The Secret of Hades' Eden

by Graham J. Thomson

  ‘Do you believe in God, William?’ Ella asked. The colour had returned to her face, but there was a sadness in her voice.

  William thought carefully for a moment. ‘I see the wonder of God in the trees and in the flowers,’ he said. ‘In the stars and in the harmony of nature.’ Above the side of the road William noticed a Kestrel hovering effortlessly in the hot thermals. Its prey lurked unseen in the long grass somewhere far below.

  ‘That’s surprisingly profound,’ Ella said and blew her nose.

  ‘Do you?’ he asked.

  Thinking of the quote from the Bible that the man in Crematorium had made, Ella looked down at the urn in her lap. ‘Did you know that the first New Testament was pieced together by Constantine I, a Roman emperor in the fourth-century AD?’

  ‘No,’ William admitted, wondering where she was going with this.

  ‘He was a pagan like the Roman troops who served him. But after losing many battles against other Roman leaders, Constantine feared that his traditional Roman deities no longer answered his prayers for victory. So he opted to try out the new Christian God. The Romans often took on the gods from the peoples they had conquered, picking new gods to worship wasn’t unusual back then. Many of the Roman deities were in fact just the ancient Greek ones with different names. But the Christians were different, they only had one God. All seeing and all knowing. At that time the Christian believers were the minority and were terribly persecuted for their belief in Christ. Constantine’s decision was a big gamble, he could have been persecuted for it himself.’

  ‘Forced to fight the gladiators or thrown to the lions to entertain the masses,’ William said. He slowed to give way at a junction, in the rear view mirror he made a mental note of the cars that were behind him.

  ‘Yes, they were particularly brutal to the Christians at the turn of the fourth-century. Initially Constantine had turned to their god out of desperation, but according to the legend he saw the light. Literally. It’s recorded that he saw the shape of the Christian cross in the clouds, along with the words, “By this sign you will be victor”. So he ordered his blacksmiths to fashion a gold cross on a staff with the letters Chi and Rho, the first two letters of Christ’s name in Greek.’

  ‘Greek? But he was Roman, didn’t he speak Latin?’

  Ella smiled and nodded. ‘Yes, but Greek was the language of the philosophers and of the intellectuals. The four Gospels were all written in Greek. Anyway, for good measure, Constantine also had the Chi-Rho sign painted on all his troops’ shields. Even though they were pagans themselves and did not believe for a moment in the Christian God.

  ‘Then, in 311AD, he took his army to Rome to fight his old enemy, the tyrant Maxentius, emperor of Rome. Against all odds he beat the opposing armies. And Maxentius, during his retreat, fell from a bridge made of boats into the river Tiber and drowned.’

  ‘Some people just have no luck.’ William slowed to let the cars behind him overtake. In the mirror he took note of the two cars that were still directly behind him.

  ‘Constantine entered Rome with his legions triumphant. Had the result of that battle been different, the world today would be a very, very different place. Constantine believed his victory was purely because the Christian God had favoured him. A divine victory. So to keep the god happy, and so he could remain favoured and successful, he ordered the persecution of the Christians to cease. The Edict of Milan, in 313AD, decreed that all men be free to worship whatever god they wanted.’

  ‘Sounds like a good moral leader,’ William said glancing in the rear view mirror. The driver behind him was getting impatient with his slow speed.

  ‘You are joking,’ Ella snorted. ‘He was a misogynistic brute. Under Constantine’s rule women who ran away with their lovers were burned alive. Even female rape victims were punished if they were deemed to be too far from home when it happened.’

  ‘Okay, I take it back. He was a great leader,’ he joked.

  Ella slapped him on the knee. William slowed and pulled into a lay-by. The two cars that were behind him accelerated ahead leaving the road behind clear. He pulled out and continued in the same direction. Ella frowned, but opted to not say anything on the matter.

