The Babylon Idol

by Scott Mariani

  ‘The Persepolis Fortification Archive,’ Ben said, remembering.

  Anna nodded.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Let me set up the context for you, or none of it will make sense. As we know, the Muranu family and their mysterious cargo left Babylon in October, 539 BC, literally days before the Persian army of Cyrus the Great swept in, conquered the city and took over the whole Babylonian Empire as part of their own, which it would remain for many years. Cyrus eventually died and his son Cambyses became king for eight years, until he died also and his son Darius took over in turn. In some ways, Darius was to the Persian Empire what King Nebuchadnezzar had been to Babylon, a highly capable empire builder. He expanded and consolidated Persia’s conquests in territories including India. Like his father and grandfather before him, initially Darius used the city of Babylon as his capital; then in the year 518 BC he founded Persepolis—’

  ‘City of the Persians,’ Ben cut in. ‘His new capital, in what’s now Iran. You already told me this part.’

  ‘But as the empire grew, so did the number of rebellions he had to deal with. Darius was very adept at putting down rebels. We can see that from the famous inscription carved into the rock of a cliff at Mount Behistun in Iran’s Kermanshah Province, studied in depth by a British Army officer called Sir Henry Rawlinson who was the first to scale the mountain in 1835. The carving depicts Darius as a mighty warrior crushing a rebel underfoot.’

  ‘What’s the point of this?’

  ‘Stop interrupting,’ she said testily. ‘All this background is important. Now, we also know from various records that minor insurrections began to break out all over Darius’ empire in those years. Most of these rebellions Darius could entrust his local governors to quell. Law enforcement records, including records of executions of insurgents, would be gathered together in a central database, if you like, in the rapidly growing capital Persepolis. Do you follow me?’

  ‘Every step. I just don’t know where we’re going.’

  ‘You must have been a terrible student. Did your tutors never tell you that patience is a virtue?’

  ‘It’s also a luxury.’

  ‘Well, now here’s where we get to the really interesting part. When Ercan gave up on the tablet fragments and turned instead to the records of the Persepolis Fortification Archive, he found there a translated account of one particular uprising against the Persian authorities. It was led by a man known as The Babylonian, whose force of rebel bandits occupied the ruins of an old fortress in the hills near the city of Harran, within the Persian Imperial Province of Athura.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And, as Ercan confirmed when he cross-checked the story against other historical records, it seems that The Babylonian and his rebels were a real stone in the side for the Persians.’

  ‘A thorn in their side,’ Ben corrected her. ‘Or a stone in their shoe.’

  ‘But you get the idea. They were a skilled guerrilla militia who scored a lot of success in attacking army convoys and supply routes, disrupting them very considerably. This went on for some time, until in 516 BC, the Persian-appointed governor finally sent a mass of soldiers who stormed the fortress and caught many of the rebels. The surviving prisoners were brought to the local garrison, where they were horribly put to death. All of which was entered in government records and later became part of the PFA archive. But while the authorities had managed to eliminate most of the outlaws, the leader himself managed to evade capture, and was never caught. Now, by cross-checking all the sources he could find, Ercan discovered that this enigmatic character was also known by another name: Ashar the Babylonian. Ashar the Babylonian,’ Anna repeated, looking at Ben with a sparkle in her eyes. ‘Do you see?’

  Ben thought. The name sounded familiar, but where had he heard it? Then he remembered. ‘You told me about him. The boy on the ship.’

  ‘That’s right. The eight-year-old Muranu child listed on the passenger manifest when they fled the incoming Persian invasion in 539, never to see their beloved home again. So it’s thanks to the very precise records of old Babylon, and then the detailed law enforcement database of the Persian authorities, that for the first time we can pinpoint where the Muranus went after leaving Babylon.’

