Sinai Tapestry

Sinai Tapestry

by Edward Whittemore (1977)

For Cat

PART ONE

-1-

Strongbow

Standing straight out in front of him, thick and menacing, was a medieval lance twelve feet long.

The Arabic Jew, or Jewish Arab, who owned the entire Middle East at the turn of the century passed his early life exactly as had his English forebears for six hundred and fifty years.

At the family estate in southern England he was taught to care for flowers, especially roses. His parents died while he was young and his aunts and uncles moved into the manor to raise him. In due time he would receive his title and become the twenty-ninth Plantagenet Strongbow to bear it, merely one more Duke of Dorset.

For it seemed that destiny had found a resting place among the Strongbows. At one time, thought to be about 1170, one of their line had helped subdue eastern Ireland and been given a title because of it. Since then the family had lapsed into patterns. Confusion had been lost or forgotten. Instead there was repetition and order.

The oldest son in each generation always married on the day he assumed his majority and became the new lord. His wife matched him in wealth and shared his concern for flowers. Children appeared at regular intervals until five or six had been born, more or less equally divided between males and females.

By that time the duke and his duchess were thirty, or nearly thirty, and both abruptly died by accident.

The accidents were routinely silly. After drinking an excess of mead late at night they might fall asleep and fall into the fireplace. Or they might doze off in a trout stream and drown in a foot of water.

Following the flight of a butterfly after breakfast, they would wander off a parapet. Or they would absentmindedly swallow a mutton joint whole, causing suffocation. Or a mild sexual diversion such as dressing up in medieval armor would lead to fatal hemorrhaging in the pelvic region.

In any case both husband and wife died at the same time, at about the age of thirty, and it was then the duty of the deceased lord's younger brothers and sisters to return to the manor to rear their five or six nieces and nephews.

It was a family custom that these younger brothers and sisters never married, but being close in age they had no difficulty resettling in the manor of their childhood and enjoying one another's company. At the beginning of the Christmas season they gathered together in the large banquet hall for twelve days of festivities that had come to be called the family game, a traditional sport in which the hall was cleared of furniture and opposing teams were formed with the goal of running a satin pillow from one end of the hall to the other.

During the first hour of play each day intensive grappling was permitted. But thereafter a firm grip on the genitals of an opposing player was sufficient to stop the advance of the pillow and bring on a new scrimmage for its possession.

Under these conditions, despite their wealth and genuine concern for flowers, it was unlikely the Dukes of Dorset would ever have distinguished themselves in the world even if they had lived beyond the age of thirty, and in fact none ever did.

From the end of the twelfth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century, successive Plantagenet Strongbows grew up with a sound knowledge of roses and a vague memory of their parents, learned the family game by watching their aunts and uncles, passed into manhood and sired an heir and a new brood of aunts and uncles before succumbing to another silly accident, thereby perpetuating a random family scheme which was their sole contribution to God and man and England.

Until in 1819, the year of Queen Victoria's birth, a different sort of infant was born in the Dorset manor, different either because of a mutation in genes or because of the terrible disease he suffered at the age of eleven. In any case this slight boy would one day end six hundred and fifty years of placid Strongbow routine by becoming the most awesome explorer his country ever produced.

And coincidently the most scandalous scholar of his era. For whereas other famous theoreticians of the nineteenth century formulated vast, but separate, concepts of the mind and body and society, Strongbow insisted on dealing with all three.

That is, with sex in its entirety.

Not sex as necessity or diversion or in the role of precursor and memory, not even sex as an immediate cause or a vague effect. And certainly not in terms of natural history or inevitable law.

Sex neither as habit nor suggestion but simply sex by itself, unplanned and chaotic and concomitant with nothing, beyond all hope of conspiracy, previously indistinguishable and now seen in infinity.

Sex as practiced. Sex as it was.

At the time, an inconceivable proposition.

In addition to the family game in Strongbow Hall there was also a family mystery. In a manor so old it was only to be expected that some arcane relationship must exist between the structure and its inhabitants, its source secret, probably a hidden sliding panel that opened onto dark passageways leading down into the past.

In fact the huge manor was said to include in its foundations the ruins of a major medieval monastery, unnamed, thought to have been desecrated when its monks were discovered practicing certain unmentionable acts. And close beside those ruins were the ruins of an underground Arthurian chamber, vaulted and impregnable, which had also been desecrated when its knights were discovered practicing other unmentionable acts.

Even deeper in the ground, according to legend, there were the ruins of a spacious sulphur bath only fitfully dormant, built during the age of the Romans.

Next to these baths was a small but impressive sacrificial circle of stones from the even more distant era of the druids.

While lastly, surrounding all these subterranean relics, was an immense erratic design of upright monoliths, astronomical in nature, erected in antiquity by a mighty people.

No one had ever discovered the secret passageways that led to these buried remnants beneath the manor, even though they had always been hunted. For centuries Strongbow aunts and uncles, on rainy afternoons, had armed themselves with torches and organized search parties to try to find them.

Of course minor discoveries had been made. In any given decade a group might come across a cozy unused tower cubicle heaped with furry rugs or a small snug cellar hideaway just big enough for three people.

But the family mystery remained. Tradition claimed the secret sliding panel might well be found in the dark library of the manor, yet strangely Strongbow aunts and uncles never led their search parties there.

