by Jon Steele
As shadows engulfed them one of the riders approached. He carried his spear upright as he rode up the plateau. He stopped within a two spans of us, quickly spinning his spear and driving the tip of it into the sand. He made his horse move three steps to the left, away from the spear. There, the bandit waited.
By now all the order had come from their residences. With them came the Teacher of Righteousness. He regarded the rider, seeing the bearded and fierce-looking face, but also that the rider’s weapon had been set in a sign of surrender. The Teacher of Righteousness called to the bandit.
“What is it you desire of us, stranger?”
The bandit dismounted and walked to us, stopping at the low stone wall that separated us from the rest of the world. There was a breeze from Mount Nebo across the sea. It brushed the bandit and carried his scent of smoke and sweat to us. He bent down, inspected the ground, and gathered seven small stones. He stood and looked over the community. Then, gently and one by one, he tossed the stones into our world.
“Be not afraid. This is not the time of your destruction, not yet. But it will come.”
“And will you bring it to us?”
“Not me. Not any of us. But it will come.”
“When?”
“I’m not a prophet, Rabbi.”
The Teacher of Righteousness bowed his head and spoke softly. “We are surrendered to the end of the world.”
The bandit tossed the last stones. He brushed his hands of dust. “No, this isn’t the end of the world. It can’t be, it mustn’t be.”
The Teacher of Righteousness studied the bandit, as we all did. Though dressed in a tunic bound with blue ribbon, though speaking our language, he was not one of us. It was with the teacher’s words that we understood he, too, shared our fear of the bandit.
“The manner of your words is dark,” the teacher said.
“Yes, I’m sure. But like I said, be not afraid.” The bandit turned to his fellows by the sea. “We’ve brought you scrolls from Jerusalem, from the ones like you.”
Having once gone up to the city to deliver messages to our community that were encamped in the valley to the west, I called to the bandit. “And our order, what of them?”
There were murmurs among those gathered that I had spoken before our teacher, but he did not reprimand me.
“Yes,” the teacher spoke, “what news of our order?”
“Slaughtered. All of them.”
There was silence. Down by the sea I saw the men making camp and lighting six fires at six points about them. It appeared they were setting themselves behind unseen walls drawn by the fires, and the light crossed the desert and pierced my eyes. Two of the men limped as if wounded. The bandit spoke to us again.
“We were protecting a tomb from bandits. It was not far from your brethren. After the Romans took the city, a cohort came from the Citadel and made camp at the Essene Gate. They found your brethren and charged. The Romans were too fast, too many. We couldn’t save your brethren, but two of my men got in and smuggled out their library. We also have scrolls from the Temple. Not all, many have disappeared. You need to save them, protect them.”
The Teacher of Righteousness became confused. “But if this place is to be destroyed—”
“You won’t keep the scrolls down here,” the bandit said. He pointed up to the caves in the west hills. “Up there. With everything from your scriptorium, too. We’ll set up block and tackle above the caves so we can rappel down and hide the Jerusalem scrolls. Then your scrolls, the ones you think are important first, then the rest.”
“But we have years of transcriptions yet. Our work is not finished.”
“Then finish it,” the bandit said.
His voice was sharp and filled us with dread. He regarded our faces. He spoke with a sense of calm.
“The killers won’t find this place for a while. They’ll follow us for a year before they realize we don’t have what they want.”
Those of the order looked to one another, wondering at the meaning of the bandit’s words. The Teacher of Righteousness silenced us.
“You speak as if it is not the Romans we should fear,” he said.
The bandit tossed the last of his stones onto the ground.
“The worst a Roman can do is kill you, Rabbi. It’s the ones hiding in the fifth cohort of the Tenth Legion Fretensis that have the power to devour human souls. They are the sons of darkness, we are their sworn enemy.”
Then did the bandit reveal the light within his eyes, and the Teacher of Righteousness was overcome with awe. He fell to his knees and lifted the palms of his hands to the bandit.
“Truly, you are an angel of the Pure G-d. Command us, lord.”
The bandit drew his sword, lowered himself to one knee before our teacher, and laid the sword on the ground.
“We carry one of our own in the large cart.”
“Does his body need healing?”
“No, there is nothing you can do for him. The soul of his form has already been delivered to the stars.”
This caused the Teacher of Righteousness to wonder. “I do not understand your words. If he is passed and he is a Jew, he must be buried at once.”
“Rabbi, some of my kind need healing, all of us need food and drink. We would be grateful for your help. Then, perhaps, we can talk. There are things you need to know about the world.”
ii
Harper walked back along the display tables to the section holding scroll number one. He tapped the glass cover. The glass was three inches thick and the scroll inside was in an atmospheric environment that matched conditions at Qumran. He had to admit the scrolls looked pretty good for being nearly two thousand years old. So good that when he first saw them he wondered if the whole thing was a hoax. Even on the second run, scrolls one through four read like the ravings of a madman. And even if they contained an awareness of Harper’s kind, it would not be the first time a madman imagined the truth.
Then came scrolls five and six.
