The Staff of Moses (Oliver Lucas Adventures)

by Andrew Linke

  Her daughter translated, “It will be long before I know how to feel about this day. I will continue to tell the story of Sephor’s folly to my people until my dying day, and hope that my daughter and her daughter will continue after I am gone. But that is for the future, and it does not concern an outsider such as you. What does concern you is the evil you have brought upon your friend, and the Temple of the Staff. We will speak more of this at dawn tomorrow, when new light brings with it the hope of a better day than this.”

  As soon as Duha stopped speaking her translation, the Elder Layla put her hand on the table and levered herself out of the tattered rattan seat. She turned her back on the three people still seated around the table and tottered through a curtained doorway into the back of the house.

  They sat in silence for a while, each pondering the story that the women had told in their own way. Oliver did his best to stifle a yawn, then stood and stretched his aching muscles. “If I’m to remain in your house, I should probably wash up. It’s been a rough day.”

  Hadiya looked up from the apple core she had been fiddling with and said, “I’ll show you to the bathroom.” She tossed the core into an earthenware bowl on the counter and moved to the curtained doorway.

  Oliver grabbed his backpack and followed her through the curtain into a narrow hall. Framed family photos hung on the wall, dimly illuminated by an old metal lamp with a scrollwork shade resting on a small wooden table.

  Hadiya paused before a door and said, “This is the bathroom. Don’t be shy about using water for a bath, this village has deep wells and a stream, so we never lack for water. Do try and be sparing with the hot water though. It has to warm in a tank on the roof and my father will still need some when he comes home. There’s a towel for you on the toilet seat.”

  Oliver thanked Hadiya and pushed the door open into a cramped bathroom. An enameled iron bathtub with a roundabout shower curtain occupied half the space of the room. A toilet and wash basin stood opposite to each other beside the tub. An old mirror, the silvering chipped away at the edges, was affixed to the wall over the basin.

  Oliver closed the door and set his bag down. He stepped up to the basin and looked into the mirror, examining his reflection with interest. It had been four days since he had last shaved and the red stubble was coming in thick on his face and neck. He had a bruise over his left eye, which he supposed he had gotten when he was knocked out, or while tumbling to get to cover when Frank had shot at him just a few hours ago. Oliver stripped off his shirt and pants and examined the fresh bruises on his sides and stomach from when Rais had kicked him. He probed the bruises, grimacing at the pain but not crying out, feeling for broken bones or the deep ache of organ damage. His ribs hurt like hell, but he was fairly certain that there was no true damage.

  Oliver filled the tub with cold water and slipped into it. The icy water felt good on his skin and slowly numbed his aches as he willed his muscles to relax. After resting for about five minutes he sat up and began scrubbing away the sweat and grime of the day. He repeatedly plunged his head under the water and massaged at his scalp, but was still picking grains of sand out of his hair as he toweled himself dry and dressed in his one set of spare clothes. He squirreled away his dirty clothes in a zipped plastic bag in his backpack.

  Clean, freshly dressed, and feeling a little more alive than he had fifteen minutes previous, Oliver pulled on his vest and unzipped the hidden phone pocket. He clearly wasn’t a prisoner, wasn’t about to be executed or coerced to reveal any information, but he didn’t know how these people would take to him telling others about their hidden oasis, so he hadn’t checked his phone for several hours. He unlocked the phone and saw several messages from Amber waiting in his Twitter client:

  Checking Leonidas from this end. Be safe.

  This was followed an hour later by another message.

  Leonidas is bad news. Get out if you can. Putting your dad on Senator, but risky.

  “Great.” Oliver muttered to himself. The last thing he wanted was for his father to get involved in this whole mess. It wasn’t that Oliver mistrusted his father, but applying pressure to Senator Wheeler and the Leonidas Security leadership might have unpredictable results. If Kyle was to be believed, the mercenaries and Rais Karim had pursued Oliver and Diana precisely because the Senator had tracked down their employer and started applying pressure for them to retrieve the staff.

  He selected Amber’s most recent message and tapped the reply icon.

