Resurrection (The Corruption Series Book 4)

by Charles Brett

  Her fix resorted to a layer of the Roman cement, made from volcanic rock and placed to separate the two metals. Stable and strong the pozzolana lay on the tops of the four arches and piers where the circular base for the drum would sit. The triangular pendentives, also to be in pozzolana, would come later, a beneficial side effect of choosing steel and aluminium for the framework.

  A cry of 'Vasilia' drew her attention away from her work. Her father, also dressed in dictatorial green – though in his case he resembled an ageing if beardless Fidel Castro – beckoned. She walked towards him. In truth, today was his day. He was the one who'd organised the drum and dome assembly.

  When she and Vasilios had first analysed how to erect the dome with their internal structural engineer, she'd advocated prefabrication off-site. They would transport and lift it into place as one complete structure. The principle advantage of off-site prefabrication assembly was accuracy.

  She sought the greatest practical accuracy because it simplified later steps. Common sense reminded her that absolute accuracy in buildings was unattainable. Adjustments were a fact of building life. One of her tutors had declaimed to her class: 'In buildings measurement, accuracy always falls short of achievement.' She'd hated these words then. She still did.

  When building, practicality always overwhelms perfection. Building sites are repositories of accumulated errors and inaccuracies. The original Hagia Sophia's dome had emerged 6 cm out. By the standards of today, when meticulously calibrated steel measuring tapes are available, this was impressive for a 32-metre structure. Sixteen centuries earlier, this had been an incredible feat. She wanted to do better.

  Her father had ridiculed her aspiration together with her prefabrication, however exact the intended result. Her face flamed at the memory of her embarrassment, her fury, at his acid scrutiny.

  He'd continued and pointed out that, unless she could find a helicopter with a lift capability not yet invented, a dome with a 32-metre span dome would be far too big to transport through the streets of Nicosia, never mind bring through the Old Town's walls and tiny streets. Unless she preferred to demolish half the Old Town?

  She'd argued to herself that she would have realised this when she'd thought about it. He'd beaten her to it. This she resented as much as his savage disdain. It rankled and festered.

  Yet, her father had also solved the problem. He'd dipped back into the original sixth-century design to mimic the 40 stone ribs which soared from the round drum sitting on the square formed by the four piers. Each of these 40 ribs curved up to converge at the top. It was that junction, 55 metres above the Basilica's floor, where the ribs would lock into place the dome's structure and provide the skeleton which would enable the builders to seal the spaces between the ribs.

  The drum was the subject of today's and tomorrow's excitement. Six trucks, each with one impressive prefabricated section with joints which slotted and locked them each to another, would arrive. Cranes would lift these above the piers and lower them to engage as a single ring. Though there were additional bolts for safety, her father's design employed gravity as the essential glue to hold the drum together. It sat on the pozzolana skimmed atop the four arches and piers.

  His was an elegant engineering solution. With the circular drum in situ, the cranes would hoist each of the 40 aluminium ribs into place.

  Eleni quivered. In less than a week, if all went to plan, the cupola in skeleton form would soar above Nicosia and the Mesaoria. She tingled with excitement.

  The cameras were here. The world waited to marvel at her uncle's vision, delivered by her... and her father, she obliged herself to admit.

  Limassol (Cyprus)

  Evdokia squirmed. The Paphos bus offered minimal comfort at the best of times. Today, her seat was worn. A metal rib thrust into her lower back. It was the price of poverty, the choice she'd made when she married the Church.

  She shrugged. She still puzzled about why she hadn't left Cyprus when advised this was her least problematic option. Abroad, she would have had liberty in Greece or the UK, freedom to express her revolutionary politics and criticisms of the corrupt ways of the entrenched elite. From her early teenage years, she'd embraced radical socialism – not quite communism, but close. The philosophy that all should be equal appealed to her sense of what was right. She'd read Orwell's Animal Farm but didn't understand the irony of 'animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others'.

