Still, he kept the pressure on, summoning his inner cowboy and urging the horse on as best he could. The SUV had disappeared from view by the time he reached the road. He guided the horse onto the cracked asphalt, but he knew it was moving too slowly to have any chance of catching up with Tess. He had to find another way to keep going. A car, a truck, a motorcycle, anything motorized—even an old, beat-up pickup truck creaking under the strain of a mountain of watermelons, which was what he got, trundling up the road and honking for him to move aside.
He had little choice.
He steered the horse into the road, then tugged on the reins, forcing it to stop sideways and block the way. The pickup truck slid to a halt just a few feet short of him. Two men were in its cab, the driver jabbing his horn angrily, his passenger leaning out the window, both men yelling and waving for Reilly to get out of the way.
It didn’t take long.
A wave of the handgun did the trick with ruthless efficiency, and a few frantic seconds later, Reilly was on the road again, hurtling after the long-gone Jeep with a truckful of watermelons in tow.
Chapter 39
With every leaden step, reality receded further and further from Tess’s mind as she followed Zahed and Abdulkerim across the alien terrain.
She wasn’t sure where she was anymore. Her eyes were having a hard time focusing, and her feet felt like they were made of lead. The relentless strain of the last few days, compounded with the heat and the lack of sleep, was debilitating. Worst of all was the haunting mirage that was Reilly. It wouldn’t leave her. She was desperate to know that he was all right, that he hadn’t died on that mountain, but she knew she wasn’t about to find out soon, and possibly never would. The uncertainty was crippling and added to the sense of disorientation that she felt, a feeling that was heightened even more by the bewildering landscape around her.
The valley they were hiking through was very different from the canyon where they’d found the Templars’ grave. In fact, it was unlike anything she’d ever seen before. It was broader and was edged by bizarre clusters of huge, pinkish-white stone cones and turrets. Fields of fairy chimneys dotted the plain haphazardly, mushroomlike spires twenty or more feet tall that were topped by caps of rust-red basalt. Framing the whole surreal spectacle were gentle slopes that rose up to a crowning cornice of vertical tufa. And while the valley may have looked disconcertingly like a behemothian meringue tray, it was the canyon within it, the one that they were now traversing, that threw Tess the most. Everywhere she looked, dark openings in the rock formations peeked out at her. One of three parallel canyons that held the ancient—and now deserted—village of Zelve, its walls were riddled with living quarters, hermitages, churches, and monasteries that had been excavated out of the most unlikely of places. From the narrowest of “fairy chimneys” to the soaring rock walls that lined the ravines, there didn’t seem to be a patch of smooth rock that wasn’t studded with a small window. Hundreds of rock-hewn sanctuaries were scattered across the region, tucked away in its valleys and hidden ravines, their walls covered with a veritable trove of Byzantine art.
From the earliest days of the faith, Cappadocia was an important cradle of Orthodox Christianity, second only to Constantinople. Paul of Tarsus—St. Paul—preached throughout the area just twenty years after the Crucifixion. Cappadocia soon became a refuge for the first followers of the Cross who were fleeing Roman persecution, its maze-like landscape providing a natural shelter from danger. In the fourth century, Basil the Great, the bishop of nearby Kayseri and one of the so-called “Cappadocian Fathers” of the faith, witnessed monasticism on a trip to Egypt and brought the concept back with him. Monks started colonizing the area like moles, building anything from individual prayer cells in ten-foot-wide spires to rock-cut churches of surprising grandeur and multilevel monasteries that reached high into the cliffs.
The burrowing didn’t only extend aboveground. With the Mongol and Muslim conquests under way, it expanded below the surface. Dozens of underground cities—some whose origins dated back to the Hittites—riddled the area, and many of them hadn’t yet been fully explored. Some of them extended as much as a dozen levels below the surface, perhaps even more, vast labyrinths of tunnels, living quarters, and storage rooms. With their ingeniously designed air shafts and one-ton “millstone” trapdoors to keep enemies out, they served as sanctuaries for entire communities whenever invading hordes were running rampant aboveground and helped the Orthodox Christian population cling to the valleys and ride out the centuries of Seljuk and Ottoman rule pretty much unscathed.
Ironically, it wasn’t until 1923, in the dawn of the secular Turkish Republic, that the Christians were finally expelled from the region. Under the forced repatriation agreement between Turkey and Greece that followed the four-year war between the two countries, the local Orthodox population was resettled in Greece while Muslim Turks moved into the valleys in its place. Following the exodus, most of the churches and monasteries there gradually fell into disrepair, through neglect and vandalism, a sad end to the last surviving link to the glory of Byzantium that had started over one and a half thousand years earlier.
As they moved through a cluster of thirty-foot-tall rock cones, Tess was finding it hard to keep in mind that the canyon had been colonized by humans. In her exhausted, weary state, it looked more like something trolls would inhabit, and her mind kept dredging up disturbing images of Morlocks and sand people creeping out of the dark recesses and dragging her away.
Zahed’s voice broke through her daze.
“Where are all the tourists?” he asked Abdulkerim. “This place is like a ghost town.”
