Giorgis had said Apostolos had devoted his life since boyhood to the study of obscure dialects and ancient tongues, but he’d mentioned nothing about English. She was relieved that they could communicate in her mother tongue, even though communicating didn’t seem to be his forte.
Apostolos started toward the entrance to the labyrinth.
Sarah followed, determined this time to make some sense of the twists of the maze. In an attempt to commit the route to memory, she counted the corridors before each turn but couldn’t keep track of the many detours. Using her archaeologist’s instinct, she tried instead to find landmarks: a groove in the stone, patterns in the soot left behind by the torches, anything. Finally, she turned to her own finely tuned senses. As the corridors got narrower and darker, the scant air smelled of ash. She knew the sensation well: they were venturing deep into the darkness of the granite mountain. The chamber closed in around them like a sepulcher, the damp coolness radiating from the stone.
Without warning, her silent guide stopped and fumbled in the dark corner for a lantern, igniting it with an old Bic lighter. The anemic flame cast a golden halo around him, and he looked like one of the saints in the old Coptic icons.
He walked forward into a round vestibule with three heavily carved wooden doors. He chose the one on the right and inserted an iron object shaped like a horseshoe into two notches until the object became a handle, which he turned. The heavy gate groaned as he pulled it toward him. He held the lantern in front of him, faintly illuminating the contents of the chamber. “This is what you seek. The Sheba Stone.”
For a few seconds, Sarah forgot to breathe. Her eyes were riveted to the enormous stele inscribed with linguistic characters completely foreign to her. In her years as an archaeologist she had been in the presence of many monuments, but this was quite extraordinary. It was the single missing link to so many of antiquity’s mysteries. Her heart leapt. She had made the right move to come here. In a near trance state, as if a different force were willing her, she walked to the monolith and instinctively raised her hand to touch it.
“Stop!” The monk’s clear, loud voice seemed out of character for his gentle nature.
She remained motionless, like a child who had just been admonished by a strict parent.
“I’m sorry,” Apostolos said, his voice soft again. “Human hands must never touch the stone. It is sacred.” He fixed his gaze on hers.
For the first time, she noticed the monk’s emerald-green eyes, which sparkled with the intensity of the gem itself. The words he spoke next rattled her.
“It will help you only if you have faith. If you do not, it will destroy you.”
Ten
Gabriel and Hairan squatted shoulder to shoulder in front of the cooking fire as the mud-brown brew simmered in the iron cauldron. The steam rising from the pot carried a medicinal smell to Gabriel’s nose, his cue that the potion was done. He dipped a clay spoon into the pot and brought a sample to his chapped lips.
“It is finished, Shaykh,” he said in perfect Bedouin patois, which he had mastered after years in the desert.
The chief squinted his raven eyes and nodded his satisfaction. “Very good, Abyan. You are ready.”
“I’ve been studying under you for many years. It’s about time, don’t you think?” Gabriel put an arm around his mentor and friend, and the two men roared with laughter. Then the chief’s young apprentice poured some of the tea into a stone bowl, added a few drops of camel’s milk, and walked out of the tent.
It was to be his first test as a novice apothecary. A young girl had developed a nasty case of chickenpox— or birdworm, as the Bedouins called it—with a fever and spots covering ninety percent of her tiny body. She had scratched the spots so much that they had suppurated, making her look like a leper. As a result, the parents had tied the girl’s hands with camel-hair rope, which had left her wrists raw and bloody. There was no question the child was suffering.
Gabriel dabbed her open welts with lemon balm, which soothed the itch and pain almost immediately. He bade her drink his special concoction, a tea of rosemary, licorice, and hyssop meant to treat her fever.
He turned to her parents. “When the Evenstar appears in the sky, she will be better. But she must stay in the tent until her sores disappear.”
The mother looked puzzled. “But she has chores. She must tend to them.”
“Any child with birdworm must remain in isolation. She must particularly avoid the pregnant women of the tribe. If she were to touch one, that woman could lose her baby or even her life.”
“How do you know this?”
Gabriel could not speak of scientific proof, for it was a foreign concept to these people. He could only tell stories or conjure images and hope they could somehow relate. “Do you remember two years ago when Mehoud’s bride, Mela, died suddenly in her sixth month of pregnancy?”
The young couple nodded in unison.
“Mela’s son had birdworm, and he infected her. I saw Mela’s body after she died. There were sores inside her mouth. Like these.” He opened their daughter’s mouth and motioned to them to look inside.
The mother looked alarmed. “Will our girl die?”
Gabriel smiled and tousled the child’s hair. “No, my friends. Children are very resilient. But you must do as I say to keep others out of danger.”
