The Great Thirst Boxed Set

by Mary C. Findley

  “Sam owns his own construction business,” Mr. Bradley replied. “He was basically volunteering on the crew at the school. He’s one of the wealthiest men in town.”

  “Wasn’t he kind of pushing it, though, dressing the kids up and pretending they’re part of his work crew?” Keith asked.

  “You should know better. Sam would never pretend about anything,” Joshua said. “I forgot to tell you, didn’t I? Brad Shannon called last night while you two were out for a walk. He helped Sam get that paperwork filed. And Sam hired all the kids from the class who were eighteen and over. They are going to be his crew to do the full inspection, and he will do his best to find out the real cause of the explosion and help them salvage anything that can be found from the Bible as Literature class materials.”

  “And did you see who was on the crew?” Talia ran back the DVR and pointed. “There’s Daryl, and there’s Sean. They’re free!”

  “Wow.” Keith leaned back in his chair. “I didn’t see any way out of this for those kids. I was willing to go to jail myself just to get them out. And I had no idea how I was going to keep the others from snooping around in what I thought was a building ready to collapse.”

  “God provided Sam to give us a way around that,” Mr. Bradley said. “And Dr. Ewing had a part in it, I’m sure. I’m still afraid of that woman.”

  “Me too,” Keith agreed. “The way she talked to me when I called her about Jenny Kaine … brrr.”

  “I’m just so relieved that the kids are taken care of, and everybody’s safe,” Talia said. “So, can we get back to work now?”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Joshua said, rising to leave the room. “I’m going to work on the Constitutional history site with Cliff Owens. I guess I’ll see you two at lunch?”

  “Yep,” Keith said.

  The two of them started organizing and examining material to include on the Restoration site.

  “Keith, here’s a contact from a teacher who found the Restoration site,” Talia said much later in the morning. “Look at what she says, and these images she included. They’ve found corundum and orichalcum artifacts at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro!”

  “Umm … where?” Keith echoed. “Wait, someplace in India?”

  “They are both ancient cities located in Pakistan,” Talia said. “In earlier times it was part of India. Remember the Guardians are still trying to decode the tablets we found in Ugarit. They haven’t really been looking elsewhere. But they can’t exactly keep the finding of that many tablets a secret. People have been speculating like crazy about a find of ancient artifacts but so far the details have been kept sketchy. This woman has gotten hold of the Britomartis story somehow.

  “You know people say that one of the earliest belief systems, wherever they find artifacts, is the worship of a mother goddess. Some secularists claim that Britomartis was a mother goddess. This teacher, though, has a really exciting theory about who mother goddesses might really have been. Come take a look.”

  Keith slid his chair closer to Talia to read the post. The title said, Daughters-in-Law of Noah?

  Chapter Fifty-one –Britomartis and Pipali

  We know next to nothing about worship practices in Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, the post said. Still, anthropologists insist that relics point to a mother goddess worship. Some trace the festival of lights in the Hindu religion back to figurines of women that seem to hold lamps. These are tall, slender women with beautiful ornaments and headdresses, not naked fertility figures.

  “Some scholars dismiss these statues as children’s toys and not significant religious objects at all. Suppose, however, that these lights were indeed made for children, as part of the mothers’ efforts to teach them the way to faithful protection and sharing of the Word? We also see what some call gods, part-beast male figures, sometimes horned, sometimes with multiple heads. These could be cherubim, something the Scriptures considered common enough that they are barely described, and with varying appearances. It is also possible that they could be evil spirits or demons.

  “People recognized angelic beings, good ones and evil ones, for what they were in Job, in Daniel, and in Ezekiel, just to name a few places. Nowadays our secularist scholars insist these figures are gods. Perhaps the true God sent His heavenly servants as helpers or protectors to the ancient faithful. Men are the first to fall in religious wars. Sometimes their wives simply outlive them.