  ‘But he did do some good,’ she went on. ‘He raised the profile of the Christians, restored their wealth and their land. He made the Catholic clergy salaried officials of the Roman government. And he commissioned fantastic temples for the people to worship the new Christian God. By 324AD, Constantine was the sole emperor of all that was Roman. He outlawed pagan sacrifices and rituals, prevented the Jews from keeping Christians as slaves, and brutally suppressed the ancient mystic ways. Including the ritual of bringing worshippers closer to the divine through hieros gamos.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Sexual communion.’

  William raised an eyebrow. ‘I didn’t know that worked,’ he said. ‘I’ll need to keep it in mind. For the next time.’ He smiled to himself and glanced at Ella from the side.

  Ella smiled dryly, but didn’t rise to it. ‘Constantine had the highly popular Temple of Aphrodite, a hive of sexual activity, raised to the ground. Eventually the Roman pagan celebrations and rituals, the acceptable ones at least, were morphed into Christian ones. He effectively forced the migration of ancient pagan beliefs to Christianity in only a few years.’

  ‘Not an easy task I’d imagine, changing the entire religious beliefs of a civilisation,’ William agreed. ‘A whole way of life.’

  ‘The ways of the mystic pagan religion were millennia old, their rituals were ingrained into their societies. So to make it more palatable the Christian and Roman festivals were blended together. December 25 was the Roman festival of the birth of the sun and the day of the winter solstice, so it made sense to pick it as the birth of the son of the one true God. Easter was originally the festival of the spring equinox and the beginning of a new year.’

  ‘Clever,’ William said. ‘So he prevented a civil war by allowing the people to keep their key party dates.’

  ‘Politics,’ she affirmed. Ella was encouraged by William’s interest, it pleased her to talk to someone with such keen ears. ‘But it was no easy task. There were a few different versions of Christianity at that time, all based on different Gospels that existed. For years the early Christians fought between themselves over what the correct version was.’

  ‘Sounds strangely familiar.’

  ‘If Constantine was to succeed in gaining absolute rule of the Roman empire, he had to create a single Christian religion and prevent a religious war in Rome. The solution was a single doctrine, an official source of truth for the bishops to preach. So he initiated an investigation into the many Gospels and Christian scripts to find out which ones were genuine, or at least the most accurate.’

  ‘Really?’ William said, fascinated. ‘My school teachers seemed to have failed to cover this part of history.’

  ‘I wonder why,’ Ella said cynically.

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘A man called Eusebius, an early Christian scholar, had travelled around the region inspecting and analysing all the original versions of the Gospels and other Christian manuscripts. He looked at the language they were written in, who had supposedly written them and when. He even assessed the style of handwriting. After all, it was less than three-hundred years since the crucifixion in 30 AD.’

  ‘So what did he find out?’

  ‘He wrote in his epic History of the Church, that out of the many Gospels there were only two that had been written by people who actually knew Jesus. Matthew and John. They had been amongst the original band of disciples. The only two other Gospels that he considered authentic were those of Mark and Luke. Mark was the scribe, and some say the son of, Peter, another disciple. Luke was a colleague of Paul, the man attributed to being the founder of Christianity.’

  ‘But I recall that Paul never met Jesus either?’

  ‘True. Eusebius found that three decades after the crucifixion when Peter, the lea
der of the early Church, and James, the brother of Jesus were executed, the early Christian followers became worried that the word of the Christ would be lost forever. So many of his followers began to write down their stories. Some were written from accounts told by people who had directly heard the teachings of Jesus, but others were totally spurious, frauds and fakes.’

  William frowned. ‘But the bible has more than just the four Gospels in it,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Yes, twenty-seven writings. There were other scripts that had been assessed to be genuine, or were at least relatively undisputed. So they went in too. Constantine’s army of bishops picked out what that they thought should be added based on what Eusebius and others had found. After the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, the first New Testament canon was approved. It was this that was officially preached in the new Christian temples in Rome.’

  ‘And the slaves became the masters, the oppressed became the oppressors,’ William added cynically. He slowed down, a road sign informed him that he had entered the tiny village of Everton. The sat-nav showed that the Church of St Mary the Virgin was only a few hundred metres away.

