The Sage Stone Prophecy (Arkana Archaeology Adventure Series Book 7)

by N. S. Wikarski

  The spymaster glanced briefly at the list and then back at his father.

  “You are to evaluate the Order Of Argus operatives at each of those locations. Pick out the best three in each compound. I want men who are fearless and will obey orders without question.”

  “For what purpose, sir?”

  “They are to act as my emissaries.” Abraham allowed the corners of his mouth to twitch into a secret smile. “They will carry a message to the Fallen on my behalf.”

  “And what might that message be?” Joshua felt a sense of dread growing in the pit of his stomach.

  “The message isn’t your concern. At least not today, it isn’t. Your task is simply to choose the best of the best at each of these compounds. One hundred and fifty men in all. Bring their names to me. That’s all you need to know at present.” Abraham waved him away. “You may go.”

  Joshua rose and took his leave. He couldn’t help feeling that he had been dismissed from his father’s confidence as well as his office. He desperately needed to find a way back in.

  Chapter 21—Mother And Sun

  “It isn’t much farther. We’re almost there.”

  Cassie glanced out of the car window. The blue pacific lay on one side. On the other lay homes perched on hillsides along a narrow road which wound steadily upward. Their destination was an archaeological site on Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido. Their driver was the Jomon trove-keeper, Kenji Takahashi, or “Ken” for short. An affable middle-aged man raised in Hawaii, he bore an accent as American as apple pie. Although Cassie and Griffin had originally contacted him to help search Sakhalin Island, he requested their aid with a conundrum related to his own trove first. As he put it, “they were going to be in the neighborhood anyway.” Consequently, the Arkana agents and their Nephilim associate boarded a plane from Chicago to Hakodate—a city on the southern tip of Hokkaido. They’d arrived the previous evening which, thankfully, had given them one night to recuperate from the twenty-hour flight.

  Cassie brought her attention back to the present moment when the car came to a stop in a gravel parking lot. Through the windshield, she could see a green meadow on a hill overlooking the ocean. It contained a few oddly-shaped wooden structures and several open pits.

  “This is it,” the trove-keeper announced.

  Everyone climbed out of the compact car. Both Griffin and Daniel took time to stretch even though the ride had lasted less than an hour.

  “Well, what do you think?” Ken asked the group, gesturing toward the hillside.

  “What do we think?” Cassie repeated. She shielded her eyes against the glare of the morning sun. “That depends. What are we looking at?”

  “Sorry.” The trove-keeper chuckled. “I suppose a recap is in order.” He motioned for the trio to follow him past the wooden fence that marked the boundary of the property. “This is Ofune, one of the largest Jomon settlement sites on Hokkaido. I thought it would be a good starting point for your visit.”

  “I’ve never heard of the Jomon culture,” Daniel admitted.

  “They were a fascinating people,” Griffin said as they ambled past the fence. “Their pottery is exquisite, far more advanced than anything else on the planet for its time.” He turned to Ken for verification. “Their earliest remains date from 18,000 years ago, yes?”

  “That’s right. Their culture flourished uninterrupted between 16500 BCE and 300 BCE. Sherds of their pottery date from 14000 BCE, making it the oldest known earthenware in the world. The Jomon didn’t use a wheel to shape their crockery. It was all done by hand. They pressed pieces of cord into wet clay to make designs. The word ‘Jomon’ means ‘rope-patterned’. These pottery-makers are thought to have been the earliest inhabitants of Japan. Of course, they didn’t resemble the modern Japanese. Their maternal DNA indicates an origin in Siberia which means their skins were pale, their eyelids had double folds and the men grew full beards. The closest living remnants of their genetic traits are found among the Ainu who look remarkably Caucasian for an indigenous people.”

  The Pythia’s eyes narrowed as she scrutinized the trove-keeper’s light complexion and neatly-trimmed beard. “You kind of fit that profile too.”

  “Some of my ancestors were Ainu,” Ken disclosed. “Siberian DNA is a mixture of Caucasian and East Asian. Geneticists used to think that the Caucasian and East Asian races developed independently at the same time. More recent gene research shows a hybrid race in between. It seems the Jomon, and later the Ainu, fell into that category.”

