by Joanne Pence
“Don't ask, Michael. Just don't ask. Let's get this show on the road so we can all get out of here.”
Some kind of resin sealed the lid. They pried it off with knives.
Saffron-colored silk, faded and dry, covered the inside. Michael attempted to lift it, but it turned to dust in his hands.
Underneath he found a second large chest surrounded by lacquered bowls and porcelain figurines of tigers and bears. Old, but crude and not remarkable by any means.
In the early Han period, wealthy Chinese often used a two-layered coffin system with an inner and outer receptacle. The inner container would be painted and lacquered with scenes of heaven including spirits and strange animals.
Batbaatar lowered himself half way down the ladder. “You must come now,” he shouted excitedly. “Sand is already falling into the first chamber. It will be all we can do to get back to the gers.”
“Two more minutes,” Michael said, as he and Acemgul studied the second box. Made of teak, floral designs were carved into it. They decided against attempting to lift it out and instead pried off the lid. Inside, they found yet a third chest, also teak, about five feet long and two and a half feet wide.
“Is this a joke?” Michael muttered.
Batbaatar climbed down the rest of the way. “What's keeping you?”
“This might be like one of those Russian nesting dolls.” Michael waved his hand dismissively at the find. “One chest inside the other until you get to the last one which doesn't open or is empty.”
The wind whistled ominously.
“Empty? You're risking your life, and ours, for an empty crate?” Batbaatar gazed longingly back at the ladder, but didn't go toward it.
“We don't know for sure it's empty,” Jianjun said, defending his boss and friend. “That's why we've got to see what's here. The storm will bury all this. If it’s as worthless as the first coffin, we can let it stay buried and go home.”
“Someone or something doesn't want us here,” Acemgul murmured. His eyes lifted to the ceiling, to the opening that could lead them out of this tomb.
Michael peered closer. “There's a design on the chest.”
The design had faded over the years, but they could make out two overlapping triangles with two veed lines and a circle in the center. It wasn't carved, but appeared to have been painted in red dye:
“What does it mean?” Jianjun asked.
“It’s not a symbol I recognize,” Michael replied. Batbaatar and Acemgul were similarly mystified.
Michael attempted to force open the third chest the way he had the earlier two. It didn't work. Some kind of wax or substance that hardened to a granite-like consistency hermetically sealed it.
The howl of the wind grew loud and commanding.
Opening the last chest was taking too long. Batbaatar and Jianjun grew more nervous. Acemgul prepared to take a crowbar to it when Michael raised a hand to stop him. “I've got it.”
It took all four of them to lift off the surprisingly heavy lid.
They gasped in astonishment at the silk banner inside, as bright and soft as the day it was created. Silk paintings often served as burial objects during the Han period.
Against a vermilion background, the scene depicted heaven at the top protected by a dragon, with the sun and a crow on the right, and the moon with a toad and rabbit on the left. In the center, a beautiful woman leaned on a walking stick while three female attendants helped her on her journey upward. Below them, the underworld swirled in darker hues of blue and purple.
On one side near the end of the box lay a piece of paper with a map. They all bent low to study it.
“I am familiar with this,” Batbaatar said with awe on his face. “Our Buddhism comes from Tibet. This type of map gives the dead a means to find their way in the bardo.” He gazed with superiority at Acemgul and explained. “As described in The Book of the Dead, the bardo is the transition period in the afterlife.”
His words confirmed that the chest was a coffin. Acemgul stepped back as he realized what it must contain.
A chill crept along Michael's spine as he proceeded to peel back the silk. Under the banner he found more silk as sheer, fine and soft as if freshly spun.
As he peeled the layers back, a shape began to appear. “It's a woman,” he whispered. “Lady Hsieh. It has to be her. So, she died after all, and her servants hid her body before they fled so her corpse wouldn't be desecrated.”
The sudden pulsating shriek of the wind all but stole his words.