  Her wedding to Georghios had begun as a sham. She was certain Georghios knew, but she had never dared to confront him. He was aware she had needed to dissuade the authorities from their pursuit of her. Not that she had committed any unlawful acts.

  In her late teens and early twenties, she'd sailed close to the wind. This had been both revenge and attempted atonement. In her last year of school, a young monk teacher, little older than herself and of whom she had grown fond, had forced himself upon her.

  Maybe she'd been complicit beforehand? She'd never know. When she'd resisted his assault, he'd refused to stop, despite her pleas. The anguish of those pleas and her helplessness still burned bright. She'd complained to his superior, a senior monk. He'd outright dismissed her story as 'inconceivable'. Weeks later, she'd known she was pregnant.

  Again, the superior's contempt had ruled. He'd offered nothing.

  Her remaining option had been that illegal abortion. After this, she was virulently anti-church, not so much against her rapist teacher, but his superior and the system represented by that senior cleric. She'd drifted further and further to the left, performing ever more provocative acts.

  An ambitious prosecutor had threatened an attempt to charge her for criminal damage. What had been clear then, and was now, was the futility of ending up in the local court system. She could only lose. It was a mug's game. Outcomes were unpredictable, irrespective of guilt or innocence or the inconvenience of facts. The interplay between your lawyer, the prosecution and the judge had as much of an impact as any actual evidence. With so many intersecting variables, it was madness to take her chance in court – unless there was no other choice.

  To avoid self-imposed exile, she'd hitched herself to the Church, to Georghios. She understood the irony, for it was deliberate. In effect, she'd resigned from the rebellious to join the righteous, all to avoid the wrath of the authorities.

  In time, to her consternation, she'd found she'd done something good. She'd come to adore Georghios with his gentle innocence and total commitment to his parishioners.

  It was ironic that she played a pivotal role helping in the latter and she enjoyed contributing. One institution she and her contemporaries had rebelled against most was the Cyprus Orthodox Church, to them a bastion of corruption in its upper ranks. In the trenches of each parish, much was different. People mattered. People assisted and supported each other. A parish priest acted to unify.

  At the local level, faith was straightforward and wholehearted. Evdokia had found herself part of a community, one which operated on socialist principles without its philosophy. In a harsh environment, everyone shared their cares.

  For almost twenty years, she'd experienced a satisfaction she'd never expected to enjoy. With the disappointment of no children, a side effect of that illegal abortion, her one bane was the incurious mind of her husband. She was the one who lived in an earthly paradise while he remained cocooned in mental cotton wool, surrounded by holy symbols she considered ridiculous.

  To his eternal credit, Georghios accepted her disbelief, with regret rather than condemnation. He cherished the dream she'd one day believe. She let him hope, but not enough to threaten their mutual respect.

  Then the Church elected that fool Constantinou to be Archbishop. A known disaster before his enthronement, his selection reawakened old resentments and recollections. He represented to her all that was bad about the Church, and that was before he began his crazed chase of Nea Hagia Sophia. Pricking the conceit of the man was what drove her forward.

  At about the same time as his
election, the global financial crisis hit Georghios's rural and remote parish hard. His parishioners were not day traders or quants or investment bankers. Yet it was those self-same investment bankers, quants and day traders who bought what the parish produced – food, buildings, land, pools, holiday homes and the like. Without the extra income from outside trickling down, all that remained was for parishioners to live off the land. If they still owned any. Most had sold their inheritances for pittances.

  Therein lay the parish crisis. Seduced by easy money, too many parishioners possessed too little to survive. Poverty accelerated. It wasn't as bad as Greece, from what Evdokia's relatives recounted. It still frightened her.

  Demolishing the Archbishop's Palace had, for a moment, seemed sensible. Sold, the site would produce a lot of money which could support those in need.