When a rainy afternoon came they invariably went in other directions.

Thus the aunts and uncles who became the overseers of the manor early in the nineteenth century might have sensed irrevocable changes afoot when they saw the eldest of their wards, the future lord, spending his afternoons in the deserted library.

The awful truth became clear when the boy was eleven, on the winter night set aside each year for the family's heritage to be recounted by the older generation to the younger. On that night everyone gathered in front of the great fireplace after dinner, the aunts and uncles with their snifters of brandy, sitting solemnly in large chairs, the boys and girls absolutely still on cushions on the floor. Outside the wind howled. Inside the little children stared wide-eyed at the crackling logs as the ancient lore of the place was recounted.

A shadowy medieval monastery, began an aunt or an uncle. Hooded figures thrusting yellow tapers aloft.

Chants in archaic syllables, incense and bats, rites at the foot of a black altar.

Underground chambers from the age of King Arthur, whispered another. Masked knights riding through the mists in eternal pursuit of invisible combat.

Roman legions fresh from the land of the pharaohs, hinted a third. Barbaric foreign gods and pagan battle standards. Luxurious baths wreathed in steam behind the walls of sumptuous palaces.

Druidical rituals, suggested a fourth. Naked priests painted blue clinging to mistletoe, a single towering oak in a lost grove, apparitions in the gloom on the moors. From the deeper recesses of the forest, eerie birdlike cries.

And long before that, whispered another, massive stones placed on the plains in a mystical pattern. The stones so gigantic no ordinary people could have transported them. Who were these unknown people and what was the purpose of their abstract designs? Yes truly we must ponder these enigmas for they are the secrets of our ancestors, to be recalled tonight as so often over the centuries.

Indeed, murmured an uncle. So it has always been and so it must be. These undying marvels are hidden in the ancient library of our manor, reared by the first Duke of Dorset, and there lies the secret within all of us, the impenetrable Strongbow Mystery.

A rustle passed around the fireplace. The children shivered and huddled closer together as the wind whined. No one dared think of the maze of lost passageways spiraling down into the earth beneath them.

A thin voice broke the silence, the voice of the future lord.

No.

Sitting erect, farther from the fire than anyone else, the boy gazed gravely at the heavy swords suspended above the mantle.

No, he repeated, that's not quite correct. In the last year I've read all the books in the library and there's nothing like that there. The first Plantagenet Strongbow was a simple man who went to Ireland and had the usual success slaughtering unarmed peasants, then retired here to polish his armor and do some farming. The early books he collected were about armor, later there were a few dealing with barnyard matters. So it seems the family mystery is simply that no one has ever read a book from the family library.

The disease that felled him the following day was meningitis, which killed his younger brothers and sisters.

Thus there would be no aunts and uncles in the next generation and a comfortable routine dating from the reign of Henry II was suddenly shattered.

In its place lay a sickly wasted boy, dying, who made up his mind to do what no Strongbow had ever done, to enter confusion and not let destiny rest. His first decision was to live and as a result he became totally deaf. His second decision was to become the world's leading authority on plants, since at that early age he wasn't fond of people.

Before the attack of meningitis his height had been average. But the revelations that came with the approach of death, and his subsequent bargaining with fate, brought other changes. By the time he was fourteen he would be well over six feet tall, and by the age of sixteen he would have reached his full height of seven feet and seven inches.

Naturally his aunts and uncles were utterly bewildered by these strange events in his twelfth year, yet they tried to go on living as the Strongbows had always lived. Therefore while he lay recovering in bed, it being the Christmas season, they gathered in the great banquet hall for the customary pillow match. And although fearful and disturbed they bravely carried on as usual, resolutely polishing family tradition just as the first duke had once polished his armor.

While the furniture was being cleared away they picked their teams and playfully jostled one another, smiling and nodding and politely guffawing and lightly patting a bottom or two, patiently forming queues and just as patiently reforming them a moment later, stolidly standing one behind the other as they commented on the rain and tittered hopelessly in agreement.

The hour closed to a few minutes before midnight on Christmas Eve, what should have been the beginning of twelve companionable days of nuzzling and scrimmaging. But when the playing field was cleared, precisely when the satin pillow was ceremoniously placed in the middle of the floor and the fun was ready to begin, a dreadful silence swept through the hall.

They turned. In the doorway stood their gaunt nephew, already an inch or two taller than they remembered him. Standing straight out in front of him, thick and menacing, was a medieval lance twelve feet long.

The boy went directly to the middle of the room, skewered the satin pillow and hurled it into the fireplace, where it burst and blazed briefly. Then in words alternately booming and inaudible, for he hadn't yet learned to modulate his voice without hearing it, he announced they were all dismissed from his house and lands forever. Any aunt or uncle found on the premises when the clock struck midnight, he shouted, would receive the same punishment as the pillow.

There were shrieks and a rush to the door as the future Duke of Dorset, twenty-ninth in his line, calmly ordered the furniture returned to its place and assumed control of his life.

Young Strongbow's first act was to make an inventory of the artifacts in the manor. With his botanist's interest in cataloguing he wanted to know exactly what he had inherited, so with a ledger in one hand and a pen in the other he went from room to room noting everything.