He felt a chill reading them through the first time. On the second go he felt a rush of ice-cold fact. He was reading the only written account of an encounter between the creatures men call angels and locals. Harper had no doubt it was genuine. There was just one problem. He leaned over scroll number six and read aloud:
“‘Receive, then, these seven scrolls to know of the seven angels of the Pure God who appeared to us in the days after Jerusalem was destroyed; to know of the crucifixion of Yeshua ben Yosef and the man who is called the man of signs and wonders.’” He looked at Chana. “Where is the seventh scroll?”
“Not here at present.”
“What’s in it?”
“Ask me after I read it.”
Harper rubbed the back of his neck. Chana watched him.
“Am I missing something?” Harper said.
“Only the obvious.”
Harper looked around the room. Computers, two electron microscopes, large-format scanners, multispectral imaging kit. All locked in a room with regulated temperature, humidity, and filtered airflow.
“What is this place, anyway?” Harper said.
“A document research vault for an agency of the Israeli government.”
“The sign out front says this is a prosthodontics laboratory. Implants, dental bridges, and such.”
“We saw no reason to change the sign, we only redecorated the interior. The new scrolls were first taken to the Israel Museum to be analyzed with the rest of the Dead Sea Scrolls. After a particular anomaly was discovered, the scrolls were brought here.”
“What anomaly?”
“Footprints. The police looky-loos made a balagan of the scribe’s cave before we got there. We managed to brush away layers of dirt and found footprints dating from 10 BC to 125 AD. Those would have belonged to the Essenes who worked there, including the scribe who wrote these scrolls. We also found one more set of footprints made five hundred years later.”
“That’s fairly precise intel, even for Israeli MI.”
/>
Chana did not respond.
“Do you think that someone took the seventh scroll?” Harper said.
“Ken, but my guess is he was not a thief. A thief would have taken everything. My guess is someone of education found the scribe’s cave, read the scrolls, and believed every word, because he believed in the sacred light of Yeshua ben Yosef.”
“I’m listening.”
“An educated man of the time would have known that Jerusalem and the Holy Land had become the fault line between East and West. The land was being poisoned in the name of gods. Never-ending war was coming.”
She knows what happened, boyo.
“What else would an educated man of the time have done, besides taking the seventh scroll?” he said.
“He gathered the things of the Christ. He carved a piece from the cup and divided the nails. Three nails and the greater part of the cup were hidden somewhere in Jerusalem with the seventh scroll. The sextant, one nail, and a piece of the cup were sent away for safekeeping.”
Harper thought about it. As a logical proof he was connected to the man of signs and wonders it was shaky, but who the hell knew? He ran his timeline for hits; nothing. He blinked.
“Is that how it works?” Chana said.
“What?”
“The thing Sergeant Gauer told me about. Your eyes lost focus for a fraction of a second. I was watching you. So what happens? You go to the past, then you blink back to now?”
“More or less.”
“An interesting way of doing things.”
“I’d settle for an ordinary memory. As far as where I’ve been, nothing pops hot with your theory.”
“It is not a theory. It is fact.”
That’s when he saw something in her eyes. Not a light connecting her to his kind, but something connecting her to some ancient knowledge.
“Where are you from?” Harper said.
“Where do you think?” Chana said.
“Russia would be my guess. Second generation.”
“My mother was from Moscow. She taught me English, so the accent is hers. My father, however, was descended from Persian Jews who first came to Israel in the time of Herod the Great. Just before the Hebrew king died, to be exact.”
“When, exactly?”
“Nine years after the birth of Christ.”
“And what did this descendant of yours do for a living?”
“He was a scribe in service to one of the Magi, the one who was the astronomer. The family kept up the blogging-on-parchment tradition in Israel.”
Harper flashed back, saw the soldier at Qumran glancing at the sextant and telling him it was thousands of years old. Zoroaster did possess it when he lived. When he blinked himself back to nowtimes, she knew where he had gone.
“Figure it out?” she said.
“The astronomer’s scribe would know the provenance of the sextant. And so do you.”
“Mazel tov. It dates back to the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty. From the reign of Akhenaten. In the neighborhood of 1350 BC.”
Harper scanned the History Channel. Akhenaten came to the throne as Amenhotep IV. He had a vision: All the gods of Egypt were reflections of the one God called Ra, and Ra was the blazing disc of the sun. Monotheism was born on the Nile. End of the Pharaoh’s reign: Monotheism was forgotten and Egypt’s gods returned en masse. He blinked. Chana was staring at him.
“Are you up to speed?” she said.
“I got it,” Harper said.
“Akhenaten had visions. There was one about a sextant. He described it and his astronomer made it for him. In his vision, the sextant would guide its bearer to a savior who would bring perfection and eternity to the world. However, the savior would be made known through three souls conceived by Ra’s sacred light and born to three different women over thousands of years. So the sextant and instructions on how to use it had to be handed down through the generations.”
Chana gave it a second to sink in. Harper appreciated it.
“Just out of curiosity, is this part of the official Israeli MI briefing?”