  Ben did the arithmetic. Twenty-three years later, Ashar Muranu would have been thirty-one. A grown man, and a dedicated rebel against the imperial invaders who forced his family into exile. Ben thought about that, then revisualised the map of the ancient Middle East that he’d spent all those hours studying in his youth. ‘Harran, in Mesopotamia. In the Book of Genesis, it’s where Abraham and his wife settled en route to the promised land of Canaan. To get there, the Muranus must have sailed a long way up the Euphrates, and then continued eastwards overland. Quite a journey, in those days. Even so, they can’t have reached beyond Persian territory.’

  ‘Something like eight hundred kilometres from Babylon,’ Anna said. ‘And you’re right, Harran was still within the borders of the Achaemenid Empire. After the conquest of Babylonia, it was now the biggest empire in all of classical antiquity, covering such a gigantic territory that it was simply too huge for normal travellers to escape from.’

  ‘Then again, the Muranus weren’t exactly normal travellers. Why not keep moving?’

  Anna shrugged. ‘Perhaps they were content to compromise, by settling in a corner of the empire as remote and far-flung as possible, in order to try to get on with their lives. There may have been a Babylonian connection, albeit a tenuous one, as some scholars believe that Addagoppe, the mother of King Nabonidus and grandmother of Belshazzar, may have been from Harran. In any case, in those days Harran was a reasonably busy trading outpost, where they might have thought they could resume their merchant business. But it seems they never returned to their former greatness. Meanwhile Ashar, who clearly had never forgiven the Persians for what they did, seems to have gone his own way. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know all the facts. But that’s history for you.’

  ‘What about the idol?’ Ben asked. ‘Did they have it, or didn’t they?’

  ‘We’ve already speculated that they could have sold it, or melted down the gold plates into enough coinage to make them fabulously rich.’

  ‘In which case, why hang around in some backwater outpost of the same empire that had ravaged their home? With that kind of money they could have travelled as far and wide as they wanted, settled anywhere they pleased, and lived like kings and queens.’

  ‘It was a bigger world then. Distances seemed much greater than they do to us now, and foreign lands were mysterious and frightening. Especially with wars raging everywhere. Perhaps they still retained enough affinity with the region to make them want to stay.’

  ‘Or perhaps it’s more than that,’ Ben said. ‘Ashar’s political involvement suggests that at least some of the Muranus must have been sympathetic to the rebel cause. Maybe they hoped that the kingdom of Babylon would one day be restored and they could go back. That could have been why they stayed.’

  She shook her head. ‘I doubt anyone could have thought that way. The Persians were too powerful. It would have seemed like a lost cause.’

  ‘And history’s full of lost causes that people never gave up fighting for.’

  ‘That’s just speculation,’ Anna said doubtfully. ‘You can’t know these things for sure.’

  ‘Not for sure,’ Ben said. ‘But close enough. And it changes everything.’

  Chapter 42

  Ben said, ‘Put yourself in his shoes. Think like him. By the age of thirty-one, Ashar would have risen up to be a fairly senior member of the Muranu clan. From what we’ve learned about him, he must have been a pretty strong personality, probably with a lot of influence within the family. Yet he broke with family tradition in a big way. He could have chosen the easy path and become a merchant trader like the whole dynasty before him, but instead he chose a life of hardship, war and risk. To make that kind of sacrifice, he must have been highly driven. And nothing drives a guy like that mo
re than ideological ambition. Then there’s the value of symbols. Ancient people placed far more importance on them than we do.’

  Anna looked puzzled, studying Ben’s face intently in the firelight. ‘I’m not sure what you’re telling me here,’ she said.

  ‘Say the idol was still in the family’s possession, still intact after all those years. A vast, magnificent monument to the fallen king they’d once revered, under whose reign Babylon had flourished. To a dedicated freedom fighter locked in a death struggle against the hated Persian oppressor, it would have been more than just a heap of gold. It would have represented more than just wealth. It would have been a massively powerful political icon, symbolising a future return to the glory days of Babylon under the rule of a mighty king like Nebuchadnezzar. Darius wasn’t a popular sovereign, or else there wouldn’t have been revolts sprouting up like mushrooms all over his empire. What if Ashar’s dream was to overthrow it altogether, rallying together all the discontented and disenfranchised peoples of the empire under the symbolic totem of the golden idol?’

