“Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu Melekh ha-olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Shabbat.”
“Listen to that, would you?” Rafi said proudly as he and Holliday got up and went to the table. “She’s a better Jew than I am. She does the licht tsinden and the blessing like a pro.”
“And Granddaddy was a Baptist preacher,” said Peggy, sitting down. “Who would have thunk it?”
“Thirteen twenty-four is more than a decade after the Templar purge by King Philip,” said Holliday. “How did he manage to get away?”
“He never went back to France,” explained Rafi. “Roche-Guillaume was no fool. He was in Cyprus after Jerusalem fell again and he could see the handwriting on the wall. The Templars had too much money, too much power and they flaunted it to the king of France and to the pope. Not healthy or smart. They were politically doomed. Rather than go down with the ship, so to speak, Roche-Guillaume fled overland to Egypt. Alexandria, to be exact. He became a tutor to the sons of the Mamluk sultans.”
“Alexandria is a long way from Ethiopia,” said Holliday.
“You don’t have a romantic bone in your body, do you, Doc?” Peggy chided, spearing a piece of duck. “It’s a story.”
“Sorry,” said Holliday.
“Roche-Guillaume was a historian, just like you, Doc, and a bit of an archaeologist to boot—you could even say he was a little like Peggy, because he documented all his work with sketches. Hundreds of them, mostly on parchment. Among other things Roche-Guillaume was a romantic. He’d become convinced over time that the queen of Sheba really did have a relationship with Solomon, and it was the queen of Sheba who showed Solomon the location of the real King Solomon’s Mines. He was also of the somewhat unpopular opinion that the queen of Sheba was black. Coal black, in fact.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Holliday laughed. “King Solomon’s Mines is a fiction. A story by Rider Haggard from the nineteenth century. The mines are a myth.”
“Solomon existed; that’s historical fact and so is Sheba. Some people think Sheba was a part of Arabia, perhaps Yemen. Given what I’ve uncovered I’d be willing to bet it was Ethiopia. Or at least it began there.”
“What makes you say that?” Holliday asked, picking at his food.
“Because of Mark Antony.”
“The ‘I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him’ Mark Antony? Cleopatra and Mark Antony, that one?”
“That one.” Rafi nodded.
“He’s involved?”
“Instrumental. It’s thirty-seven B.C. and Mark’s running out of cash. Cleopatra’s paid for his wars so far but the cupboard is dry and his enemies are closing in.”
“Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa and his pals. I know the history, Rafi. I taught it at West Point for years.”
“Mark Antony’s broke. He’s got an army to feed, but like I said, the cupboard is bare and his mistress is nagging him. So what does he do?”
“Don’t keep me in suspense,” said Holliday.
“He sends a legion up the Nile to look for the treasure of the land of Sheba and King Solomon’s Mines.”
“What legion are we talking about here?”
“Legio nona Hispana,” said Rafi. He rolled a piece of steamed bok choy around his fork and ate it. “The Ninth.”
“The lost legion?” Holliday laughed. This was getting more Byzantine by the second. “They disappeared up by Hadrian’s Wall. They were wiped out.”
“That’s one theory,” said Rafi. “The other is that they suffered heavy losses and changed their name when they were sent to Africa under Mark Antony. They became the Eighteenth Legion Lybica under Mark Antony and a questionable general named Lucius Gellius Publicola, who was inclined to betray you depending on which way the wind blew.”
“Says what historical source?”
“Julian de la Roche-Guillaume, the Templar turned rich kids’ tutor,” responded Rafi. “While he was in Alexandria he found the legion’s records detailing their orders, equipment, stores, all kinds of things. The Imperial Romans were like Germans, meticulous about their records, but there’s no record anywhere of their return. They simply vanished up the Nile.”
“Looking for King Solomon’s Mines.”
“Apparently.”
“That’s quite a rabbit hole you’ve got there, Alice,” said Holliday. He dipped a spring roll in a small dish of soy sauce and took a bite. “What’s next, the Mad Hatter?”
“Better,” said Peggy, grinning. Outside a light breeze gently ruffled the leaves on the olive trees in the courtyard. In the distance they could hear the arthritic creaking of the old stone windmill that had once generated electricity for the neighborhood.
“Better?” Holliday said.
“Harald Sigurdsson,” said Rafi.
“A Viking? The one who became Harald Hardrada, Harald the Hard Man? This is starting to get silly, guys.”
“Harald Sigurdsson was, among other things, the head of the eastern emperor’s Varangian Guard in Constantinople. He also led the Varangians into battle in North Africa, Syria, Palestine and Sicily gathering booty. While he was in Alexandria raping and pillaging, he heard rumors about the lost legion and sent one of his best men, Ragnar Skull Splitter, to lead a crew up the Nile looking for them.”
“When was this?”
“A.D. ten thirty-nine. About three hundred years before Roche-Guillaume.”
“So what happened to Ragnar Skull Splitter, or should I ask?”
“He disappeared, just like the lost legion.”
“So where is this going exactly?”
“Ragnar Skull Splitter took a scholar much like Roche-Guillaume with him to record the story of the journey. His name was Abdul al-Rahman, a high-ranking slave from Constantinople with a yen for travel and adventure. He was also useful as an interpreter. He also had his own artist to record what he saw, a court eunuch named Barakah. An eleventh-century version of Peg here.”
Peggy gave her husband a solid swat on the arm. “I ain’t no eunuch, sweet lips.”
“And they went looking for King Solomon’s Mines, right?” Holliday asked.
“Not only did they look for them; they found them. Ragnar died of blackwater fever on the journey home but Abdul al-Rahman survived and made it as far as Ethiopia. While Roche-Guillaume was at Lake Tana, he found al-Rahman’s chronicle of the journey at an obscure island on the lake. He copied the parchments, which were buried with him.”
Holliday shrugged. “Who’s to say Roche-Guillaume didn’t make it all up, a pleasant fiction? A Homeric epic. Where’s the proof?”
Rafi got up from the table and went to the old Victorian buffet where the Shabbat candles burned. He took out an old, deeply carved wooden box and set it gently down in the center of the table. The carvings appeared to be Viking runes.
“Open it,” said Rafi.
Holliday lifted the simple lid of the dark wood box. Nestled inside was a piece of quartz about the size of a roughly heart-shaped golf ball. Threaded around one end of the stone was a thick, buttery vein of what appeared to be gold.
“That was in Roche-Guillaume’s tomb,” said Rafi. “If the thugs at the Central Revolutionary Investigation Department in Addis Ababa knew I smuggled it out, they’d probably arrest me.”
“For a bit of gold in a quartz matrix?” Holliday said.
“It’s not quartz,” replied Rafi. “It’s a six-hundred-and-sixty-four-carat flawless diamond. VVSI, I think they call it. I asked a friend who knows about such things. According to him it’s the tenth-largest diamond in the world. Fair market value is about twenty million dollars. The historical value is incalculable.”
“And this supposedly came from King Solomon’s Mines?” Holliday said, staring at the immense stone.
“According to al-Rahman’s chronicle that Roche-Guillaume copied, there’s a mountain of stones just like it. Tons.”
“Where exactly?”
“That’s the problem,” said Rafi. “As far as I can figur
e out, the mines are located in what is now the Kukuanaland district of the Central African Republic.”
“Oh, dear,” said Holliday. “General André Kolingba.”
“Kolingba the cannibal,” added Peggy, eating the last piece of lemon chicken. “The only African dictator with his own set of Ginsu knives for chopping up his enemies.”
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