What he found appalled him. The manor was an immense mausoleum containing no less than five hundred thousand separate objects acquired by his family in the course of six hundred and fifty years of doing nothing.

There and then he decided never to encumber his life with material goods, which was the real reason, not vanity, that when the time came for him to disappear into the desert at the age of twenty-one, he did so carrying only his magnifying glass and portable sundial.

But such extreme simplicity was for the future. Now he had to master his profession. Methodically he sealed off the rest of the manor and moved into the central hall, which he equipped as a long botanical laboratory. Here he lived austerely for six years, at the age of sixteen writing to the Rector of Trinity College stating that he was prepared to take up residence at Cambridge to receive a degree in botany.

The letter was brief, attached to it was a summary of his qualifications.

Fluent ability in Early and Middle Persian, hieroglyphics and cuneiform and Aramaic, classical and modern Arabic, the usual knowledge of Greek and Hebrew and Latin and the European tongues, Hindi where relevant and all sciences where necessary for his work.

Lastly, as an example of some research already undertaken, he enclosed a short monograph on the ferns to be found on his estate. The Rector of Trinity had the paper examined by an expert, who declared it the most definitive study on ferns ever written in Britain. The monograph was published by the Royal Society as a special bulletin and thus Strongbow's name, one day to be synonymous with rank depravity, made its first quiet appearance in print.

Almost at once three sensational incidents made Strongbow a legend at Cambridge. The first occurred on Halloween, the second over a two-week period prior to the Christmas holiday, the third on the night of the winter solstice.

The Halloween incident was a fistfight with the most vicious brawlers in the university. After drinking quantities of stout these notorious young men had adjourned to an alley to pummel each other in the autumn moonlight. A crowd gathered and bets were taken while the sweating fighters stripped to the waist.

The alley was narrow. Strongbow happened to enter it just as the brawlers went into a crouch. Having spent a long day in the countryside collecting specimens, the wild flowers he now carried in his hand, he was too exhausted to turn back. Politely he asked the mass of fighters to stand aside and let him pass.

There was a brief silence in the alley, then a round of raucous laughter. Strongbow's bouquet of flowers was knocked to the ground.

Wearily he knelt in the moonlight and retrieved his specimens from the chinks in the cobblestones. When he had them all he moved forward, flowers in one hand and the other arm flailing.

Because of his extraordinary reach not a blow fell on him. In seconds a dozen men lay crumpled on the pavement, all with broken bones and several with concussions. The stunned onlookers pressed against the walls as Strongbow carefully dusted off his flowers, rearranged his bouquet and continued down the alley to his rooms.

The second incident involved England's national fencing tournament, which was to be held at Cambridge that year. Although unknown as a fencer Strongbow applied to enter the preliminaries to the tournament, a kind of exhibition for amateurs, on the basis of letters of recommendation from two Italian masters with international reputations. When asked which event he wished to enter he said all three, foil and épée and sabre as well.

The proposal would have been ridiculous even if he had studied privately under two masters. But in the end he was allowed to enter all three classes because the letters from the Italians, as he pointed out, failed to mention which event was his specialty.

Actually none of them was, nor had he ever studied under the two Italians or anyone else. A year earlier, aware that his rapid growth might render him awkward, he had decided to improve his balance. Fencing seemed as useful as any exercise for that, so he read the classical manuals on fencing and dueled with himself in front of a mirror an hour each day.

The time came for him to go up to Cambridge. While passing through London he learned that two famous Italian masters were in the city instructing members of the royal family. Curious about several techniques he was using that didn't seem to be in any of the manuals, he offered the Italians a large sum of money to pass some judgment on his moves.

An hour was duly arranged. The masters watched him do his exercises in front of a mirror and wrote the letters of praise he carried on to Cambridge.

But secretly the two men were less enthusiastic than alarmed by what they had witnessed. Both realized Strongbow's unorthodox style of fighting was revolutionary and perhaps unbeatable. Therefore they canceled their engagements and left London that same night to return home in the hope of eventually mastering his techniques themselves.

At Cambridge, meanwhile, the national tournament opened early in December. Refusing to wear a mask because he wasn't used to one and refusing to reveal his methods, Strongbow won straight matches in the foil and épée and sabre and advanced from the preliminaries into the main competition. There he continued to fight maskless and continued to win with as much ease as ever.

At the end of two busy weeks he had reached the finals in all three events, itself an unprecedented accomplishment. The finals were meant to occupy most of a weekend but Strongbow insisted they be held one after another. All together they took less then fifteen minutes. In that fierce span of time Strongbow consecutively disarmed his three masked opponents while himself receiving only one slight prod in the neck.

Furthermore, two of the champions he defeated had dislocated wrists by the end of their matches.

In less than fifteen minutes Strongbow had proved himself the greatest swordsman in English history.

Having done so, he never entered a fencing contest again. The cause for this was assumed to be his extreme arrogance, already unbearable to many. But the truth was simply that Strongbow had stopped growing. He no longer needed a special exercise and had given up the tiresome practice of parrying with himself in front of a mirror.

He never lost his style as a swordsman, however, and decades later it was still distinct enough to betray his true identity, as nearly happened in a tiny oasis in Arabia more than forty years after he left Cambridge.

