Relics

by K. T. Tomb

  “You made the right call, Phoe,” Kessler interjected. “It keeps everyone happy, though ignorant, and takes the focus off of the location of the real Ark of the Covenant.”

  “I sense that this was more than the simple task that you had originally informed me of.” Her eyes narrowed as she smelled the rat.

  “No. I only wanted you to determine whether the Ark in Aksum was authentic or not.”

  “But...?”

  “No,” Simon replied. “But—”

  “Damn you, Simon Kessler. You knew that once I discovered that the Ark in Aksum was not authentic that I’d be inevitably hooked into wanting to know where the real one was.”

  “It had crossed my mind.”

  “Bullshit! You had it planned that way. You reeled me in. You allowed me to bring Charlotte along in order to make me believe that it was all a very simple little assignment, but you had something bigger in mind.”

  Thalia was fuming. Had he simply asked her to find the Ark of the Covenant, she would have been able to accept or reject the mission. By using her for his little game, he had sucked her right in.

  “Damn it, Simon, you knew that I was going to lie. You knew that I would have no choice. The enormous public spectacle, the arrangements that you made for me to be the expert that was called in; you set me up!”

  “Not exactly. I didn’t know for certain that the Ark in Aksum was fake.”

  She suddenly realized that had the Ark been real, she might have been dead. “So, you risked my life to discover that it was a fake. What if it had been real? What if God had fried me for touching his sacred Ark?”

  “Phoe, I was counting on you being smarter than that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you open the lid and look inside?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You wouldn’t have done that if it had been real.”

  “How do you know that, Simon?’

  “Phoe, how long have we been working together?”

  “I know,” she muttered. “God, Simon, you could have gotten me killed!”

  There was a long pause as each was sifting through their own thoughts.

  “You knew it wasn’t real before you took the lid off,” Simon began with a much calmer voice than before; almost a whisper. “How did you know?”

  “The mercy seat,” she replied. “There were no tarnishments. A thousand years of blood being sprinkled over gold without being wiped off would have tarnished it. The mercy seat and lid were brilliantly shiny.”

  “See. That’s why I knew you’d figure it out before you opened the lid.”

  Again, there was a long pause.

  “Was there anything in it?”

  “Yes, the prescribed items were all present, but they were obviously fake as well.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “Well, the jar of manna?”

  “Was it a mason jar?” Simon chuckled.

  “No… not quite that bad.” She smiled for the first time since the conversation had begun. “It looked sort of like those plastic snowflakes that people use to decorate at Christmas time.”

  After a brief laugh, there was another pause in their conversation. Thalia knew that he wanted her to find the authentic Ark, but she wasn’t going to volunteer so easily. She was going to make him ask her.

  “Soooo…?” he finally asked.

  “Soooo… what?”

  “Are you in or out? I’ll understand either way, but wouldn’t it be great to know the truth? Wouldn’t it be great to discover the greatest, holiest and most powerful relic handed down by the very hands of God…” He had started into one of his sales pitches.

  “You don’t need to sell me on it, Simon. I’m already hooked, thanks to your little trick.”

  “So, what do you want?”

  “Double,” she replied. She was likely risking her life going after the real Ark of the Covenant. The reward needed to fit the risk.

  “Double?”

  “Don’t push me or I’ll make it triple,” she snapped.

  “Okay. Double.”

  “And I want my whole team: Peter, Kadan and Jeremy…”

  “And Charlotte and Eric,” Charlotte added and then matched the stern look that she received from her friend for butting in.

  “And I’ll send Jonathan along,” Simon put in.

  “Jesus, this is a boy scout camping trip. This thing is serious. A person can get killed just for looking at it.” She considered for a moment. “I need to go to London again.”

  “More shopping?” Simon teased.

  “No,” she replied, rolling her eyes. Simon knew as well as she did that her little shopping spree in London was well out of character for her. “I want to continue a conversation that Mr. Whitherby and I had before; a conversation about the possibility that the Ark fell into Babylonian hands when Nebuchadnezzar sacked Jerusalem and something that he referred to as the Diary of Esther.”

  “Interesting. You think that the Ark is somewhere in Iraq, then?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s a good place to start.” She waited a couple of long beats. “It’s the only place I know where to start at this point.”

  “Do you want to land and then reroute, or do you want to spend a night at home?”

  “I think both Charlotte and I need a night at home,” she replied. “Believe it or not, lying to tens of thousands of people and being within inches of getting struck down by God makes for an exhausting day.”

  “I understand. I’ll make arrangements for tomorrow morning, then,” Simon replied.

  “Can we make it afternoon?” she asked. “I may not want to drag myself out of bed at the crack of dawn.”

  “Okay. Fine. Tomorrow afternoon. Get some rest.”

  “You better believe it,” she replied, leaning forward to press the button on the phone.

  “Thalia?” Kessler said. “I don’t know how to thank you for what you’ve done.”

  “Trust me, you’ll pay for it,” she replied. She placed her finger on the button, but just before pressing it, she said, “Through the nose.”

