Tomb of the First Priest: A Lost Origins Novel

by A D Davies

  “No, I only speak a bit because of family. Read and write enough to keep them happy. These make no sense to me. At all.”

  “Really? You’re not curious enough about your heritage to become fluent?”

  Harpal stepped back. “Nah, I leave that to my parents. Arabic, I’m fine with, pretty good with the Chinese dialects, and Russian of course. I’m all about the future.”

  Toby shook his head. “What an odd career choice, then.” He looked at one of the three pages featuring illustrations, the first showing an arched door. The notations were in the unknown language. “Will you be able to decipher it?”

  “There’s all sorts here.” Her finger ran over the words written by a true historic figure, the real Saint Thomas. “Some of it is almost stream of consciousness. No real narrative, just his feelings on aspects, like... like he wasn’t making sense to himself. He mentions forging history, receiving power, ultimate knowledge.”

  “Common themes in those days. A major religion was being birthed after all.”

  “I’ve also got this symbol repeating, and this one.” She pointed to one glyph, a circle with a short break at the bottom like a tight letter C facing down that showed a dot in the middle, then another character of nearly identical shape, this one with the break in the C facing up. “It stands out because the rest appears to be a written language, whereas this symbol is more like a hieroglyph.”

  Toby frowned. “Indus.”

  “Pardon me?” Dan said.

  “Indus,” Bridget answered. “Exactly what I was thinking. They had spoken language back then, but not much in the way of writing. At least not letters and words and sentences like we use.”

  “More like Egyptians?” Harpal asked.

  “Kind of. The Egyptians were more literal in their writing. It didn’t always translate to the spoken word. Indus did. The spoken language was translated around 3,000 BC.”

  Toby held up a finger in his point-of-order way. “That’s the earliest discovery of the language being used. In its complete form. It may have been developed earlier.”

  “Yes, thank you, Toby. My point is... this was copied. Translated from something else, then transcribed. The only reason to use an out-of-place symbol in the middle of a sentence is if there’s no direct translation or it needs to be incredibly specific.”

  “Like a name?” Charlie suggested.

  “Or a unique object. Judging by the shapes they mean one bangle or the other.”

  “They couldn’t just write ‘bangle’ or ‘bracelet’?” Dan said.

  “The only reason they wouldn’t is if... if they knew they were special.” Bridget wasn’t sure how long her brow had been furrowed, but it was starting to ache. She relaxed her skin and rubbed it. “Other than that, I’ve only got guesswork to offer.”

  Toby patted her on the back. “Your educated guesses, my dear, are better than most calculations. Let’s hear it.”

  “Most of the additional pages are Aramaic, which is Thomas’s... travel journal for want of a better phrase. He’s talking about places and people, and I should be able to translate quickly. But this Hindi script... it was written by someone who spoke a two-thousand-year-old version of whatever came before Hindi. I think, and this is the guessing part, that the author was translating Indus.”

  “Could the author have been Thomas himself?”

  Bridget focused on the words and the vastly differing languages and forms. “They’re too dissimilar. It’s like comparing your handwriting to a drawing of a car.”

  “But you can crack it, right?” Harpal said.

  “Bearing in mind that Hindi only dates back a thousand years, we either need a Hindi entomology expert, or... I’ll need more coffee.”

  Valerio’s Gulfstream, Airborne

  Tina Trussot had been obedient, which was good. Valerio was still going to kill her, but it would be painless. A shot to the head. The back of the head so she wouldn’t see it coming. Yes, that’s kinder. Fear is a form or torture when it’s drawn out by, say, staring down the barrel of a gun.

  He woke an hour ago feeling exhausted. His arms barely moved, and his leg muscles were tight. His head throbbed. He called these periods of downtime “episodes” but his doctor explained how his body would fight against the disorder while he rested. It was the best time, after all. The injections kept the cancerlike condition under control, and pills alleviated the symptoms, but most of his days were spent as any other. Albeit with yellow skin.