  In the clear for now, but Leonidas still has Diana. Going to try and rescue her in next 24 hours. Leonidas team led by a Kyle Sanders. Includes a Frank.

  He paused for a moment, then added.

  Thanks. You and dad be careful, mercs came after us because of pressure from Wheeler.

  He locked the phone and slipped it back into the hidden pocket in his vest.

  Oliver emerged from the bathroom dressed much as he had been before, with the exception that his clothes were no longer stained with blood and dirt. He found Hadiya and Duha in the kitchen, busily chopping vegetables with large, extremely sharp looking knives. A pan on the stove splattered cheerily and gave off the aroma of browning lamb meat. At the table sat a large man dressed in canvas pants and a light cotton shirt with long sleeves. The naturally tan skin of his face and hands had been tanned a deeper brown by long days spent working in the sun. He looked up from a laptop computer that sat on the table before him as Oliver entered the room.

  “You must be Oliver Lucas.” He said to Oliver in Arabic.

  He rose from his seat and shook Oliver’s hand. “Welcome to my house. I am Mahir, husband of one of these women, father of the other, and all-around problem solver in this little village.”

  Oliver smiled at Mahir, already getting a sense that he liked the man. “Yes, I am Oliver. Your daughter and the Elder Layla found me in the desert this afternoon and rescued me. Elder Layla said she has a task for me to perform, so I thank you for letting me stay the night.”

  Mahir nodded gravely. “Yes. My wife told me of Elder Layla’s plans for you. I don’t envy the journey you are about to undertake, but if half of what Hadiya tells me of your exploits today is true, you might just survive this.”

  “That’s my goal.”

  “They tell me you have photographs of the estate. May we see them? My wife and her ancestors have never set foot beyond the walls in all the years they worshiped there.”

  Oliver nodded and pulled the camera out of his bag. “Yes, I have many photos. Can we load them onto your computer?”

  Mahir nodded, so Oliver ejected the memory card from his camera and passed it to the man. The transfer took only a few moments, during which Oliver explained how he and Diana had come to explore the estate. Once all of the photographs had transferred, Oliver put the memory card into a plastic case and slipped it into a vest pocket. Mahir turned his laptop so that the women could see the screen while they cooked, and for the next hour Oliver took the family on a tour of the estate that they had guarded, but never entered, for a hundred generations.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Oliver woke the next morning with the rich smell of coffee filling his nostrils. He opened his eyes in the dim light of the common room and rolled over, being careful to not fall off the sofa as he did so. Every muscle in his left side flared to a fiery wakefulness, reminding him of yesterday’s events. His eyes fell upon a large mug resting on the table, filled to the brim with a dark brown liquid. He glanced around, but didn’t see anybody else in the sitting area or the kitchen.

  He swung his legs down to the floor and leaned on his knees for a moment, waiting until the pain subsided into a dull ache, then dropped to the floor and did several pushups. The pain returned, but he pushed through it and kept moving until his arms pumped his body fluidly up and down. He rolled to his feet, wincing as his bruised muscles and organs screamed at the sudden movement. Oliver knew he didn’t have any broken bones, but the damage he had sustained yesterday would take at least a week to f
ully heal.

  Oliver sat down on the sofa and pulled on his shirt. He picked up the thick brew and sipped at it experimentally. The liquid was as thick as heavy cream and far stronger than normal coffee. It left a slightly gritty feeling on his tongue, but it was so sweet that he couldn’t help but keep drinking it. He sat on the sofa for a few more minutes, mulling over the events of the previous day as the caffeine worked its way into his system.

  He was half way through the mug of coffee when Hadiya pushed through the curtained doorway to the family’s rooms. “Good, you’re awake. I was worried when the noise of making coffee didn’t wake you, but thought the smell of a mug right beside your nose might work.”

  Oliver raised the cup in salute and thanked her, then set it down and began pulling on his boots while Hadiya busied herself at the stove.

  “My mother and father are out refueling the Jeep. When they return we will have breakfast, then I imagine you will be on your way to rescue your partner.”