  Chapter Nine

  He (King Josiah) said to the Levites, who instructed all Israel and who had been consecrated to the LORD: “Put the sacred ark in the temple that Solomon son of David king of Israel built. It is not to be carried about on your shoulders…”

  —2 Chronicles 35:3

  That was the last reference that Phoe could find which definitively located the Ark of the Covenant in Jerusalem. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that the Ark had not been taken to Ethiopia by Solomon and Sheba’s son. The dude would have had to have been around 300 years old. Mr. Whitherby hadn’t mentioned that rather important fact.

  Though she’d promised Simon that she would rest once they returned to her home on the Grand Canal in Venice, she simply couldn’t. She cursed the man softly under her breath, realizing that she had taken his bait… what was the old cliché? Hook, line and sinker?

  The last line of the passage intrigued her. “It is not to be carried about on your shoulders.” That would be one of the points that she intended to bring up with Reginald Whitherby. Did God retire the Ark when it was moved into the Temple of Solomon? Did it lose its power? Up until that point, it had led the Israelites through their wandering, led them as they conquered the land of Canaan and even revealed the power of God to their staunchest enemies. During all of that time, it had been carried on the shoulders of the Levite priests. There had to be some significance in those words, but what?

  Was it possible that the power of the Ark was completely gone? Could she have been wrong about the tarnished gold? Could she have actually stood in front of the authentic Ark and not even known it? If that was true, then the quest that she was about to undertake would be an empty one and pure foolishness.

  I’m exhausted and I’m letting that get to me.

  In spite of the fact that all of her energy was drained, Phoe couldn’t sleep. Her mind was already l
ocked onto the mystery of the missing Ark like the jaws of a pit bull. With her elbows on the table in front of her, she leaned forward and rubbed her eyes.

  Her head was pounding and she was beginning to feel lightheaded. She needed to let go of it and get some rest. She sat up, closed the laptop, pushed the chair back and started toward her bedroom. She’d taken less than a half-dozen steps before a thought came to her. Who said they had a son? I didn’t see anywhere that Solomon and the Queen of Sheba were married and had a son. Did they really have a son or was that something that was made up? Retracing her steps, she found herself back in the chair with the laptop open in front of her.

  Engaged in the new mystery that had presented itself, sunrise came while Phoe continued tapping away at the keys of her laptop as she continued to put in searches throughout both books of Samuel, both books of Kings and both books of Chronicles. She could find no reference to a son of Solomon and Sheba that was actually based in irrefutable fact. Though that search was particularly fruitless, she did gain a wealth of information regarding the Ark of the Covenant and the power that it was alleged to possess. Did it truly possess those powers? She often wondered about ancient writings. She knew that the Greeks often used a great deal of colorful metaphors that assigned the reasons that something had happened to some particular act of one or another of the gods or goddesses. Did the Hebrews do the same?

  Wondering if the entire night had been a complete waste of time and energy, Phoe closed the laptop again and started to go to her bed, when Charlotte shuffled in. The cheerfulness of the morning before was much less noticeable in her friend.

  “Did you stay up all night?” Charlotte asked, staring at her with tired eyes.

  “Yes,” Phoe replied.

  “Oh God, Thal,” Charlotte said, coming more awake at the revelation. “I didn’t know or I would have stayed up with you.”

  “No point in both of us being worn out.”

  “Yeah, but we’re a team. I should have been out here with you.”

  Thalia shrugged a reply.

  “I know what you did yesterday was stressful.” She paused for a moment. “It was yesterday, right? God, all of this traveling and stress and… God, I don’t know… this death and destruction and pestilence. It all seems so unreal and impossible and…”

  “You’re rambling, Char,” Phoe smiled.

  “Yeah.” She turned to the coffee pot, dumped out the stale contents that had sat for two days, rinsed the carafe and basket and started making a fresh pot. Phoe just stared at her while she worked, seeing, but not really focusing on what she was doing. “You want some breakfast?”

  Phoe hadn’t even thought about breakfast, but the moment that Charlotte mentioned it, her stomach grumbled. She looked at the clock on the laptop. It was almost 9:00 am. “Yeah, but let’s get out of here. I need to get some air. Let’s go to that little café that we went to a few mornings or weeks or months ago.”

  “It really seems like it was a long time ago, doesn’t it?” Charlotte commented, wrinkling her nose as she spoke. “I think it was like three, maybe four days ago, but God… Did we go through a time warp or something?”

  “I don’t know. I’m going to grab a quick shower and throw something on.”

  “Oh yeah. Right. Me too.”

  They both headed in separate directions toward their respective bedrooms while the gurgling coffee pot continued producing the dark brew that would go ignored.

  Feeling more refreshed after a shower and change of clothing, Phoe and Charlotte left the building and strolled along the bank of the Grand Canal toward the small café that sat on its banks.

  “Char, what if I’m wrong? What if that was the actual, authentic Ark that I saw yesterday?”

  “Then wouldn’t you be dead, and maybe a whole bunch of other people too?”

  “But what if the Ark no longer had any power? What if..? God… I wish I could stop this!” Thalia was obsessing. She didn’t often do that. She was persistent and stubborn in the pursuit of whatever artifact or subject matter that she was engaged in, but rarely obsessive. Her questions about the Ark were controlling every thought and emotion in her. She felt out of touch and confused.