  “Nimrod surely fought against those who opposed his false, man-centered worship. He pursued them to enslave them, or his descendants tried to steal from them or corrupt them. These figures might represent faithful women who had to continue to teach the children or stand against the armies of evil when their men had died.

  “I have heard through trusted confidential sources about the discovery of the Ax of Britomartis in Crete. My specific knowledge is scanty, as was my contact’s. I hope to gain the trust of those who can fill in the gaps by presenting my theory of a parallel figure in the Indus Valley.

  “Another of the ancient representations archaeologists find in the Indus Valley is the Pipal tree. The leaves of the living version of this tree never stop moving, even when there is no wind. Many Scriptures use trees as symbols of being rooted in God, receiving food, shelter, and protection from Him. I see this woman with the lamp as a constant nurturer of others, sharing the Word without ceasing.

  “Perhaps you will dismiss my theories as fancy, but please study the enclosed images and consider how they might cause me to connect the woman I have named Pipali with Britomartis. I urge you to consider that these ancient women might be two of Noah’s daughters-in-laws or their descendants. If Noah’s sons married much younger women, as tradition suggests, they could have outlived their husbands, possibly by a century or more.

  “Pakistan is a dangerous place. I understand if you cannot consider coming here and looking at my findings in person. But please know that the artifacts I have found are real, and that they seem to me to be comparable to ones I have been privileged to glimpse, and which I am told were found in Crete and Ugarit. I eagerly await your response.”

  “Can we trust this person?” Keith asked.

  “She mentions her contact, and it’s someone Uncle Naddy and Aunt Sophie have worked with for years. I believe we can trust her. Just look at the artifacts,” Talia said, opening the attached image files.

  “Whoa,” Keith said, his breath leaving his lungs for a second. “That’s orichalcum, isn’t it?” He stopped himself from reaching out to touch the image of a woman, glittering golden, holding a red crystal bowl in her hands. “And that bowl has to be corundum. What’s that black stuff in the bowl?”

  “Burned oil, I think,” Talia replied. “This is one of the lamp figures. Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. This figure is older than anything I’ve seen from the Indus Valley. Even the female figures she mentioned that I’ve seen had to be later corruptions of this design. They were called the ‘slim’ ones, in contrast to those fat fertility goddesses. They were still mostly naked, with lots of jewelry and elaborate headdresses. This one is clothed, and the ornaments are very conservative. The workmanship is superior, too. Pipali. I love that name.”

  “There’s a tree figure,” Keith said as he touched the screen to expand another thumbnail image. “The detail is incredible. Is that some kind of fruit I can see peeking out from under the leaves?”

  “Yes. Pipal trees bear a type of fig. The symbol of Israel has been a fig tree from ancient times. This is an exciting parallel, isn’t it? See the tiny marks on every single leaf? Do you realize what those are?”

  “They’re … some kind of writing?”

  “Exactly. We’ve got another code. No one knows how to read the Harappan language. But here are symbols all over this tree. And look at the woman’s ornaments – the borders on her gown –” she flicked to enlarge the image on the touchscreen.

  “More symbols. More code.” Keith nodded. “But are we sure this is connected to the Testaments? Those symb
ols don’t look the same at all. Everybody’s already scrambling to translate the tablets from Ugarit. We’re not even sure Britomartis has a connection to them. That could just be a corruption, like you and Naddy talked about.”

  “Or maybe this is the connection.” Talia pulled up another image. “Look at this carving. It’s part of a wall, looks like, and there’s one of the male part-animal beings the lady from Pakistan talked about.”

  “Weird,” Keith said. “There’s a whole bunch of animals around it, regular ones. But that thing has a bull’s body, and a man’s head, with horns on it. It looks like a lot of idols I’ve seen pictures of. What’s significant about it?”

  “See that man kneeling in the middle of all the animals, with something in his hand, and whatever that is under it? Some people might think he’s making a sacrifice and worshiping the part-bull figure, but what if the bull creature is there to protect him, not to be worshiped?

