Ethan Gage Collection # 1

by William Dietrich

“Who?”

  “Moses.”

  For a moment he simply blinked, in consternation. Then he laughed, a scornful bark. “So! I have been hosting a madman! Does Sidney Smith know you are insane?”

  “I haven’t told him all this, and wouldn’t tell you if we hadn’t seen that Frenchman. I know it sounds odd, but that villain was allied with my greatest enemy, Count Silano. Which means time is short. We have to find the book before he does.”

  “A book Moses stole.”

  “Is it that impossible? An Egyptian prince kills an overseer in a fit of rage, flees the country, and then comes back after conversations with a burning bush to free the Hebrew slaves. All this you believe, correct? Yet suddenly Moses has the power to call down plagues, part the waters, and keep the Israelites fed in the wilderness of Sinai. Most men call it a simple miracle, a gift from God, but what if he discovered instructions to tell him how to do so? This is what Astiza believed. As a prince, he knew how to get in and out of the pyramid, which was but a decoy and a marker to protect the book from the unworthy. Moses takes it, and when Pharaoh discovers it gone, he pursues Moses and the Hebrew slaves with six hundred chariots, only to be swallowed by the Red Sea. Later, this tribe of ex-slaves enters the Promised Land and proceeds to conquer it from its civilized, established inhabitants. How? By an ark with mysterious powers or a book of ancient wisdom? I know it sounds improbable, and yet the French believe it too. Otherwise, these men wouldn’t have seized your sister. This is a crisis as real as the bruises on her arms and shoulders.”

  The blacksmith looked at me, drumming his fingers. “You are mad.”

  I shook my head in frustration. “Then why do I have these?” And I reached in my robe to bring out the two golden seraphim, each four inches long. Miriam gasped and Jericho’s eyes went wide. It wasn’t just the brilliance of the gold, I knew, still vivid after thousands of years. It was the fact that these kneeling angels, their wings outstretched toward each other, were a tiny model of the ones that had once decorated the top of the Ark of the Covenant. This wasn’t a cheap trick I could have had made up in an artisan’s shop. The workmanship was too good, and the gold too heavy.

  “One old man I met called these a compass,” I went on. “I don’t know what he meant. I don’t know how much any of this is true. I’ve been operating on science, faith, and speculation since I fled Paris a year ago. But the pyramids seem to encode sophisticated mathematics that no primitive people would know. And where did civilization come from? In Egypt, it seemed to spring wholly formed. The legend is that human knowledge of architecture, writing, medicine, and astronomy came from a being called Thoth, who became an Egyptian god, predecessor of the Greek god Hermes. Thoth supposedly wrote a book of wisdom, a book so powerful that it could be used for evil as well as good. The Egyptian pharaohs, realizing its potency, safeguarded it under the Great Pyramid. But if Moses stole it, the book may have—must have—been brought here by the Jews.”

  “Moses didn’t even get to the Promised Land,” objected Miriam.

  “He died on Mount Nebo, looking across the river Jordan. He was not allowed by God to enter.”

  “But his successors came, with the ark. What if this book was part of the ark, or supplemented it? What if it was secreted under Solomon’s Temple? And what if it survived the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians and the Second Temple by Titus and the Romans? What if it’s still here, waiting to be rediscovered? And what if it is found first by Bonaparte, who dreams of being another Alexander? Or by the followers of Count Alessandro Silano, who dream of enriching themselves and their corrupt Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry? What if Silano survived his fall from my balloon, even if Astiza did not? This book could tip the balance of power. It must be found and safeguarded or, if worse comes to worst, destroyed. All I’m saying is we have to look in every likely place before those French do.”

  “You live in my house, and work at my forge, and not until now do you tell me this?” Jericho was annoyed, and yet was looking curiously at my seraphim.

  “I’ve tried to leave you and Miriam out of all this. It’s a nightmare, not a privilege. But now, if you know of underground tunnels you must help me find them. The French will not give up. We’re in a race.”

  “I’m a smith, not an explorer.”

  “And I’m a mere trade representative caught up in distant wars, not a soldier. Sometimes we’re called to things, Jericho. You’ve been called to help me with this.”