  Then word seeped out. Instead of committing the proceeds, from any sale of the Church's resources, to cradle the faithful, a monster cathedral was to fill the space where the Palace had stood. The ultimate indignity was the news that Ioannis intended to replicate Istanbul's Hagia Sophia with all its grandiloquent pretensions.

  Evdokia noticed people were leaving the bus. Absorbed in her reverie she hadn't marked their arrival in Limassol.

  Georghios didn't know she was here. She'd left Georghios ignorant, for he did not need to know. Ignorance would keep relations with his superiors straightforward.

  Nor did Georghios know that Nikolaos Constantinou was an old enemy of hers. He and she had exchanged angry words in the past, though she was confident she was anonymous to him – one among many from decades before. She was too unimportant to recall. But...

  She made her way to the beach. She had time in hand before she joined the next protest.

  Far from Georghios, her rebel blood boiled again. The chutzpah of 'His Abominable Beatitude' was limitless. Besides failing to disburse the Church's riches to the poor, he squandered all on a monument to himself. Then there were the rumours of expensive loans.

  She knew why he did it. There was no live-and-let-live with him. He despised multi-culturalism. He'd denigrated Muslims years back. Nea Hagia Sophia was foremost a personal initiative to belittle the mosques and their believers. Second, it was about ego. His never shrunken ego.

  There was no escaping this. Just as there was no avoiding the need to act.

  Her imperative was to confront 'His Abominable Beatitude', to stop or ridicule him to the point where the wider world could see for itself his absurdity. She'd do almost anything to procure this. It was why she was here today, to team up with fellow protesters as offended as herself. To attract others to attend the protests in Limassol, then Larnaca and other smaller towns before upping the ante.

  Their common objective was to set alight public anger in Nicosia in front of 'His Abominable Beatitude's' iniquitous monument. Might he name it Agios Ioannis? She felt sick at the possibility.

  While her blood steamed, her head told her that meek protestations would never dent 'His Abominable Beatitude's' confidence. To puncture that demanded something far more original than demonstrations. But what? Maybe a fellow protester today might throw up an idea.

  Near Apostolos Andreas (Cyprus)

  The sea was blue and the sand warm. Kjersti delighted that she'd packed a bikini. It was skimpy so as to slip into her running sack.

  She reminded herself. She mustn't encourage Costas. She liked him. She respected him for what he'd persuaded her to achieve, though she was grateful the Trek was over. She wasn't interested in him in her future though she felt sure he wanted to reignite their old flames.

  She waded into the water. It deepened in a gentle, sandy decline. She took at least fifty metres to be at belly button level, the point from where she could swim with the confidence she wouldn't stub a foot on anything below. For a leisurely half hour, she crisscrossed the small bay.

  Tiring, she trudged out of the Mediterranean to lie on one of the sun loungers provided. The sun beat down on her. This was a pleasure, though she ached all over. She must have burnt off three kilos, perhaps more. The Trek had been epic. It was not for repetition. It would have to be the last of her extreme runs. Until the next one. She grunted in self-derision.

  She would write about it in the vein of a series of long individual runs. At least eight pieces, she now reckoned, and maybe with an extra one about the pleasures of, and how to enter, the flow. Should she assemble a multi-part package for her agent to sell at a greater price? It was worth following up.

  Her legs hurt. She assumed Costas's did as well. All those kilometres in the past week had left them numb, with a gentle tingling. Too much on roads.

  She must buy new running shoes. That was always a pleasure, trying to balance the attractions of the latest and greatest innovations with what she knew worked for her. Hmmm. There might be a tenth article in this, once she reached civilisation and the variety available in a modern sports store.

  Kjersti dozed, dreaming of the past days. It was just as well her eyes closed. Costas idled across the beach. He admired her, but didn't have the heart to wake her. He too was exhausted. He went for his own swim. Kjersti's awakening was gentle. She floated up through thoughts of their last day.

  They'd started from the comfortable hotel in Dipkarpasi. Unlike previous days, the countryside rolled and did not present problems. There were hills and farms and sand dunes.