  That was what irked Valerio the most. Not the fatal nature of Fybert’s syndrome but that it first manifested in his liver. While they had halted its progress, the initial damage was now irreversible without a complete transplant, and because Valerio was special in many ways, including his blood type, a donor was not likely to appear soon.

  He had, of course, explored the possibility of simply taking a liver from someone less beneficial to the world, but it had proved more difficult to locate both a viable donor and a surgeon willing to work under such conditions. Again, kidnapping a family member and forcing someone to perform the operation was a possibility, but when he added up the risk of a surgeon working out of sheer fear, it became too much. Especially since the yellow skin was mostly cosmetic.

  Besides, a transplant would not save Valerio’s life; Fybert’s could only be slowed, not cured.

  As he lay there deciding whether to move his aching body, he considered his dedication to what his father called “these eccentric quests.” Clues to medicine that the modern world had long forgotten or written off. After eight failed attempts at tapping into ancient knowledge, perhaps it was time to consider the horrible procedures that would extend his life. Maybe they’d be worth it for a handful of extra years.

  “No.” Valerio sat up, his hips creaking with the effort, shoulders tight and painful.

  He had seen enough to believe an alternative answer existed. Only three months ago, he had touched a staff they tracked down in South America, fixed into an altar located within an unremarkable temple beneath the jungle canopy. It had seemed a nothing location at first, grave robbers having stripped it bare centuries ago. All except the staff. Made of gold, it stood eight feet tall, embedded in a stone slab covered in slashes that indicated hundreds of years of sacrifices.

  Valerio wondered immediately why it had not been looted along with everything else, an object referenced in not one but four conquistador texts as imbuing the priest with mystical powers, not least of which included healing. When Valerio touched it, his hand vibrated. He held it tight, and his whole arm and soon his body did too.

  A cursed relic that would have kept superstitious grave robbers at bay.

  He hollered and laughed and whooped with joy, but when his men dislodged it, the vibrations died. They inserted it back in its original housing, but nothing happened. Not even a tremble.

  That triggered something of a tantrum, which Valerio was still embarrassed to recall.

  Now, though, the painkillers on his bedside table relieved the aches while the jellybean–size pills flushed his body of its attempt to combat Fybert’s syndrome toe to toe and rolled him back to his pre-nap state. He dressed in a fresh shirt and splashed water on his face, then made his way out to the cabin.

  Horse drank coffee while reading the Trussot woman’s notebook. She slept in a flat chair with a woolen blanket over her.

  The big man looked up and stood. “Boss, we have something.”

  Valerio waved Horse to sit and poured his own coffee. “A location?”

  “I got guys making calls to confirm it. But turns out the language was known to one of Mrs. Trussot’s colleagues. We set up a satellite link, and the initial translations are promising. Don’t worry, I made sure she didn’t get him a message or anything. To be honest...” He glanced at the woman’s sleeping form. “I think she’s as curious to solve it as we are.”

  “Academics.” Valerio smiled as the coffee warmed him. “So where are we headed?”

  Sicily

  “So,”
Bridget said, going over her notes one more time. “We don’t have his exact starting location, but Thomas is traveling north from India, intending to split up the bangles. He relinquishes the Aradia bangle to a courier who will transport it to Carthage into the hands of Peter. But he also needs to find someone to send Mary’s away too. He chose John. This second courier didn’t show, though, so John never received the one meant for him.”

  “John?” Dan said.

  “John the apostle, not John the Baptist.”

  “I knew that. Saint guy. Is Tommy sure about the other John’s address?”

  “Fascinating,” Toby said. “John and Thomas were in conflict about many things, and there are strong hints that John actively tried to discredit Thomas. It is only mentioned in John’s gospel that Thomas doubted the divinity of the risen Christ, not in any of the others. Interesting that he would choose John as the recipient.”

  “A bluff?” Harpal said. “Maybe they were buds but didn’t want anyone to know?”

  Charlie answered before Bridget could. “And they just, what, lied in the Bible? I doubt that.”