  “To find Moses’ magic book.”

  “Not Moses. Thoth.”

  “Ah. To find a book written by a mythical god, a false idol.”

  “No! To prevent the wrong people—the renegade Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry—from harnessing its power for evil.” My frustration was rising because I knew how insane I sounded.

  “The Egyptian Rite?”

  “You remember the rumors of them in England, brother,” Miriam said. “A secret society, said to have dark practices. Other Masons abhorred them.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” I encouraged. “I suspect the man who attacked your sister is one of them.”

  “But I work with hard iron and hot fire,” Jericho protested. “Tangible things. I know nothing of ancient Jerusalem or hidden tunnels or lost books or renegade Masons.”

  I grimaced. How could I enlist him?

  “Yet we know there is a scholar in this city who has researched the ancient pathways,” Miriam allowed.

  “You don’t mean the usurer!”

  “He’s a student of the past, brother.”

  “A historian?” I interrupted. It sounded like Enoch, who had helped me in Egypt.

  “More like a mutilated tax collector, but no one knows more about the history of Jerusalem,” Jericho conceded. “Miriam has befriended him. We need lanterns, picks, help from Sidney Smith…and the counsel of Haim Farhi.”

  “And who is he?” I said cheerfully, relieved the blacksmith was helping.

  “A man who knows more than anyone about the treasure hunters who came before you—the Christian knights who may have beaten you to your quest.”

  CHAPTER 7

  I expected Haim Farhi would have some of the Aristotle-like gravity and dignity of Enoch, the mentor and antiquarian in Egypt who was murdered by my enemies. Instead, I was struggling not to gape. It wasn’t just that this short, slight, middle-aged Jew with corkscrew sidelocks and dour, dark clothing lacked Enoch’s majesty. It was that he had been mutilated into one of the most hideous men I’d ever seen. Part of his nose was carved away, leaving a piglike snout. His right ear was missing. And his right eye had been gouged, leaving a socket closed by a scar.

  “My God, what happened to him?” I whispered to Jericho as Miriam took the man’s cloak at the door.

  “He incurred the ire of Djezzar the Butcher,” the smith replied quietly. “Do not express pity. He carries his survival like a badge of honor. He’s one of the most powerful bankers in Palestine and has Djezzar’s trust, having remained loyal after torture.”

  “People use him for their savings and loans?”

  “It was his face that was damaged, not his mind.”

  “Rabbi Farhi is one of the province’s foremost historians,” Miriam said more loudly as they came toward us, both guessing the reason for our whispers. “He’s also a student of Jewish mysteries. Anyone delving into the past is wise to seek his counsel.”

  “So I appreciate his help,” I said diplomatically, trying not to stare.

  “As I appreciate your tolerance of my misfortune,” Farhi replied in a serene voice. “I know my effect on people. I see my disfigurement mirrored in the look of every frightened child. But mutilation’s isolation gives me time for this city’s legends. Jericho tells me you’re searching for lost secrets of strategic significance, yes?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Possibly? Come, if we’re to make progress we must trust each other, must we not?”

  I was learning not to trust much of anyone, b
ut didn’t say that, or anything else.

  “And these items may have some connection with the Ark of the Covenant,” Farhi persisted. “Is this not so as well?”

  “It is.” Obviously he knew what I’d told Jericho.

  “I can understand why you’ve journeyed so far, with such excitement. Yet it is my sad responsibility to warn that you may be seven hundred years too late. Men have come to Jerusalem before, seeking the same powers you have.”

  “And you’re going to tell me they tried their best and didn’t find them.”

  “On the contrary, I am going to tell you they possibly found exactly what you are looking for. Or, that if they didn’t, it’s unlikely you could succeed either. They searched for years. Jericho tells me you have days, at most.”

  What did this mutilated man know? “Found what, exactly?”

  “Curiously, scholars still argue about that. A group of Christian knights came away from Jerusalem with inexplicable powers, and yet they proved powerless when they were betrayed. So did they find something? Or not?”

  “A fairy story,” Jericho scoffed.

  “But one grounded in history, brother,” Miriam said quietly.

