The Flaming Sword

by Breck England

  Chandos smiled again, but this time with a trace of uncertainty. Ari now knew that the man’s discipline was also his weakness. Chandos would not violate the ritual; he would have to approach Ari to carry it out.

  Ari watched him intently but was still unready.

  In a flash, with a simple Krav Maga kick, Chandos dropped Ari to the edge of the cliff. Ari’s kneecap collapsed like broken stone. Chandos crowned him with the red thread and in the same motion flicked him almost lightly off the precipice.

  As he fell, Ari instinctively tightened his elbow around Chandos’s ankle and pulled him over with him. Both men grabbed for the cliffside and found the same sharp spur of rock to arrest their fall.

  Then the pain struck. Ari’s knee froze; trembling, he pushed off the spur with both arms to get distance from Chandos, slid a few meters and stopped, grasping a nubbin of crystal rock with one hand.

  Steadying himself, Chandos darted like a spider across the rock face toward him.

  Ari kicked at him with his good leg and made contact. But it was like kicking hard ice; Chandos grasped his leg in the upsweep, and Ari involuntarily pulled his enemy toward himself.

  Chandos pirouetted over his body and landed flat against the cliff, attaching himself to the limestone by his hardened fingers. Now he was on the side of the bad knee, and Ari had nothing to fight with. He could neither kick out nor punch.

  He wedged himself into an angle of the cliff that opened like a book beneath him and waited, hoping to use Chandos’s moves against him.

  But Chandos made no move. For an instant they hung there together, matched and checked. Ari could sense his enemy’s odorless breath, feel him thinking and measuring machine-like the possibilities before him.

  Ari’s left leg was useless; his only chance was to get away. He twisted his body around like a door against the cliff and reached back desperately for a new handhold—the rock was rotten. With an agonizing thrust, he jammed his left heel into the crumbling stone to keep from falling. Instead he slid, his feet plowing into the cliff, his fingers searching wildly for a grip. Then, just above a sheer drop, his right foot found a shard of hard rock and he balanced on it like a bird frozen in flight.

  He looked up; Chandos was snaking carefully toward him, almost on him, his officer’s boots mirroring the moon. He reared back to give Ari a final head kick that would send him plunging into the jagged talus at the foot of the cliff. With one free hand, Ari reached for the boot and jerked down on it with all his strength.

  But Chandos had counted on this. In a flood of scree, he skidded down next to Ari, jammed his left hand into a crack, and raised his right elbow, ready to slam it into Ari’s face.

  By reflex, Ari snapped his right fist into the man’s eye. The tissue around the eye melted into black blood, the blinded head sprang back.

  And Chandos fell. He swirled downward without a sound, scrabbling helplessly at the cliff, and smashed full against an obelisk rising from the talus below.

  Coughing hot dust, Ari trembled, his arms spread-eagled over the rock.

  For a long time he lay there, breathing without thinking. Gradually, the dead heat and darkness relaxed him, and his heart slowed. But he could not stay there; he feared the torpor because he knew he was going into shock.

  Levering off his right foot, he turned and hugged the cliff like a bed, and then began to edge his way upward. His practiced fingers discerned tiny, soft cracks in the stone, almost invisible, and bit by bit he wound his body diagonally up the run-out toward a harder surface. The exertion got his blood running again, but nausea came with it. He choked it back and willed himself toward the verge of the cliff.

  At last he could see overhead a sharp break between sheer blackness and the smudge of sky. With a final push, he manteled over the edge and fell to the ground.

  “My God,” he whispered. It was not a curse.

  He allowed himself to rest only for a moment. There was more to do. Much more.

  Ari struggled up on his good leg and hobbled to the van. Leaning against it, he massaged the thigh above his injured knee, watching as the corroded moon slipped behind the hills in the distance. Now it was truly dark.

  He pulled himself into the driver’s seat. From the dash a small clock glowed: 0111. Next to it a digital thermometer keyed to Fahrenheit: 78°. It was an old vehicle with a manual transmission and a petrol engine, the kind he could start without a key. Fumbling in the dark for the wires, he made the contact and the engine jolted to life. The light from the dashboard revealed a mobile phone on the seat next to him.