  ‘Christianity spread throughout Europe like a virus. They discredited and wiped out the remaining pagan mystical religions. The witch hunts, the burnings, the false confessions that were tortured out of anyone who disagreed with them. And the rest, as they say, is history,’ Ella concluded.

  They had arrived at the church. William parked up under a tree by the dry stone wall that surrounded the old building and turned the engine off.

  ‘History? By that you mean humanity regressed several steps and that science and progress were suppressed for centuries?’

  Ella looked at William and smiled, she realised that she felt safe with him. ‘It wasn’t until the renaissance of the fifteenth-century that the western world re-emerged from the darkness and once again took to questioning the natural wonders of the world.’ She looked out of the window to the church. Then she remembered herself and looked down at the urn in her lap.

  ‘So, Ella. Do you believe in God?’ William asked.

  ‘Too many people have fought and died over them.’

  ‘But millions have found comfort and hope in them.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m not one of them,’ she said.

  But William wasn’t so sure that he believed her.

  ‘Right, let’s do this,’ she said. ‘Then I want my life back.’

  *

  The Church of St Mary the Virgin was a typical village parish church. Situated in the thick of the beautiful Bedfordshire countryside, the atmosphere in the grassy churchyard was quiet and peaceful. Birds sang in the trees, a gentle warm breeze blew in from the west bringing with it a hint of lavender. Built during the Gothic Revival period in the eighteenth-century, the church had a brown stone end-tower with a clock, pointed windows and peaked doors. At the top of the castle-like tower sat four spiky pinnacles.

  Walking past the gated entrance into the yard, William and Ella looked upon dozens of headstones that stuck out of the unkempt grass. Some seemed ancient, the inscriptions on the brown-grey stone had been all but worn away, only a few looked to be recent additions. Some were made from black marble, they twinkled like tiny stars in the sunlight, engraved white letters were easily read against the black of the stone.

  William sighed, he felt like he was looking for a needle in a haystack. ‘This could take a while,’ he said.

  ‘Find my mother’s headstone, trace her code then find the Biblos Aletheia,’ Ella said recalling the decoded poem. ‘Simple.’

  ‘Any ideas where to start?’

  ‘None, I’ve never been here before. But her name was Elizabeth Davidson. She died in the sixties. Probably born sometime at the turn of the century. That’s all I have.’

  ‘Should be good enough. Well, there’s only one way to find out. Let’s start from that corner over there and we can work our way back.’

  At the far corner of the churchyard overgrown shrubs and trees had claimed much of the land. A few of the older gravestones were hidden in the foliage. One by one, Ella and William read the engravings. Although the newer graves were neatly laid out in a straight line, the older ones were all over the place and their inscriptions were hard to read, in some cases worn away completely.

  Frustrated, Ella sighed deeply. ‘There’s no logic to their order here. It could be anywhere,’ she complained. ‘Let’s split up, we can cover twice the area. I’ll start over there.’ She pointed to the other end of the churchyard.

  ‘We should stay together,’ William protested as he squatted down to read another inscription.

  ‘Please. I need a moment to go and find a nice private spot to spread his ashes. I won’t be long,’ she pleaded.

  ‘Okay. But if you see the headstone, shout out. I’ll see you soon.’

  ‘In this world, or the next,’ she said as she walked off.

  Squinting in the sunlight, William watched her go. He admired her strength. In his experience people who found themselves in the face of hardship fell into two categories: victims and survivors. Victims went to pieces under the stress and often succumbed to their fate. But survivors fought on, whatever the risk, or cost. He knew which one Ella was. She reminded him of someone, someone he dearly missed. He smiled at the memories, and then went back to work.

  *

  Minutes later, after having inspected twenty or so headstones without success, William stood up and looked across the yard for Ella. She was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Ella!’ he shouted. There was no response. Just as he was about to go and find her, he stopped, something caught his eye. He bounded over for a closer look.