  “Those stories of tunnels are musty legends,” Jericho insisted to Miriam.

  “And what is legend but an echo of truth?” his sister answered.

  I looked among the three of them. They’d argued this before.

  “What legends?”

  “Of our ancestors, the Knights Templar,” Miriam said. “Their full name was the Poor Knights of Christ on the Temple of Solomon. Not all the warrior monks were celibate, and tradition holds that our blood descends from theirs. They sought what you seek, and some think they found it.”

  “Do they now?”

  “It’s a curious story,” Farhi said. “I understand you have lived in Paris, Mr. Gage? Are you familiar with the Champagne region of France, southeast of Paris and north of Troyes?”

  “I’ve passed through, and enjoyed its products.”

  “More than thirteen hundred years ago, one of the most terrible battles in all history was fought there. The last of the Romans defeated Attila, the great Hun.”

  “The Battle of Chalons,” I said, grateful that Franklin had mentioned this ancient scrape once or twice. He was a fount of oddball information, and read history books thick enough for three doorstops, written by some Englishman named Gibbon.

  “At this battle Attila had a mysterious ancient sword with mystical powers, dating far, far back in time. Legends of such enchantments, and the idea that there are greater powers in this world than mere muscle and steel, carried down to the generations of Franks who came to inhabit Champagne. These were people who thought there might be more to the world than what we easily see and touch. The great saint and teacher Saint Bernard of Clairvaux was one who heard these stories.”

  That name struck a bell too. I remembered the French savant Jomard evoking him when we first climbed the Great Pyramid. “Wait, I’ve heard of him. He said something about God being height and breadth—being dimensions. That you could incorporate divine dimensions into holy buildings.”

  “Yes. ‘What is God? He is length, width, height and depth,’ the saint said. And the powerful knight André de Montbard, Bernard’s uncle, shared the idea that ancients who knew such things might have buried powerful secrets in the East. Buried, perhaps, beneath Solomon’s Temple, which occupied the Temple Mount a short distance from where we sit.”

  “Freemasons believe that to this day,” I said, remembering my dead journalist friend, Antoine Talma, and his enthusiastic theories.

  “In 1119,” Farhi went on, “Bernard’s uncle, Montbard, was one of nine knights who journeyed to the Holy Land on a special mission. Jerusalem had already been captured by the Crusaders, and these nine arrived in the city and asked to form a new military order of warrior-monks called the Templars. Yet from the very beginning their purpose seemed mysterious. They proposed to protect Christian pilgrims, but these men from Champagne initially recruited no followers and did little patrolling of the Jaffa road. Instead, they got extraordinary permission from the ruler of Jerusalem, King Baldwin II, to set up their headquarters in the El-Aqsa Mosque, on the southern end of the Temple Mount.”

  “Nine newcomers get to camp on the Temple Mount?”

  Farhi nodded, fixing me with his one good eye. “Curious, isn’t it?”

  “And what do these Templars have to do with Moses and the ark?” I asked.

  “Here we come to speculation,” Farhi said. “The rumors are that they tunneled into the roots of what had been Solomon’s Temple and found…something. After their sojourn here, they returned to Europe, were given special status by the pope, and became the continent’s first bankers and most powerful military order. Recruits flocked to them. They were rich beyond imagination, and kings trembled before the Templar Order. And then on one, single, terrible night—on Friday, October 13, 1309—the Templar leaders were arrested in a massive purge by the king of France. Hundreds were tortured and burned. With them died the secrets of what they’d found in Jerusalem. So legends began: how did an obscure order of knights grow so rich and powerful so quickly?”

  “You think they found the Ark?”

  “No trace of it has ever been seen.”

  “Soon after,” Miriam added, “stories began to be sung of knights in search of a Holy Grail.”

  “The cup of the Last Supper,” I said.

  “That’s one story,” Farhi said. “But the Grail has also been described in various accounts as a cauldron, a platter, a stone, a sword, a spear, a fish, a table…and even a secret book.” He was watching me carefully.

  “The Book of Thoth!”

  “I haven’t heard it called that, until now. And yet the story you’ve told Jericho and Miriam is intriguing. The god Thoth was the precursor of the Greek god Hermes. Did you know that?”