  Ari ran his fingers over the surface; it was the size of an ordinary GeM but covered with a net made of some light metallic substance, brush-like to the touch. A menu bar blazed a dull blue across the top, but the rest was featureless black plastic. At the base, he found a tiny, glowing red spot and debated whether to touch it.

  “Is it done?” the voice asked. It was electronically scrambled, monotone, unrecognizable.

  He hesitated, and then, “This is Davan. Who are you?”

  Now there was hesitation at the other end.

  “Then he is dead,” came the voice, a muted hum.

  “Yes. Chandos is dead.”

  Another silence, and then: “I have Mandelyn. You will return to the Dome immediately. You will speak to no one.”

  Grimly, Ari realized that he would obey the voice.

  Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, 0139h

  Her first impression was beauty.

  Pulsing, jeweled light filled her eyes as she crept back through a maze of winding, straggling memories toward consciousness. Hot mist drenched her body; she was sweating, trembling with pain, nauseated with shock.

  She imagined herself in a nest of plants and trees, gazing up as a vast rose spun slowly around, beyond the forest, in a bright orbit veined with red and gold. Involuntarily, her arms reached for it. Far away at the apex of the circle, there was a single symmetrical golden star—the center of the sky—she fixed her eyes on it, and gradually the wheeling sphere around it slowed and stopped.

  Where was she? Chartres? The Holy of Holies?

  She remembered.

  The Dome of the Rock.

  Maryse gazed past the marble pylons with the mosaic palms that signified Eden into the dome overhead and counted the ripples of gold leaf and crimson, all converging on the central star. On the rock beneath it Adam was created; here Abraham brought his son Isaac to be sacrificed; here Christ died. The world began here, and it would end here.

  Reaching reflexively for her neck, she massaged the point of pain where someone had struck her so hard it had nearly blinded her. She remembered the rocklike blow of that hand and shivered.

  There was a sensation on her leg—something there—a device like a wristwatch with a plain gray brand encircling her calf. It was an electronic tag used to keep track of convicts; it would detect even a millimeter of motion. She touched it lightly and felt the galvanic patch that would give the alert if the device were tampered with. Someone had made her a prisoner.

  She lay quietly thinking, willing away the pain in her head. Her weapon, her GeM—all gone. Whoever attacked her—it had been total, crushing surprise. Who had done it? What had happened?

  Why was she alone?

  Risking detection, she crept carefully to her knees trying not to move the banded leg. She had been lying on a carpet that edged the wooden screen around the holy rock; pulling herself up against the screen, she immediately felt the blood drain from her head. On all fours, she breathed hard, and soon her sight returned and the pressure in her head normalized. She inched her way up and peered over the screen into the sanctuary, then caught herself before she cried out.

  Propped on the rock, soaked in light from the lamps overhead, stood the Acheropita, its silver frame flashing with jewels, the brown eyes of Jesus staring eastward in eternal calm. Her first re
action was relief—it was intact.

  Then shock. At first, she couldn’t make it out. Positioned centrally on the rock, in front of the picture, was a metal bowl with heavy gold handles. She had dreamed of it, searched the world for it, cursed it. She knew it as she knew her own face. The Ardagh Chalice. Stolen in Dublin years before.

  A ring of lighted candles surrounded these objects as if arranged for some bizarre ritual. What was happening? What did it mean?

  From somewhere in the Dome, someone spoke.

  “How shall I lie through centuries, and hear the blessed mutter of the Mass, and see God made and eaten all day long, and feel the steady candle-flame.”

  She recognized the voice. “Jean-Baptiste Mortimer,” she said aloud.

  “No, Robert Browning.”

  Mortimer’s disembodied voice echoed from somewhere beyond the rock, directly across the shrine.

  “ ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb.’ Not one of Browning’s best, but apt for the occasion, I hope.”

  “Jean-Baptiste, where are you? What’s going on?” Maryse asked the walls. “What is all this about?”