  Oliver folded the thin blanket that he had slept under and laid it on the arm of the sofa. Then he picked up the cup of coffee and walked to the kitchen table. He watched Hadiya in silence for a moment, sipping his coffee and trying to think of the right words for the question that had been bothering him since Hadiya, her grandmother, and their guards had rescued him yesterday. Finally he said, “Hadiya, I’ve been thinking about this all night. Why didn’t your men just shoot me yesterday?”

  She turned from the counter, still twisting a ball of dough in her hand, and gave him a quizzical look.

  “Not that I don’t appreciate it, but what do you gain by keeping me around? What can I do for you?”

  “I know the reason, but it is my grandmother’s place to tell you, not mine. Now go get washed up for breakfast.”

  Oliver watched as she turned back to the counter and tossed the flattened disk of bread onto an oiled cast iron skillet. He drained his coffee mug and set it on the table, then slipped through the curtain into the bathroom.

  When he returned he found the Elder Layla sitting in her chair at the table, her hands resting on a wooden box that was polished to such a sheen that it seemed to glow softly in the growing light of the morning sun. Taking his seat at the table across from the old woman, Oliver could smell the rich scent of olive wood that that been preserved by frequent polishing with a rag soaked in olive oil. The light was too dim for him to make out the precise nature of the inscriptions on the box, but he could see the vague outline of several hieroglyphs running across the side of the box facing him.

  “Good morning, Elder Layla.”

  The old woman nodded and replied in her own tongue.

  Hadiya translated, without looking away from the stove, “Good morning, Oliver. Are you prepared for the journey that awaits you?”

  “I think I am, but I don’t know the nature of the journey. Where do I go? How will I save my friend?”

  Elder Layla didn’t reply for a moment. Her hands caressed the box on the table, crooked fingers slipping into the groves of the engraved hieroglyphs and tracing their outlines. She seemed to look past Oliver and into some distant place that only she knew.

  “I am an old woman. For over seventy years I have served the gods of my ancestors and preserved the sacred memory of Sephor’s folly, as did my mother and grandmother before me, and their mothers before them. As long as I have lived I expected that my daughter and her daughters would do the same. But now...” She hesitated long enough that Hadiya was forced to pause in her translation and wait for her to continue. She sighed deeply and said, “Now I am unsure what we will do. Sephor has been destroyed and violent men are moving to desecrate the temple that holds the rod of power.

  “The men who attacked you are not the first to have sought to take this relic. Seven generations ago a party of French soldiers came upon our village as they explored the land. My ancestors said little to them and they were soon gone, but not before the rebellious son of the Elder, bored with his simple life in this peaceful place, offered to show them the sacred canyon in exchange for a commission into the army. He went away with them, only to return a month later bearing a tale of woe.

  “The boy had led the soldiers to the sacred canyon and told their leader, a lieutenant, of two relics said to be hidden in the chapel. They did not destroy Sephor, but they managed to capture the guide stone and the key. The lieutenant was furious with the boy because several of his men had died in the assault, but the boy pled for his life and showed the lieutenant how to use the guide stone to find the Temple of the Staff. He then guided them to the temple and helped them to gain entry. Soon after they entered the temple, they were driven off by the powers that guard that temple. The soldiers who still lived retreated to the north, never to return, while the rebellious boy retrieved the relics from the corpse of the lieutenant and journeyed back to this village.”

  Elder Layla stopped speaking and caressed the box in her hands. Oliver nodded slowly, the realization dawning that the box must contain the guide stone and key. That would explain why the French soldiers had attacked the chapel in Sephor’s estate, but not made any effort to loot the riches of the main house. He recalled the layout of the inner sanctum, where he and Diana had puzzled over the two empty niches in the side walls of the chamber. Those must have been where the guide stone and key had rested until they were stolen by the French soldiers.

  He stood then and retrieved his camera from the backpack resting beside the sofa. He pulled a chair up beside Elder Layla and switched the camera into review mode, loading up the images of the inner sanctum from its memory card.

  “Hadiya, could you explain to your grandmother that these are photographs I took in the chapel. She didn’t see them last night.”