Strongbow was then over sixty and living as the poorest sort of bedouin. The oasis was on the haj route from Damascus and one day Strongbow had to move quickly to turn aside a murderer's sword, which he did, causing the murderer to wound himself. Then he squatted on the ground and began to bind the man's wound.

Traveling in the caravan that year was Numa Numantius, the German erotic scholar and defender of homosexuality, who happened to witness the performance and was astounded by it. At once he led his Arab dragoman over to Strongbow.

Who are you really? asked the German, his interpreter repeating the words in Arabic. Strongbow replied meekly in an ignorant bedouin dialect that he was what he appeared to be, a starving man of the desert whose only cloak was the arm of Allah.

Numantius, the leading Latinist of the day and an exceedingly gentle man, said he knew for a fact only two European fencing masters had ever been able to execute that particular technique, both Italians now dead, and that although no one else in the Levant might be able to recognize the wizardry it implied, he certainly was. For emphasis he even gave the maneuver its official Latin designation. The interpreter repeated all this to Strongbow, who merely shrugged and went on binding the wound. Numantius was growing more curious.

But master, whispered the interpreter, how can such a one be expected to answer? Look at his filth and his rags. He's a wretch and a dog and that was a lucky blow, nothing more. Surely there can be no learning of any land in such a brute.

But there is, said Numantius. How it can be I don't know and it's making me dizzy just to think of it. So please tell him if he swears by his God he has never heard of these two Italians, I'll give him a Maria Theresa crown.

The words were repeated in Arabic and a large crowd gathered. The money offered was a fortune in the desert and there was no way a poor bedouin could be expected to refuse it. But Strongbow had never sworn falsely in his life. Thus there was a more lengthy exchange between him and the interpreter.

What does he say? asked Numantius in awe. Does he swear?

No, he doesn't swear. In fact he says he once knew these two men in his youth.

What?

Yes, in a dream. In this dream he went to a large city from a large estate he owned. In that large city he hired these two men to watch him use a sword, and that was when they learned the secret of this particular maneuver as well as others. And he adds that since it was truly his secret in the beginning, what you saw him do here a few minutes ago was original and real, whereas what you saw those two Europeans do years ago was imitation and unreal. And all this he says in a language so barbaric it is almost impossible to understand him.

Numantius staggered.

Original and real? Imitation and unreal? What gibberish is this? What madness?

Just that, whispered the interpreter hurriedly as he and the frightened crowd fell back. Now quickly, master, we must leave. His eyes, don't you see it?

And indeed Strongbow's eyes were rolling in his head, his head was swaying on his shoulders and his whole body had begun to shake uncontrollably. He was sending himself into a dervish trance, a trick he had learned long ago when he first came to the desert and the impenetrability of his disguises might have been in danger. As he knew, no Arab would remain close to a dervish suddenly possessed by spirits.

The crowd withdrew muttering charms and a dazed Numantius retreated with them fearing he might be a victim of brain fever, rejoining the caravan and leaving behind the only opportunity there would ever be to discover what had really happened to the young Duke of Dorset after his shockingly obscene disappearance in Cairo on the eve of Queen Victoria's twenty-first birthday.

But it was the third incident at Cambridge that was most significant to Strongbow in the end because it involved the Secret Seven, or the Immortals as they were also known.

This undergraduate society had been founded in 1327 to mourn the passing of Edward II after a hot poker had been thrust up the king's anus. Through legacies the society had gradually grown in wealth until its endowments surpassed those of any other private institution in Britain. It supported numerous orphanages and hospitals and commissioned portraits of its members for the National Gallery.

The protection it provided its members was absolute and perpetual. If a member happened to die in a remote corner of the Empire his body was immediately pickled in the finest cognac and brought home at the society's expense.

Among its alumni were kings and prime ministers, scores of bishops and battalions of admirals and generals, as well as many country gentlemen who had never been known for anything other than certain eccentric dealings with their valets. The alumni of the Secret Seven, in short, constituted the richest and most influential old-boy network in the land.

Of all the masturbation societies in the public schools and universities of England, none could match its enduring prestige.

As indicated by its name, only seven undergraduates were members at any one time, their term running from midnight on a winter solstice to midnight on the following winter solstice, when a new group of seven was chosen. During their year as members the reigning Seven, other than engaging in masturbation, spent their time discussing the merits of their potential successors.

The Christmas holidays began well before election night but all Cambridge undergraduates in Britain, by secret agreement according to tradition, sneaked back to their university rooms by devious routes on the day of the winter solstice. There every gate and door was left unlocked and no one stirred in the wild hope of a miracle. The Seven were known to begin their visits at eleven o'clock at night under cover of darkness and end an hour later, the last man chosen being the most illustrious of the new group and its future leader.

Thus Strongbow, who hadn't bothered to interrupt his research with the Christmas holidays, was sitting in his rooms one winter night perusing a botanical treatise in Arabic when seven loud knocks struck his door. The handle then turned but nothing happened. Strongbow's door was locked. He had just emerged from a bath and, still warm, hadn't bothered to dress yet.

Of course he didn't hear the knocks but he did notice the handle turning ineffectually. He went over to investigate and immediately seven young men filed into the room and drew themselves up in a row. They didn't seem surprised by his nakedness but the leader of the group spoke his classical Greek in a confused tone of voice.

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? Well 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 affronted 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 Strongbow 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 than 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.

