Spear of Destiny Read online

  Skinner, Clark, Donaldson and Leary clustered round the radio car, setting two tall poles to front and rear, rigging the support lines, and stringing the dipole antenna between the poles. While they were struggling to get the aerial set up, Gerald and Max Chippendale took out the theodolite and screwed it onto its tripod.

  Max put a wide wooden board beneath the tripod legs and spent the next five minutes with a plumb bob trying to get the instrument absolutely flat.

  ‘Who the fuck thought you could use one of these on sand?’ he swore, as he did every time he had to get it straight. He fiddled with the legs, tightening and loosening, while Gerald lit the tripod with his Kempthorne torch, one he’d ‘liberated’ from an Aussie patrol.

  ‘OK, skipper. It’s as plumb as I can get it.’

  He put his eye to the theodolite’s telescope and picked out a star.

  ‘Up,’ he called out as the star moved across the lens. Gerald noted the time, using his chronometer.

  Back at the radio car, Leary had his receiver buzzing. He twisted dials until the time signal came through from Big Ben, and Gerald confirmed the coordinates. He dictated a brief message to Leary, who encrypted it and transmitted the result to Kufra.

  ‘Let’s have a spot of swing, Weary,’ someone said, and other voices joined in, calling for music before they settled down, a desert custom. Leary’s wireless ranged from 4.2 to 7.5MHz and could pick up most short-wave broadcasts. He twiddled the dial and caught Glenn Miller’s band halfway through ‘In the Mood’. Clark found the rum pot and doled out rations to keep the cold at bay. No one declined.

  Next thing, Peggy Lee was singing her new hit with the Benny Goodman sextet, ‘Full Moon’. Above them, the moon moved majestically through its field of stars, the twenty-eight lunar mansions, through al-Haq‘a, al-Han‘a and al-‘Adhara, past stars and planets named by the Arabs centuries ago. The song ended, and Leary moved the dial again, this time picking up Radio Belgrade. They listened uncomprehending to a barrage of German propaganda, but everyone knew what they were waiting for. They weren’t disappointed. A record crackled briefly, then the airwaves were filled with the lush voice of Lale Anderson, the German Angel of the Soldiers.

  ‘Vor der Kaserne

  Vor dem grossen Tor

  Stand eine Lanterne

  Und steht sie noch davor…

  Wie einst Lili Marleen.’

  For all the English versions that had been recorded, the auf Deutsch original was the anthem of all the British troops in the desert. Some hummed, others listened silently. The desert swallowed the music and the silence equally. There was this moment in every day when they sat and thought of home and the nearness of violent death. The song ended, and Leary switched off the wireless.

  Gerald drank the last sip of rum and put his mug back on the car. As he did so, he saw a dark figure coming towards the cars from the encampment. He reached for his pistol, then remembered what he’d done with it.

  ‘Chips!’ he hissed. ‘Someone’s coming. Maybe more than one. Tell the others.’

  He jumped into the car and crouched behind the Browning. The figure moved rapidly across the sand, half shadow, half reflected moonlight. It didn’t seem to be making any effort to conceal itself.

  He let the shadow come within several yards of the car, then shouted ‘Stop!’ in Tamasheq. The figure came to a halt.

  ‘I must speak to your lord.’ It was a woman’s voice. Relieved, Gerald told her to come forward.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ he asked. Donaldson had left the child sleeping after the dancing, and said there was nothing more he could do for him. Either the antitoxin worked or the child died. Had the woman come to tell them he was dead?

  ‘My name is A’isha,’ she said. ‘Si Musa’s wife. Is the doctor here?’

  ‘Donaldson,’ called Gerald, ‘I think you’d better come over. It’s the headman’s wife. She wants to speak with you.’

  Donaldson’s heart was thumping. He knew how much might hinge on this one small life. As he came out of the shadows that encircled the second car, the woman broke away and ran to him, throwing herself onto the sand at his feet and grabbing his legs, sobbing and laughing simultaneously. Amidst the tears and laughter, broken words escaped her lips.

  ‘Bloody hell, Bill, I think the kid pulled through. She thinks you’re a miracle worker. Next best thing to God.’

