Sinai Tapestry

by Edward Whittemore

  And as its discoverer Strongbow had the inalienable right to name it.

  The archbishop led a select delegation to Strongbow’s rooms. After congratulating him warmly the archbishop eased into a persuasive discourse. A new rose had been found for England, a new monarch was soon to be crowned from the House of Hanover. How magnanimous it was of God, working through a brilliant young scholar and nobleman, to bless the land and Her Britannic Majesty at this time, in this manner.

  While the archbishop spoke Strongbow remained bent over his workbench examining a blade of grass with his enormous magnifying glass. When the archbishop finished Strongbow straightened to his full height, still holding the glass in place, and stared down at the delegation.

  Behind the powerful lens of the magnifying glass his unblinking eye was two inches wide.

  During his year at Cambridge Strongbow’s disgust with his family’s history had fully matured. He could no longer abide the memory of the silly accidents that had killed twenty-eight successive Dukes of Dorset, the silly aunts and uncles who had been returning to the manor for centuries to raise its orphans, the silly family mystery which was just another name for illiteracy, above all the silly sexuality that had gone by the name of the family game.

  At the same time he had grown increasingly contemptuous toward England, which he found too small and prim and petty for his needs. And being still young, he preferred to believe his country was more to blame that his family for six hundred and fifty years of Strongbow silliness.

  So his enormous eye rested on the archbishop and his speech was short.

  Your Grace has made reference to the House of Hanover, Germans who arrived here some five hundred and forty years after my own dukedom was established. It is certainly true the Plantagenet Strongbows did nothing for England in six and a half centuries, but at least they had the decency to do it on English soil. Therefore we will honor that soil and Victoria of Hanover by naming this discovery the rosa exultata plantagenetiana. Thank you for coming, and thank you for recognizing the inevitable existence of this rare flower.

  Nothing more was said on either side of the workbench. The huge eye continued to hover near the ceiling as the shrunken delegates crept out the door.

  Strongbow immediately disappeared from England, his first journeys allusive and unrecorded. From time to time a detailed monograph on the flora of western Sudan or eastern Persia appeared in some European capital, posted from Damascus or Tunis and privately printed according to his instructions.

  And at least once a year a dozen new species of desert flowers would be described, the discoveries invariably genuine. So although he continued to be feared and disliked even when far from home, the English botanical community had no choice but to admire his accumulated research.

  Yet in fact Strongbow was spending very little time on botany. Instead, unexpectedly, he had turned his vast powers of concentration to the study of sex, an endeavor that eventually would bring about the fall of the British Empire.

  But that was of no concern to Strongbow. What was important to him was the startling discovery he made in a Sinai cave after only a few years in the Middle East, that the lost original of the Bible actually existed, a secret he would share with only one other man in his century.

  With that discovery began Strongbow’s forty-year search for the Sinai Bible and his lifelong speculations about what the mysterious lost original might contain, of all his legacies to the twentieth century the one that would most intrigue and baffle his sole child and heir, the idealistic boy one day to become a gunrunner named Stern.

  2 Wallenstein

  Men tend to become fables

  and fables tend to become

  men.

  BEFORE BEING KILLED AT the order of the Habsburgs, a former Czech orphan named Wallenstein had twice risen to become the all-powerful Generalissimo of the Holy Roman Empire during the religious slaughter known as the Thirty Years War.

  A variety of enemies had hunted the fugitive through the mists of northern Bohemia, but when finally trapped the halberd driven through his chest was held by an English captain commanded by an Irish general. The year was 1634 and that killing, followed by the specter of an eagle, which in Arab lore traditionally lives a thousand years, brought to the Mediterranean the apparent ancestor of the man who would one day undertake the most spectacular forgery in history.

  While he lived and scavenged, Generalissimo Wallenstein had immersed himself so excessively in astrology that everyone in his family detested stars—with one exception, an indolent nephew who believed in nothing else. Therefore the morning the nephew learned of his famous uncle’s death he immediately rushed to consult his local wizard.