-2-

Wallenstein

Men tend to become fables and fables tend to become men.

Before 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 failing 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.

Unable to gauge distances with one eye, he stepped off the tower and landed on his head in a fountain one hundred feet below, instantly dead and never able to reveal that the stars had told him it was his destiny to found a powerful Albanian dynasty, and that a pardon from Germany resulting in his immediate death was the surest way for this to happen.

Thereafter the drooping left eyelid was apparent in all Skanderbegs soon after birth. As with the progenitor of the clan, the eyelid tended to droop more severely under the pressure of alcohol or when death was near.

With it went other unmistakable traits inherited from the original Albanian Wallenstein, who had always suspected his uncle's Holy Roman enemies were sending spies down from the north to assassinate him.

As a result the Skanderbeg Wallensteins were deeply suspicious men. They moved furtively and never dared look anyone in the eye. When guests were in the castle the master disappeared frequently, being seen now slinking along the far side of the garden, next in the kitchen behind a cupboard sneaking a quick glass of arak, a moment later peeking out of a tower with a spyglass.

What the family malady amounted to, in short, was an unshakable conviction that the entire universe was ordered with the sole purpose of endangering Skanderbeg Wallensteins. The plots they imagined were vague yet pervasive and thereby explained all events on earth.

By tradition they received no education. War was their vocation and they left home at an early age to pursue it, fighting fiercely against either the Turks or the Christians as had their contradictory namesake, the national hero. Yet curiously not one of them was ever killed in battle. Although always campaigning they somehow managed to survive the massacres perpetrated by their enemies and return to their castle to become extremely alert shrunken old men.

Thus in almost every way the Wallenstein men were the exact opposites of the Strongbows, who died young never suspecting anything. In their dark damp castle perched gloomily on a wild Albanian crag, a windy and insecure Balkan outpost, these aging illiterates were forever given to rampant instabilities and extravagant reversals of character.

Then too, the Skanderbeg Wallensteins had never been father and son. Combining love with sensual pleasure was beyond them and they were impotent with their wives. Sexually they could only be aroused by very young girls of eight or nine.

When a new bride was brought to the castle this situation was delicately explained to her by the resident mother-in-law. There was nothing to worry about, however, since the castle had a large staff of loyal retainers. Matters could be easily arranged, as indeed they had been for nearly two hundred years.

The resident matriarchs were always quick to claim that the Wallenstein men loved their women well. Yet the fact was that successive Skanderbegs were never related, perhaps the real reason why these masters of the castle so violently distrusted everyone at home and spent most of their lives away in wars.

Generally their fathers were stolid Albanian butlers or gamekeepers whose interests were limited to the confines of a pantry or a nest of grouse. But in 1802 the new wife of a Skanderbeg happened to take to her bed a young Swiss with a passion for details, a highly gifted linguist who was on a walking tour to the Levant. Later that year a Wallenstein heir was born for the first time in history without a drooping left eyelid.

The boy was unusual in other ways, being both shy and ascetic. At an age when other Skanderbegs would have been glancing lasciviously at girls of four or five, preparing for their adult sex life with girls of eight or nine, he seemed to notice no one at all. Nothing interested him but the Bible, which he read incessantly. In fact this Skanderbeg passed his entire youth without leaving the castle, all his time spent in the private conservatory he had built for himself in its tallest tower.

From the conservatory he had superb views that stretched all the way to the Adriatic. The walls of the room were lined with Bibles and there was an organ at which he sat playing Bach's Mass in B Minor long into the night. Before he was twenty it was said he had memorized the Bible in all the tongues current in the Holy Land during the Biblical era. So of course no one was surprised when he paused at the gate one morning, there to cross the moat into the outside world for the first time, to announce he was on his way to Rome to enter the Trappist monastic order.

When Wallenstein professed his vows he did so as Brother Anthony, in honor of the fourth-century hermit and founder of monasticism who had died in an Egyptian desert at the age of one hundred and four. As a monk he continued to live much as he always had until he was sent to Jerusalem and ordered to make a religious retreat to St Catherine's monastery.

This lonely enclosure of gray granite walls at the foot of Mt Sinai, fortified by Justinian in the sixth century, was supported by a curious tribe called the Jebeliyeh, bedouin in appearance, who had been forcibly converted to Islam a thousand years earlier. But actually the Jebeliyeh were descendants of Bosnian and Wallachian serfs, and therefore not very distant neighbors of the Wallenstein castle, whom Justinian had forcibly converted to Christianity three hundred years before that, then sent to the Sinai so the monks could tend to their prayers while others tended their sheep.

When a Trappist first arrived in the Holy Land it was common practice for him to be sent to St Catherine's to consider these and other wonders concerning time and emperors, prophets and the desert.

As part of his working day at the monastery Brother Anthony was directed to clear away the debris in the dry cellar of a storeroom long in disuse. He uncovered a mound of hard earth, and in keeping with God's plan for regularity in the universe he began chipping away the mound to level the floor.

His tool struck the edge of a cloth. A few minutes later a large bundle lay in his lap. Carefully he unwound the lengths of stiff swaddling and found a thick stack of parchment. He lifted the cover, read the first line of Aramaic in the first of the four columns on the page, closed his eyes and began to pray.

