Tomb of the First Priest: A Lost Origins Novel

by A D Davies

  On top of this, thanks to this spongelike capacity in both brain and muscle, by the age of fourteen, he was considered an expert in his father’s favored sport of Krav Maga, and by seventeen, he had progressed through the kung fu discipline of Wing Chun to the point where he was teaching groups under the watchful eye of his master in New York. Yet, it was aikido that seasoned and highly honored martial art practitioners considered Jules to have mastered. Perhaps it was that blend of philosophy and physicality that melded together and blossomed within him, the additional study that meant he had to practice and constantly learn what lay within himself.

  In academic terms, he studied both laws and customs, laws so he knew how far to push himself and customs to remain invisible. In some countries, causing a major insult would draw attention to a person faster than a grenade going off. That he was a black man often infiltrating places where African blood was still considered “dirty” didn’t help, so he worked as hard at the mental side as he did the physical.

  Now, as the team of strange people filed into their operations room, he tried to get a read on them all.

  Bridget—researcher, professional archeologist, language expert. Would have made a good code breaker. American, Alabama.

  Toby—appeared to be in charge, classical education, with obvious experience in the echelons of diplomacy. If he turned out to be a former government minister or military officer, Jules would not be surprised. English, upper crust.

  Charlie—presumably short for something (Charlotte?), engineering expert and multilingual coder and hacker. Moved well, athletic, ex–Royal Signals according to his research. Kept a knife sheathed on her thigh, which looked military but was stubby, shorter than the average Ka-Bar—out of place with the smart jeans and flowery T-shirt. Welsh, well educated.

  Dan—another former soldier, this one from the US Army Rangers, expert in close protection—a bodyguard—who took the lead on field ops. Silver Star Medal for an undisclosed incident. Unmarried, he preferred to present the image of an ex–military type: a thick but well-trimmed beard dressed his jaw, and his fashion sense may as well have included a hat with “I’m a veteran” printed on a flag sticking out of the top. American, West Coast.

  Harpal—the hardest to pin down, but he blended in well, making him a recon expert, possibly a former spy, certainly trained in undercover ops. Designer labels even when in the field, a haircut that probably set him back more than his shoes did. British, second or third generation, from Indian lineage.

  Charlie and Bridget remained standing beside the big touch screen—the so-called ”Demon Hub”—in the middle of the room, and Toby perched on a tall chair beside them while Dan and Harpal took seats by the bank of monitors.

  Toby leaned forward, adopting the manner of a teacher. “So, how much do you know about the Aradia bangle?”

  Jules shrugged. “I know it belonged to my mom. She got it from Africa—Kenya, I think. I know it was lost but found its way back to where it belonged. My mom said it was more valuable than the rock it was made of. More valuable than gold. And it’d be mine to look after one day. Your turn.”

  “Did she say that? ‘Yours to look after?’ Those words?”

  “I don’t know. I was a kid.”

  “Could she have said ‘yours to guard’?” Bridget asked.

  Jules shook his head, paced, unclenched a fist he hadn’t realized he’d closed. “I said I don’t know. I was a kid. It could’ve been... I’ll be responsible for it one day, or I gotta look after it. It was an ugly rock thing that she never took off, and I was thinkin’ about the basketball tryouts and whether playing ball’d help me hook up with Sondra McKay. Then, a couple months later, someone robbed a pizza shop. My mom didn’t give up the bangle, so they killed her and my dad. They twisted it off her wrist. Sold it for ten bucks to a pawnshop. So I’ll say it again: your turn.”

  The three at the desk exchanged solemn glances.

  Dan said, “Okay, here he comes. It’s Basil Exposition time.”

  Jules looked at him. “Who? I thought his name was Toby.”

  “It is,” Harpal said. “It’s a joke. Like in the Austin Powers movies. When something needs explaining—”

  “I don’t watch movies.”

  Bridget did the same as a lot of folks whenever he revealed this tidbit about himself: she opened her mouth a crack as if rendered speechless from shock. And what was going on with Dan and Harpal? Dan had been a stone-cold soldier back in Prague; now he joked like a regular guy bantering with his buddies at a barbecue.