He slowly lowered the last layer. First he saw her hair, as black, shiny and thick as it had been in life, arranged in a high, fashionable style with coils held with combs of gold and rubies.
Next, he saw her face.
She was beautiful with flawless skin, the color of pale ivory, her cheeks lightly rouged as were her lips. A small stone, a deep but brilliant blood red color, lay against those lips, as if she were kissing it.
She wore a dress of pure white silk, delicately embroidered in shades of blue. It skimmed her body showing a slim, youthful figure.
A jade medallion with a gold design in its center of the same interlocking triangles seen on the coffin, had been placed on her chest. His gaze rose again to her face. To see her so perfectly preserved startled him. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
“It's impossible,” Jianjun said. “No way. No way at all.” He had been standing close to the body, but now he eased back.
A sharp metallic clang! made them all jump. The storm, now gathered to an ear-splitting force, had slammed the aluminum ladder from the wall it leaned against onto the opposite side. The noise resounded in the narrow chamber.
Michael ignored the storm. “What process did they use?” he whispered, as much to himself as to Jianjun. “A modern taxidermist can't keep a body so lifelike. No culture has been known to mummify a body so perfectly or so completely.” He turned to Acemgul and Batbaatar. “How can this be, here in the Mongolian desert?”
Just then, the first grains of sand whipped down upon them.
Her face looked bloodless, yet the skin appeared as fresh and natural as if she simply slept. A stray lock of hair touched her cheek—a stubborn lock as if with a will all its own.
Batbaatar ran to the ladder and began to climb up. “We've got to get out! We'll be buried alive!”
Michael stared at the woman. He knew better, but couldn't help himself, and reached out to brush back the lock of hair, his fingers delicately traveling along her face.
Where he touched, the skin felt soft. Warm. His breathing quickened. He lightly pressed down, and when he lifted his fingertips, her skin reformed with the elasticity of living flesh.
Jianjun saw, and Michael heard his sharp intake of breath.
How could she have been preserved this way?
And what...
He bent low and studied the strange red stone over her lips. He had never seen or heard of a stone that particular color in nature, and wondered if it wasn't an alloy of some sort.
More sand fell. The storm had arrived in full, violent fury.
“We can wait no longer,” Acemgul cried. He began to follow Batbaatar out of the pit. “This will be your own tomb if you don't hurry!”
Ignoring the sand and chaos behind him, Michael glanced at Jianjun. Jianjun understood; his shoulders slumped, everything about this felt wrong to him, yet he nodded. “Yes. Yes, of course. You must.”
As the air of the chamber grew thick with sand and dust, Michael kept his hand steady and used only his forefinger and thumb to grip the red stone. He slowly lifted it from the body's mouth.
Then, unable to believe what he saw, he stood mute and frozen in place.
The woman's eyes opened and she looked straight at him.
Chapter 7
Jerusalem
AT THE SOUND OF footsteps running toward her, Charlotte’s uneasiness from earlier in the day combined with her ICE and terrorism training kicked in. She lunged inside Al-Dajani’s building to se
ek a secure position.
Behind her, the guard shouted. Then, a sickening pop, the sound of a silencer on an automatic handgun.
Down the hall she found a narrow side corridor and spun into it. Heart pounding, she slid her hand into her shoulder bag and gripped her Glock.
“What's going on?” Al-Dajani flung open the door of his office at the end of the main hall.
A stranger with frizzy, close cut black hair, an olive complexion, and wearing tan slacks and a black sweater stepped into view. The .357 magnum in his hand looked like a cannon.
With no word, no hint of danger, no warning, he lifted it and fired.
“No!” Charlotte shouted. She pulled the trigger three times in rapid succession, her unsilenced handgun loud and reverberating in the hallway. The stranger fell.
She ran to Al-Dajani. He lay on the floor, the top of his head a gaping black hole of hair, blood, and white matter.