“What official briefing? I am only telling you old family stories. It is all part of the tour. There was a comet over Thebes, I am not sure when. It was a comet the bearer of the sextant was waiting for. He had also been given coordinates that triangulated a position in Persia near today’s Tehran. The sextant was carried there and presented to soul-born-of-light number one: a monotheist named Zoroaster. With him the savior was called Saoshyant. With the name comes the concept of the savior’s role on earth: He is here to benefit humanity. Jump ahead a few thousand years and a new monotheistic faith called Judaism takes shape from Babylonia to the Mediterranean Sea. Despite its bloody history getting started, it is the first religion on earth to codify works performed in the name of the One God to benefit humanity. And they have a savior, too, he’s called the Mashiach. Jump ahead a few thousand years again and there is another comet that someone with a sextant has been waiting for. This time triangulation guides the bearer, one of the Magi, to Israel. The sextant is presented to soul-born-of-light number two: Yeshua ben Yosef. The final entry in the family blog tells of ben Yosef’s crucifixion. No details. Just that his death occurred. End of story.”
It took Harper fifteen seconds to realize she had nothing more to add.
“Sorry?”
“Forty years after the crucifixion, Rome would destroy Jerusalem and scatter the Jews to the wind. The family blog disappeared. Everything I am telling you has been handed down orally over two thousand years. It was considered too dangerous to write it down. But according to Sergeant Gauer, your commander found them in Paris among a treasure trove of ancient documents and secret writings.”
“Your family history? In Astruc’s hideout on Rue Visconti?”
“That is his name, Astruc?”
“Yes.”
Chana nodded. “Good name for an angel.”
“I’ll be sure to tell him.”
She stared at him. “But a child was born, ken?”
“Sergeant Gauer didn’t tell you?”
“I said I saw the comet after seeing a photograph of you jumping off a bridge in Paris. I told him it looked to me like a child had been born. He told me the sextant was used to track a comet. I said, ‘So what?’ We left it there. But I need to tell you this: The sons of darkness need to slay the child, as they slayed both Zoroaster and ben Yosef.”
“Both?”
“Zoroaster was slaughtered while praying at his altar. The one you call Jesus was slaughtered on the cross. Slaughter soul number three and the sons of darkness will inherit the earth. That is what will happen, or so said an Egyptian pharaoh in 1350 BC.”
Harper had to admit it thread the needle rather neatly. Almost.
“Did you leave something out?” he said.
“Such as?”
“My connection to Jesus.”
“Lo,” she said. “But so what?”
“It’s the bloody reason I came to Jerusalem. And from what you’ve told me and shown me, it’s the same bloody reason you helped me get here. Or does it take the seventh scroll to find out?”
Chana pointed to the scrolls in the display. “Even without the seventh scroll, the connection is obvious.”
Harper felt himself wobble. He leaned back against the scrolls. “What is it?”
She recited from memory: “‘To know of Yeshua ben Yosef and the crucifixion of the man of signs and wonders; to know how through him the world may be saved.’ At first glance one would think the scribe is talking about one in the same person. What if it is two beings in the same body?”
Harper flashed his meet with the dream catcher on the esplanade of Lausanne Cathedral. Marc Rochat’s soul is alive and well within Ella . . . Binary star, binary soul.
“Maybe. But it requires the two beings having souls. I don’t have one.”
“What if it is two separate beings in the same body at two separate times? That is how it works with angels, isn’t it?”
/> Harper did not answer. She read his mind.
“Do not worry, your Swiss Guard friend did not tell me your secret. I discovered it when I read the scrolls. Six angels in the form of Jewish bandits appeared at Qumran, one more was being carried in the cart. One for whom nothing could be done, one whose soul had been delivered to the stars. Question is, if his soul was gone, why save the body? Why not just leave it where it was buried to await the return of the Mashiach, according to Jewish custom? After all, Yeshua ben Yosef was a Jew. That would be his belief. Answer is, an angel was still using it.”
She was better than very good at her job; she was brilliant.
“Trust me, taking human form isn’t something we do on a whim,” Harper said. “It’s a complicated process. And there are rules and regs; starting with, we are forbidden to intervene in the manner or time of someone’s death.”
“Unless you had no choice but to make a choice.”
Harper flashed the dream catcher again: Krinkle says you made a choice once; that you changed the course of human history by making it. He blinked to nowtimes. Chana was watching him come back again, her assault rifle slung over her shoulder, leaning on the large table holding the electron microscope. The reliquary box was on the table, too. Chana’s hand was resting on it; her fingertips tapped it softly.
“What choice?” Harper said.
“You knew who Yeshua ben Yosef was. You saw him suffering and you intervened. You delivered his soul to the stars and you died in his place. Except you did not die, you only appeared to die. You were laid in a grave by ben Yosef’s followers, then quickly moved to a second grave by your angels. There you were hidden for forty years, until the fall of Jerusalem meant that you had to be moved. In doing so you gave ben Yosef resurrection.”
Harper felt dizzy. He took a slow breath to steady himself. “I’m . . . I’m not sure.”