  The trove-keeper led them along a path that looped to the left, stopping when he reached a large oval hole in the ground. It measured about six feet deep with several circular depressions, deeper than the tamped base of the pit itself. These holes were spaced around the edge of the pit except for two positioned near the center. The trio clustered around the spot, anticipating an explanation.

  “The Jomon dug these pits for their homes,” Ken said. “They drove a central pillar into the middle of the pit with support posts along the sides. The shell would have been constructed of chestnut boughs. Like those.”

  He pointed back to a structure on the right side of the path which they’d passed earlier. Everyone turned to study a latticework of weathered tree limbs covering another pit.

  “Over there you see the finished product.” Ken gestured beyond their current location to a grass hut farther up the path. “They used kaya grass for thatching.”

  The reconstructed Jomon hut possessed a door opening that jutted out a few feet from the building like a porch. The roof rose to a narrow peak with a vent over the front entry to allow smoke from the central hearth to escape.

  “This seems rather elaborate for a gatherer-hunter society,” Griffin remarked.

  “The Jomon put some time into constructing their dwellings because they were sedentary,” Ken said. “This site was occupied continuously for a thousand years. It originally included about one hundred homes. Unlike most gatherer-hunters, the Jomon didn’t need to migrate to find food. Chestnuts and other local plants were a staple part of their diet. They fished and harvested crustaceans. Whale and seal bones have been found here which means they also hunted sea mammals. A readily-available food supply gave them time to build permanent settlements and create their wonderful crafts—pottery, jewelry, votive figurines.”

  “I don’t quite understand why this particular culture caught the attention of the Arkana.” Daniel eyed the Jomon dwellings dubiously.

  Ken grinned with amusement. “Because the Jomon offer archaeological proof of Japan’s matristic past, that’s why. Their culture thrived for sixteen thousand years. If you factor in their antecedents in Siberia, it makes patriarchy’s timeline seem like a blip on the radar.”

  The Scion furrowed his brow. “I know what ‘matristic’ means but I don’t see anything here that proves the Jomon were a female-centered society.”

  “Most of the hard evidence has been carted off to museums,” Ken conceded. “I could take you to the exhibits but how about I just give you the highlights?”

  “That would be helpful,” Daniel said.

  Cassie nudged Griffin in the ribs. She leaned up to whisper, “Remember when I was the new kid on the block and asked all the questions?”

  “I always found your naiveté endearing,” he confided back.

  “Aww, that’s sweet,” she murmured. “But everybody else found it annoying.”

  They both transferred their attention back to Ken who’d already begun a discourse on the finer points of Jomon culture. “We can infer a lot from the way these people lived. For example, we know the Jomon were a classless society because all their housing was of a uniform design. There were no elaborate palaces. Every home looked exactly the same and they were intended for large kin groups, not nuclear families.”

  “Like a Haudenosaunee longhouse,” the Pythia noted.

  “Exactly,” Ken agreed. “Jomon houses were also clustered in settlements that offered no defensive advantage in
case of attack. This hilltop is a perfect example.”

  He gave his listeners a few moments to scan their surroundings.

  “It was chosen because of proximity to the food supply. In all the Jomon villages across Japan, we’ve never found fortifications of any kind.”

  “The Minoans weren’t defensive either,” Cassie remarked. “They settled in places that had spiritual significance. The threat of attack never factored into it.”

  “Also true.” Ken went on. “The Jomon possessed the technology to build weapons but they chose not to. All we’ve found are hunting implements. They made jewelry for personal adornment, not as a tribute to a ruler. We also know they were probably goddess-worshippers.”

  The Scion’s eyebrows shot up.

  “It’s in the clay,” Ken informed him. “Aside from some intricate pottery, the Jomon spent a lot of time fashioning votive figurines known as dogon. About ten thousand of these dogon have been recovered so far. That’s a huge number given the small geographical area of their territory. The overwhelming majority of those figurines have been identified as female. Maybe one percent of the dogon are male.” The trove-keeper peered at Daniel. “Does it seem likely that they would have wasted all that energy creating female figurines that held no symbolic significance?”

