Lisa Emmer Historical Thrillers Vol. 1-2 (Lisa Emmer Historical Thriller Series)

by Rob Swigart

  “Your colleague?” Steve’s tone was sour. “Paleographer, the handwriting guy at École Practique? Tall, thin, slope-shouldered, dandruff. Fourth century Egyptian and Greek. What could be so important he calls you? Breaking news in a sixteen-hundred-year-old parchment? You’d think an email would suffice.”

  “I should take it. Keep up appearances.”

  She answered, listened for some moments. “OK, Frédo, we can talk about it. What? All right.”

  She closed the car door. To Steve’s questioning look, she shrugged. “He got a call he didn’t answer, but it’s worried him.”

  “We waiting for something?”

  “I don’t know. He sounded strange.” The phone chirped a text message, another, and a third. She read them. “We’ll have to reschedule this climb.”

  “Normal business, or Delphi Agenda?”

  “Hard to say just yet— maybe Delphi, maybe nothing, but I have a feeling.”

  “Good enough for me. I presume we’re in something of a hurry, then. Rue du Dragon?”

  She nodded.

  The A6 back to Paris was relatively clear of traffic for a March Thursday and they made good time.

  Usem’s Vision

  Another in an endless series of unseasonably humid March midnights slipped by before Brother Usem Izri, S. J., switched off his bedside light. Unlike on previous nights, though, sleep eluded him. He turned over, punched his pillow, turned again. As he approached the mercy of sleep’s edge, the dusty triangle of baked brown clay he had found that afternoon floated before his closed eyes. The wedges of ancient writing, chicken scratches some called it, would cover both sides of a large tablet, but the few visible words, small as they were on this fragment, kept him awake.

  For the past six months Brother Usem had sorted through shards, mostly junk, really, collected by hurried, uncoordinated excavations all over the Ottoman pashalik of Baghdad in the second half of the 19th century, a period of undisciplined search for treasure. European amateurs eager to discover pre-Biblical artifacts that might confirm events in the Old Testament or help solve its mysteries swarmed over the decaying empire. They hired swarms of local workers in what is today Syria and Iraq to dig in the dust. When they found something even faintly interesting, it was thrown in a box and sent back to Paris, London, or Chicago.

  Brother Usem passed his days hunched over a long table under the low, sloping roof on the top floor of a Collège de France building on the rue du Cardinal Lemoine. He was unaware that Ernest and Hadley Hemingway had lived nearby a century earlier, nor would he have cared.

  The Salle Botta, so named for the French Consul in Mosul in 1852, was a narrow, nearly forgotten room thick with dust, and to Usem’s sometimes fevered imagination, regret. After many disappointments, Botta made his reputation uncovering a palace of Sargon II, King of Assyria, at Khorsabad. That, his collection of mammals, birds, reptiles, and insects from California, and this room full of shattered clay tablets, comprised his legacy. Brother Usem sometimes felt he was no better than Paul Émile Botta, that he, too, would sink into obscurity, known, if known at all, to only the most solitary and dedicated of scholars.

  On occasion the functionary in the outer office would stick his head through the door to ask Usem if he needed anything. Usem would wave his hand without looking up, and the man would disappear.

  Three or four times an hour he rubbed his weary eyes, pushed himself to his feet, and shuffled over to the floor-to-ceiling cabinets extending over twenty meters along the wall behind him. The series of windows overlooking both the street and the inner courtyard garden were thick with dust and spider webs. They admitted only the feeblest and gloomiest of light.

  He would fill a plastic tub from yet another drawer full of sun-or-fire-baked clay. He would place the tub on the long central table, the surface of which was marred by pen points, knife gouges, and cigarette burns. The table had been installed decades before in that condition.

  He would hunch over, pick up a shard, and distribute it to a pile, according to its type and origin.

  Brother Usem had dedicated most of his life to assembling and deciphering ancient tablets. He did this for the glory of God, although, on the days he was most honest with himself, he had to admit to some troubling questions about his faith to which he hoped he might one day find answers in these discarded scraps from the dawn of writing.