  “More likely a prearranged drop-off,” Toby said. “Or John was the only apostle whose location he knew. Or John’s account was accurate, but the others didn’t mention Thomas’s doubt. Or the others were edited by the Roman Catholic Church, or John’s was, or blah blah blah. Sorry. We could speculate all night, but let’s concentrate on what we do know. Bridget.”

  “He preached,” she continued. “As he had around Kerala and beyond. They’d built their churches, so off he went on another pilgrimage. North then west. Across the steppes.”

  “Steppes?” Harpal said. “As in Genghis Khan country?”

  “As in the steppe region, Genghis Khan’s birthplace. Hundreds of years after Thomas visited, though. They never met, if that’s what you’re thinking. But speaking of Genghis Khan and his birthplace...” Bridget held up one of the sheets with a drawing on it. “This isn’t a diagram. It’s a map. Thomas’s last destination before heading back to India... was Mongolia.”

  Valerio’s Gulfstream, Airborne

  “Is she sure?” Valerio asked once Horse relayed what Tina Trussot had translated so far.

  “Sure as she can be.” Horse dropped her notes on the desk next to the two-thousand-year-old manuscript. “Can’t map the exact location, but—”

  “Wake her up. Let’s get her back to work.”

  “But, boss, I think she—”

  “I don’t pay you to think, I—”

  “Actually, you do pay me to think. Good thing too, cause I’m the one who pinpointed Mongolia from the translation.”

  Valerio’s head thickened inside; pressure built behind his eyes. He waved his hands, frustrated. “Fine, fine. Whatever. Just wake her up. I have follow-up questions.”

  The large Australian obeyed, and Valerio furnished Tina with coffee and a donut. Once she appeared to have rebooted, Valerio asked for more input, more details about the supposed trail.

  “There were temples in the places Thomas visited,” Tina said. “Buddhism was only five or six hundred years old. The temples were crude—in line with the Buddha’s teachings. Thomas befriended many priests and monks from other religions, not just Buddhism, but this appears to be his main target—”

  “Shut up,” Valerio said. “Do you have an exact location?”

  “We narrowed it down to a hundred square miles.” She glanced at Horse. “Once he found the map and we worked out which area was which, and by looking at Thomas’s route out of Nepal... it is somewhere around one of the former trading posts of Mount Bogd Khan Uul.”

  “Why didn’t you just say so? How narrow is your information? How close can we get?”

  “Guesswork only. A temple. Possibly one reference that is obscure. I have no idea where the phrase fits in Mongolia or what it refers to.”

  “And what is it?”

  “A tomb. The author sometimes calls it ‘the tomb of Aradia’ and sometimes ‘the tomb of the first priest.’”

  Sicily

  “At least I think that’s what it’s called,” Bridget said, still unsure whether she’d translated correctly. It was an inexact science at the best of times, doubly so when rushing the process and under pressure. And tired. So very tired. She yawned. “Mount Bogd Khan Uul overlooks the land north of Ulaanbaatar, today’s Mongolian capital. All over that region, you get these amazing royal tombs up to two thousand years old. The Tuul River attracted settlements dating back to the Upper Paleolithic period. There are tools that date back even farther—”

  Dan dropped his head onto Harpal’s shoulder, eyes closed, and Harpal leaned his own head on Dan’s. Both snored.

  “Fine, fine.” Bridget rearranged her notes and workings-out. “When Thomas arrived in this region, there was a temple of mud and brick. He befriended the Buddhists, and he states he is worried that the second courier, the one due to collect the Mary bangle, was intercepted. By bandits or by people who wanted these bangles.”

  The two men “awoke” and Harpal asked, “Why’d he make friends? Thought he was trying to convert them.”

  Bridget paused, hating to voice something she’d long accepted as a possibility, her Christian upbringing conflicting with the notion of critical thinking. As a family of faith, they accepted certain things as truth, but the scientist in her did not.

  “Christianity and Buddhism are really similar,” she replied. “Some people think they’re even the same thing. Some say they’re not the same, but that the notion of Christianity was inspired by Buddhism.”

  “I’m no Christian,” Dan said, “but even I know one is heaven and the other is reincarnation.”

