All around her, the skulls of the dead in their niches watched. They might have been saints, they had more probably been ordinary human beings caught by the tribulations of life. Sarah could look them in the eyes, and if they seemed to smile, she could bear it, for she could see no difference between them and her.
She walked among the tombs, identifying the sarcophagi one by one: the tombs of Simon and Alexander, the ossuaries of Joseph and Mary and their children, and finally the Christ tomb, the holiest thing in the world, if not to her, then to millions.
For a long time after that, she sat in the centre of the charnel house, as though communing with the dead. Not far away lay the bodies of the freshly dead, and the weapons that had killed them. She understood everything, and she understood nothing.
At some point in the night she thought she heard breathing. Later, when she had fallen into a light sleep, she was wakened by a different sound. A baby was crying among the tombs. And a girl’s voice was hushing the child to sleep.
33
Jesus
Ethan and the others finally reached Ain Suleiman towards noon on the following day. Their arrival sent the women into a state of near hysteria. Even though their guide, Ayyub – who knew a little Tamasheq – called to them reassuringly, they vanished among the palm groves and would not come out. The other guide, Mohamed, was nowhere to be seen.
The monks got out, weapons in hand, searching for Aehrenthal and his gang. They knew they would have been alerted by the sound of their engines as they arrived. But as they started to spread out, they came across several bodies. Clearly, something had happened here.
And then a voice called out.
‘Ethan! Gavril! It’s all right, you can put your guns down. Aehrenthal is finished. His men are all dead.’
Ethan swung round. Like a bird, his heart escaped him and took flight. Sarah was walking towards them across a stretch of sand. On one side of her walked a Tuareg man, on the other a young Tuareg woman carrying a child.
‘I thought you were dead,’ he said. His cheeks were wet with tears, but he barely noticed.
‘I’d given up hope,’ she answered, and then she was crying and falling into his arms. He clung to her, as if to turn her ghost to flesh. He wanted to sing or dance with her, or to sit with her in silence, holding hands.
After a long embrace, Sarah led them to a place by the pool where they could refresh themselves. Their cook brought food, and the monks sat at the water’s edge, eating and gulping down mouthfuls of fresh water that Flaviu and Claudiu had drawn from the spring. While they ate, Sarah told Ethan and Gavril as much as she could remember of what had taken place. The deaths, her visit to Wardabaha, Aehrenthal’s death.
‘I’ve walked around a bit,’ she said. ‘This city is much larger than the synagogue and tombs your grandfather found. They’re probably the most important part, but it will take teams of archaeologists decades to excavate the whole thing. Who knows what’s hidden here?’
She smiled to herself. For many hours now she had been hugging herself inside. Not for Egon Aehrenthal’s death, which she considered a minor thing. What was Aehrenthal set beside the bones of Christ or the Lance of Longinus or the Crown of Thorns? But more than that, she knew something that would shake half the world to its foundations. It was not a relic, not a tomb, not a collection of bones.
She let her hand fall in the open water, felt it ripple across her skin. Later, when it was dark perhaps, she would come down here and take a bowl of water and strip naked, so she could wash it all away, so she could cleanse herself of Aehrenthal’s filth and abuse. She smiled gently.
Next to her sat the young woman she had found in the tombs the night before, the woman with the baby. For some time, the woman had been in deep conversation with Mohamed, the Tuareg guide.
On her other side sat Ethan and Gavril. They were getting ready for their first venture into the city, which was being emptied of the corpses of Aehrenthal’s men and the bodies of the women who’d been slaughtered there.
‘Ethan,’ Sarah said. ‘Gavril. I want to tell you something. There’s no easy way to tell this. The young woman beside me is the youngest widow of Idris agg Yusuf, who was the chief of this settlement when Aehrenthal arrived. His body is out with the other men awaiting burial.
‘Idris is Arabic for the prophet Enoch. Yusuf is Joseph. All the leaders of the Tuareg here have carried the names of Jewish prophets or holy men. The names are the same as those used by Muslims, so no one has ever noticed anything odd. But all the men in general carry Jewish names. It is quite possible that this group are not Tuareg at all, but direct descendants of the Jewish Christians who settled the oasis in the first place. Some of the men have survived Aehrenthal’s massacre. In time, the line may be re-established. But there is more. Ask this young woman what her name is.’
Ethan exchanged glances with Gavril. Neither man could understand what Sarah was up to.
Gavril spoke first.
‘Mohamed, will you ask this woman what her name is?’
The reply came without hesitation.
‘Maryam.’
Mohamed nodded.
‘The name Maryam mean Mary,’ he said. ‘Her name Mary.’
‘Ask her mother’s name.’
He asked her.
‘Hana,’ the girl said.
‘Her mother’s name in English is Hannah.’
‘Now ask her the name of her baby.’
‘Isa,’ she said.
Mohamed looked at Gavril and Ethan.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Her baby is Jesus, like the prophet, salla ‘llah ‘alayhu wa sallam.’