  “It’s all about twenty centuries of Western civilization coming down round our heads.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a very, very long and complex story, Maryse. You’ve heard only the beginning. Unfortunately, you are now present for the ending.”

  “The ending.”

  “Yes, like a bad disaster movie. No poetry. No sense of wonder. Just a big explosion preceded by lots of poor acting, really.”

  “Jean-Baptiste…where is David Kane?” She hesitated. “And Ari Davan?”

  “Your Romeo, your Antony, your Porphyro? Dead by now, I imagine. At the hand of the jealous lover.”

  “Stop playing with me and tell me what’s going on.”

  There was a heavy sigh. “Maryse, open the book around you and read it for yourself.”

  It was the old game, she thought; he would tell her nothing until she stumbled through her own translation of the text.

  She tried to reset her mind to understand the story. Where to start?

  “It’s all in where you stand.” Mortimer’s voice was almost gentle. “Look around you.”

  Beyond the screen lay the rock the Jews called eben shetiya, the foundation of the cosmos—an unremarkable outcropping of stone, as bare as the moon, formless, ominous as a frozen drift of the sea. Here Abraham had bound Isaac, here the lamb without blemish was offered up and slain. On this rock, she recited half consciously, I will build my Church…

  “It’s the cosmic altar at the center of the universe,” she said. “And on the altar, the sacrifice?”

  “Thus the image and the cup,” Mortimer replied eagerly. “You’re beginning to work it out.”

  “It’s the Holy of Holies again.”

  “Precisely. The Sancta Sanctorum in Rome was the temple transplanted, but now the Presence, the Acheropita, the Image of the universal sacrifice, is returned to its source. Where it belongs.”

  “And the cup?” she asked. There was dread in the question.

  “For the blood of the sacrifice.”

  “Whose blood?”

  Mortimer was silent for a moment. “Now…look up. Read.”

  Shaking off the thought of blood, she gazed up into the dome.

  Shapes, angles, cubes, and spheres—the geometry of the cosmos. Hexagonal walls rising into the four-sided tympanum overhead, the spherical cupola above.

  “The circle squared,” she announced.

  “Yes, a symbol of the transcendent. Go on.”

  The cupola above was bright with serpentine lines of red and gold, all converging on a central sunburst. The lines reminded her of something. Of what? The rippling pathways of a maze…

  “The labyrinth!” she breathed. “The labyrinth at Chartres. Leading to Jerusalem, the rose at the center of the earth.”

  Mortimer laughed. “The labyrinth traces history from the beginning to the end. And it ends in Jerusalem, at the Dome of the Rock.”

  “But this is an Islamic shrine, not a church.”

  Mortimer’s voice softened. “My dear, why do we Cherubim guard this Dome? It is more than an Islamic shrine. It is not a mosque. Not a church. Not a synagogue. It is a great book in which we can read the meaning of atonement. It is the very symbol of the oneness of the faith of Abraham, and of the oneness that eludes the children of Abraham—Jews, Muslims, and Christians, fragmented in turn into multiple sects and schisms. But no matter where one starts, if God is the true quest—not power, not gain, not glory—one will arrive here.”

  Maryse now understood.

  A schematic of the shrine materialized in her mind. The building wheeled around her, as symmetrical as the sky. She pondered aloud, “Four gates, equidistant from each other, each aligned to a cardinal point on the compass. North, south, east, west. So there are four Cherubim.”

  “And on the pillars?” Mortimer asked.

  Great round medallions…globular moons of granite, golden sunbursts.

  “And the stars overhead.”

  “Think of the Tarot deck,” Mortimer pressed her. “What comes after the Star, the Moon, and the Sun?”

  “The Last Judgment. And then the Redemption. The second coming of Christ.”

  “You have it, my dear. The pure sons of Levi are about to offer unto the Lord an offering…for the last time.”

  Hints of the scripture echoed in her mind. Was it Isaias? She tried to remember, but Mortimer recited it word-perfect.