Although the valley was a national park, they hadn’t encountered more than a half dozen groups of hikers, each with no more than a handful of individuals in it.
“This canyon and the two on either side of it were deemed unsafe back in the fifties,” the Byzantinist explained. “The caves were crumbling on their occupant. All the villager were relocated to a new town a few kilometers away, and nowadays, tour group prefer to stick to safe areas, like Goreme.”
“The less, the merrier,” Zahed said, his eyes surveying the trail ahead. “How much farther?”
“Almost there.”
Moments later, they had cleared the cone village and paused by a featureless rock face. The sun was much lower now, its shifting angle bathing the moonscape around them in a striking mix of pinks and blues.
“This is it,” the Byzantinist announced.
It didn’t look like much until the man pointed upward. Tess followed his direction. There was a gaping, square-cut hole in the side of the cliff, about fifty feet above her head. It was an exposed room—part of a room, actually—that had been carved into the rock.
“The church’s outer wall collapsed in a rock slide centuries ago,” Abdulkerim explained, “taking with it the entrance tunnel and the stair that led up to it.”
“So how do we get up there?” Zahed asked.
“This way,” the Turk said as he led them to the edge of the cliff and pointed out the footholds that had been chiseled into the smooth wall of tufa.
“Lead the way,” Zahed gestured.
Abdulkerim went first, followed by Tess, then Zahed. They clawed their way up the crumbly wall and managed to reach a small ledge. Steep, eroded steps led from there to the three-walled chamber. There was no railing at its edge. Its floor just ended with a drop straight down the cliff.
Tess looked down. The sight made her wince. “I can see why this isn’t exactly heaving with tourists.”
The Turk shrugged. “This was the vestibule of the church,” he explained. “Come. The nave is through here.”
He led them through a narrow doorway and switched on his flashlight.
The room they were standing in was surprisingly large, around forty feet deep and half as wide. Aisles ran along either side of it, separated from the nave by columns that were purely decorative as they weren’t supporting anything, given that the entire chu
rch had been carved out of the soft rock. The nave rose to a soaring, barrel-vaulted ceiling and ended in what looked like a horseshoe-shaped apse.
“The mural’s this way,” Abdulkerim said, leading them farther into the church, “and the burial chamber’s under us.”
Tess followed him, her eyes roaming the Byzantine frescoes that covered every inch of the cavernous chamber’s walls and ceiling. In the soft, bouncing beam of his flashlight, she glimpsed biblical scenes she was familiar with, such as Christ’s Ascension and the Last Supper, as well as more local religious iconography, like a mural of Constantine the Great and his mother, Saint Helen, who was holding the “True Cross,” the actual cross on which Jesus was crucified, which she believed she had found on a relic-finding pilgrimage to Jerusalem in A.D. 325.
The walls were also rampantly covered with more disturbing imagery. One fresco showed a monster with three heads and the body of a serpent, devouring the damned. Another showed naked women being attacked by snakes, and another showed a giant locust being warded off by two crosses. Adding to the discomfort was the fact that most of the figures in the murals had their eyes, and sometimes their entire faces, scratched out, defaced by the Muslim invaders who believed that doing so killed the subject in the painting. The frescoes higher up and the ones on the curved ceiling, however, were undamaged, presumably because they were harder to reach. Cold, striking faces with intact almond eyes, black, cordlike eyebrows, and stern, angular mouths stared down at Tess, the smooth paint making it seem as it their skin itself had been plastered onto the wall.
Abdulkerim stopped at the far end of the nave, by the apse. Tess now realized that the darkness had hidden the fact that there were in fact three apses spreading out off the nave. Next to one of them was a doorway, through which Tess could make out a passage.
The Byzantinist shone his light at a mural high up on the half dome of one of the apses. It was a richly detailed work, delicate and finespun, dominated by pale hues of red ocher and green. Crucially, it was also unscathed. It showed a man, on foot, engaged in battle against four warriors. He wore no helmet or chain mail and had no horse. Behind him, several villagers were shown to be hiding in dark openings in a rock face.
The warriors, given that they wore turbans and held scimitars, were clearly Muslim. The figure fighting them was lunging with a broadsword in his right hand. His left hand was held up high, defiantly.
Tess leaned in for a closer look.
The figure’s left hand was clearly missing, but it wasn’t due to any paint flaking off. It simply hadn’t been painted in. The figure’s forearm just ended in a rounded stump.
She saw the inscription on the mural. It was in Greek, written in bold uncial lettering. She concentrated on translating it, drawing on a reasonable familiarity with the language, but one that she hadn’t put to use in a long time. The Byzantinist stepped in and saved her the trouble.
“’The one true hand vents his wrath on the heathen raiders,’” he read out.
Tess glanced at the Iranian. If he was feeling any anticipation, he wasn’t showing it. She turned back to the mural. There was another inscription, in smaller letters, above and to the right of the battling figures.
“What does that one say?” she asked.
“’As for pain, like a hand cut in battle, consider the body a robe you wear. The worried, heroic deeds of a man and a woman are noble to the draper, where the dervishes relish the light breeze of spirit.’ It’s from a poem. A Sufi poem, written by none other than Rumi himself.”
