Finally the noise in the ancient church edifice subsided, and Katherine took a seat in the front row of the audience.
“Who will lead us now?” a woman shouted. This was the traditional call for leadership when a Chairwoman had died.
“I will,” Dixie Lou called out.
The room fell silent and all present closed their eyes in contemplation, as if the women were considering Dixie Lou’s offer. Actually it was a fait accompli, since Amy had designated her successor in writing, as specified under the bylaws of the organization. If Dixie Lou had not spoken out, if she had not wanted the position, a different process would have been initiated, involving a formal vote of the council.
While she waited, Dixie Lou was thankful that Katherine Pangalos was not a younger woman. Had she been, by virtue of her position as Amy’s closest friend, she might have been competition for the Chairwomanship.
Presently the women looked up, and each of them whispered Dixie Lou’s name.
“Congratulations,” Deborah finally said in her throaty voice, from a seat beside Dixie Lou. And from other council seats came more words of support. With intense focus, Dixie Lou chronicled the voices and faces, and judged which of them were sincere and which weren’t. Along with Deborah, eight other councilwomen could be counted on to take her side most of the time.
A chill of excitement coursed Dixie Lou’s spine. She stood in a humble fashion, shoulders sloped, head downturned. “I am your servant now,” she said.
The old church erupted with cheering and thunderous clapping, though Katherine participated with a stony countenance. All rose to their feet.
As Dixie Lou walked across the stage, she did her best to appear somber, concealing the unseemly glee—riotous and ecstatic—that threatened to erupt within her. After all, this was not a happy occasion for the UWW, not with the death of their founder.
The audience noise continued.
Dixie Lou resisted an urge to say Amy was looking down on them from her place beside She-God, blessing these events, although such a comment would have had emotional impact. This was not Amy’s moment, after all.
It was Dixie Lou Jackson’s.
And so, raising her voice to be heard over the excited buzz in the church, she described her humble beginnings as an impoverished black woman whose Baptist mother forced her to memorize passages from the Bible. She also told of her mistreatment at the hands of men in her teens, when her stepfather and his brother raped her repeatedly. Presently she said, “Since I have been selected to lead you, I will carry a message to every man on earth.” She paused for dramatic effect, then shifted her voice to a strong Negro dialect: “Massah Man, we ain’t gonna be yo’ slaves no mo’!”
Wild enthusiasm shook the ancient church, and in the buildings around the plaza it was the same. People were on their feet, applauding and cheering.
As Dixie Lou completed her remarks, someone in the back row called out, “Who will fill the vacant council seat?”
Again this was tradition, to fill the chair vacated by Dixie Lou Jackson. This process was even more involved than the one she had just gone through, because it was the full initiation of a new councilwoman into the inner sanctum of the order, a procedure Dixie Lou had already gone through years ago.
“I will,” Katherine Pangalos announced. She smiled and stared at Dixie Lou, adding, “After I take the Vow of Angkor, of course. Would the Chairwoman like to administer it to me?”
Simmering with anger, Dixie Lou waited for the vote of acclamation in the chamber, the murmuring of Katherine’s name. Then she motioned for the candidate to come up onto the platform. The old woman did so, and knelt in the proper fashion—head bowed, waiting—in front of her new superior.
With a barely discernible shrug of resignation, Dixie Lou rose and went to the high pedestal base of the She-God statue. At a control panel she entered a security code and punched in a command. Looking up, she saw the arms of the gray stone goddess tilt down with a grating creak, and the legendary Sword of She-God lowered slowly, supported by a nearly invisible wire cage. The mechanical fingers, usually cupped up slightly to support the sword on open palms, were gripping the weapon now.
When the cage reached her she removed the sword and carried it back to Katherine, who stared at it with palpable trepidation, perhaps wondering if Dixie Lou would kill her with it. Oh, how the new Chairwoman wanted to do that! But not now. The handle of the ceremonial weapon glittered with emeralds and fire opals, and sunlight sparkled from the gleaming blade.
Standing in front of the kneeling Katherine, Dixie Lou made her squint from the brilliance of the sun’s reflection on the finely worked Spanish steel of the razor-sharp blade. “Look deeply into the Sword of She-God,” Dixie Lou commanded, beginning the rite that she and all other UWW personnel had previously undergone. “Look and see the faces of all women who have come before you, and who will come afterward.”
Shifting the weapon in her hands, Dixie Lou caused undulating waves of reflected sunlight to splash across Katherine’s face, changing the character of the elderly woman’s features by throwing them in and out of shadow. Transfixed by the light, Katherine stared into the gleaming blade and, in deep hypnosis, intoned the Vow of Angkor:
Bonded to women,
With hallowed secrets
Of mind and heart,
Sealed as one
For the rest of time.
Her eyes still closed, Katherine kissed the blade, then fell silent. And for several moments, everyone in the assemblage closed their eyes and were entirely silent, in contemplation.
At the appropriate time the audience looked up, and each whispered the name of Katherine Pangalos again. She opened her eyes as well, and smiled softly. Then, one by one, the councilwomen, and even Dixie Lou Jackson, congratulated the newest member of their elite circle.