  First, they crossed the peninsula to reach the southern shore. The road ran alongside the sea all the way to the sacred Monastery, at least to Greek Cypriots, of Apostolos Andreas. They stopped for a few minutes, then continued the final six or seven kilometres to the very end of the north-eastern tip Cyprus.

  The Trek's end was up a small rocky hill. They staggered to the top, legs rebelling, and contemplated the half dozen islets reaching out east towards Syria. According to Costas's phone map Latakia was almost 100 kilometres out there, less than a half of the two hundred-plus kilometres from Paphos if you flew as a bird.

  She'd asked Costas about Syria. Syria's proximity wasn't something he'd much considered. To Costas, Syria, and Lebanon and Israel, were as distant as California. In a lazy fashion she smiled to herself. He wasn't as cosmopolitan as he believed himself to be. Yes, he'd travelled. But to the west, not the east.

  What next? They planned to stay tonight in separate primitive wooden lodges above the beach. Tomorrow, at about midday, a car should materialise to drive them back to Nicosia. She ought to write her running pieces while her memories were fresh and where she could have questions readily answered. A week? Perhaps a fortnight more?

  That would present the opportunity to pump Iphi. It was a shame she, or Aris, wasn't here to celebrate.

  Where would she stay in Nicosia? Or should she try another part of the island? One thing was a given: she mustn't run for at least a week, possibly two. Some gym time would be better. Swimming best of all. Her lower limbs, all of her body, demanded rest.

  "You're awake?" Costas. She mustn't be impolite. Not now. Before she could respond, he restarted. "Look who's here. Our faithful followers."

  Kjersti sat up and peered round. Iphi, with Aris weighed down under cameras and recorders. They stumbled across the sand before Iphi sniped.

  "Shirking beside the sea?"

  Aris reeled off several photos of Kjersti and Costas in their beachwear before either could object. "So that's how to run across Cyprus! Fetching, especially you, Kjersti."

  She pulled a face at him. It was too late. He had his pictures. Iphi, in a more deferential tone, pleaded for them to put on their running gear.

  "Could we go to the end of the island? I assume you've been? My editor will want photos from there as well as in front of the Monastery."

  Before Kjersti could object, Costas said what she would have done. Thank goodness. "There's no way in hell I'm running another metre!"

  Iphi's face fell. The disappointment sparked sympathy in Kjersti. "You have the motorbike? It's only about five kilometres to the end of the worl
d. Take Aris there and leave him."

  Aris looked up, startled. It wasn't what he expected. Just desserts for his comment earlier?

  "Then come back first for Costas and then for me. While you transport Aris, we'll change, though the prospect does not please. We'll do the photos you want and then use the same technique to return to the Monastery and finally here. With Aris last to come back."

  Iphi displayed relief at the reprieve, and gratitude to Kjersti. Aris was less convincing. Costas grumbled.

  Two hours later, all four sat down overlooking the blue waters of the bay where they'd swum earlier. The sun had set far to the west. It was about where Ana probably polished her olives, thought Kjersti. They ordered dinner.

  At first the conversation was animated. Soon it slowed. Costas was the first to go, followed by Aris. The lodge had no spare rooms. Costas shared his bed with Aris, as Kjersti would with Iphi.

  Kjersti willed herself awake. She wanted to grill Iphi.

  Iphi was the next to submit. All the bike riding, she explained. Kjersti yielded.

  They walked in silence back to Kjersti's cabin. As soon as Iphi's head hit the pillow she was dead to mankind.

  Kjersti hoped tomorrow would be more fruitful. And snuffled.

  Nicosia (Cyprus)

  Stephane scratched his head. Bewildered, he was in danger of losing his prized sang-froid, a characteristic in which he took too great a pride, a fact he'd accepted on the few occasions when self-contemplation beset him. He couldn't deny it. Eleni did that to him. She possessed an aura and projected sufficient custom-designed conceit to exasperate an army.