  Toby made that “ah” sound and gave a smile that suggested he was going to lecture them again, regardless of their objections. “There were six hundred years between Buddhism and Christianity springing up, and six hundred years is a long time. Only two hundred-and-thirty years ago, the United States was fighting to become a country rather than a colony, and think of all that’s happened during that short time span. Six hundred years of trade and communication between the Far East and the Middle East...”

  A raised eyebrow elicited no response.

  “The two religions have much in common. Heaven, an afterlife, exists in both. Buddha and Jesus both conceived in a miraculous manner—for Jesus, God planted his seed inside a virgin; Buddha’s mother dreamed a white elephant entered her womb, and the child was birthed painlessly. Both fasted for a long period while traveling alone. Both were tempted by the devil but rejected him. Both cured blindness and walked on water, rejected riches, and demanded the same of their followers. Buddhism and Christianity teach the same things too: do unto others, love one another, even your enemies, or they will never be friends, do not judge other people, no killing... among others.”

  Harpal faked a yawn. “Anyone else getting drowsy again?”

  Dan pointed at his face. “I’m thinking about getting eyes painted on my lids. Will you nod my head for me occasionally?”

  “Okay, okay,” Toby said. “But here’s a far-out idea. Scholars inside and outside the church have long wondered what happened to Jesus between his infancy and the Sermon on the Mount period. It’s a gap of almost thirty years. There is evidence, locked away in the Vatican, that Jesus traveled, learning about the world. That he got as far as... guess where?”

  “I’m on tender hooks,” Dan said.

  “First of all, it’s tenterhooks not tender hooks. Secondly, the answer is...”

  Harpal held up two fists. “Are you waiting for a drumroll? Because I can give you a drumroll.”

  “India,” Bridget chimed in. “Nepal, all around that region.”

  Toby nodded with a satisfied smile. He really couldn’t shake that university lecturer style of teaching. “Where Buddhism was a fledgling religion.”

  “So Buddhism informed Christianity?” Charlie said.

  “It’s a theory that held for many years but was suppressed in the fif
teenth century. With the rise of Islam and the costly Crusades, the church needed to shore up Christ’s divinity. Even now, the writings of those early scholars are only accessible by the highest-ranking cardinals. Bridget, my apologies, I interrupted.”

  Bridget resumed seamlessly. “Thomas writes about his friendship with an unnamed Buddhist priest. A temple he stayed in to recuperate when he contracted an illness. He believed his life to be at an end, so he entrusted the Mary bangle, which he calls ‘the second jewel,’ by the way, to his friend. After his recovery, he believed he must return to the original tomb where he would ‘forge history’ and, quote, ‘rest for all time in the light beneath the midnight gaze of Zephon,’ end quote. The tomb of the first priest.”

  “Or Aradia,” Harpal pointed out.

  “Or Aradia. Take your pick. And ‘the light’ might mean fire. Or maybe burning.”

  “And Zephon?” Dan asked.

  “There’s a star called Zephon,” Charlie said.

  “It’s also the angel that Gabriel sent down to hunt Satan,” Toby said.

  Dan snapped his fingers. “Oh, he probably means that Zephon.”

  “So the bangle isn’t in the first priest’s tomb?” Charlie said.

  “Seems that way,” Bridget answered.

  “Who is the first priest?” Dan asked.

  “Doesn’t say. Unless it’s in the earlier pages Jules didn’t get to.”

  “Could ‘the first priest’ be Jesus?” Harpal suggested.

  Toby laughed. “No, no, if there is a tomb of the Christ it’s in the Middle East. From everything Bridget has found, this first priest is entombed in the steppe region. Or perhaps India.”

  “Or the first priest is Thomas himself,” Bridget said.

  No laughter. Some frowning but no laughter.

  She added, “Back then, important figures gave specifications about their own burial arrangements. Thomas founded the Kerala Christians. It’s one of the strongest achievements of the known apostles. Couldn’t it be possible this illness took a lot out of him and he wanted to be sure his burial would be honored?”