  By the wall on the very edge of the churchyard was a gloomy looking headstone made from some kind of dark granite. Grass and foliage had grown up around it and it was partially hidden from view. But something about it seemed unusual, different. In addition to the obscured inscription in the centre of the stone, there was an elaborate pattern around its edge. None of the other headstones had such a pattern. After ripping the foliage off, William read the inscription:

  Here lies

  Elizabeth Eleanor Davidson

  Born February 14, 1918

  Died December 25, 1969

  RIP

  Chapter 23

  1410hrs – Bedfordshire

  Thrilled to have finally found the correct headstone, William looked out across the graveyard for Ella, but the bulk of the church blocked his view across the yard.

  ‘Ella! I’ve found it,’ he shouted. There was no response, he cursed under his breath. Using the camera on his phone he took several shots of the gravestone ensuring that the markings around its edge could be clearly made out. Inspecting the stone closely, he rubbed his fingers over the markings. To the untrained eye they looked like an elaborate pattern, merely artwork, or perhaps a strange, alien language. But William instantly recognised them for what they really were.

  From the periphery of his vision, he noticed something move behind him. Thinking it was Ella, he rose and turned to face her.

  The blow to his stomach caught him unawares. Winded he staggered back as another blow caught him on the chin. His eyes had barely focused on the blond man’s face when another punch hit him hard on the side of the head. The world dimmed and William fell to his knees. He reached for the wall to steady himself. When he looked up, he saw a large black pistol pointed at his head. He recognised it instantly, it was a Glock 18C, military issue.

  ‘Agent William Temple, I assume,’ the man sneered with a heavy Russian accent. ‘And the hunted becomes the hunter.’ The sneer turned to a satisfied grin.

  ‘Cossack,’ William spat. ‘How did you find us?’

  Moving at lightning speed, Cossack smashed the butt of the Glock into the side of William’s head. William fell to his knees, dazed, but conscious. The blow was hard, but clearly only intended as a warning.

  ‘Get up,’ Cossack ordered. ‘Keep your hands where I can see them.’<
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  Using the wall to steady himself, William stood up slowly. ‘Did you follow us?’ he pressed.

  Cossack seemed to be amused by his persistence. ‘If you must know, your stupid little bitch left a map on the hotel computer. Where is she?’

  Disorientated from the pistol whip, William’s vision was blurred and unfocused. His head throbbed. But he noticed something move, nothing more than a shadow, behind Cossack by the wall at the edge of the graveyard.

  ‘What girl?’ William said, he spat saliva and blood out onto the grass.

  ‘Ha, very funny,’ Cossack laughed. ‘A tough guy.’ The smile vanished, he narrowed his eyes. ‘Don’t try to be clever, or I will torture and kill you right here. Last chance, Temple. The girl who has the painting, Ella Moore, where is she?’

  Behind Cossack the shadow moved again, it was no figment of his imagination, he realised what it was. William tried to keep the Russian’s attention on him. ‘What do you want from her? I can get you whatever you want. Let’s negotiate.’

  ‘Ha! Negotiate? I don’t need to negotiate with anyone.’

  Despite the pain, William tried to think clearly; then he had a thought: ‘I don’t have the Biblos Aletheia with me, but I know where it is.’

  In a flash the expression on Cossack’s face changed, he hadn’t expected to hear those words. William watched him consider his response. As long as Cossack still thought he was in control, William knew he could manipulate him. Cossack opened his mouth to speak.

  Two gun shots rang out from behind him, the blasts echoed off the church walls. Cossack flinched and instinctively looked over his shoulder.

  In the split second of confusion, William lunged forward and grabbed Cossack’s pistol arm at a pressure point. He snapped the arm back in a well practised move and pushed the Glock straight into the man’s face.

  Dazed, Cossack staggered backwards. William kept a hold of his arm and pulled it towards himself. He then slammed the pistol with such force into Cossack’s face that the man’s legs gave way instantly. Cossack slumped onto the grass unconscious. Blood poured out of his nose and over his cheeks.