  The wizard had been up all night nodding in his observatory. He was on his way to bed but he couldn’t turn away his most important client. Wearily he laid out his charts and tried to come to some conclusion. By the time he did he was falling asleep.

  Bribes, screamed the nephew. Can they save me? Should I flee?

  Eagles, muttered the wizard.

  The Wallenstein nephew leapt from his chair.

  Flight. Of course. But where to?

  I’m sorry, all else is unclear.

  Wallenstein shook the wizard by his beard but the old man was already snoring. He galloped back to his castle above the Danube where his confessor, a Jesuit in the habit of dropping by for a glass of wine at noon, was waiting. He saw that the nephew’s left eyelid was drooping, a sure sign of profound agitation. Having traveled widely for his order, he suggested Wallenstein unburden himself. As the nephew talked the priest calmly emptied their bottle of wine.

  Shqiperi, he murmured at length. An excellent vintage, my son.

  What’s that? asked Wallenstein, peering out from under his drooping eyelid.

  I said this is a remarkably fine vintage.

  No, that other word you used.

  You mean the ancient name the Albanians used for their country? Thought to have meant eagle originally? Certainly an old race, the Albanians, who have survived because their land is mountainous and inaccessible. Probably they once identified themselves with the eagles of the place.

  The Jesuit seemed unsurprised as Wallenstein dropped to his knees and confessed he had never believed in stars. There was a further exchange, after which the priest praised the young man for not falling victim to his uncle’s astral follies.

  He then absolved him of various sins, suggested a number of Hail Marys and wished him success in the south, if he-should ever travel south, meanwhile accepting responsibility for the wine cellar beneath the castle if its owner were ever absent.

  The first Wallenstein in Albania considered himself a temporary exile from Germany. The country was barbarous and he intended to leave as soon as possible. Nevertheless he had to live so he moved into a castle and took a local wife.

  When a son was born he allowed the baby to be named after Albania’s national hero, a fifteenth-century Christian turned Moslem turned Christian who had been given the name by which history knew him while a hostage to the Turks, Lord Alexander or Iskander Bey, or Skanderbeg as his countrymen pronounced it when he finally returned to his native land and became its most famous warrior, tirelessly storming Christian fortresses for the Turks during the first half of his life, then tirelessly defending those same fortresses against the Turks for the second half of his life.

  After several decades of exile Wallenstein learned that his dead uncle was no longer considered a threat to the Holy Roman Empire. It was now safe for him to return to his home above the Danube. Elated, he drank a quantity of arak one evening and climbed his tower to see what the stars of an Albanian night might say of his future.

  Unfortunately a condition that was to afflict his male heirs for generations came over him. His drooping left eyelid slipped lower and lower until it closed.

  Unable to gauge distances with one eye, he stepped off the tower and landed on his head in a fountain one hundred feet below, instantly dead and never able
to reveal that the stars had told him it was his destiny to found a powerful Albanian dynasty, and that a pardon from Germany resulting in his immediate death was the surest way for this to happen.

  Thereafter the drooping left eyelid was apparent in all Skanderbegs soon after birth. As with the progenitor of the clan, the eyelid tended to droop more severely under the pressure of alcohol or when death was near.

  With it went other unmistakable traits inherited from the original Albanian Wallenstein, who had always suspected his uncle’s Holy Roman enemies were sending spies down from the north to assassinate him.

  As a result the Skanderbeg Wallensteins were deeply suspicious men. They moved furtively and never dared look anyone in the eye. When guests were in the castle the master disappeared frequently, being seen now slinking along the far side of the garden, next in the kitchen behind a cupboard sneaking a quick glass of arak, a moment later peeking out of a tower with a spyglass.

  What the family malady amounted to, in short, was an unshakable conviction that the entire universe was ordered with the sole purpose of endangering Skanderbeg Wallensteins. The plots they imagined were vague yet pervasive and thereby explained all events on earth.