During the moments of this process, Dixie Lou considered the effects of the Vow of Angkor, how its mysterious powers—reputedly linked to the sacred Sword of She-God—now prevented Katherine Pangalos from revealing the existence of the organization to outsiders. The vow was curious, and many times Dixie Lou had considered the extent of its influence, wondering how it worked.
Did it operate through the power of suggestion, making a person think she couldn’t break the oath, or was some other, more esoteric force, responsible? The wording contained no threat whatsoever, so what did a person fear, if anything? What was the penalty for violation? In any event, Dixie Lou had taken the vow herself, and while she felt bound by its strictures, it didn’t prevent her from being secretly happy with Amy’s death; it didn’t stop internal UWW plots and intrigues; it didn’t keep her from killing Katherine Pangalos eventually, if necessary.
At the very least, the leathery old woman would be a thorn in the side of the newly selected Chairwoman. Katherine would begin her duties with less support on the council than Dixie Lou’s, but the old hag had wiles and would be constantly on the alert for weak links in her opponent’s power base, for ways to undermine it.
Dixie Lou vowed to stop at nothing to protect her own position.
* * *
After the chamber had been cleared, Dixie Lou remained by herself. It was mid-morning, with sunlight still slanting through the stained glass windows, pooling bright light around the red leather chair of the Chairwoman of United Women of the World.
My chair.
She sat in it to get the feel of it, caressed the sun-warmed, timeworn leather armrests and inhaled the patrician smell of fine old leather. With a deep sigh of satisfaction, she held the Sword of She-God, and in the gleaming blade she saw her own smiling reflection.
“I am the Sword of She-God,” she murmured. “Nothing can stop me now.”
* * *
As Lori lay in bed that evening, she felt herself slipping into another dimension, but not of slumber. She was afraid to sleep. The mysterious word mouthed by Veronica, “Iktol,” continued to disturb her, and she recalled the agitated expression on the innocent little f
ace. Murder.
But how do I know what it means? And how do I know it is not Aramaic?
Being with the special child had triggered something Lori didn’t understand. Something that terrified her. A chain reaction in the depths of her soul. She sensed it bubbling, percolating inside . . . growing, moving through her body back and forth, repeatedly traversing her cellular structures, intensifying. . . .
A powerful presence.
The new Bible project was big. Huge, in fact. Any doubts she had felt in the beginning, upon learning of the she-apostles, had been dissipated quickly by the evidence all around her. Lori felt as if she was in the eye of the most powerful hurricane in the history of the planet. It was relatively quiet at the center now, but a tremendous force was being generated.
She didn’t know what her part might be in all of this, but knew she couldn’t escape it. She needed to be with Veronica again, to protect her . . . and to shelter the other she-apostles. It seemed an impossible thought to Lori, the image of a teenage girl safeguarding the children against Dixie Lou and her cohorts.
Lori also wanted to question Veronica, to learn if the awful word had really been on her lips, or if it had only been imagined, some residue—a flashback?—of the drugs Lori used to take.
What do I know anyway? How could I possibly read the lips of anyone speaking an ancient, perhaps secret language? It’s preposterous.
And yet, the presence-within was speaking to her now. Silently, but not in the same fashion as Veronica’s message. This was a wordless communication within Lori Vale’s cells, contained within every fiber of her being. It told her to sleep, to rest her troubled, fatigued brain.
She slipped into REM slumber.
And dreamed of being a baby herself, of struggling through her mother’s birth canal, of trying desperately to reach the light. She felt large, strong hands around her, shifting her tiny, fragile form, guiding her to safety, and heard her mother scream out in pain, a muffled sound that was replaced by the cry of a baby. Her own voice.
I am born.
In Lori’s dream she heard the urgent voices of women. Strangers in a shifting haze of light. They cut something, and she was no longer connected to her mother. The women spoke of a breach birth and their success at getting the baby turned around so that it didn’t strangle on its umbilical cord. They said it had almost become necessary to take the mother’s life to save the baby.
An odd comment, Lori realized, the reverse of what medical attendants usually said.
They were bathing her now, and Lori felt the cool, fresh wash of clean water spreading over her skin, like an ablution. Then something else, being rubbed all over her tiny body. A small amount touched her lips and she tasted it. Salt.
In her dream Lori was all things at once, a teenager and a baby, a person with knowledge of medical procedures, clean water, and salt, and a person who had never before experienced these things.
The newborn Lori was warm now, having been wrapped in swaddling clothes. A woman cradled her, murmuring, “Tkehet erab, tkehet nahira.”
She was speaking in the secret language of Veronica. The ancient, mysterious tongue.
Servant of darkness, servant of light.
From a nightmare, Lori screamed for her mother.
There was no response.
She awoke, pushed away the blankets and sheets. Much too hot. The pillow was wet; sticky perspiration covered her body.
Chapter 17
Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.
—Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:17, The New Testament)
BOI headquarters, eastern Washington State . . .