  “Basically,” Dan explained, “Toby loves giving history lessons. Bridget gets a real kick out of it too. Charlie... she’s happy sounding smarter than everyone.”

  Charlie winked. “Good reason for that, boyo.”

  “It’s called the Aradia bangle,” Bridget said, finally someone getting to the point. “And it’s one of a pair.”

  A pair. Jules had never considered there might be others. But then he never considered anything not directly connected with acquiring the item. That sole, single item. He held no interest in any of that. He held no interest in this session either, frankly, but they seemed committed to it, so as with the utterly unnecessary tour of the grounds, he figured he’d play willing and endure what was plainly their preferred method.

  It was polite.

  “First, let me tell you about the Cult of Aradia,” Toby said.

  As if by a telepathic prompt, Bridget fluttered her hands over the touch screen on the tabletop. Artwork popped up on the freestanding glass pane: a group of six men hung upside down from a tree, flayed by whips wielded by two women in black robes.

  Toby continued, “Conventional texts will refer to ‘Aradia’ concerning a group of nineteenth-century folklore witch stories, but we don’t think the bangle is anything to do with witchcraft. A mere coincidence. This painting was rendered at the time when the cult was active.”

  Bridget zoomed in on the canvas. The image pixelated slightly, but the women appeared to be wearing grayish-green bangles of the same proportions as the one stolen from Jules’s mom—three inches wide with green flecks rather than jewels.

  “Cult of Aradia,” Jules said. “Tuscany witches?”

  Bridget’s voice rose an octave. “You’ve heard of it?”

  “Vaguely. I hear a lotta stuff. There’s a book outlining the Aradia rituals. Fortune telling, sacrifices, blah blah blah. If trivia helps me find something, fine. If it’s legends and stories, it ain’t relevant.”

  Toby slipped on a pair of oval spectacles and selected a thin notebook from a drawer beneath the touch screen. “Legends and stories can often point the way to genuine facts. Peel away one legend, seek out its origin, investigate that origin.”

  “Yeah, but it’s usually just another legend.”

  “So you peel that one away too. Eventually, you arrive at the truth. Elementary investigation.”

  Jules focused on the notebook. “Fair point. But when there’s only one source, like these Aradia women, what then?”

  Toby turned to the first page and thumbed half a dozen more. Stopped. “Because it’s rare that we only accept one source. Here, the cult of Aradia first came to prominence thanks to the folklorist—”

  “Charles Godfrey Leland,” Jules finished for him. “I told you, I know about it already.”

  “Oh. It... sounded like a passing familiarity. The ‘blah blah blah’ you mentioned.”

  “There ain’t no passing familiarity with me. Either I know it or I don’t. And I know these girls popped up in this Gospel of Witches book published by the Leland guy. Some text he got ahold of called il Vangelo.”

  “Indeed. Literally ‘the Gospel.’”

  “But it’s nonsense,” Jules said.

  Toby gave him that smile again, a teacher impressed by a tricky student. “Why?”

  “Because of the gap. Eleven years between getting hold a’ Vangelo and publishing his own book.”

  “Good. So you understand how we do things.”
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  “No, it’s how I do things. Discard the useless and focus on what gets me where I wanna be.”

  “Not quite our approach,” Bridget said. “And you failed to connect this to your mom’s bangle because you didn’t dig further.”

  “And what would I have found if I dug more?”

  A chuckle from Toby—the inspirational professor now a patronizing schoolteacher. “You would have found the Cult of Aradia is more accurately known as the Cult of Herodias. They sound similar don’t they? And who is Herodias?”

  Jules sighed but cut himself off midway through—because, well… politeness—then mined his acquired knowledge from various hunts. There was a lot of it. “Wife of one of King Herod’s sons. Bible stuff.”

  Dan groaned. “Damn, I hate when it gets biblical. There’s always a smart-ass conclusion.”