After some minutes he opened his eyes and gazed at the flowing mixture of Aramaic and Old Hebrew, knowing that no Biblical texts survived in those dead tongues, suspecting, therefore, that here before him was one of the oldest Old Testaments in existence.

The lost original perhaps?

Once more Brother Anthony closed his eyes to pray, this time for deliverance from vanity. Then he opened the manuscript again and it struck him as a blow. The New Testament as well? Centuries before Christ had lived?

His hands trembled as he turned the pages, recalling the various Bibles he had memorized. It was absolutely impossible, but by the end of the afternoon two facts had enveloped his mind in darkness.

First, this Bible was complete and without question the oldest Bible in the world.

Second, it denied every religious truth ever held by anyone.

The stories it told distorted every event that had taken place over three millennia in the Eastern Mediterranean, in the Holy Land and more particularly in Jerusalem, legendary home of Melchizedek, King of Salem which also meant King of Peace, the fabled priest of antiquity who had blessed the future patriarch of all three faiths when first the shepherd Abraham journeyed forth from the dawn of the east with his flock.

Melchizedek's very existence was in doubt and so was that of Jerusalem, which since Melchizedek's reign had always been the ultimate destination of all sons and prophets of God toiling up from the desert, stern with their messages of salvation for the eternally queasy souls of that city.

Possibly, the pages implied, Melchizedek had lived elsewhere or been someone else. And just possibly, there had never been a Jerusalem.

To Brother Anthony the words before him were terrifying. What would happen if the world suddenly suspected that Mohammed might well have lived six centuries before Christ rather than six centuries after him?

Or again, that Christ had been a minor prophet in the age of Elijah or a secret messiah in the age of Isaiah, who alone knew his true identity and rigorously followed his instructions?

Or that Mohammed and Isaiah were contemporaries, brethren in a common cause who comforted one another in moments of trial?

Or that idols were indeed God when made in the shape of Hector or David, Alexander or Caesar, if the worshipper was living in the same era as one of these worthies?

Or more or less in the same era.

Or at least thought he was.

Or that the virtues of Mary and Fatima and Ruth had been confused in the minds of later chroniclers and freely interchanged among them? That the virtues ascribed to Fatima more properly were those of Ruth?

That the song of Ruth had been sung by Mary? That the virgin birth called Mary's belonged to Fatima?

Or that it was true from time to time that innumerable Gods held court in all the high and low places? That these legions of Gods were variously sleek and fat or gnarled and lean, as vicious as crazed brigands or as gentle as doting grandfathers?

That they passed whole epochs vaguely preoccupied with the slit necks of bulls, ambrosia, broken pottery, war, peace, gold rings and purple robes and incense, or even gurgling vacantly while sniffing and sucking their forefingers?

Although at other times there were no Gods anywhere? Not even one? The rivers wending their ways and the lambs bleating with mindless inconsistency?

Or that the carpenter who had gone down to the Jordan to be cleansed by his cousin was either the son of Fatima or the father of Ruth? That Joshua had gained his wisdom from the fifth Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad, who might himself have been Judas or Christ if only he had foreseen a painful future as clearly as he recalled a blissful past?

That David and Julius Caesar had been secret card-playing cronies? That Alexander the Great had challenged them both to a primitive sort of backgammon for nominal stakes, winning easily, yet had gone on to lose his earnings to a chattering barber whose only other distinction in history was that he had cut Mohammed's hair?

That Abraham had passed on his legacy to the Jews through his first son, Ishmael the wanderer, and his legacy to the Arabs through his sedentary second son, Isaac? And since he had no more sons, that he rejected outright the paternity claims of the Gentiles and refused to take any responsibility whatsoever for them?

Or that the trumpet beneath the walls of Jericho had been blown by Harun al-Rashid, not stridently but sensuously as was his manner, as he seductively circled the oasis seven times and brought his people into a happy land?

In order that Joshua might take a promised bath in the Jordan and Christ might retire to a sumptuous court on the banks of the Tigris to spin forth a cycle of tales encompassing the dreams of a thousand and one nights?

And so on in the windblown footsteps that fled across the pages of this desert manuscript where an entire fabric of history was woven in magical confusion, threaded in unexpected knots and colored in reverse patterns, the sacred shadows of belief now lengthened or shortened by a constantly revolving sun and shifting moon.

For in this oldest of Bibles paradise lay everywhere on the wrong side of the river, sought by the wrong people, preached by a prophet different from the one who had been heard, an impossible history where all events occurred before or after they were said to have occurred, or instead, occurred simultaneously.

Numbing in its disorder and perplexing to the edge of madness. Circular and unchronicled and calmly contradictory, suggesting infinity.

But the worst shock of all came on the final pages, where the compiler of the Bible had added an autobiographical footnote.

He was blind, he said, and had been blind since birth. His early life had been spent sitting beside dusty waysides in Canaan with a bowl in his lap crying out for alms, always close to starvation.

In time he learned a few more coins always came his way if he chanted imaginary histories and the like, for there was nothing poor toilers on the road loved more than a description of wondrous events, their own lives being both dreary and hard. And perhaps not surprisingly after so many years spent gathering gossip, he had no difficulty making up tales.

Before long an old couple had come to him with their son, an imbecile. The boy couldn't tell night from day or summer from winter, but while he was still young his parents had discovered he drew shapes in the sand very well. An idea had come to them. Why not see if the boy could memorize the alphabet?