  By tradition they received no education. War was their vocation and they left home at an early age to pursue it, fighting fiercely against either the Turks or the Christians as had their contradictory namesake, the national hero. Yet curiously not one of them was ever killed in battle. Although always campaigning they somehow managed to survive the massacres perpetrated by their enemies and return to their castle to become extremely alert shrunken old men.

  Thus in almost every way the Wallenstein men were the exact opposites of the Strongbows, who died young never suspecting anything. In their dark damp castle perched gloomily on a wild Albanian crag, a windy and insecure Balkan outpost, these aging illiterates were forever given to rampant instabilities and extravagant reversals of character.

  Then too, the Skanderbeg Wallensteins had never been father and son. Combining love with sensual pleasure was beyond them and they were impotent with their wives. Sexually they could only be aroused by very young girls of eight or nine.

  When a new bride was brought to the castle this situation was delicately explained to her by the resident mother-in-law. There was nothing to worry about, however, since the castle had a large staff of loyal retainers. Matters could be easily arranged, as indeed they had been for nearly two hundred years.

  The resident matriarchs were always quick to claim that the Wallenstein men loved their women well. Yet the fact was that successive Skanderbegs were never related, perhaps the real reason why these masters of the castle so violently distrusted everyone at home and spent most of their lives away in wars.

  Generally their fathers were stolid Albanian butlers or gamekeepers whose interests were limited to the confines of a pantry or a nest of grouse. But in 1802 the new wife of a Skanderbeg happened to take to her bed a young Swiss with a passion for details, a highly gifted linguist who was on a walking tour to the Levant. Later that year a Wallenstein heir was born for the first time in history without a drooping left eyelid.

  The boy was unusual in other ways, being both shy and ascetic. At an age when other Skanderbegs would have been glancing lasciviously at girls of four or five, preparing for their adult sex life with girls of eight or nine, he seemed to notice no one at all. Nothing interested him but the Bible, which he read incessantly. In fact this Skanderbeg passed his entire youth without leaving the castle, all his time spent in the private conservatory he had built for himself in its tallest tower.

  From the conservatory he had superb views that stretched all the way to the Adriatic. The walls of the room were lined with Bibles and there was an organ at which he sat playing Bach’s Mass in B Minor long into the night. Before he was twenty it was said he had memorized the Bible in all the tongues current in the Holy Land during the Biblical era. So of course no one was surprised when he paused at the gate one morning, there to cross the moat into the outside world for the first time, to announce he was on his way to Rome to enter the Trappist monastic order.

  When Wallenstein professed his vows he did so as Brother Anthony, in honor of the fourth-century hermit and founder of monasticism who had died in an Egyptian desert at the age of one hundred and four. As a monk he continued to live much as he always had until he was sent to Jerusalem and ordered to make a religious retreat to St Catherine’s monastery.

  This lonely enclosure of gray granite walls at the foot of Mt Sinai, fortified by Justinian in the sixth century, was supported by a curious tribe called the Jebeliyeh, bedouin in appearance, who had been forcibly converted to Islam a thousand years earlier. But actually the Jebeliyeh were descendants of Bosnian and Wallachian serfs, and therefore not very distant neighbors of the Wallenstein castle, whom Justinian had forcibly converted to Christianity three hundred years before that, then sent to the Sinai so the monks could tend to their prayers while others tended their sheep.

  When a Trappist first arrived in the Holy Land it was common practice for him to be sent to St Catherine’s to consider these and other wonders concerning time and emperors, prophets and the desert.

  As part of his working day at the monastery Brother Anthony was directed to clear away the debris in the dry cellar of a storeroom long in disuse. He uncovered a mound of hard earth, and in keeping with God’s plan for regularity in the universe he began chipping away the mound to level the floor.