  “Yeah,” Harpal agreed. “Then we end up flying off somewhere to prove Toby and Bridget were right. You’ll get used to it, Jules.”

  Jules focused on Bridget. “I ain’t planning on sticking around long enough to get used to anything. And I don’t mess around debunking two-thousand-year-old myths when they got no bearing on finding what I’m looking for. All I care about is actionable intel.” Jules folded his arms and met the gaze of everyone in the room, one at a time, halting on Toby. “So. This Herodias. She gonna help find my mom’s bracelet?”

  Toby breathed through his nose and adjusted his spectacles, then leafed through his notebook. “Bridget, will you be so kind as to bring up our favorite Feast of Herod painting by Peter Paul Rubens?”

  “It’s a bangle,” Bridget muttered as she returned to the touch screen.

  The flaying image was replaced by a tightly framed scene of ancient times rich folks at a banquet or—yeah, a feast—with a serving girl in a long red dress presenting some nobleman with a silver platter. On the platter lay a severed head. It wasn’t excessively gory. The king, or whoever he was, seemed positively relaxed about it.

  “Herod Antipas,” Bridget said. “Son of Herod the Great, he was the man who counseled Pontius Pilate on the fate of Jesus of Nazareth. He is also Herodias’s second husband after Herod the Second. Also a son of Herod the Great.”

  “Keepin’ it in the family,” Jules said.

  “The head on the plate belongs, or belonged, to John the Baptist. Not to be confused with the Apostle John who features in the Gospel of John. There’s more than one John.”

  A narrow-eyed glance at Dan suggested the clarification was for his benefit.

  “John the Baptist called Herodias marrying her brother-in-law ‘incest.’ And before you get on your high horse, this is what starts finding your actionable intel.”

  Jules held out his hand, indicating she should continue.

  “Herodias persuaded her husband to order the execution of John the Baptist. She held something of a grudge and couldn’t rest until she put it right. John’s head was removed during this feast and presented to her and Antipas.”

  “Very Game of Thrones,” Dan said, but Jules had only the vaguest clue what he meant—a popular TV show? Might have been a book too.

  “Indeed,” Toby said. “And it gets rather more interesting than that. What if I told you that Middle Ages folklore found Herodias transformed into a spirit, condemned to walk the sky forever as punishment for her part in John’s death?”

  Jules crossed his arms. “I’d say you’re getting into irrelevant detail again.”

  Bridget leaned her hip on the table, her arms folded in a mirror of Jules. “Where do most myths come from concerning loose women?”

  Jules let his arms drop and rolled his eyes as his patience once again wore thin. “Let’s assume it’s the church slandering her.”

  “She chose to leave a powerful husband for his more successful brother. She used her feminine wiles to murder a Roman Catholic icon. After that, the vacuous bitch whispered in her husband’s ear to accelerate their standing within the kingdom. But when Antipas tried to lay a claim to a royal title, Herodias’s actions meant both she and her husband were exiled. All the blame was laid at her door. So yeah, she was slandered. A bit.”

  “Okay, fine. What’s the actual intel?”

  Bridget hit more icons, and several windows opened containing texts written in an ancient script. “Flavius Josephus was a chronicler at the time. His writings’ve largely remained in the hands of the Roman Catholic Church and museums, although independent historians have been permitted a peek on occasion.”

  Toby turned to another page in his book. “Josephus worked at the same time as the events we are discussing here, so we can assume they’re contextual. But we can also assume that much of his writing did not survive or was mistranslated, either by design or error.”

  Jules wound his hand around in the air in a “get on with it” gesture, his politeness quotient having all-but exhausted itself. “You found part of it? Some vanished writings?”

  Toby’s tongue played at his lips, not getting that this delaying tactic of building tension had no effect on Jules. When Jules gave no reaction, Toby went on, “Of those present during the feast, which eyewitness would know the real reason for John’s execution? Herodias, surely. Herod Antipas, maybe.”

  “The executioner,” Jules said flatly.