  “How about we change the subject?” Charlotte suggested.

  “Fat chance, but we can try,” she replied.

  “What time do you think the guys will get here?”

  “I don’t know. What is it, like 8 or 9 hours’ time difference? Um… Peter was going to try to track everybody down yesterday afternoon after I talked to him. If they leave this morning, which will actually be late afternoon here, they won’t get here until the wee hours of the morning tomorrow. But you know how it is trying to track all of the guys down. I have my doubts they will get here before noon tomorrow.”

  “It’s going to be a blast having everyone together again,” Charlotte beamed.

  There was that overly perky attitude again. Phoe had hoped that it had been swallowed up in the exhaustion and tension of the past two days. Though she grumbled about it, Thalia actually adored that particular side of her friend. In a lot of ways, the return of the perkiness set all things right again. “Yeah,” she smiled. “I guess it will.”

  As they strolled along the bank to the small café and were seated in the al fresco dining area, they had no idea that a pair of eyes was watching their every move and two sets of ears were listening to and recording every word they said.

  Chapter Ten

  When the turn came for Esther (the young woman Mordecai had adopted, the daughter of his uncle Abihail) to go to the king, she asked for nothing other than what Hegai, the king’s eunuch who was in charge of the harem, suggested. And Esther won the favor of everyone who saw her.

  She was taken to King Xerxes in the royal residence in the tenth month, the month of Tebeth, in the seventh year of his reign.

  Now the king was attracted to Esther more than to any of the other women, and she won his favor and approval more than any of the other virgins. So he set a royal crown on her head and made her queen instead of Vashti.

  And the king gave a great banquet, Esther’s banquet, for all his nobles and officials. He proclaimed a holiday throughout the provinces and distributed gifts with royal liberality.

  —Esther 2:1-18

  “It seems quite silly to us, in our day and age, but when Queen Vashti did not come at her husband’s bidding, it embarrassed Xerxes greatly in front of his guests.”

  Reginald Whitherby had the complete attention of his guests while he lectured.

  “After all, as a god, if his own wife would not obey his commands, then, well, who would? So, in order to, ‘save face,’ if you will, he had her stripped of her crown and banished, but he later came to realize that a king without a queen simply wasn’t right. Oh, he could fulfill his sexual desires upon a whim, he had a rather large harem for that purpose, but a queen or something of a helpmate was what he truly longed for and so, he set up a decree that would bring all of the fairest in the land to be ‘test-driven,’ if you’ll pardon my rather vulgar metaphor.

  “The fair virgins were put through a year-long beauty school, so to speak. When it came their turn to be presented to Xerxes, they would spend the night with him and then be placed in reserve until Xerxes decided what to do with them. If they had pleased him, they would be added to his harem, but if they didn’t, they were tossed out into the barracks where the soldiers could have their way with them, usually ending in a much longed-for death for the poor young maidens.”

  Witherby’s voice trailed off with a sad tone and he stared into the distance for a moment.

  “Anyway, it was in this particular set of events that the young Hebrew, Haddassah, was brought. The moment the man directing the preparation of the virgins saw her, he was quite impressed. Not only was she lovely, but she was also very polite, intelligent and well-spoken. He and the entire household fell in love with her instantly. He, Hegai, changed her name to Esther, which is the Persian word for Star or Morning Star
. So, Esther passed her year of beauty school and was presented to Xerxes. The king was quite taken by not only her beauty, but also her, shall we say, ‘savoir-faire,’ not a great deal unlike your own, Miss Phoenix.”

  “Thank you.”

  Thalia blushed a bit at the compliment. Though the man was old enough to be her grandfather, the bit of flattery was not lost on her, though it caused a brief moment of discomfort as she glanced at Charlotte, who was deeply fascinated by the story and hardly noticed the interruption.

  “But how does all of this relate to the Ark?”

  “I’m getting to that, Miss Phoenix.” He chuckled softly at her impatience. “Xerxes made her queen of Persia. That placed her over several of the provinces of his kingdom and she became something of an administrator in a number of them. In such a position, little, if anything, would have been hidden from her. Therefore, those who believe that the Ark was taken when Nebuchadnezzar took the Jews captive—and there are few of us—think that Esther discovered the Ark and had it removed to a location where it could be hidden until it could be returned to Jerusalem and placed in the new temple.

  “Though the temple had been rebuilt some thirty years before Esther was made Queen of Persia, the freedom to worship the way that the Hebrews worshipped had not yet been granted to them; it would be another twenty-nine years before that would be allowed. No doubt, Esther had been waiting for that to take place before revealing the location of the Ark and having it taken back to the temple. Sadly, however, that event never took place.

  “However, that is where some scholars—a very small number, actually—believe there was a diary kept by the queen, which would reveal the location of the Ark. Due to the fact that this particular document has been rather elusive, much of the fervor for this particular theory has all but died out. It would have died out completely, had I not stumbled upon something in some rather obscure Macedonian writings dating to the second century BC that referred to the diary being in the hands of Parmenion, who was a general in Alexander the Great’s army.”