  Hadiya set her cooking aside and came to stand behind Elder Layla. She spoke softly to her grandmother, translating as Oliver flipped between photos and pointed to parts of the inner sanctum that seemed relevant to the story she had just related. He showed her the bodies of the French soldiers and the remains of Sephor. At the sight of her destroyed ancestor, the old woman began whispering to herself. Hadiya explained to Oliver that her grandmother was praying for the soul of the ancient warrior, freed from torment after so many years. When she grew silent, he flipped to another photo and pointed out the empty niches in the inner sanctum of the temple. He zoomed the image in close enough that Elder Layla could inspect the inscriptions around each niche. The old woman’s eyes lit up as she gestured between the screen of the camera and the box on the table. The inscriptions were remarkably similar. Then Oliver flipped to a photo of the roughly carved inscription.

  Layla studied the photo of the inscription intently, asking Oliver to zoom in on several portions in turn. Finally she spoke, almost in a whisper. Hadiya translated, “You must leave as soon as my parents return with the car. I will pack supplies for you.”

  “I am eager to rescue my friend, but why is your grandmother in such a rush all of a sudden?”

  The old priestess did not reply to Oliver’s question. Instead she began speaking rapidly to her granddaughter. Hadiya pulled a pad of paper from a drawer and began writing as quickly as she could, occasionally interrupting the old woman, apparently insisting that she repeat herself. Oliver watched in silence, waiting for an explanation. After several minutes Hadiya stopped writing. She tore off the paper and folded it up, then handed it to Oliver.

  “This is a rough translation of the instructions that Sephor scratched into the wall. He was furious that his relics had been stolen, but was unable to pursue the thieves because of the magic that bound him to the chapel, so he left instructions for his descendants to find the temple and retrieve the staff if the soldiers hadn’t already taken it.”

  Oliver made to unfold the paper and read the instructions, but Elder Layla laid a hand on his and shook her head. She motioned for him to put the paper in one of the pockets of his vest. Confused, he did as she told him.

  Elder Layla turned to the olive wood box on the table
and rested her worn hands on it. She breathed a few words in what Oliver assumed to be a prayer, then lifted the top of the box. The top half slid smoothly apart from the bottom, revealing a piece of crumbling parchment inscribed with hieratic script atop the thick folds of a finely woven white linen cloth. She set the lid of the box on the table and paused for a moment to whisper a few more words. Then she tenderly moved the parchment aside and laid it atop the lid. With one more murmured prayer she lifted the linen cloth.

  Underneath, two objects rested in gentle indentations they had made in another linen cloth. One was a oval disc of alabaster stone about the size of Oliver’s palm with a large hole bored through the center. Within this hole was set a large fleck of mica. Carved inscriptions in hieratic and, to Oliver’s surprise, a script that reminded him of ancient Hebrew surrounded the hole on one side. The other was a pyramid of polished brass, about an inch to a side, with fine lines of hieratic script scribed into each surface.

  “These are the guide stone and key that were stolen from the chapel of Sephor by the French soldiers. With these you will be able to find the temple of the staff and open its outer gates. After that, you must follow your heart and heed the instructions that my granddaughter has written for you. I pray that you will reach the temple in time to save your friend.”

  Elder Layla lifted the brass pyramid from the box and handed it to Oliver. It was still cold with the night’s chill and felt heavy for its size. At Layla’s prompting, Oliver slipped the pyramid into a zippered pocket on the front of his vest, pulling out the spare camera battery he normally kept there and dropping that to the tabletop. She then handed him the guide stone and pantomimed holding it up and looking around.

  Oliver held the guide stone up to his right eye and looked through it. At first he saw nothing unusual. The fleck of mica set into the hole was clear enough for him to see through, but it distorted the image enough that he had trouble making out the features of the women in the room with him. He turned his head from side to side as Layla had shown him and was about to set the stone down when he noticed something strange. When he turned his head to the right, Oliver could just see a faint reddish orange glow at the edge of the mica fleck. He initially wrote it off as the sun rising outside the front window of the house, but then he realized he was sitting with the window to his left.