Which threw Tess. “A Sufi poem? Here? Written in Greek?”
The Byzantinist nodded. “It’s unusual, but it’s not that surprising. Rumi lived and died in Konya, which is only a couple of hundred mile west of here. Konya was the center of Sufism. Still is, spiritually at least. The Sufis and the Christian of these valley would have been allies of sort, outsiders—followers of an alternative faith living in a sea of Sunni Muslim.”
“Let’s see the tomb,” the Iranian interjected. Some impatience was coloring his tone, for once.
Abdulkerim looked at him with quiet resignation, then shrugged. “This way,” he muttered.
The three of them walked in single file, trailing the flashlight’s beam down the narrow passage by the side apse. Any natural light from outside was now barely coming through, but the beam was strong enough to light up the ceiling, which was enlivened by an elaborate pattern of crosses that were carved in low relief within a grid of sunken lozenges, before it faded into the shadows.
The passage led to a steep flight of narrow steps that corkscrewed downward. A small vestibule was at its base and gave onto five rooms. It was too dark to see beyond their doorways. Abdulkerim shone his light into each of them briefly to get his bearings, then said, “It’s this one.”
He led them into the crypt. It was a long, low-ceilinged room. In its flat floor, Tess noticed two parallel rows of rectangles of hard-packed earth, one row lining each side of the room. They were hard to discern, but they were there, cut into the tufa from which the entire church had been carved. Each patch seemed just big enough to accommodate a human body, and the walls behind them bore inscriptions that were more or less regularly spaced. On closer look, Tess realized they were names.
“They’re church elders, and donors,” Abdulkerim explained. “These church were expensive to carve and decorate. The paint alone cost a small fortune back then. By paying for this church, these people bought themselves a ticket to Heaven. And a burial spot in here.”
Tess surveyed the names and stopped at one of the graves. She recognized the Greek letters. “This is it,” she said.
Zahed and Abdulkerim joined her.
“‘The one true hand,’” she read.
She looked over at the Iranian, guessing what was in store. Sure enough, he was already unloading the pick-shovel combo, which he handed to her.
“Let’s get to work.”
Chapter 40
This one was harder to dig out, but at least it was just one grave. The narrow space felt suffocating, what with the weakening light of the flashlight and the dust that the digging was kicking up. It made Tess work even harder. She just wanted to be out of there as quickly as possible.
The body they found was wrapped in two-foot-wide strips of white linen, like a mummy, and covered with seeds that had long since petrified. Tess and Abdulkerim got down close and carefully peeled back the stiff fabric. The bones within were loose and jumbled up, but one thing soon became clear. There were only enough of them for one hand.
There was something else in there, too.
A prosthetic hand, made out of copper. It was corroded and oxidized, tarnished to a dark brown patina with greenish-blue patches all over it. It was startlingly elaborate and well crafted for something that was seven hundred years old.
She held it up to the Iranian. “It’s Conrad,” she said, then gave him a “what now?” look.
He mulled it over for a beat, then said, “If he had it with him, it’s got to be around here somewhere. Maybe even buried with him.” He thought about it for a further moment, then said, “Take him out. Let’s see if there’s anything else down there.”
Tess and the Byzantinist lifted the linen cocoon out and set it down in the middle aisle. Tess then stepped back into the shallow pit, got down on her knees, and started digging some more. After only a few strokes, the pick struck something hard, sending a recoil of adrenaline through her. With renewed focus, she started clearing the earth around the hard object with her hands.
“Give me some more light,” she told Abdulkerim.
He shone the flashlight at her hands as she scraped the earth back to expose what appeared to be a dark round shape. She cleared more soil from around it to reveal a plain earthenware cooking pot, low and wide, about a foot and a half in diameter and under a foot tall. Her breath caught. She studied it for a beat, then lifted it out carefully and settled it on the flat part of the grave.
She examined it closely. I
t was plain and unremarkable, lacking any external decoration, and it had some kind of a bowl for a lid that was sealed into place with bitumen.
Abdulkerim’s eyes bounced around from the pot to Tess and to the Iranian and back. “What do you think is in it?”
“Only one way to find out,” Zahed said.
He snatched the pick from Tess and, before she could stop him, slammed it into the top of the pot. The plate that was sealing it shattered. Zahed then pried off the pieces that were still hanging in place.
He took the flashlight from the Byzantinist and aimed it inside the pot, then turned to Tess, making an inviting gesture with his hand.
“Be my guest,” he told her. “After all your hard work, you deserve it.”
She looked at him askance, then leaned in for a look. The sight made her heart bolt. She reached in and pulled out the pot’s contents: two codices—small, ancient leather-bound books, each roughly the size of a hardcover novel.
She held them with quivering fingers, carefully, as if they were made of the most fragile porcelain, marveling at them. For a blissful instant, all the horrors she’d been through, the Iranian monster standing inches from her—it all faded away. Then she set one down in her lap and examined the other.
“What are they?” Abdulkerim said, his tone a whisper.
Tess gently unfurled the thin, leather strap that was rolled around the first codex. The back cover extended into a triangular flap that folded over the front one. She peeled that back, then, slowly, opened the codex.
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