It didn’t take long before the knowledge Gabriel had imparted to the young couple reached all the goums. That night after supper, the tribesmen showed their appreciation for Gabriel’s lifesaving revelation with a fire circle in his honor. Telling stories by the fire was one of the most sacred activities to the desert dwellers, reserved for nights of celebration and tribute. Gabriel knew how important this rite was, and he felt humbled to be at the center of it. In the six years he’d spent among the Bedouins, a fire circle had never been dedicated to one man. He felt the simple people’s appreciation and respect in the depths of his being and was grateful.
The drummer pounded a soft beat on a square goatskin drum painted with stars and moons to symbolize the night, for playing the storyteller’s drum was strictly a nighttime ritual. Anyone who had a story to share was draped with the ceremonial blanket and given eager audience.
A beautiful young woman named Banu shared a story about the scorpion and the elephant. She had told it before, and the childre
n whooped with delight when she started. As she went on about the scorpion king who was outwitted by a cunning baby elephant, Gabriel found his thoughts traveling to another realm.
Mesmerized by Banu’s silken black locks and café au lait eyes sparkling by the firelight, he thought of the woman he loved. Calcedony. Speaking her name was like tasting honey. In his battered mind, she was the most splendid creature walking the planet. It had been long years since he’d last seen her, but his memory of her burned like the Bedouin fires: her hair falling around her face like ribbons of black satin; her slender, sharply angled nose; those eyes, the clearest sapphires suspended in almond-shaped pools; her laughter as playful as a child’s.
He still remembered the day they’d met, though it seemed several lifetimes had passed since. They were in the isles of Greece one summer. It had been raining, a freak storm from out of nowhere. Quite happily she stood in the warm downpour. While everyone else sought cover under the eaves of the ancient stone houses, she walked along the cobbled path she’d chosen. Gabriel was so taken by the metaphor in that lyrical moment he felt compelled to approach her. There he stood, next to her in the drizzle, his heart singing with the freedom he felt in that fleeting moment. They spent the rest of the summer together, frolicking in the Mediterranean, debating the true meaning of the word love in Plato’s Symposium, drinking wine out of a copper jug, growing into passionate lovers. As autumn’s first breaths cooled the air, he asked Calced-ony to warm him that winter and every winter of his life. She followed him home, and they built a life that lasted almost seven years, until the fateful day when all their dreams were swallowed by an impenetrable cloud of smoke.
As Banu’s story came to an end, Gabriel felt a dull ache in his bones. No matter how he tried to change his life, to tell himself he had found his place in this strange new world, the plain truth was that he lamented the loss of everything he’d held dear. More than anything, he missed Calcedony—her abandon, the way she could cut through the nonsense to find truth, her calm and peaceful spirit even in the face of a thousand sorrows.
And he missed their son. The pain of that loss had a relentless grip on his heart. Many nights he sat awake, tormented by the tiny laughter of the boy in whom he had placed all his faith for the future. Other nights the boy would come to Gabriel in his dreams, as alive as if he had never died in the fire. Those nights he woke to the sound of his own sobbing, cursing the weakness that would not relinquish him from his grief.
“Abyan’s turn … Abyan’s turn,” exclaimed Banu, laughing as she draped Gabriel with the ceremonial blanket. Everyone, young and old, cheered wildly. In all those years, the pale stranger had never told a story in the fire circle. Now that his language skills had come along, it was time for his debut. He didn’t fight being the center of attention, as he had during his early days with the tribe. He felt less self-conscious now, less like an outsider. He puffed on his pipe, which he’d kept all those years since Da’ud’s death and which had become almost an extension of his being. He brushed the tangles of long, wavy hair away from his face so that the children could see his expressions, paramount to the art of storytelling, and began.
“This is a story about the tree of life. It was a lone tree in the middle of the desert, with a trunk the size of a camel’s hump and more branches than a palm tree has dates. Its leaves were shiny green and leathery as Hairan’s skin.” He reveled in the nomads’ innocent laughter at his joke. At long last, he shared their humor, which made him feel more connected to them. He waited for the laughter to subside. “This tree bore the most succulent, tastiest fruit known to man. It gave its fruit freely to everyone who passed by, even to the animals and birds, sustaining all life in the desert. It required very little in return. It was nurtured by the sands and the sun and the nutrients in the air and the water from the rains. The scarabs gnawed on its roots, and their saliva became food. The monkeys swinging from its branches fertilized the soil, and their waste became food. The worms slithered on the leaves, and their silk became food. All the creatures worked as one to make sure the tree of life lived on, for it would in turn feed and shelter the others.
“One day, a passing tribe of men came upon the tree and stopped to get their fill of its delicious fruit. As he sat beneath the canopy to avoid the sun, their leader got an idea. Since the tree was so wide and always provided fruit and shade, they would claim it as their own. They could slaughter the animals that frolicked in its branches for food. They could make wine out of its flowers. They could puncture its trunk and let the water run so they would never thirst. Why should they take the long road across the desert, always searching for food and water, when everything they needed was right there? They decided to colonize the tree of life.
