Sinai Tapestry (6 page)

Your door was locked.

That’s right.

But it’s midnight on the winter solstice.

Correct. And so?

But don’t you know what happens on this special night?

I know we have more night than any other night, but who are you anyway? Amateur astronomers?

You mean you don’t
know
who we are?

No.

The Secret Seven, announced the leader in a hushed voice.

My God man, thundered Strongbow, I can see you’re seven but what’s your infernal secret?

You mean you’ve never even heard of us?

No.

But we’re the most ancient and honored secret society in England.

Well what’s your secret? What kind of a society is it?

A masturbation society, said the leader with dignity.

Strongbow roared with laughter.

Masturbation? Is that all? What’s so secret about that? And why in God’s name are we speaking Greek?

You are elected,
intoned the seven young men in unison.

I am? To what?

Our society. The Seven Immortals.

Immortal you say? Because you masturbate?

The Seven were stunned. There had never been any question of explaining their society to anyone, let alone justifying its purpose. They stood in line speechless. Strongbow smiled.

The Seven Sages of Greece, are you? How often do you meet to exchange your wisdom?

Two evenings a week.

Not enough, said Strongbow. Am I to confine myself to masturbating only two evenings a week? Ridiculous.

No one’s confined. That’s just when we meet formally.

But why be formal about it at all? A ludicrous notion.

The leader began talking about charity and fraternity. He even mentioned kings and archbishops and famous statesmen who had been members of the society, but all these impressive names Strongbow waved aside with a long sweep of his arm.

Listen, o wise men. Masturbation is certainly relaxing, but why have a society for it and one that is secret at that? Nonsense. Pure farce.

You don’t mean you’re refusing election, stammered the leader.

Of course that’s what I mean. What an absurdity.

But no one has refused election in five hundred years.

Distinctly odd. Now I’ve cooled down from my bath and I think I should dress and get along with my duties. The chapter I’m reading has to do with
Solanum nigrum,
probably known to you as deadly nightshade, composed in Cordoba in 756, learned but not quite right. Shall I explain the irregularities to you? We’ll have to switch from Greek to Arabic but of course you can carry on with your usual activities.

The door opened. The seven young men slinked away into the longest night of 1836. Midnight had come and gone and in refusing to accept immortality Strongbow had insufferably effronted over three hundred of the most powerful Englishmen of his day, not to mention the memories of another three thousand dead heroes of his race, an insult that would be well remembered nearly half a century later when he published his monumental thirty-three-volume study entitled
Levantine Sex.

Nor was it merely his intellectual ferocity, his savage fighting skills or his insolent disregard for tradition that caused him to be viewed as dangerous at Cambridge. There was also his unfathomable manner.

For of course no one realized Strongbow was deaf and that he could only understand others by reading their lips. Therefore anyone outside his field of vision was ignored as if nonexistent, just as any event occurring behind his back was ignored as if nonexistent.

There was the disturbing occasion in the spring, for example, when a heavy downpour caused half the botanical laboratory at Cambridge to collapse at dawn. The laboratory was thought to be empty but the thunderous crash was so great the entire university rushed to the spot within minutes.

What they saw standing on what had once been the third floor, the precipice only a few inches behind his feet, was Strongbow bent over a microscope studying the lines of a new spring leaf, oblivious to the destruction that had jolted everyone from their beds.

Strongbow’s concentration, in sum, was frighteningly aloof and apart. Because of his unnatural height he bore only a distorted resemblance to a man and the only voices he seemed to hear were those of plants. In other eras he might have been burned at the stake as the Antichrist, and undoubtedly it was only because his nineteenth-century world was so rational that he was merely regarded as exceptionally perverse, maniacal and un-English.

But significantly, it was this very rationality that Strong-bow would one day assault with such devastating results.

His career at Cambridge culminated in an episode both brilliant and typical, yet so extravagant it was considered intolerable by many, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and possibly the new monarch then awaiting her coronation, Queen Victoria.

Strongbow stood for his tripos examinations at the end of one year rather than the customary three, and his achievement was such that he had to be awarded a triple first, the only time that ever happened in an English university. As a parting gift to English scholarship he proceeded to announce he had discovered a new species of rose on the banks of the Cam.

Even if proposed quietly the discovery would have been shocking. In a land devoted to roses it seemed unthinkable that six centuries of British scholars could have gone punting on the Cam and entirely overlooked a species.

But the proposal wasn’t made quietly. Instead Strongbow noisily nailed it to the chapel door one Sunday morning just as the service ended and the faculty began to appear.

The uproar throughout the nation was immediate. An official board of experts was convened, to be chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who would cast a deciding vote should that ultimate resort to fair play become necessary.

Strongbow’s evidence, arranged in ninety-five theses, was removed from the chapel door and studied in full by the board. The Latin was impeccable and to their dismay they found there was nothing to consider or vote on. The discovery was genuine. There was simply no way to assign the rose to any of the existing species.

And as its discoverer Strongbow had the inalienable right to name it.

The archbishop led a select delegation to Strongbow’s rooms. After congratulating him warmly the archbishop eased into a persuasive discourse. A new rose had been found for England, a new monarch was soon to be crowned from the House of Hanover. How magnanimous it was of God, working through a brilliant young scholar and nobleman, to bless the land and Her Britannic Majesty at this time, in this manner.

While the archbishop spoke Strongbow remained bent over his workbench examining a blade of grass with his enormous magnifying glass. When the archbishop finished Strongbow straightened to his full height, still holding the glass in place, and stared down at the delegation.

Behind the powerful lens of the magnifying glass his unblinking eye was two inches wide.