Bile rose in her throat. Unbelieving, her gaze darted over the office where she'd sat with both joy and curiosity that very morning. Blood had splattered over the walls, furniture and floor. Then she turned to the gunman. She'd never shot a man before. Had never killed. Her head swam. Something about him...had she seen him earlier? Near the Wailing Wall? She wasn't sure. But what if she had been followed that day? There was no “if,” she realized. How else could the gunman have been so close behind her when the guard unlocked the door?
If she had acted faster, shot to kill sooner, would her friend still be alive? Had she hesitated? The thought crushed her. If she could have saved Al-Dajani...
A police siren sounded in the distance.
With sudden clarity, she realized she had to get away. To become involved with the Israeli police investigating a triple homicide verged on madness.
The siren grew louder, closer.
On top of Al-Dajani's desk she saw a stack of papers about alchemy.
His words flooded her…alchemy, the American professor, Dennis…and she found herself snatching up the papers, clutching them tight against her chest as if they might contain some answers. As she turned to run from the office, she remembered hearing a slight jingle of keys as Al-Dajani walked. His jacket lay draped over the back of the desk chair, a surprisingly normal and homey touch considering all that had just happened. He had always parked his car in a small lot in the back—a perk for those with offices in this building. She reached in one pocket then the other before she found his keys.
At the door to the office, she checked to be sure there wasn't a second gunman in the hall.
She ran to a stairway then paused, clutching the cold steel of the railing, and listened for footsteps on the staircase. All remained silent. She plunged down.
“What I've found is incredible,” Al-Dajani had said.
He complained about his office being broken into, and feeling he'd been followed. Foolish paranoia, he'd called it. But it wasn't paranoia.
The only thing that connected her and Al-Dajani was the reason he had called her—the subject Dennis investigated before his death. Did that cause Al-Dajani to die?
A thought, unbidden and terrifying, hit her. If someone killed Al-Dajani now because of Dennis’ investigations thirteen years earlier, could Dennis’ death have been—
No! She couldn’t think that. His death was because he’d been in the wrong place…because of bad luck.
Or was it?
Al-Dajani had said she might want to know the truth.
He was right. She did.
As she exited to the street, she pushed the remote, and saw the welcoming flash of the headlights on an older Mercedes.
She got in, and as she started the car, a tall, muscular man, with short blond hair, a thick jaw, ran towards her from the back of a neighboring building. He aimed his gun directly at her.
Chapter 8
Mongolia
THE KARABURAN OR “black hurricane” swept over the desert at one-hundred-twenty miles per hour, burying everything in its path with layers of sand. This one was larger than most, a true Sahara-like sand storm caused when individual particles of sand vibrated and flew upward, and then slammed back to earth. As they repeatedly struck the ground they loosened other particles that did the same thing, causing the storm to grow and revolve, much as an ocean wave churned and swelled as it raced over the water.
Jianjun pulled Michael out of the tomb and forced him to hurry. Above them, the sky had turned a sickly brown. In the distance a wall of dust, sand, and dirt rolled toward the site. It looked as if the entire desert had been lifted up and formed a thick ochre cloud that would smother everything in its wake.
“There's no more you can do now.” Jianjun shouted as the wind grew louder. “You covered the coffin. It survived two thousand years; it can survive a few more days. We'll dig it up again when the storm passes.” He hooked one arm with Michael's, and with the other grabbed Batbaatar's shirt as the Mongolian led them to the jeep, with Acemgul pushing from behind.
“Get in quickly,” Batbaatar begged. He'd seen sand hit so hard it tore the skin off a man, and he wasn't about to get stuck in it, or to let that happen to his boss. Despite himself, he liked the difficult, solitary American, but the man had a death wish.
They jumped onto the jeep. Michael pulled his jacket off and covered his head and face with it. The winds advanced, swirling as if in some wild, syncopated rhythm. Depending on how the sands hit, the entire excavation could be wiped out in an instant, burying Lady Hsieh deep underground once more.
