FATHER THERON MORAKIS squinted at the blue, blue sky and the great golden sun that rained heat down on him. Sweat ran down Theron’s face, mixing with the grime to make trickles of mud. The front of his brown habit was stained with more sweat—and with blood. It didn’t seem right, that the sun should dare to shine on such a day, in such a place.
A shadow flashed by as a crow flew overhead. Theron trudged over the uneven ground, occasionally stumbling over obstacles he refused to look at. Some of them rolled unpleasantly beneath his feet. The heavy rosary beads and crucifix on his belt banged against his legs, and his toes felt slick inside his boots. It had to be here somewhere. Had to be.
Theron wiped a hand across his forehead, unaware that he left a smear of blood behind. He kept moving forward. Behind him and ahead of him, bodies littered the battlefield. A few twitched or moaned, but most lay still. Dark skin mingled with pale in the piles. Spears and swords stuck out at all angles, and the coppery smell of blood hung heavy on the air. Theron moved among them, his sharp black eyes searching the ground for—
There. A man in a brown robe similar to his own, facedown, impaled by a spear driven through his body and into the ground. The corpse crawled with glittering black flies. Their buzzing made a low, angry roar that pounded Theron’s ears like the sun pounded his head. As Theron knelt beside his fallen comrade, a small part of his mind noticed that none of the nearby corpses bore a single fly. Grief knotted Theron’s heart and thickened his throat.
“Iason,” he whispered, and crossed himself.
Iason didn’t respond. The spear stuck out of his back and pointed at the sky like an accusing finger. Theron wanted to remove it but didn’t know if he possessed the emotional strength. He waved his hand, trying to clear the flies. They rose for only a moment before settling back down. It looked as if Iason wore a living black cloak. He lay on the blood-soaked ground with one hand outstretched as if he were reaching for something. Theron followed the line of his arm. A blocky stone idol sat just beyond Iason’s fingertips. It was squat and square, a winged man with the stylized head of a snarling lion. Its tongue hung out of its mouth in vicious glee. Theron’s heart leaped at the sight and he crossed himself again. Had Iason taken it or had he been trying to retrieve it? In any case, Theron had found it.
The idol grinned up at him. Theron wanted to touch it, pick it up like a baby, and hold it close. The grin bore into Theron’s head, and a gentle whisper wafted by like a soft breeze. Theron gazed at the idol with both fear and longing. He became aware that he had an erection, hard and throbbing in his loins. The sun continued to pound hard heat down on him.
Still kneeling, Theron reached for the idol. There was a flash of movement, and a hard, pale hand clamped his wrist. Theron let out a yelp of surprise and…guilt? He tried to pull free, but the grip was too strong. Iason now raised his head and looked up at Theron with pleading, pain-filled eyes as blue as the perfect sky above them. Theron swallowed.
“Iason,” he said. “Everything will be fine. Be at peace.”
Iason’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. Theron got the impression Iason was trying to warn him about something. He looked around sharply, but there was no one nearby except the corpses. Flies crawled in and out of Iason’s mouth. He wasn’t trying to speak anymore. It took Theron several moments to realize his friend had died. Theron gently freed his wrist. It seemed as if he should be weeping or performing some sort of service, but he felt no need to do either. His erection still pulsed, long and hard as a spear. Theron looked at the idol again and felt a rush of desire. He picked it up, cradled it against his chest, and got to his feet.
Contentment filled him as he walked toward the hills. He completely ignored the fallen he passed, and didn’t hear the harsh calls of the gathering black birds. The roar of Iason’s flies died away. Theron walked through hot sunlight until he came to a hollow between two hills. A stone staircase led down into the earth. Beside the staircase stood a low house made of rough wood. Theron looked at the stairs, then at the idol. The idol was beautiful, desirable. It felt so right to hold it in his arms. His groin throbbed anew. He
couldn’t keep the idol, that he knew. But how could he give up something so wondrous and powerful? The sun caused it pain, wore it away like wind or water. Its true home was under the earth, where it would be hidden and protected. Theron could not keep the idol, true, but neither could he let it come to harm.