  “The executioner.” Toby turned to his dense, neat handwriting on the page. “Josephus claims the following: ‘And John did confide in his murderer that the order passed from a woman of fake words and vindictive motives. That she accused the Baptist of theft, a crime of which he was innocent. But he had knowledge of the theft, and approved, and so did die with this knowledge.’”

  “Meaning John knew who stole something from Herodias,” Harpal said brightly, as if the knowledge surprised him.

  Toby nodded. “It might not have been her narcissism that invited John’s death but a threat of what would happen if he did not talk. Shortly after the execution was carried out, Herodias grew impatient with her husband’s lack of title and lands, and—as Bridget mentioned—pushed him to acquire more power—”

  “Okay, I’m outa here.” Jules turned from the sermon and set off toward the door.

  “Where are you going?” Toby asked, standing.

  Dan was laughing. “You finally found someone who doesn’t go for your lesson plan.”

  “It is not a lesson plan. This is important information, gleaned through extensive research.”

  Jules paused but did not turn. “Clearly we’re heading to the part where Herodias owned my mom’s bangle but lost it, then she killed John the Baptist in the hope of gettin’ it back. Herodias then resorted to violence in some quest to find it, and it got passed down the centuries until this witch cult got ahold of it and made copies for their followers to wear. How’m I doing?”

  He glanced over his shoulder to see Toby shuffling his feet, his cheeks a light shade of red.

  Jules knew he was right. “So that’s its origin. Herodias dies, her legend grows, and a bunch a’ Middle Ages progressives decide to fight back and turn her into the goddess Aradia. It inspires other women to stand up to the menfolk, and because they’re so insecure in their dudeness, they denounce the women as witches like the church did. Then, I dunno, let’s take a guess—the Aradia bangle symbolizes rebellion or purity or leadership or something that don’t matter one... damn... bit.”

  Jules closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and listened to the noises around him.

  Fans whirring.

  Others’ breaths.

  His own heartbeat in his temples.

  Someone stood from their chair—Dan, judging by the weight shift.

  One of the women coughed.

  Jules opened his eyes and faced them. “Last chance. Tell me how this helps. Or I walk.”

  Bridget stepped to Toby’s shoulder. He nodded for her to proceed, plainly disappointed at not getting to conclude the story himself.

  She said, “Remember we said it was one of a pair? We think the other still exists. And Valerio wants them bo
th.”

  Jules started to get it.

  Dan stuffed his hands in his pocket and smiled. “All this history lesson means is... we follow the trail, grab the other bangle, and Valerio comes to us.”

  Chapter Eight

  Jules sat in one of the seats next to Harpal and listened. If this Valerio Conchin weirdo wanted matching stone jewelry, fine. LORI could keep the twin, and Jules would walk off into the sunset with his mom’s for a beer and a pizza. Toby did most of the talking.

  “Because John the Baptist felt that Herodias leaving her husband for her brother-in-law was incestuous, he investigated the arrangement and discussed it with Jesus of Nazareth himself. Now, we know very little about Jesus as a man except from gospels written decades and even centuries after his death. Even Josephus only notes that many meetings between the pair took place, but little of the content. However... another chronicler—a Roman called Trelius—was also a bookkeeper and one of Jesus’s more avid fans.” He paused to take in Jules’s nonexistent reaction. “Of course, the details here are unimportant.”

  Another pause to find his place in the notebook.

  “Anyway, Trelius notes that he met with Jesus, and indeed Jesus’s mother, on numerous occasions, intrigued by the Jew’s teachings although not yet a convert. And when Trelius learned of John’s execution, he made inquiries, which ended with the apostle Philip.”

  Jules nodded. “Are you trying to make history cool? Why don’t you just skip to the important bits?”

  “History is cool,” Bridget said. “When you actually look into it properly.”

  “According to the Bible,” Toby continued, “Philip sought Jesus out himself. First came to him after hearing about his deeds, curious. Philip is the only apostle who did that. The others either happened across him or were introduced by another. Philip went on to assist Jesus in arranging his congregations, bringing people to him, organizing the Feast of the Five Thousand—”