  And so it transpired. When she finally collected herself, she told Gerald that her son had come out of his sleep hungry and asking for food. She’d given him some leftovers from the meal, and he’d kept them down. The doctor raised her to her feet and clapped her on the shoulders.

  ‘No one else knows,’ she said. ‘Just my sisters. I came to tell you first. To thank you for saving his life. I am in your debt. My husband, my son, and myself will for ever be in your debt.’

  Flustered, Donaldson said he would come to see the boy right away. But A’isha put up a hand and shook her head.

  ‘He’s sleeping again,’ she said. ‘Before you see him, you must come with me. All of you. You must be rewarded.’

  They looked at one another awkwardly, assuming she meant that she would share her sexual favours with them. Gerald explained that they wanted no reward, that hearing of the child’s survival was sufficient reward in itself.

  She continued to shake her head.

  ‘I know why you came to Ain Suleiman. Everyone knows. Shaykh Harun says you must be killed before you find what you are looking for. But you have given my son back his life, so I will take you there. I will take you there tonight. It isn’t far.’

  Gerald looked at her, not understanding.

  ‘We came to find Ain Suleiman. That is all we sought.’

  ‘I know what you came to find,’ she said. ‘I will show you. The sands have moved in the storm. There is much to see.’

  ‘What is this thing?’ Gerald asked.

  ‘It is not a thing,’ she said. ‘It is a city. The city of Wardabaha. I will walk there with you now. Before the moon sets. I will take you to the hall of the sleepers, where the Old Ones sleep. I cannot go all the way inside, none of us can. But you are angels. Come with me. Come to Wardabaha.’

  3

  The City of Wardabaha

  Leary stayed by the radio in case base tried to make contact. Skinner had already been placed on sentry duty: he manned one of the Brownings, with a Very flare to hand if it turned out that the whole thing was a ploy on the part of the Tuaregs to raid the cars. The others set out with torches, following A’isha across the silver landscape. Not a word was said by anyone. Their feet sank in the soft sand, leaving impressions that were at once filled by moonlight, like mercury flowing into hollows. A white lizard, startled by the light, ran across their path and vanished.

  They did not go far, a quarter of a mile at most. Their minds set on a desert city, on towers and battlements, on domes and minarets, on ancient stairways and the inevitable ruin of things once lovely and blessed, they saw nothing at first. When A’isha’s voice rang out, telling them they had arrived, they looked and saw only dunes with more dunes behind them, moonlight with moonlight following.

  Then A’isha took Gerald by the arm and led him forward. The others followed, all certain by now that they’d been tricked, that the woman had, out of treachery or high spirits, fooled them or betrayed them. Chips wanted to turn back, thinking the Tuaregs had duped them in order to loot the cars, fearing Leary and Skinner might already be dead. Yet there had been no shooting, no shouts, no hint of any activity behind them.

  And then something altered, as though the landscape itself had undergone a great change or things magical become evident to the material eye. Just to his right, Gerald saw what looked like a human figure, a woman draped in clinging fabric. In a flash, he saw she had no head, and in the same moment realised it was a statue. Behind him Max Chippendale whistled.

  ‘Holy Hercules!’

  He walked up to it, content to let the moonlight serve for illumination.

 
‘Roman,’ he said. ‘Roman and this far south, it doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Over here, Dr Chippendale,’ called Teddy Clark, reverting quite naturally to the don’s civilian title.

  Teddy had stumbled on a lion’s head carved from marble, its nostrils flared, its eyes wide open, its luxuriant mane sculpted with great delicacy.

  They went on, crossing between two dunes, and now a new world opened before their awestruck eyes. Pillars, some broken, others still topped by carvings of acanthus leaves, sprang from the sand. To one side, there was a fallen archway linked to another by a round face surrounded by what seemed to be long, wreathing curls.

  ‘Medusa,’ whispered Chippendale. Not curls of hair, he said, but serpents chiselled into it so finely they might yet have moved. Moonlight trickled across the face, blanching it, making it appear lit from within.