During his year at Cambridge Strongbow’s disgust with his family’s history had fully matured. He could no longer abide the memory of the silly accidents that had killed twenty-eight successive Dukes of Dorset, the silly aunts and uncles who had been returning to the manor for centuries to raise its orphans, the silly family mystery which was just another name for illiteracy, above all the silly sexuality that had gone by the name of the family game.

At the same time he had grown increasingly contemptuous toward England, which he found too small and prim and petty for his needs. And being still young, he preferred to believe his country was more to blame that his family for six hundred and fifty years of Strongbow silliness.

So his enormous eye rested on the archbishop and his speech was short.

Your Grace has made reference to the House of Hanover, Germans who arrived here some five hundred and forty years after my own dukedom was established. It is certainly true the Plantagenet Strongbows did nothing for England in six and a half centuries, but at least they had the decency to do it on English soil. Therefore we will honor that soil and Victoria of Hanover by naming this discovery the
rosa exultata plantagenetiana.
Thank you for coming, and thank you for recognizing the inevitable existence of this rare flower.

Nothing more was said on either side of the workbench. The huge eye continued to hover near the ceiling as the shrunken delegates crept out the door.

Strongbow immediately disappeared from England, his first journeys allusive and unrecorded. From time to time a detailed monograph on the flora of western Sudan or eastern Persia appeared in some European capital, posted from Damascus or Tunis and privately printed according to his instructions.

And at least once a year a dozen new species of desert flowers would be described, the discoveries invariably genuine. So although he continued to be feared and disliked even when far from home, the English botanical community had no choice but to admire his accumulated research.

Yet in fact Strongbow was spending very little time on botany. Instead, unexpectedly, he had turned his vast powers of concentration to the study of sex, an endeavor that eventually would bring about the fall of the British Empire.

But that was of no concern to Strongbow. What was important to him was the startling discovery he made in a Sinai cave after only a few years in the Middle East, that the lost original of the Bible actually existed, a secret he would share with only one other man in his century.

With that discovery began Strongbow’s forty-year search for the Sinai Bible and his lifelong speculations about what the mysterious lost original might contain, of all his legacies to the twentieth century the one that would most intrigue and baffle his sole child and heir, the idealistic boy one day to become a gunrunner named Stern.

Men tend to become fables

and fables tend to become

men.

B
EFORE BEING KILLED AT
the order of the Habsburgs, a former Czech orphan named Wallenstein had twice risen to become the all-powerful Generalissimo of the Holy Roman Empire during the religious slaughter known as the Thirty Years War.

A variety of enemies had hunted the fugitive through the mists of northern Bohemia, but when finally trapped the halberd driven through his chest was held by an English captain commanded by an Irish general. The year was 1634 and that killing, followed by the specter of an eagle, which in Arab lore traditionally lives a thousand years, brought to the Mediterranean the apparent ancestor of the man who would one day undertake the most spectacular forgery in history.

While he lived and scavenged, Generalissimo Wallenstein had immersed himself so excessively in astrology that everyone in his family detested stars—with one exception, an indolent nephew who believed in nothing else. Therefore the morning the nephew learned of his famous uncle’s death he immediately rushed to consult his local wizard.

The wizard had been up all night nodding in his observatory. He was on his way to bed but he couldn’t turn away his most important client. Wearily he laid out his charts and tried to come to some conclusion. By the time he did he was falling asleep.

Bribes, screamed the nephew. Can they save me? Should I flee?

Eagles, muttered the wizard.

The Wallenstein nephew leapt from his chair.

Flight. Of course. But where to?

I’m sorry, all else is unclear.

Wallenstein shook the wizard by his beard but the old man was already snoring. He galloped back to his castle above the Danube where his confessor, a Jesuit in the habit of dropping by for a glass of wine at noon, was waiting. He saw that the nephew’s left eyelid was drooping, a sure sign of profound agitation. Having traveled widely for his order, he suggested Wallenstein unburden himself. As the nephew talked the priest calmly emptied their bottle of wine.

Shqiperi,
he murmured at length. An excellent vintage, my son.

What’s that? asked Wallenstein, peering out from under his drooping eyelid.

I said this is a remarkably fine vintage.

No, that other word you used.

You mean the ancient name the Albanians used for their country? Thought to have meant
eagle
originally? Certainly an old race, the Albanians, who have survived because their land is mountainous and inaccessible. Probably they once identified themselves with the eagles of the place.

The Jesuit seemed unsurprised as Wallenstein dropped to his knees and confessed he had never believed in stars. There was a further exchange, after which the priest praised the young man for not falling victim to his uncle’s astral follies.

He then absolved him of various sins, suggested a number of Hail Marys and wished him success in the south, if he-should ever travel south, meanwhile accepting responsibility for the wine cellar beneath the castle if its owner were ever absent.

The first Wallenstein in Albania considered himself a temporary exile from Germany. The country was barbarous and he intended to leave as soon as possible. Nevertheless he had to live so he moved into a castle and took a local wife.

When a son was born he allowed the baby to be named after Albania’s national hero, a fifteenth-century Christian turned Moslem turned Christian who had been given the name by which history knew him while a hostage to the Turks, Lord Alexander or Iskander Bey, or Skanderbeg as his countrymen pronounced it when he finally returned to his native land and became its most famous warrior, tirelessly storming Christian fortresses for the Turks during the first half of his life, then tirelessly defending those same fortresses against the Turks for the second half of his life.

After several decades of exile Wallenstein learned that his dead uncle was no longer considered a threat to the Holy Roman Empire. It was now safe for him to return to his home above the Danube. Elated, he drank a quantity of arak one evening and climbed his tower to see what the stars of an Albanian night might say of his future.

Unfortunately a condition that was to afflict his male heirs for generations came over him. His drooping left eyelid slipped lower and lower until it closed.