  His tool struck the edge of a cloth. A few minutes later a large bundle lay in his lap. Carefully he unwound the lengths of stiff swaddling and found a thick stack of parchment. He lifted the cover, read the first line of Aramaic in the first of the four columns on the page, closed his eyes and began to pray.

  After some minutes he opened his eyes and gazed at the flowing mixture of Aramaic and Old Hebrew, knowing that no Biblical texts survived in those dead tongues, suspecting, therefore, that here before him was one of the oldest Old Testaments in existence.

  The lost original perhaps?

  Once more Brother Anthony closed his eyes to pray, this time for deliverance from vanity. Then he opened the manuscript again and it struck him as a blow. The New Testament as well? Centuries before Christ had lived?

  His hands trembled as he turned the pages, recalling the various Bibles he had memorized. It was absolutely impossible, but by the end of the afternoon two facts had enveloped his mind in darkness.

  First, this Bible was complete and without question the oldest Bible in the world.

  Second, it denied every religious truth ever held by anyone.

  The stories it told distorted every event that had taken place over three millennia in the Eastern Mediterranean, in the Holy Land and more particularly in Jerusalem, legendary home of Melchizedek, King of Salem which also meant King of Peace, the fabled priest of antiquity who had blessed the future patriarch of all three faiths when first the shepherd Abraham journeyed forth from the dawn of the east with his flock.

  Melchizedek’s very existence was in doubt and so was that of Jerusalem, which since Melchizedek’s reign had always been the ultimate destination of all sons and prophets of God toiling up from the desert, stern with their messages of salvation for the eternally queasy souls of that city.

  Possibly, the pages implied, Melchizedek had lived elsewhere or been someone else. And just possibly, there had never been a Jerusalem.

  To Brother Anthony the words before him were terrifying. What would happen if the world suddenly suspected that Mohammed might well have lived six centuries before Christ rather than six centuries after him?

  Or again, that Christ had been a minor prophet in the age of Elijah or a secret messiah in the age of Isaiah, who alone knew his true identity and rigorously followed his instructions?

  Or that Mohammed and Isaiah were contemporaries, brethren in a common cause who comforted one another in moments of trial?

  Or that idols were indeed God when made in the shape
of Hector or David, Alexander or Caesar, if the worshipper was living in the same era as one of these worthies?

  Or more or less in the same era.

  Or at least thought he was.

  Or that the virtues of Mary and Fatima and Ruth had been confused in the minds of later chroniclers and freely interchanged among them? That the virtues ascribed to Fatima more properly were those of Ruth? That the song of Ruth had been sung by Mary? That the virgin birth called Mary’s belonged to Fatima?

  Or that it was true from time to time that innumerable Gods held court in all the high and low places? That these legions of Gods were variously sleek and fat or gnarled and lean, as vicious as crazed brigands or as gentle as doting grandfathers?

  That they passed whole epochs vaguely preoccupied with the slit necks of bulls, ambrosia, broken pottery, war, peace, gold rings and purple robes and incense, or even gurgling vacantly while sniffing and sucking their forefingers?

  Although at other times there were no Gods anywhere? Not even one? The rivers wending their ways and the lambs bleating with mindless inconsistency?

  Or that the carpenter who had gone down to the Jordan to be cleansed by his cousin was either the son of Fatima or the father of Ruth? That Joshua had gained his wisdom from the fifth Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad, who might himself have been Judas or Christ if only he had foreseen a painful future as clearly as he recalled a blissful past?

  That David and Julius Caesar had been secret cardplaying cronies? That Alexander the Great had challenged them both to a primitive sort of backgammon for nominal stakes, winning easily, yet had gone on to lose his earnings to a chattering barber whose only other distinction in history was that he had cut Mohammed’s hair?

  That Abraham had passed on his legacy to the Jews through his first son, Ishmael the wanderer, and his legacy to the Arabs through his sedentary second son, Isaac? And since he had no more sons, that he rejected outright the paternity claims of the Gentiles and refused to take any responsibility whatsoever for them?