  “In the literature I’ve read about ancient Europe, such statues are dismissed as fertility symbols,” Daniel countered.

  “Dismissed,” Griffin echoed sardonically. “It would be quite typical for an overlord archaeologist to dismiss fertility as an unimportant concept. And he would be utterly wrong to do so. Jomon survival depended on fertility. Not simply as it related to the offspring of the clan, but the fertility of the seals and whales they hunted, of the crustaceans and fish they gathered, of the plants whose seeds and fruits they collected. Their lives depended on the continued abundance of nature. It was inevitable that they would invoke a goddess who embodied the concept of fertility. Of course, such a divinity would have seemed insignificant to overlords. They exploited others to meet their survival needs and, consequently, equated sustenance with pillage.”

  The Scrivener smiled humorlessly. “Overlords exchanged the fertility goddess of a Garden of Eden for a warlord god of perpetual bloodshed. They prayed only for new people to conquer: ‘O Lord, grant me the power to smite all who oppose me and take what is theirs.’”

  The Scion flinched. He lowered his eyes, a flush suffusing his cheeks.

  “What’s wrong?” Cassie asked.

  “I was just thinking about my father,” Daniel confessed. “Lately, all he prays for is victory over his enemies. Nothing else matters to him anymore.” He lapsed into a gloomy silence.

  Ken hastily changed the subject. “Whether you believe the dogon are goddesses or not is open to question but there’s compelling evidence that goddess worship has been alive in Japan from the very beginning. Worship of the sun goddess probably began with the Jomon and it continues to the present day. How else can you explain that the most important deity in the Shinto religion is Amaterasu-omikami?”

  Both Daniel and Cassie stared at the trove-keeper blankly.

  He held up his hand. “Let me back up. Shinto is the traditional religion of Japan. It has its roots in the prehistoric past, probably springing from Siberian shamanism fifty thousand years ago. That’s why Shinto doesn’t have any founder or religious texts. It’s an animist religion. ‘Animist’ is a derogatory term that overlords use to describe the concept that everything has a soul. In Shinto, the divine essence of a thing is called a ‘kami’. The term can refer to a god in the conventional overlord sense, but it can also apply to a rock or a tree or an ancestor or an event. Whatever someone considers holy.”

  “That sounds really New Age,” Cassie observed.

  “Or really Old Age depending on your perspective.” Ken chuckled. “The notion of the sanctity of all life is as ancient as human spirituality itself. Shinto holds that the greatest divine spirit, or kami, is the sun goddess Amaterasu. Actually she’s the mother creator of the whole universe, not just a sun deity. Her name means ‘the great august god who shines in heaven’.”

  Griffin picked up the thread. “The worship of Amaterasu is significant because it has survived to this very day despite Japan’s overlord culture. Both Buddhists and Confucians actively discouraged her worship but never succeeded in stamping it out. The Japanese flag is a rising sun, the emblem of Amaterasu. The imperial dynasty only legitimized its rule by claiming that Amaterasu ordained it. In fact, the emperor is supposedly descended from the goddess herself.”

  “And it all began thousands of years ago with the Jomon.” Ken eyed the Scion, silently daring him to offer an objection. When none came, the trove-keeper continued. “But it’s more than goddess worship that proves the Jomon were matristic. We know they were a peaceful, gender-equal society from the contents of their pit graves.”

  “Pit graves!” Cassie registered alarm.

  The trove-keeper seemed bewildered by her reaction. “Yes, there were about a hundred found at this site.”

  “Maybe it isn’t such a good idea for me to be standing here.” The Pythia took a few steps backward.

  Griffin placed a steadying hand on her shoulder. “Our Pythia had rather a bad experience at Anyang.”

  “Anyang.” Ken gave a low whistle. “I can understand why. If I was a psychic, I wouldn’t want to set foot in that place.”

  “What’s Anyang?” Daniel asked.

  “An overlord site in China that we visited during our last recovery mission,” the Scrivener informed him.

  “Yeah, it was a hoot.” Cassie grimaced. “Pits full of decapitated and mutilated human sacrifices. One old dude was even buried alive and I got to channel that experience!”

  “Oh.” The Scion’s eyes grew wide.