  There were countless jigsaw puzzles in this room, and no pictures to help solve them. He moved pieces around more or less at random, pleased when he reassembled an account of the sale of some sheep, a list of boots from the king to one of his overseers, or a receipt for a few liters of barley flour. In the past half year, though, he had managed to put together only two fragmentary scribal practice tablets, a partial list of medicinal plants, and the first half of an omen: “If the new moon is first seen in Scorpio, there will….” There the omen broke off. He would never know what the new moon in Scorpio might mean. Trouble in the kingdom? An alliance of enemy kings? A good harvest?

  These four texts were not much to show for hundreds of hours of close work! Mostly, he believed they contributed to the inexorable deterioration of his eyesight.

  Each fragment had a label in faded black ink identifying the place and date of its discovery, what archaeologists called its provenance. At least those amateurs had done that much: write the where and when before shipping the fragments back home. Future specialists like Brother Usem would decipher them. Meanwhile, they commanded high prices from collectors who were mostly indifferent to what the tablets said.

  The crates came from long-dead cities that stretched from the Persian Gulf to the headwaters of the Euphrates, from Syria to Iran. They were packed with chips and shards, some as small as a fingernail clipping, others nearly complete tablets. Whatever their size, they smelled of the dust of civilizations long dead, and as the days of his life crept from years into decades, Brother Usem was gradually overcome by a sense of unfathomable sadness. He imagined a nameless scribe holding each blob of damp clay in his or her hand, smoothing it, pressing a stylus into it. In this small act he or she told someone far away in space or time a tale of trade or treatment, gain or loss, things made, animals sacrificed, taxes collected. Now the scribe and the people for whom the text was written were dust as well.

  In the fall of 1863 some junior clerk identified only by an illegible signature had distributed a decade’s worth of finds into several dozen drawers, where they languished for over a century. Few in all the intervening years had so much as glanced at them, much less tried to read them. To Brother Usem’s secret joy they were untouched, as if they had been left just for him. He considered himself a worker in a great scholarly enterprise, a solitary soul true to vows of humility, poverty, and obedience. He felt love for these ancient texts. Love; it was that simple, at least at first. He had begun many decades before in Algeria poring over parchments of Coptic Egyptian or racy, vernacular Greek. Now he traced the indentations of the world’s oldest writing with his fingertips. Their delicate pressures shaped long-dead words in his mouth.

  After the Collège closed each evening he returned to the small apartment his Order rented for him amid the artists and immigrants in the noisy Belleville quarter. He climbed the spiral staircase to the seventh floor, ate a small supper of bread, cheese and tinned or dried fish, prayed (prayers increasingly perfunctory as his faith weakened), and lay down on his narrow cot with metal springs that clanged like church bells whenever he turned.

  This night of the day he found the corner of the tablet (already he thought of it as the tablet), he tried to follow routine, but this was no simple accounting document, and his prayers were more brief than usual. To avoid leaping to a conclusion (or several conclusions), he went over the possibilities.

  Perhaps it was just an incantation, a lengthy poem, a description of ritual, a recipe for medicine, even. From the paleography, the style of the writing, it was early, mid to late third millennium before Our Lord, long before the Patriarchs. The wri
ting was exceedingly fine, careful, and clear, no sloppiness. He thought it might be from Ebla, or from Mari, perhaps. If he was right, it would be the oldest known tablet of its kind, and without doubt the most important find of his long, undistinguished career.

  He tried to set his agitation aside, and saw that underneath, for no reason he could determine, lay a queasy fear.

  The language was ancient, spoken by the mysterious black-headed Sumerians, inventors of writing. The signs on the triangle said, “Dimme, daughter of the Great God An.”

  This was all he could read, but the opening phrase suggested to him that the text was important. An was the god of the sky, the most powerful and remote of the ancient deities, and his daughter Dimme was a fallen goddess, a monster, bringer of pestilence, snatcher and killer of babies, eater of men, the most terrifying of all ancient demons. Later the Akkadians and Assyrians would call her Lamaštu, the Goddess Whose Face is Wild, She Who Lights the Fire, Sword that Splits the Head, the essence of evil.