Styx was in quite a sweat. Not wearing his eyeglasses, he alternately pulled and pushed on the rubber-wrapped metal bar, and with his legs he lifted a connected bar, so that the abdominal machine did its best to harden his flabby stomach. It was part of a regimen Styx had been following for four months, and included the ingestion of fruit, vegetable, and protein capsules twice a day.
Located in a room adjacent to his office, this was a private exercise room that had formerly been occupied by a subordinate, and which Styx had appropriated for his own purposes. Equipment lined the walls, including weight machines, aerobics units, and an exercycle. Now he could work out any time he felt like it, followed by a refreshing shower in his private bathroom.
It was, admittedly, a rather retro collection of equipment, since there were new health maintenance techniques available, including fat-melting electronic fields, injections and implants, surgical procedures, and any number of ways to get physically fit without having to work hard at it. But he preferred old-fashioned ways and things. His antique Lear Fan prop-jet was another example. Old things were available; you just had to search for them and have them rebuilt or constructed new, according to original specifications. That was how he felt about religion, too. The old ways were best, when women knew their place.
Exercise, Styx was discovering, had an unadvertised bonus: good ideas came to his busy, troubled mind as he worked out, apparently as his endorphin-relaxed brain developed solutions to complex problems that had been troubling him.
So engrossed was he in the machine now and in such thoughts that he didn’t notice a uniformed orderly who appeared at his side and stood stiffly at attention, awaiting recognition. Receiving none, the orderly, a young man in the silver-and-black uniform of the BOI Quick Reaction Force, inched forward a little, until he was into the periphery of his superior’s line of vision. When he finally caught the Vice Minister’s attention, he spoke quickly and nervously.
“Sorry to interrupt, sir, but this appears to be important.” He handed over a single sheet of white paper, but held onto an envelope.
A message in bold print proclaimed, to the Vice Minister:
Glory be to She-God Almighty, Creator and
Destroyer. Her power shall last forever.
—Gospel of the Apostle Mary Magdalene, Holy Women’s Bible
“The Apostle Mary Magdalene?” Styx roared. “There was no such apostle! Holy Women’s Bible? She-God Almighty? What is this filth?”
“It came from an unknown source.” The soldier handed him the envelope, which bore no return address and no post mark.
“Get out!” Vice Minister Tertullian thundered. He rolled the sheet of paper and the envelope into a ball and hurled it across the room, toward a wastebasket. It missed its target and rolled behind a weight machine.
* * *
In his office, Minister Culpepper read an e-mail report on what had transpired in the exercise room of the Vice Minister of Minority Affairs.
Voice activating it, the Minister read the blasphemous Holy Women’s Bible quotation, which had been scanned into the system. With cigarette smoke curling around him, he looked out the window at the barren terrain. A large black vulture flew low in the sky, its wings flapping slowly as it searched the ground for prey.
With another voice command, he opened a folder and wrote an e-mail to Tertullian, saying : “Did you know about this women’s Bible? What in the Hades is it?”
Forty minutes later he received a response: “Nothing to worry about. I’m taking care of it.”
But gnats of worry swarmed through Culpepper’s thoughts. These women were proving resilient and surprisingly enterprising. Maybe the Vice Minister wasn’t up to the challenges of the job. He would bear even closer monitoring.
* * *
In the days following Lori’s visit with the she-apostle Veronica, the Scriptorium hummed with increased activity. The anecdote related by Veronica in Lori’s presence had only been the beginning, the translators reported. Suddenly all of the she-apostles were talking more, revealing additional stories from ancient times. The presence of Lori when Veronica poured forth new information was only a coincidence, the councilwomen were saying. The teenager had not been an influence on the child, after all.
One apostle, Abigail, told the Scriptorium sc
holars that their original Testament of the She-Apostles had been compiled and written during the lifetime of Jesus. During a period of persecution against women after the death and resurrection of the Christ, these gospels were placed in pottery jars and secreted in a cave. Subsequently they were found and destroyed by Sadducee priests. There were no other copies—except in the memories of the she-apostles.
With mounting excitement, editors organized the material into the burgeoning Holy Women’s Bible. More than seventy new pages were added in a matter of days, to the less than forty that had existed previously. As part of this monumental project, Scriptorium editors were also revising the King James Version of the Bible, deleting and rewriting anti-feminine passages based upon the new information that was being received. When complete, the Holy Women’s Bible would consist of three books, The Old Testament, The New Testament, and The Testament of the She-Apostles. It was a structure that had been set in place during the lifetime of Amy Angkor Billings, and many women in the monastery were saying it was a shame Amy wasn’t here to see this glorious time.
Through it all, Dixie Lou had been reading and editing printed pages, instead of reading them on computer screens, because she found the hard copies easier on her eyes. She felt an increasing sense of unease, which she kept to herself. As head of United Women of the World, she directed the gospel recovery project, but everything seemed to have developed a life and energy of its own, entirely independent of her, a situation that didn’t provide her with adequate credit. She could go to sleep or walk away and it would all continue apace. This bothered her immensely.
The Stolen Gospels Page 15