There was a long silence as the truth began to sink in. Finally, Gavril spoke.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘How does this work?’
Sarah smiled.
‘I don’t really understand it fully yet myself. It may take a long time working with linguists and genealogists. But I think it works like this. There appears to be a sacred lineage that has continued at Wardabaha for a long time. Two thousand years, perhaps. Since the time the first Jewish settlers arrived here around AD 70. The line goes back further than that, though. If I’m right, Jesus fathered children, both sons and daughters. When Jerusalem was burnt, both lines left the city and wound up here. The female line took precedence, as it always has done among the Jews. Mary tells me that the women in the female line are always called Hannah or Mary, alternating. And when they have a male child, he is called Jesus.
‘You’ll be able to make DNA tests. But if I’m right, this little baby is in a direct line from Jesus Christ, through his daughter Hannah.’
Tears were streaming down Gavril’s cheeks. He had never dreamt of such a thing, but even imagining it was too much for him.
‘What do we do with them?’ asked Ethan.
‘Do?’
‘Do we take this young woman out of the only home she has ever known, take her child into an environment where he’ll become a target for every sensation-seeker on the planet? Look what happens to a mere celebrity like Britney Spears, how publicity destroys what it creates. This baby will be proclaimed the Son of God and who knows what else. He will never know a moment’s peace. Before very long, the world will crush him.’
‘What do you suggest, then?’
‘Let’s find a way to re-establish this settlement. We leave the relics here. We find a few young Tuareg men who will agree to come here to marry and have children. They will be placed under oath never to reveal the existence of Ain Suleiman or Wardabaha. The women here and the male survivors will instruct them in the stories of their ancestors. But this place will slip beneath the sands as it did before. In time, Jesus will marry and have sons or daughters, perhaps both. The lines will continue.’
It took a long time for Gavril to answer. His hopes had been dashed and fulfilled almost at once. He was seated a few yards away from the new Christ child. He could not guess what these people knew or what they did. Did the boys called Isa perform mirac
les? Did they raise the dead and heal the sick? Would the men and women Aehrenthal had murdered come to life if this little baby walked across to them and put his hand on them? Or did it not work like that?
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think you’re right. We’ll come back here again, just to make sure things go well for them. I would like to come often, to see Isa grow up. I would like to bring him gold, frankincense and myrrh. Or perhaps something more useful.’
The baby began to cry lustily. His mother Mary started to shush him. She gave him her breast, and he calmed down slowly. When the crying stopped, Gavril noticed something. The wailing of the women, that had been unbroken since the previous evening, had vanished like a cloud before the sun. A deep stillness pervaded the encampment. It rippled through the palm leaves and across the surface of the blue water, before heading out into the unending wasteland of the desert.
Mary stood up and handed her baby to Sarah. She looked at Sarah and spoke for some minutes.
Sarah cradled the baby and summed up what Mary had said. ‘I asked you before why you have no children, but I did not understand your answer. You said you are twenty-eight years old, and that you have no husband. It must be a very strange place where you come from. I have asked God to give you a husband, and for the husband to have a large penis and to give you many children. I have lost my husband. Now you must have one of your own.’
There was much amusement when this was translated. Sarah handed the baby back to Mary, then turned, still laughing, to Ethan.
‘Well, Ethan Usherwood, what do you say to that? Are you big enough for the job?’
She took him later to the synagogue that was halfway to being a church. They went down finally to the crypt underneath. Some of the monks had gone down before them to take away the harsh lights brought by Aehrenthal’s team and replace them with hundreds of candles.
The monks were praying silently, using the Jesus Prayer of the Eastern mystical tradition. Knowing what had taken place in the chamber not many hours earlier, Sarah shivered. The blood had been washed away and incense was burning everywhere, giving out clouds of spikenard and onycha and styrax. Later, there would be masses and prayers to cleanse the place of its newly come horror.
They watched for a while, then went back and out to the open air. There, she told him how she had pierced Aehrenthal with the pilum. When she finished speaking, there was a cold wind. The wind carried fragments of the voices nearby, the women and their keening.
‘Will you marry me?’ he asked.
‘You don’t have to ask.’
‘You are sure about that?’ he asked.
‘If you ask me that again, I’ll call it all off.’
‘You haven’t said “yes” yet.’
She looked at him.
‘Yes,’ she said in a whisper, ‘yes.’
Gavril married them that afternoon in the church-synagogue. Mary was there with her baby, with others of the women, and a choir of monks. There were clouds of incense, and candles in ancient candelabras, shedding a light that had not been seen in centuries. Neither Ethan nor Sarah understood a word of the Romanian rite, but they had passed far beyond understanding by then. Mary had given them rings to exchange. The women had taken Sarah to a private place, stripped her naked, washed her and hennaed her hands before sending her to be married in Tuareg robes. And when the service was finished and the last words spoken, Ethan kissed his bride while the women of Ain Suleiman broke the silence with loud ululations. Not of grief this time, but of joy.
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