  “He almost looks like he might be carving or writing something on that object in front of him. He might be surrounded by animals because he’s living in a wild place, or on a farm, away from a city.”

  “I can see that, now that you point it out. Man, how many textbooks did I read that just assumed all this stuff represented idol worship. I never looked at it the way you described it, or that lady did. It makes so much sense. So the man is writing – maybe like in Ezekiel’s vision, God was giving him something to write down?”

  “We have to be really careful about how much interpretation we put into these things,” Talia cautioned. “The Scriptures say holy men of old spoke, or wrote things down, as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. So it’s not a stretch to say the man could be recording a part of God’s Word. He could be making a copy, not something directly inspired. He could be writing down something passed to him orally from earlier records lost because of persecution.”

  “Right. We don’t have enough context to be sure what he’s writing. So it’s inconclusive. And I still don’t see how this connects to Britomartis or to the Testaments.”

  “Look at this border,” Talia said. “On the stonework, just before the broken edge – there.” She expanded the image.

  “More symbols,” Keith grumbled. “Is that Harappan?”

  “Yes. But the point is, there are messages here that are worked into the elements of the design. They’re hidden in plain sight. Now, let me show you some images from photos the Guardians took at Olous, where we found the ax. Uncle Naddy just received these last night.”

  She swiped open a new file and brought up underwater pictures. Keith recognized their dive site. Talia expanded a shot at the base of the broken column.

  “Somebody’s been chipping off the barnacles and stuff,” Keith observed.

  “Yes. See this border at the bottom of the column?”

  “That’s orichalcum, not corundum,” Keith said. “I see more symbols. Oh, man. We don’t just have to decipher the tablets. We’re going to have to figure out what all these hidden messages say?”

  “Not necessarily. Look what the email that came with these images says.”

  We are beginning to be convinced that in many of these artifacts are repeated copies of similar or identical messages. In other words, structures, clothing, pottery – any kind of man-made object could have been used to make copies of the Word. Small portions, some portable, some wearable, some fixed, but they are simply ways of keeping the Word before people’s eyes and in their minds. These cultures wanted to fill everyone’s consciousness with as much of the Scriptures as they could.

  We are not taxed with translating every scrap of these writings. We need only use them for comparison to try to locate and identify the true and complete copies of the Word. There may be more than one set of Testaments, in different languages. The Ugarit tablets may represent only one of the sets.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Keith said. “Those writings in Olous are copies of parts of the full Testaments in that language that’s like Linear A, maybe. But the images we got from that Pakistani lady are a different language, another one we don’t know. But they still point to there being tablets, maybe, in that language, somewhere relatively near these artifacts, like the Ugarit tablets were relatively near Olous and Crete.”

  “Yes. Exactly.” Talia hugged him. “No crowds to embarrass us here, right?”

  “Right,” Keith said, kissing her. “But I wouldn’t care if there was a crowd. I love you so much. Are you and Naddy and Sophie planning on having that wedding anytime soon? Because I am so ready.”

  “Aunt Sophie and I are talking about it,” Talia said with a shy smile. “Keith, I think we do need to go to Pakistan and see these artifacts firsthand. I think we can at least hope that there are some more Testaments nearby. But I want to have the wedding before we go.”

  Chapter Fifty-two – Covert Wedding

  “Is the Skype set up?” Keith asked, running into the command center.

  “All set,” Bart Matthews said. “Get on into the chapel, Son. They’re ready for you.”

  Keith wrestled with his tie as he hurried across the foyer to the chapel. His father caught him in the doorway.

  “Let me do that, Son,” he said with a smile.

  “Thanks, Dad.” As they walked up toward Pastor Stokes, waiting to officiate, Keith glanced around at the collection of big screen TVs and saw groups start to appear. The Bradley Central gang, other teachers, students, and parents, sat in the school auditorium, waving, grinning, and cheering. Another display showed their friends and pastor in the church sanctuary. A third had Grandma Bradley’s friends from her senior apartments gathered in their community room. Grandma Bradley sat next to that screen, chatting softly on a computer with some of them.