Batbaatar drove as fast as he dared across the desert. The first waves of sand punished the jeep, tossing it about as it struggled forward. Batbaatar used every ounce of strength to control the wheel. Yet, Michael's thoughts remained at the tomb.
Once inside the ger, although the storm shook its ribbed walls, its round construction helped withstand the area’s brutal winds. Two sturdy wooden vertical posts supported the entire structure, while wooden latticework framed the circular walls. Slim poles slanted upward from the walls to form a circle at the center of the roof providing a means to vent the stove. The walls were swathed in layers of thick, natural-colored wool with a top layer of off-white canvas. Overlapping rugs of hides from yak and horses along with richly patterned wool carpets covered the floor and portions of the walls.
Acemgul handed Michael a glass of airag, a sour brew of fermented mare’s milk, and made him drink it straight down. Batbaatar gave each man a bowl of hot tea laced with salt and yak milk in the Mongolian style. Michael didn’t realize his fingertips were nearly frozen from the temperature drop in the sunless sky until he touched the hot bowl.
To forget the sound of the storm, Batbaatar took out his stringed huqin and began to sing traditional melancholy songs of brave deeds of warriors past. Soon, the wind’s howls grew too loud for even that simple pleasure. The temperature plummeted further, and they all burrowed beneath rugs and quilts to stop shivering.
Michael leaned back against a pile of pillows, holding another glass of airag. Candles cast shifting patterns on the ger's walls, suffusing it with a subdued and gentle mood within the raging storm. Michael looked over at Batbaatar and Acemgul, and even Jianjun, all now convivially joking and drinking in this land of no power lines, no fences, not even a road sign.
He felt alone. Again. He shut his eyes, hoping for the relief of sleep.
The winds grew louder, thundering around him.
She opened her eyes and looked straight at me.
Gently, Jianjun lowered the lids, and they had stayed shut.
Her skin had been warm and soft. Jianjun saw that, too. Or had he?
He repeated to himself she was dead, she had to be, and yet…
He tried to convince himself he only wanted to find out how Lady Hsieh’s body could have remained without putrefaction or decomposition for over two thousand years. He knew of a few instances of that happening, but none for that length of time. In the west, Catholics believed the body of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes remained preserved after death
as in life. In Japan, the tooth of the Buddhist monk, Nichiren Daishonen, honored by the Soka Gakkai cult, was said to have a piece of the monk’s gum on it, and that the gum was living flesh.
At the other extreme, the Soviets had tried to preserve Lenin’s body in a glass enclosure, but it rotted away and they had to rebuild him in wax—a sort of Communist homage to Madame Tussaud’s famous museum.
Michael had never heard of an instance of a body of someone who wasn’t a saint or a holy man surviving unblemished. But he had no interest in saints or sinners, no interest in the spiritual or ethereal. Cold, rational science interested him. Or so he tried to persuade himself.
Somehow, he would find a way to sneak Lady Hsieh out of Mongolia. Bribes might help, but somehow, he would succeed. He must.
She wasn’t just a mummified corpse to him, but much more.
He had to find out why.
The winds grew louder, thundering around him.
o0o
Michael left the ger hours later, drunk and miserable, while the others slept. The brunt of the storm had passed, but the night was cold and dark. He wanted the solitude of his own ger.
He paused, needing to think, but the world swayed under his feet and he stumbled forward.
He angled toward his ger.
It was gone. Smashed by sand. Blown away.
His mind couldn’t function. What had he been thinking? He should go back inside. Back to sleep. But not to dream. He hated his dreams.
It must have been the rush of air entering her mouth when I removed the red stone that caused her eyes to open that way. No other rational explanation existed. No rational...
He raked his hands through his hair. Only here, in this quiet loneliness, could he admit what he saw, what had both frightened yet electrified him. When her eyes were open, they were alive. Not the flat, unseeing eyes of the dead, but focused. Warm. They saw him, and somehow formed an unbidden, unimagined connection. They seemed to understand his innermost, darkest, most frightening thoughts.