Very few people could write. If the boy learned to do so he could become a scribe and copy down the documents others dictated to him. The advantage, of course, was that he wouldn't have to understand what he was writing.

It took many years and all their money but the task was accomplished. Their son could write beautifully, his teachers said so. When a reed was placed in his hand he wrote down exactly what was said, no more and no less.

The problem was that the other difficulties still remained. Now the parents were both ill and wanted to make some provision for their son's future. They thought of the blind storyteller. What if the boy accompanied the blind man on his travels and wrote down his words, in exchange for which the blind man could show their son when to sleep and eat and wear more or fewer clothes? Wouldn't it be a fair and useful partnership"?

Well it had seemed a good arrangement, said the blind man, and from that day forward they had proceeded from dusty wayside to dusty wayside making a meager living. Affection had grown into love and they had become like father and son. All had worked out for the best in the dusty waysides of Canaan.

But here the blind man had to make a confession. The histories his adopted son had faithfully copied down weren't histories at all, for several reasons.

For one, because the blind man only knew what he heard, having no eyes to verify anything.

For another, because his position in life was lowly and he knew little about great events, having never heard more than bits and pieces of rumors.

Thirdly, because the din beside a dusty wayside was often deafening, and how could one old man be expected to extract a coherent theme from so much noise?

And lastly, perhaps because he felt the truth could be rendered more accurately anyway when dealing with the open spaces of the future rather than the murky depths of the past. In the future anything might happen, so he could be flawlessly correct in reporting it. Whereas in the past, although some events were known and others suspected, many more were neither known nor suspected.

Furthermore, why belabor his poor listeners with the past? These wretches longed for new worlds, not old. Between them they had only a few coppers to hear hopefully where they might be going, knowing full well where they had already miserably been.

In any case, the blind man humbly noted, men tend to become fables and fables tend to become men, so in the end it probably didn't matter whether he was dealing with the past or the future. In the end it must all be the same.

And wasn't it also possible that all prophecies were really histories misplaced by tricks of time?

Memories in disguise? Pains and torments spilled out in weariness when memory no longer could bear its heavy burdens? When it lightened itself by taking a part of the past and putting it in the future?

He thought so, but even if he was confused he had still taken care not to cheat his listeners, by varying his accounts so there would always be new matters for them to consider. Occasionally he chanted about mighty wars and migrations and who begat whom, and although he sometimes presented the solemn side of life he also included the sensuous and sacrificing, all the while enlivening his chants with anecdotes and sayings and reports, curious inventions, every manner of adventure and experience that might come to mind.

And so the entertainment had gone on for years in dusty waysides, the blind man giving his recitals and his imbecile son recording them word for word.

Until with increasing age a time had come when they had both grown stiff in the joints. Then they had sought a warm place to assuage their aches and gone south into the desert, to the foot of a mountain called Sinai, where they were sitting at the very moment this last chapter was being dictated.

Having already been in the desert for some time, the blind man could not be sure what era was current in Canaan. But not too long ago a traveler had passed their way and he had asked him what news there was in Canaan, and the man had replied that a great temple was being built on a great mountain by a great king called Solomon, which of course meant little enough to the blind man since as long as he could remember great temples were always being built in Canaan on great mountains by great kings who all had one name or another.

So here the dictation was coming to an end. Unfortunately he couldn't add his own name to these recitations because in his blindness and poverty, being no one of importance, he quite simply had never had a name.

And finally, in conclusion, he advised that the verses had their best effect when chanted to the accompaniment of a lyre and a flute and a ram's horn, these pleasing sounds tending to alert passersby that something of interest was taking place beside the road.

But gentle blind man doth not will not shalt not knowing [it was written after that, the lines indented to set them apart from the previous text, the words formed in a particularly proud and elegant script], saith imbecile of imbeciles adding few some several own thoughts first Abraham last Jesus last Isaiah first Mohammed thought of thoughts adding over years of years saith wanting hoping hope of hopes here Matthew Mark Luke John sharing work here Prophet love of loves here Lord never adding much Gabriel doth not will not shalt not adding much adding little Ruth little Mary little Fatima here Elijah there Kings here Judges there Melchizedek word of words Lord of Lords saith soon doth not will not shalt not winter summer day night ending imbecile of imbeciles ending desert end gentle end blind end no name man end doth not will not shalt not too cold too hot too hungry tired saith sleepless saith starving saith holding hands ending father of fathers son of sons no name ending kingdom come ending amen ending be with you ending saith end ending of endings end.

Brother Anthony closed the book and groaned. He had read the last pages in horror. The mere thought of it paralyzed him.

A nameless blind beggar chanting whatever came into his head? His mutterings recorded by an imbecile who saw fit to insert a few shadowy thoughts of his own? The two of them moving their shabby act from wayside to wayside with no other purpose than to make a meager living?

Drifting away to the desert while Solomon was building his temple? Coming to rest at the foot of Moses'

mountain for no other reason than to ease their arthritis? Lunatic prophecy and moronic fancy collaborating to produce original Holy Scripture fully seven hundred years before the first appearance of the Old Testament? More than eleven hundred years before the first tiny fragments of the New Testament?