  “Superstitious rubbish!” he muttered, tossing again. Such sentimental misgivings were unworthy of a Jesuit. They were not logical.

  Staring up into the dark, he prayed. “I asked for Your guidance, oh, Lord. Why do you not answer me?”

  The only reply came in the form of blooms and swirls of white and orange light. Try as he might to tease out a meaning from them, deep down he knew they arose from within his own body, from the flow and beat of blood, phosphenes and floaters inside his eyeballs. They were not messages; they were certainly not answers.

  They faded away, leaving that small tan triangle. “All right, Lord, is this then Your sign? Do you speak to me thus, through this old text, tempting me with knowledge always just out of reach? Do you tantalize to test me?” His voice came out hoarse with anger, and he looked around in sudden fear.

  As if in reply, more fragments drifted into view and floated toward the triangle. He was dimly aware he had fallen into the twilight between sleeping and waking, but when he tried to move, to sit up and shake off his unease, he could not move, could scarcely breathe. Something large and shadowy and dark sat on his chest, pinned his arms, and pressed him onto the bed. He tried to scream and could not. He thrashed and made guttural sounds in his throat. It was hopeless.

  He stopped struggling, let a breath go, and the fragments hovering in his visual field came together, as if drawn by a magnet, remaking the tablet, his tablet. He knew, though he could not say how, that he was to be a conduit for its message. When the edges aligned and clicked together, the document would be as it had been over four thousand years ago, a rectangle of clay two hands high and one wide, covered with columns of tiny signs that pointed to words. The cracks and breaks would fade; he would read and understand.

  A flush of elation arose in him, and faded away. A part of him (so he imagined in a small corner of his feeble awareness) knew assembling the tablet was impossible. He had handled thousands of fragments over the past half-year, and thousands more remained in the cabinets of the Salle Botta.

  Something shifted when he teased out Dimme’s name. Ever since touching the ancient clay and reading her name, the change had been coming. Now, lying in the dark, he realized the quality of his faith had changed, not just its quantity.

  In this secular age the Church’s perennial concern with demons was largely academic. Still, Dimme-Lamaštu belonged to a tradition that undoubtedly began in the darkness long before the emergence of writing. Perhaps it still had that ancient power buried under millennia of civilization, the power of primal fear.

  There had been a time when the Mother Church had taken such entities far more seriously than today; after all, people did fall sick, demons did haunt their nights and dreams, did bring them terrors. When that happened, when something evil possessed a person (a vulnerable person, he reminded himself), the Church must do something to banish evil, and so had developed the Rite of Exorcism.

  The demon sitting on his chest relented and he moved his hands over the blanket, feeling its rough weave, the smooth satin of its border. The acuity of Brother Usem’s eyes may have dimmed with age, but his fingertips remained exquisitely sensitive. Week after week he sat at the long table and ran them over edges and breaks, smooth spots and rough. The pieces seldom fit together, but he continued to feel doggedly along an upturned curve, around a notch, over a splintered edge. One after another, day after day, he had felt their textures and peered at their broken words. Most were too fragmentary for meaning, but he kept hoping for success and despairing of achieving it.

  The images drifting before his now-closed eyes summoned a series of sense-memories: a wavy break in the obverse of a piece, the matching edge of its partner; a small bit fit between two other pieces; a chip floating down to snug into a gap. He felt as if he were laying the pieces out on a sheet of virgin cardboard and could examine the lines of wedge-shaped signs under bright light at leisure.

  Had he really come this close to a discovery, or was he just dreaming it because he wanted it so badly? Had he really felt and discarded all those pieces? There was only one way to know. In the morning he would take the fragments one by one from their separate boxes, for they all came from different places. Divine Will would guide his fingers. He would pluck them out and put them together one by one.

  Each had been discovered in a different city! Each piece. Someone had deliberately broken the tablet and scattered the fragments all over Mesopotamia, to Nineveh, Ur, Nippur, Mari, Umma, Lagaš, Keš, and a dozen other places. He could see the cities, their baked brick buildings, date palms, high temples, and sluggish canals. He could hear the braying of donkeys, the cries of vendors hawking cloaks and turbans, birds and amulets, magic potions, clay pots, sacks of barley flour; he could feel the cities pulsing around him as if he was there.