He thought a moment, then went inside the rough house that served—had served—as a headquarters for the holy men and their native servants. When he emerged a moment later, he was carrying a rolled sheet of vellum. He carefully made his way down the staircase, idol and vellum in hand. An hour passed. Two. More crows gathered in the battlefield, their sharp beaks seeking the tenderest parts of each corpse.
Theron came back up the staircase with an expression of longing on his face and the vellum in his hand. The idol and his erection had both disappeared. Theron unrolled the thick material and gazed at its contents for a long moment, then rerolled it and trudged wearily away.
Behind him, the sun continued to shine down on the battlefield and the busy crows. They croaked and called to their fellows in harsh voices. One bird flew down from the sky, perched on the sole of a dead soldier’s foot, and pecked experimentally at the tough, callused skin. The soldier’s dead eyes stared down at the ground, his face twisted in a rictus of agony. The crow pecked again at the soldier’s foot, then dropped lower to find something more tender. It landed on the underside of the soldier’s jaw, and by reaching down, the crow found it could reach the soft, sweet eyes. The bird clacked its beak in satisfaction and bent its head to feast.
The soldier’s wrists and ankles were nailed to a wooden cross, and he was hanging upside down from it. Across the battlefield, hundreds more crosses bore hundreds more dead bodies. They marched motionless across the landscape, an army of twisted dead. The crows circled, dipped, and went to work as the figure of Father Theron Morakis disappeared into the distance.
One
Cairo, Egypt
1949
A goat that is loose does not listen to the voice of the shepherd.
—Kenyan proverb
THE BOY SIDLED through the door and took in the bar with a practiced, mercenary glance. Hard lines of light leaking in through the cracks of the straw window shades and snaking across the dusty floor. A scattering of cheap tables and rickety chairs, most of them empty at this time of day. The few customers staring into half-empty glasses. Flies hovering on still, hot air.
The boy’s gaze passed over a young woman who nursed an infant in the corner and came to rest on a white man. The man’s head was down, and his hat covered most of his face. The boy smiled and readjusted the battered bag flung over his shoulder. Inside it, wooden joints clattered like broken teeth. As the boy headed across the bar, he noticed half a dozen empty glasses on the white man’s table next to a haphazard pile of coins. The boy’s footsteps suddenly grew quieter and he handled the bag more carefully so it wouldn’t rattle. Silver gleamed in the dusty light. The boy reached the table and edged a hand out.
The white man slapped his own hand hard over the coins. He didn’t bring his head up. The boy’s only reaction was to smile with crooked teeth and raise his bag. It rattled woodenly again.
“Puppet, sir?” he asked, his English accented but clear enough. “Only ten piastres.”
At this Lankester Merrin raised his head. He wore two days’ growth of beard and a wrinkled khaki shirt with food stains dribbled down the front. His blue eyes were dull with drink, though his square face was impassive.
“Do I look like I play with puppets, son?” he replied.
Undaunted, the boy fished an articulated wooden figurine out of the bag and laid it with a clatter on the table. It was about a foot high, man-shaped, with the head of a jackal. The maker had painted it in crude, bright colors.
“Anubis?” Merrin asked. “Why would I want to buy a marionette done up as a death god?”
“I give you one for five piastres, then,” the boy said. “It’s handmade. Please. My sister—she’s very sick.”
“Your sister,” Merrin said nastily, “is peddling in the next bar over.” He grabbed one of the glasses in front of him, raised it, and saw it was empty. The boy hadn’t moved. “You’re not going to leave me alone, are you?”
“No, sir,” the boy replied, grinning again. “Or you can see my sister. She charges twenty.”
Merrin glanced down at the marionette. The jackal-headed god’s dull eyes stared back at him. One of the strings was looped around the puppet’s hand, making it look like Anubis was carrying a noose—or a garrote. The boy stood on the other side of the table with his shabby sack and ragged clothes, looking earnest as only a street urchin can. What the hell. Ten piastres would probably buy this kid’s family two or three decent meals. Merrin sighed and flicked a coin across the table. The boy snatched it up and fled without another word, leaving Anubis behind.
Merrin pushed the puppet aside and reached for a different glass, one that still had a slosh of scotch at the bottom. He lifted it to drink.
“That’s a bad idea, you know,” said a new voice. “It’s like feeding pigeons.”