  “Don’t worry, Cassie.” Ken’s tone was reassuring. “The Jomon pit graves are nothing like that. Still, the comparison to Anyang illustrates a point I was about to make. Anyang is all about overlord power. Ofune isn’t. The pit graves here contained a mix of male and female skeletons buried at different times over the centuries. Nobody was given an elaborate state funeral that included buried plunder and slaughtered slaves. This wasn’t a ‘big man’ type of society. In fact, the greatest care was taken in burying infants and children, not dignitaries. Most significant of all, not a single skeleton we’ve unearthed shows any sign of violent death. The same is true of all the other Jomon sites as well. They were a peaceful people.”

  “Yeah, I get that.” Cassie swept her gaze over the hilltop. “The vibe of this place has absolutely zero drama, zero trauma.” She smiled contentedly. “I like it here. It feels nice.”

  “So what happened to them?” Daniel asked.

  “The same thing that happens to all peaceful cultures.” Ken rolled his eyes. “Overlords.”

  “I believe the Jomon were driven out of this area by the Yayoi people,” Griffin said.

  “That’s right,” trove-keeper agreed. “Around 1000 BCE, a new group migrated to Japan from the Asian mainland. They knew how to plant rice and they lived in a stratified society with different clans battling each other using bronze and iron weapons. For a long time, it was believed the Yayoi came from Korea. They might have taken that route to get here but DNA evidence shows they originated in the Yangtse River valley.”

  “So they were Han Chinese,” Griffin concluded.

  “In all their overlord glory,” Ken summarized grimly. “It doesn’t appear that the Yayoi slaughtered the Jomon. The gatherer-hunters simply pulled up stakes and moved farther north to get out of range. Eventually, they all died out. The Ainu tribe contains remnants of Jomon DNA but their numbers are dwindling too.”

  “Same old, same old.” Cassie sighed. “Overlords move in. Everything good dies out.”

  “Strangely enough, Yayoi women retained some vestige of authority,” the trove-keeper said. “Around 200 CE, their ruler was a shaman-queen named Himiko. She was succeeded by another f
emale ruler but reigning queens vanished with the influx of more foreigners. By 300 CE, tribes were burying their rulers in kurgan-style mounds with lavish grave goods indicating that an overlord society had emerged.”

  Ken paused in his lecture and searched the faces of his listeners. “So, is everybody up to speed on Jomon culture now?”

  The trio mumbled their assent.

  “Good.” The trove-keeper unexpectedly turned on his heel and started walking back towards their parked car. “Now we can get on to the real reason I brought you to Hokkaido.”

  Chapter 22—Lend Me Your Ears

  Erik checked the display on his digital alarm clock. One in the morning. Everybody should be asleep by now. He glanced at the layout map Daniel had given him. His objective was to get from his own room to the Diviner’s office without being spied on camera. It wasn’t going to be as impossible as he’d originally anticipated. For that, he had to thank Chopper Bowdeen. Whether through sheer incompetence or personal misgiving, the mercenary had left wide gaps in the surveillance coverage of the compound.

  It was a stroke of luck that the guest wing wasn’t being monitored at all. Maybe Metcalf had thought visitors shouldn’t be subjected to the same scrutiny as the rest of the community. Given that Joshua Metcalf was in charge of security, this was a good thing. The spymaster wasn’t supposed to know Erik had survived, much less that the two were living under the same roof. His suspicions would certainly have been aroused if cameras were capturing the number of food trays traveling to the guest wing. Hannah’s presence alone couldn’t justify that amount of activity. Daniel’s frequent visits to two different guest rooms would have been equally suspicious. Thankfully nothing that happened in the wing was being recorded.

  The Paladin gave a rueful sigh. While he might be able to get out of his room and out of the guest wing undetected, that wouldn’t be the case once he started moving through the rest of the building. To accomplish that feat, he needed help. Daniel had given him a layout map and had drawn arrows from Erik’s current location to Metcalf’s office. The Scion had circled all the cameras in the corridors and their field of view. There were plenty of blind spots if the Paladin was careful. He should be able to make it all the way to the Diviner’s office without being seen. “Should” being the operative word.