  The deliberate destruction and scattering of the fragments made no sense. Why would anyone do such a thing, unless four thousand years ago they believed the tablet was dangerous and must be destroyed?

  He shivered despite the heat. No, he thought, it was not just a belief, a whimsy: the tablet was dangerous. Someone had tried to destroy it. They had neutralized it temporarily, but now it would be brought back together. He would read it.

  And in doing so, he could unleash a terrible power.

  He almost laughed. This was sheer melodrama! He was imagining things. It was the 21st century, not the Middle Ages.

  Despite his efforts, a small worm of anxiety uncoiled within him. Tomorrow he would find the pieces and see if was imagining it all, or if he really could put them together, completely restore dozens of lines of text.

  And if he could, he would decipher it, translate it.

  The worm twisted in his gut. He shifted in the bed and the springs clanged.

  In his dream he felt bitter disappointment when the Collège closed. He had to leave. The nights he paced his two small rooms, ate his meager meal, knelt by his bed, turned off the light to stare into the pool of ceiling darkness and fell at last into dreamless, thankful sleep, all merged together and he knew he was dreaming of dreamlessness.

  The document snapped together before his closed eyes. His stomach jumped, his eyes flew open, and the fragments vanished into a void.

  The bed twanged and clicked when he sat up. He snapped on the bedside lamp, threw on some clothes, turned on the desk lamp, and opened his laptop with trembling fingers.

  His email inbox was filled with messages from the Order, announcements of forthcoming workshops and retreats, advertisements for expanded cable television service (he had no television), and deceptive phishing messages from unknown banks. He chewed on the tip of his index finger, wishing briefly that Paris had not installed such effective Internet service. He felt old, and frustrated, and afraid.

  He typed, “Cher Frédéric.” He stopped.

  The insert cursor blinked after the comma.

  He continued, “I stumbled upon a tablet and have seen a glimpse of its contents in a vision. I won’t tell you all I saw, for it mu
st be a delusion. Tomorrow I will know for sure, but I was reminded of that Greek letter you told me about, the parchment you found in the eastern desert in Egypt last summer, the one with references to a child born far away. I remember it was related to Lilith, Lamia, or Hecate as spawn of Lamaštu, and had something to do with snakes. The tablet I found is Sumerian, mid to late third millennium. The subject is Dimme - Lamaštu.

  “In ancient times— and I wonder how ancient— there were many prophecies of a child who would bring down the powerful and change the world. There were so many of these hopeful stories of the Anointed One, a messiah come to save us from ourselves. We assume that He has already come, and why not? After His coming the world did change! But if my vision is even a little bit right, this tablet does not refer to Our Lord, but something or someone else, not yet seen and as likely to belong to the dark and purely evil as to the Light. Would that not change things? The tablet invokes Dimme, who was attended by snakes.

  “Here I am, telling you my visions. You will say that what I saw, after all, was just an hallucination, a dream, but I am frightened, my friend…”

  He stared at the hypnotic blink of the cursor, and the fear swelled rapidly toward panic. He glared around the room.

  Nothing had changed. His cell, as he liked to call this cramped apartment with its hideous flowered wallpaper, was ordinary: the mirrored circles of light on the bedside table and ceiling, the edges of black shadow trembling in the corners, the cheap, battered furniture, all were familiar and ordinary. The computer screen glowed blue.

  Through the open window drifted the soft hiss of early traffic and then, surprisingly, the churring call of a nightjar. How often had he heard this sound from the window of the dormitory back in Algeria! What was it doing in the city? Hunting in the park, perhaps. In the morning it would return to the fields.

  The muscles in his neck thrilled with tension, like wind in wires. Waves of fear rippled unabated up his abdomen and he had trouble catching his breath. He pressed SEND, threw his laptop into his bag, and hurried from the apartment, leaving the door unlocked.