Merrin looked up at a tall man—white, older, and dressed in a well-cut linen suit and white hat. His beard was short and silver, his fingers long and elegant. He carried a silver-topped cane tucked under one arm.
“Feeding pigeons?” Merrin echoed, the glass at his lips.
The man gestured at the door where the boy had exited. “Feed one and a hundred more will beg for food—just before they shit on you.”
“Do I know you?” Merrin said, in no mood for company. He was never in the mood for company these days.
The man sat down across from him. The rickety chair creaked alarmingly but didn’t break. “My name is Semelier. I work for a…private
collector of rare antiquities. I cabled you last week.”
“Ah yes.” Merrin drained the glass and raised it to the bartender. “I didn’t answer.”
“There’s been a discovery in East Africa,” Semelier said. He had an accent Merrin couldn’t place. “A Christian church circa five hundred A.D.”
The bartender, a slender, elderly man in a filthy apron, brought Merrin a fresh glass of scotch, took Merrin’s money, and flittered back to the bar like a bat fleeing to its cave. The bar was hot, the air was dry, and Merrin sucked down a mouthful of scotch. It burned his tongue, and his stomach begged him not to swallow. He did anyway. He was at the best part of drunk—pleasantly mellow and not too far gone to enjoy it. The smell of scotch was almost enough to overpower the usual Cairo smells of rotten food, animal manure, dust, and body odor.
The Anubis puppet’s pointed jackal nose reminded Merrin of a dog he had owned when he was a boy. What was its name? Shambler? Ambler? Rambler, that was it. He’d been trampled by a coach. Merrin remembered finding the crushed, bloody body near the ditch and not quite understanding what he was seeing. It had been days before he could get the image of scattered brains, blood, and bits of bone out of his head. What a world.
“…hear me? It’s a fifth-century Byzantine church.”
Slowly realizing that Semelier was still speaking, Merrin turned bleary eyes on the man. The archaeologist part of his brain stirred beneath its alcoholic blanket and dredged up a response. “That’s not possible. The Byzantine empire adopted Christianity, but it never got that far south.”
“Nevertheless,” Semelier returned, “there it sits.” He rested both hands on the top of his cane. “The British have financed a dig to uncover this church. We believe a rare object waits inside, a relic the British are happily unaware of. We want you to find it and bring it back to us.”
Merrin roused himself at this. “You think I’m a thief?”
Semelier’s response was to slide a thick brown envelope across the tabletop. “For your trouble.”
“So now I’m a thief and a whore.”
“No. Simply a man who’s lost faith in everything but himself. An interesting position, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t ask.” Merrin slugged down more scotch. It was definitely time to bypass mellow and head straight for dead drunk. “You know nothing about me.”
“Actually, I do,” Semelier said. “An Oxford-educated archaeologist and expert in religious icons. You had a promising career in archaeology, but you chose the Church just before the War. The Church sent you on several digs, most notably ones that had the potential to uncover something of religious significance. Several of your discoveries are on display at the Vatican, and at least one vanished into the Pope’s personal archives without further acknowledgment. You have demonstrated your dedication to both science and the priesthood.” Semelier
leaned forward on his cane. “Only…where is that collar now?”
Merrin discovered he was on his feet with no memory of actually standing up. His chair rocked back and forth on the floor behind him. “You can—”
A rolled leather case hit the table with a thump. The case was cracked and worn—clearly old. Merrin guessed seventh or eighth century, though that was positively modern compared to most of the materials he had examined over the years. He looked at Semelier, then back down at the case. That it contained a clue to the artifact Semelier was interested in, Merrin had no doubt. And he couldn’t deny that he wanted to see it.
Merrin remembered rooting through the attic at his grandparents’ farmhouse in Cambridgeshire—it was the same summer his dog had died—and uncovering a packet of papers that turned out to be a journal his great-great-grandmother had started just before she got married. The faint, spidery handwriting offered him a glimpse of true history and awakened a hunger that he had never completely sated. He had also been shocked to read about his ancestor’s colorful and specific comments on her new husband’s considerable prowess in bed. His shock hadn’t prevented him from reading the journals over and over, though. These passages had awakened other hungers, ones which he had also never sated.
The priesthood had helped him feed the first and deny the second, though, come to think of it, ...
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