  Max wandered among the ruins, mesmerised, at every step reminded of the great Roman sites to the north: Leptis Magna, Ptolemais, Sabratha. Libya, known then as Cyrenaica, had been one of the greatest provinces of the Roman Empire, producing grain, livestock, and a vast array of medicinal plants. The trade in silphium alone had made the province rich. Ancient Libya had boasted amphitheatres, baths, forums, villas – all the rich panoply of an imperial success story.

  ‘I’m only guessing at this point,’ Max said as he ran his fingers down the fluted side of a rose granite column, ‘but I reckon this place dates from sometime after the imperial cult was brought here. Say around AD 70, up through Trajan’s rule, maybe to AD 100 or a bit after. This is really a guess, though. There could be much later buildings. There might be anything buried in the sand. It just depends how long this place was active.’

  ‘Is there really no record of a place like this?’ Gerald asked.

  Max shrugged.

  ‘No idea. I’ve done my reading about Roman Africa, but I’m no expert. There could be a record, but I’ve never come across it. All the same, there’s something at the back of my mind. Maybe it’ll come to me.’

  It was Clark who stumbled on the doorway. Young Teddy Clark, a fair-faced lad from Kent, a farmer’s son, barely out of school, and lost in a desert of stone and gravel, far from the green fields of his father’s farm. His sharp eyes picked it out from the sand, and he ran to it, calling the others to him.

  The half-open door lay on the sheltered face of a dune, protected from the prevailing winds. Two fluted rectangular columns stood to either side, rising to over six feet, where they were crossed by a stone lintel on which had been carved an inscription in Greek, partly obscured by sand. At both ends of the lintel the engraver had placed a rosette with six narrow petals, flanked by stylised palm trees.

  But it was the door itself that took Max Chippendale’s breath away. It was a bronze door made of two halves. On the right-hand panel a skilled hand had limned in gold a faithful likeness of a seven-branched candlestick, and on the left side, matching it in skill and fidelity, the embossed image of a cross, and on this latter, writing in Hebrew. The left-hand side had been pushed back, leaving a narrow opening that a child might have passed through.

  Astonished by this incongruity, Max raised his hand to the entablature and brushed away the sand that had stuck to the lintel. One by one, the letters came into view, each chiselled neatly into the stone.

  Gerald came up close and stared at the inscription. The others gathered round. A’isha stood to one side, as though frightened to go any closer.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Gerald. ‘I thought this was a Roman place. What’s a Greek inscription doing up there?’

  ‘Can you read it?’ asked Max.

  ‘Not without a dictionary. Never was much good at Greek in school.’

  ‘Well, you might also ask yourself what that Hebrew writing is doing on the cross. That, I’m afraid I cannot help you with. But the Greek’s more straightforward. The Romans still used Greek in Egypt and Cyrenaica. There’s nothing odd about it at all. It’s the Hebrew that’s bloody odd, and the candlestick. Jewish obviously. Next to a Christian symbol. Most peculiar.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that. Can you read what it says?’

  Donaldson had brought an oil lamp from his car and now held it up. The flickering flame cast light and shadow across the square epigraphy.

  Max ran his eyes across the Greek letters, thought for a moment, then translated:

  In the second year of the emperor Marcus Ulpius Trajanus, on the seventh of Tammuz, this doorway of the proseuchê was erected by the congregation of the Ebonyim of Ain Shelomo by order of the archisynagogos Dositheos, son of Ammonius and the archiprostates Zenion, son of Zoilos.

  ‘That’s about it,’ he said.

  ‘When was that?’ asked Teddy Clark. ‘The second year of Trajan.’

  Max did a quick calculation.

  ‘Sometime in 100 AD. Trajan became emperor in January 98. The month is odd, though. Tammuz. It’s a Jewish month. If I’m not mistaken, proseuchê is an alternative word for a synagogue. This Dositheos would have been the leader of the synagogue.’

  ‘It can’t be a synagogue,’ commented Donaldson. ‘There’s the wee matter of a cross on the door.’

  Max shrugged.

  ‘I think you may be in for a surprise,’ he answered.

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure. But I think we have to go inside, don’t you?’

  They looked at one another, at faces dim in the moonlight, then at the darkness in the doorway.

  ‘Will it open, do you suppose?’ asked Gerald.