  ‘Then he would have kept it carefully concealed until the time came when he could use it. If my theory is right about its modular structure, he could even have scattered its parts in various secret hiding places.’

  ‘That’s what I would have done,’ Ben said. ‘And I would have been extremely cautious about who I trusted with the knowledge of those hiding places. Maybe just a handful of my closest and most faithful followers. I certainly wouldn’t have allowed my family to know. For their own protection as much as anything else.’

  ‘That makes sense. Go on, I’m listening.’

  ‘He had a lot to lose. And a lot to gain. When the day finally came when the idol could be reassembled in its proper home, the guy who could pull off a coup like that would be sure to become the new king of Babylon. Except it never happened. Ashar’s dream fell apart when his rebels were decimated and he became just another renegade fugitive. What if he was the only one left who knew where the pieces of the idol were hidden? Or, what if he was killed too, in some skirmish with imperial forces that never made it to the official record?’

  Anna had her head bowed in thought, beginning to nod to herself as she gradually came round to Ben’s idea. ‘Or that did, but the official record is still lying in a storeroom of the Persepolis Fortification Archive with a thousand others, waiting to be translated? I told you, there are still years of work left to be carried out.’

  ‘In which case’, Ben said, ‘he’d have taken the secret to his grave. And if he’d chosen his hiding places half as carefully as I would have done—’

  ‘It could still be there,’ Anna finished for him.

  ‘Not just the single piece you were hoping for. But the whole thing. You’d just have to know where to dig.’

  Her eyes sparkled from the flames. ‘You’re right. This changes everything.’

  ‘It’s just a theory,’ Ben said.

  ‘But an excellent one. All the more reason why we need to go to Harran.’

  Ben thought back to his mental map, picturing what the vast territory of the Persian Empire looked like in ancient times. Then he set it side by side in his mind with a modern map of what the region looked like in the present day. ‘My ancient geography’s a little rusty after all these years.’

  ‘Like your Bible knowledge.’

  ‘But if I’m getting it right, our destination is right here in Turkey.’

  Anna nodded. ‘I already worked out the location. Harran is about forty kilometres from Sanliurfa, which is just six hundred kilometres to the south and west of Ankara, with a motorway connecting them. Except we don’t have a car. How are we even going to get out of here?’

  Ben kept the wood burner going all night. When he ran out of logs he smashed a chair for firewood, taking it outside first so as not to wake Anna who was sleeping peacefully in the glow of the fire with his jacket over her as a makeshift blanket. After the last spar of the chair was burned up, he carried out the wooden table and broke that up too, then tiptoed back inside carrying an armful of splintered pieces. Being on fire duty kept him from thinking too much about all the things that would have crowded his mind and kept him from sleeping anyway.

  As the red tendrils of dawn came creeping in over the eastern forest skyline, he quietly left the cabin and went exploring about the smallholding. He took the hatchet with him, partly for wanting some kind of weapon just in case, and partly for its usefulness in helping him to get inside the chained-up barn, which was what interested him most. Specifically, what he might find inside. The snow had stopped; the rising sun shone its ruby glitter across the hard-frozen white ground. It was going to turn out a gloriously crisp, perfect winter’s morning. You could almost forget you had a bunch of crazed murderers after you, and a best friend back home who was deep in a coma.

  The rural property was too far out in the middle of nowhere to have been of interest to vandals and thieves. Judging from the thick rust that had seized the padlock, the barn hadn’t been opened since the day the smallholders had departed. Ben used the shaft of the hatchet like a crowbar to prise the rusty screws holding the hasp to the rotted wood of the door. The chain fell away, he creaked the door open and sunlight shone inside for the first time in years. The floor of the barn was covered in musty straw. Shovels and rakes and a pickaxe leaned against one wall. A small tractor stood partially dismantled, never to run again. Next to it, tucked away behind piles of old boxes and crates and covered by a dusty tarpaulin, was a large object whose shape there was no mistaking.