  A fourth monitor showed the inside of a tent and Keith could see Jiggly, Cindee, and people he didn’t know who might have been Naddy and Sophie’s archaeology associates, diggers, or even Guardians for all he could tell. Jiggly and Cindee kept waving like idiots and Cindee looked like she was already crying. Keith hadn’t remembered her having green hair before. In the background Keith spotted that Israeli pilot, David somebody, who worked for Magnum Security and had saved Keith from Jenny Kaine’s runaway van. He looks like he’s about ready to cry too. Wow.

  Keith’s brother Dan stood beside David and kept poking him and laughing. David, who stood almost a head taller, finally put Dan in a headlock and held him for a full minute. Keith didn’t even know for sure where they were, or how Dan had managed to get himself there a week after they announced the wedding date. He didn’t know how any of this had come off in such a short time.

  “Turn around, Son.” Keith did. Sophie entered, wearing a soft blue dress, and came to stand opposite Keith and his dad. Behind her he saw Naddy with Talia on his arm. She wore a simple white cotton dress and carried a bouquet of daisies and buttercups picked that morning from the meadow outside the main building. Her hair was up and stuck full of little white flowers. Keith’s grin widened as the people on the TVs went silent. Naddy gave Keith a long, hard look before breaking into a smile and putting Talia’s hand into his, patting both of them with his big paws.

  “You will never be buried at a dig site,” he rumbled as he went to sit by Keith’s grandmother.

  Keith’s cheeks twitched by the time the ceremony ended, he was trying so hard to control his grin. He managed to control the tremors long enough to kiss the bride at the right time.

  “I feel like this is a milestone for our Intergrid ministries,” Larry said afterwards over punch and cake and the “congratulations” and other happy screams still periodically erupting from the TVs. Everyone in the remote locations was having something to eat and drink, even the people in the tent. “This is our first covert wedding, isn’t it?”

  All the residents of the campground looked at each other. “I believe you’re right, Pastor,” Bart agreed.

  “Intergrid?” Keith asked.

  “Instead of going off the grid, we’ve sort of made our own grid within
it,” Tom Schuster, the man working with Keith’s dad on the Constitutional history site, explained. “We have people who do nothing else for us but secure our online communications. Magnum Security does a lot of it. Don’t know what we’d do without Drew Summers. He’s kind of made us his mission.”

  “Drew Summers is – what – the owner of Magnum?” Keith’s dad asked.

  “Yes,” Naddy replied. “He was also the owner of the Tesla that is now Talia’s.”

  “He was the guy with the gambling problem?” Keith asked. “The guy who came personally to pick us up from the airport?”

  Sophie nodded. “Drew lost everything to gambling. His wife still will not speak to him. He does not even know where she is. Naddy has invested in his business, as have others, since he swore off his Poker addiction. And he helps our cause so much.”

  “God has blessed him in the two years since he put down his cards,” said Eva Sanchez, the woman who managed the campground.

  Keith and Talia couldn’t help glancing at Naddy.

  “Ask no questions for conscience sake,” he said with a scowl.

  “Okay,” Keith said. He took Talia’s hand. “So, Mrs. Sanchez, where’s the honeymoon suite? You said you wouldn’t tell us until after. It’s after, and it’s almost midnight. Can we –?”

  “Oh, of course!” Eva jumped up. “Come. Your chariot awaits.”

  “Chariot? It’s not in this building?” Talia asked.

  “I thought you knew everything about this place,” Keith said as Eva led them out the side door of the main building.

  “It never occurred to me that I would need to know about a honeymoon suite.” Talia giggled.

  “And we never had one before,” Eva said. “Like the pastor said, this is our first wedding here. But we improvised.” She waved a hand to show them a golf cart covered in streamers and paper flowers, complete with cans and shoes tied on the back. Just Married was written in soap on the clear snap-on side covers. Everyone had come out to shout more congratulations and wave. In the luggage rack sat two suitcases.