  “Who may abide the day of his coming? For he is like a refiner’s fire. He shall purify the sons of Levi, he shall purge them as silver and gold, and they shall offer unto the Lord offerings in righteousness.”

  “It’s insane,” she breathed. “You’re trying to coax God down from Heaven.”

  “I?” Mortimer laughed. “I’m trying? You still haven’t understood, have you?”

  There was a rustling noise behind her. And then another voice—a voice she knew so well—pierced her through like a shock of lightning.

  “Jean-Baptiste is not responsible. I am.”

  Beit Horon Junction, near Jerusalem, 0210h

  Ari struggled with the unfamiliar clutch as the old van groaned through the hills on the divided highway toward Jerusalem. The complete absence of traffic unnerved him; he felt utterly alone in the darkness. Pounding loudly, the powerful motor made the night hotter, and Ari scraped with one dirty hand at the sweat that scorched his eyes. The ache in his knee had become nearly unbearable.

  He couldn’t think about it now.

  Soon the van lumbered into the suburbs, and he made his way through a maze of back streets to avoid checkpoints. It would take longer this way, but not so long as getting permission to proceed toward the Old City. He could not explain himself to anyone—not to his friends, not even to Kristall.

  In the dark curve of the road just west of the Dung Gate, he cut the engine and sat quietly for a moment scanning the night. His knee vibrated with pain. How would he get to the Dome—through the crowd of worshipers, through Security, filthy as he was and with one shattered leg?

  It would have to be done.

  He grasped the GeM and stared at it. It was his only prospect, the only way to communicate with the devil at the other end, the only advantage he had. And what it could really do, he barely understood.

  He turned it over and over in his hands, baffled at its unmarked surface. Under his thumb, the lattice felt soft and brushy, like the skin of a starfish. He touched the blue-lit menu bar, and it gave a slight, interrogatory pulse, as if waiting for a command.

  “Gold,” he said to it, and immediately felt foolish. Nothing happened. No gold appeared on the surface. Had he really expected anything? At the very least there would be a login code, a password. The thing would
be totally secured from fools like himself.

  He leaned his head against the steering wheel, trying not to let despair in. The Dome was surrounded by the most sophisticated defense force on the planet, the most advanced of security systems, but it was all for nothing. And what could he do about it, even if he made it inside? The Dome would be destroyed and hell itself would descend on his home. He had killed the man he thought responsible, only to face alone a far more inscrutable enemy behind an impenetrable wall. Alerting Kristall would not help, although he knew he should do it. And there was Maryse Mandelyn.

  He thought of the first time he saw her, in the posture of a saint, gazing up at that bouquet of a ceiling in the Sancta Sanctorum. She was so curious, like a young girl, unintentionally fragile; but also old in her way, maternal. She could have been one of the holy figures painted on the wall. There was a deep root of love in her, spiraling up without branches, with nothing to connect to; a sad kind of love, reaching and at the same time detached.

  He knew then that he would try to make it into the Dome.

  Alongside the van a group of white-clad Orthodox men walked along, floating past like a flock of pale fish—nine of them, looking for a tenth to make a minyan for prayers. He listened to their muttering. They stopped at the gate, and then, startling himself, he called out to them.

  “Let me pray with you.”

  They turned and stared back at the van. Two of them, tall adolescents, approached him; he opened the door and, grasping the GeM, he swung his legs out and gasped with pain.

  “You’re hurt,” one of the men said. He looked doubtfully at Ari, all at once conscious of his torn, dusty clothes.

  “Yes, I hurt my leg. I’ve been sitting in that van for a long time.”

  “Let us take you to the infirmary,” another said, as the rest of the group closed in on him.

  “Yes, yes. But first let me pray with you.”

  The men made a stretcher with their hands and carried him through the gate and into the plaza. Weak with fasting and praying, thousands of worshipers lay chanting, reading, or dozing hypnotically on benches and on the stony ground. The floodlit Western Wall rose before them like bleached coral under a sea of heat. Gently setting him down, the two tall boys supported him as the ten of them formed a circle and prayed.