  The old sedan was a Peugeot 404, the car whose design the East Germans had pinched for their papier-mâché Trabant. It was about the same age Ben was, though it had been enjoying a far more restful existence for quite some time, doing little except provide a home for generations of mice. The key was in the ignition but the battery was totally dead, its terminals badly corroded, which Ben guessed might have been the reason why the smallholders had abandoned it.

  Ben had never been much of a car person but he did happen to know something its former owners might not have been aware of: that this model was one of the last saloon cars to incorporate a manual starting crank. Hence, it didn’t need a battery or a starter motor to turn the engine over. Knowledge like that was the kind of thing Special Forces soldiers found useful on occasion, such as when commandeering improvised transport in tricky situations in Third World countries where such ancient vehicles tended to proliferate. He’d once seen a pickup version of the 404 in Yemen, carrying two live camels in the back. These old crates could survive just about anything.

  He smiled when he found the crank handle buried under a heap of junk in the boot, still in its original plastic pack. The smallholders might have dismissed it as some kind of oddly shaped wheel brace or other tool whose purpose they couldn’t figure out, or they might never have spotted it at all. Along with the crank handle Ben found a tatty, mouldy old road atlas of Turkey and a battered but serviceable pair of wellington boots. Where they weren’t caked in old chicken shit they were pink, with flowers all over them. Fashionable footwear for a farmer’s wife or teenage daughter.

  Ben walked around to the front, found the hole below the rusty front grille where the handle could connect to the crankshaft, gave it a turn, and the engine coughed into life amid a massive cloud of blue smoke. Now he was smiling even more. He tossed the crank handle and the map on the back seat, along with a shovel and the pink rubber boots. Brushed the mouse droppings from the driver’s seat, climbed in and engaged the steering-wheel gearstick, and the car rattled out into the morning sunshine, tyres crunching on the snow.

  He parped the horn twice. Moments later, Anna appeared in the doorway of the cabin, wide-eyed in amazement.

  He stepped out of the car and leaned on the door. ‘Did you say something about a motorway trip to Sanliurfa?’

  ‘In that?’

  ‘It’s a classic.’ He slapped the bodywork. ‘No recycled Coke tins in there.’

  ‘
It looks like something we could have excavated from the ground in Iraq.’

  ‘Suits me fine,’ he said. ‘These modern cars, a couple of little knocks and they just fall to pieces.’

  ‘How are we going to drive in deep snow?’

  ‘We’ll dig our way out, if we have to. That’s what you have me for.’

  She ventured out onto the veranda, stopped short and looked down at her feet. I’ve got no shoes.’

  Ben grabbed the rubber boots from the back. ‘Sorted,’ he said, tossing them to her. They landed on the veranda. She bent to pick them up, tentatively sniffed them, pulled a face and held them at arm’s length as though they were two dead fish.

  ‘I’m supposed to put my feet into these?’

  ‘Might not cut the mustard on the Florence catwalk, but at least now you’ll be waterproof. Now let’s grab our kit and get out of here. Next stop, Harran.’

  Chapter 43

  Some hours earlier

  Massimiliano Usberti stood by his window overlooking the dark sea, hands clasped behind his back, deep in thought and ignoring the presence of his assistant Silvano Bellini. At this late hour, the house would normally have been all in silence, except only for the continual hiss and boom of the waves breaking in the rocky cove below.

  Tonight, instead, the room was filled with the sound of agonised screams.

  The screaming was coming from the fifty-eight-inch LCD television screen that had been set up especially for the occasion by Pierangelo Volpicelli who, unlike his employer, was handy with technology. Usberti had never used Skype before. The idea seemed like science fiction to him, not to mention faintly vulgar for its populist appeal. Yet he was willing to admit its usefulness in certain applications, and he was enjoying the show playing out on the big screen. Bellini, though, judging by the contorted frown on his face, was not.