“Years passed. The tribe still lived under the shade of the tree, only they had created an entire village. They stopped dwelling in the desert because it was so much easier to take from the tree. Every winter, they would cut more and more of its living branches so they could make fires. They plucked the leaves and used them to make roofs for their houses. In the summer, when the air was hot and the creatures were thirsty, they made gash after gash in the trunk so they could extract every drop of water. Each spring, they would pick all the fruit to sell to passersby, instead of letting them take what they needed as they had always done in the past. That way they amassed chickens and goats and oranges and grain. They were rich and fat and had everything they ever needed, even bird’s milk. But one day the sun burned hotter than any other. In all their years dwelling in the desert, the tribesmen had never known such heat. It burned hotter every day, as if the sun were coming down from the sky and scorching them with its rays. The branches had been plucked of their leaves, so the tree could not provide shade. Without shade, the ground grew so hot the water beneath the tree’s roots dried up. The tree could no longer make fruit or provide water for the tribe. Its branches became the color of ash. Its trunk withered. Livestock perished. Locusts swept in and ravaged the tribe’s grain reserves. The people died of thirst and hunger. And still the heat would not relent. It got so bad the tree of life, dry and barren as it was, caught fire. The tribesmen panicked. They scattered like ants in a flood, leaving the tree to burn to the ground. They disappeared in the heat waves of a mirage and were never seen again. And the tree and all the creatures it sheltered and sustained were no more.”
Without the traditional Western expectation of a happy ending, the Bedouins cheered for Gabriel. He could tell it wasn’t the story itself they liked but rather the telling of it. To his delight, he had kept them engaged and, when he’d occasionally flubbed up a word, amused.
They pushed and taunted him in a loving, playful way, and Gabriel reciprocated in a show of appreciation and acceptance. As the frolicking quieted down, he noticed Hairan in the distance, sitting alone and silently observing the spectacle with a smile.
If only the old man knew how much he’d taught his young acolyte.
The night before the tribe reached the camel festival, spirits were high. The goums had been traveling for several fortnights to reach Ubar, where tribes from all corners of the Syro-Arabian Desert gathered once a year to trade their animals and goods. Gabriel had heard that Ubar was a prosperous place, the land of milk and honey, full of fascinating strangers with exotic habits. He knew it was a highlight for the Bedouins, the just reward for the hardships they had to endure the rest of the year. They were so close—only a few kilometers away—that Gabriel could practically smell the myrrh and taste the plump dates reportedly lining the streets. In anticipation, the Bedouins sat around the campfire, drumming and toasting with palm wine.
But Gabriel was not in the mood to celebrate. His intuition had been telling him for some time that forces in the universe were stirring. He’d sat in solitude night after night searching for answers. On this night, a full moon floated like gossamer in a filmy sky. An opportunity for enlightenment and change, the Bedouins always said. The prospect filled Gabriel with hope. He was sitting in waking me
ditation, studying the sky and stars for omens, when Hairan approached. Gabriel looked at the old man without any hint of surprise, almost as if he’d been expecting him.
“Come with me, Abyan. It is time.”
Without the desire to know what it was time for, Gabriel followed his teacher to the eastern edge of camp, noting that the choice of location was not random. In the Bedouin tradition, the east was the source of all life and everything sacred. It was also where leaders looked for direction and wise men sought guidance.
Hairan stopped on a sand dune and invited Gabriel to sit opposite him. The shaykh pulled out of his sack a gourd and a mortar. In silence, he removed the top of the gourd and poured a dark liquid onto the sand.
Even by the full moonlight, Gabriel could not recognize the substance, but he was all too familiar with its strong smell. Blood. He hypothesized that it was from an antelope the men had killed for food a few days back, for the Bedouins did not make blood sacrifices. In fact, in all the years he had traveled with the tribe, he had never seen blood used—not in daily life, not in ceremony. His logic told him he should be uneasy, but his heart was surprisingly calm. He trusted these people, trusted Hairan. Whatever was about to happen, he accepted as part of the order.
Hairan kneaded the blood into the sand, making a thick paste. Chanting softly in a tongue Gabriel could not comprehend, the old man smeared the paste over Gabriel’s eyes, then his own. With all thoughts of the West tucked in some inaccessible corner of his mind, Gabriel surrendered to the rite. The night wasn’t cold, but his skin was like goose flesh and he trembled. He could feel his forehead, now beset with the lines of hardship and advancing age, tighten as he tried to concentrate. The sweet, sharp smell of burning resin crystals filled the air. The smoke was thick, heavy. Gabriel let it fill his nose, his lungs. He felt weightless. The chill on his skin was replaced with a flush that warmed his face and weighed down his eyes. He began to drift, though not quite to sleep. It was a state he had never entered before. His mind’s eye was a gray screen, a hollow womb.