  The door seemed frozen in place, trapped ajar beneath a mountain of sand, its interior buried for ever under the weight of the desert, its secrets hidden in permanent shadow.

  Max brushed sand away from the embossed images on the door, then ran his hand softly along the open edge. He felt old sand, old dirt, an accumulation of grime that century upon century had laid there.

  ‘There’s one way to find out,’ he said. And he began to push the left-hand wing inwards. The others lent a hand and, to their surprise, the door offered little resistance. The gap between the bottom edge and the floor was wide enough to let the wing travel, grinding on sand, yet pushing whatever sand lay behind it away.

  When the opening had been enlarged enough to let them enter, Max took one of the torches and led the way inside. A moonbeam followed him, a pale, milky wash of molten alabaster flowing across a dark layer of sand. Gerald told Clark to stay on guard duty outside.

  ‘Keep an eye on A’isha,’ he said. ‘I still don’t trust her.’

  But when he looked round, the young woman was no longer there. He swung the beam of his torch around the nearest dunes, but there was no sign of her.

  ‘Call us if anything happens, Clark,’ Gerald ordered. ‘Anything.’

  He stepped inside.

  It was as if, in that single step, he had been transported from one world to another, like a man who, falling from the gunwales of a ship at sea, passes at once into the waves and is taken by water down to infinite depths. In the first moments of falling, he has no sense of the transition that is to come, and no true picture of how deep and cold the ocean is. Thus it was for Gerald Usherwood, and after him his companions, as he stepped from the desert into a sea built of stone and the webs of small incessant spiders.

  The room he stepped into was lightless. No opening existed in its roof that might have let moonlight or starlight through. It had, he realised at once, been dark like this for centuries, lit only partly in the day by the passing rays of the desert sun. It was no colder here than outside, and no warmer. But as his torch picked out walls and the shadowed recesses of a high ceiling, the vast spaces of the desert, through which he seemed to have been travelling for years, dwindled to the confines of an ancient room, an antechamber that would lead him deeper inside this inner place, this inmost of all places.

  For centuries, the legs of orb-weaver and sheet-web spiders had crossed and recrossed the chamber, leaving everywhere fine cobwebs in the dark
ness. As the moving light of Gerald’s torch caught them, living spiders scuttled to whatever shadow they could find. A camel spider six inches long scurried from its nightly hiding place to a crevice between wall and floor. Gerald held to the centre of the room, knowing there would be scorpions in the cracks and interstices of the walls.

  Max joined him silently, and together they began to pick out the features of the entrance hall.

  The hall was supported at either end by four Ionic columns. One side wall carried a stone plaque inscribed in Hebrew, and its counterpart, opposite, a similar plaque bearing an inscription in Latin. The walls behind and in front were decorated with dozens of elegant mosaics. Among them all, one right ahead stood out. It glistened in the cold beams of their torches, burning with tesserae of white and red and blue and gold. It showed a great building set on a hill, a building of white stone that rose upon steep steps on every side. It was surrounded by battlements, with towers on each corner and a great courtyard in front. The central edifice towered above these, tipped by gold along the roof, and supported on columns whose capitals were of gold. A tall doorway led into darkness. In the sky above, angels flew on golden wings, and in the silence they could almost hear the wings whisper.

  Gerald went up to the mosaic and touched it, running his fingers gently over the tesserae.

  ‘It’s as if it was made yesterday,’ he said in a hushed voice. ‘As if the artist had walked away moments ago and is still in hailing distance. Look at the gold. The tiles are glass with gold foil behind. This was made in the middle of a desert.’

  Max was still staring at the mosaic from a few feet away.

  ‘It’s the Temple,’ he said.

  ‘Temple?’

  Max hesitated. He stepped closer to the mosaic and, like Gerald, ran his fingers over the gold and shining tesserae. He spoke in a quiet voice, but they all heard him clearly.

  ‘“And now Herod, in the eighteenth year of his reign…undertook a very great work, that is, to build of himself the temple of God, and make it larger in compass, and to raise it to a most magnificent altitude, as esteeming it to be the most glorious of all his actions to bring it to perfection; and that this would be sufficient for an everlasting memorial of him.”