  “Yes, I learned that in Egypt.”

  “In the legend of Parzival, finished in 1210, the hero seeks counsel from a wise old hermit named Treurizent. Do you recognize that name?”

  I shook my head.

  “Some scholars believe it comes from the French treble escient.”

  Now I felt a warm surge of excitement. “Thrice knowing! Which is what the Greek name Hermes Trismegistus means, Hermes the thrice knowing, master of all crafts, who in turn is the Egyptian god Thoth!”

  “Yes. Three Times Greatest, the First Intelligence, the originator of civilization. He was the first great author, the one we Jews know as Enoch.”

  “Enoch was the name my mentor in Egypt took.”

  “I’m not surprised. Now, when the Templars were arrested they were accused of heresy. They were charged with obscene rituals, sex with other men, and worshipping a mysterious figure named Baphomet. Have you ever heard of him?”

  “No.”

  “He’s been portrayed as a goat-headed demon, or devil. Yet there is a curiosity about that name. If it came from Jerusalem, it could be a corruption of the Arabic word abufihamat, pronounced “bufihimat.” It means “father of wisdom.” And who could that be, to men who called themselves Knights of the Temple?”

  I thought a moment. “King Solomon.”

  “Yes! The connections continue. The ancient Jews also had the habit, during foreign occupation, of sometimes writing secret codes using substitution ciphers. In the Atbash cipher, each letter of the Hebrew alphabet actually represents another letter. The first letter becomes the last in the alphabet, the second letter the second-to-the-last, and so on. If you spell Baphomet in Hebrew, and then translate it using this Atbash cipher, it comes out reading sophia, the Greek word for wisdom.”

  “Baphomet. Solomon. Sophia. So the knights were pledging themselves to wisdom, not to a demon?”

  “That is my theory,” Farhi said modestly.

  “Then why were they persecuted?”

  “Because the king of France feared them and wanted their wealth. What better way to discredit your enemi
es than to accuse them of blasphemy?”

  “The knights may have pledged themselves to something more tangible,” Miriam said. “Did you not tell us, Ethan, that thoth is allegedly the origin of the English word for ‘thought’?”

  “Yes.”

  “And so the chain is even longer. Baphomet is the Father of Wisdom, is Solomon, is Sophia…but could he also not be thought, Thoth, your original god of all learning?”

  I was stunned. Had the Knights Templar, the reputed ancestors of my own fraternal Masonic lodges, know of this ancient Egyptian deity? Had they even worshipped it? Was all this nonsense connected, in ways that stretched from Masons to Templars, and from Templars back through Greeks, Romans, Jews, to ancient Egypt? Was there a secret history that wound through all the world’s time, paralleling the commonly known one?

  “And how did Solomon become so wise?” Jericho said slowly. “If this book were real, and the king had it in his possession….”

  “There were dark rumors Solomon had the power to summon demons,” Miriam said. “And so the stories loop on themselves—that pious men sought only knowledge, or that the knowledge itself was corrupting, leading to riches and evil. Is knowledge good or bad? Look at the story of the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Back and forth the legends and arguments go.”

  I was dazed with the possibilities. “You think the Knights Templar already found this book?”

  “If they did they may have lost it in the purge that followed,” Farhi said. “Your particular Grail may be nothing but ashes, or in other hands. Yet no power followed the Templars. No group of knights ever equaled them, and no fraternity ever again became so widespread over Europe. And when Jacques de Molay, the last grand master, was burned at the stake for refusing to betray Templar secrets, he levied a terrible curse by promising that the king of France and the pope would follow him to the grave within a year. Both did so. So was the book found to begin with? Was it lost? Or was it…”

  “Re-hidden,” Miriam said.

  “In the Temple Mount!” I cried.

  “Possibly, but in places so deep it cannot be easily found again. Moreover, when Saladin recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders, the possibility of penetrating the mount seemed lost. Even now, the Muslims guard it zealously. No doubt they’ve heard some of the stories we have. Yet they allow no exploration. These secrets could shake all religions to their foundations, and Islam is an enemy of witchcraft.”