Chants by dusty waysides varied to vary the entertainment? Lyres and flutes and ram's horns squeaking and rumbling to attract attention? Roadside gossip overheard and repeated? Men begatting in Canaan?

Curious inventions in Canaan? These and other odd bits of rumors twisted and retold for a copper coin?

Then on to another dusty wayside? Eventually to retirement in a warm place good for the joints? The divine source of inspired religion, these whimsies concocted by two rambling anonymous tramps in 930

B.C.?

Brother Anthony went down on his knees and prayed for enlightenment Night came. He wrapped the manuscript in its swaddling cloth and reburied it in the storeroom cellar. On the way to his cell he made signs that God had instructed him to remain in seclusion until he found the solution to a personal problem.

For the next week he fasted in his cell, drinking one small cup of water at sunrise and another at sunset, and at the end of those seven days he decided what had to be done.

Melchizedek must have his City of Peace, men must have their Jerusalem. There had to be faith in the world and if the cause for it wasn't there, he would provide it. If the Father of the real Bible was an aging blind beggar and the Son was an imbecilic scribe, then Wallenstein would become the Holy Ghost and rewrite Scripture the way it ought to be written.

The decision he had made in his cell was to forge the original Bible.

Of course he couldn't place his forgery in the tenth century B.C., when the imbecile had recorded the blind man's recitations. His Bible had to be a genuine work of revealed history, not a jumble of capricious tales assembled by two stray tramps. Thus it had to come sometime well after Christ, which meant writing it in Greek.

But when?

In prayer he turned to his namesake for guidance and at once the question was answered. The great St Anthony had gone into the desert in the fourth century, so that would be the date of his forgery. Time enough after Christ for all the truths to have been gathered, yet still earlier than any complete Bible in existence.

Secretly he revisited the storeroom cellar and buried the real Sinai Bible more deeply in the clay so that it would not be discovered in his absence. Then without warning he left the monastery and returned to Jerusalem, to the quarters of his order, where his unauthorized arrival during the morning meal caused worried looks from his brothers.

Immediately he shattered the silence by announcing he had learned something at St Catherine's that transcended his vows of obedience, silence and poverty. He must be allowed to go his own way for a number of years or he would be forced to abandon the Trappists.

The monks in the refectory were stupefied. When his shocked superior warned in a quavering voice that merely suggesting such blasphemy constituted a fatal nakedness before God, the former Brother Anthony at once removed not only his cassock but his loincloth, exposing even his genitals, and left the room without an explanation of any kind. Behind him his weeping former brothers stayed on their knees for hours praying beside their bowls of gruel.

Wallenstein meanwhile, penniless and naked and shivering violently in the cold winter wind, limped through the narrow alleys of Jerusalem abjectly begging coins. And although soon starving and frostbitten, his first coins went not for a crust of bread or a loincloth but for a stamp and an envelope. In this letter to Albania he directed that a huge sum of family money, his by right as the Skanderbeg of his generation, be sent to him.

While waiting for the money he continued to beg in the streets but also found time to begin his special studies, the cumbersome process of teaching himself the secrets of ink, more specifically the techniques of making ancient inks from dyes and crude chemicals. He also began teaching himself to analyze ancient parchments by feel and taste and smell in order to determine their exact age. Lastly he applied himself to the eccentricities of writing styles.

Throughout this period of second initiation he wore only a loincloth and lived in a miserable basement hole in the Armenian Quarter, supporting himself by begging.

When the money finally arrived Wallenstein equipped himself as a wealthy and erudite Armenian dealer in antiquities and journeyed to Egypt seeking a large supply of blank parchment produced in the fourth century, neither weathered nor well cared for during its fifteen hundred years, parchment that had been quietly resting in some dry dark grave for all that time.

In Egypt he was unsuccessful and returned to Jerusalem nearly insane with despair only to discover the parchment he sought was already there in the Old City, apparently buried at the bottom of an antique Turkish safe in a cluttered shop owned by an obscure antiquities dealer named Haj Harun, an Arab so destitute and bewildered he readily parted with the treasure as if unaware of its immense value.

Wallenstein rejoiced. Undoubtedly a man less fanatical could never even have conceived of such a forgery, for the task he had set for himself was no less than to deceive all scholars and chemists and holy men in his own era and also forever.

But Wallenstein was fixed in his love for God, and in the end he did succeed.

It took him seven years to assemble his materials. Another five years were spent in the basement hole mastering the precise style of writing he would need for the forgery. During this time he assumed many disguises so that every step of his work would always remain untraceable. And he had to spend the entire Wallenstein fortune, selling off farms and villages in Albania, to maintain his disguises and buy what he needed.

At last when all was ready he traveled once more to St Catherine's and presented himself as a ragged lay pilgrim of the Armenian church, requesting and being given a tiny cell in which to meditate. That night, as planned, while the moon waned to nothing Wallenstein crept into the storeroom cellar he remembered and stole the real Sinai Bible from its hiding place.

The next morning the shabby Armenian confessed he needed an even more lonely retreat and said he would seek a cave near the summit of the mountain. The Greek monks tried to deter him, knowing him to be mad, but when they saw he couldn't be swayed they blessed him and prayed he would find relief in the examination of his soul.

Once in the cave Wallenstein unpacked the supplies he had cached there, the chemicals and stacks of precious fourth-century parchment. Then he knelt and embraced the sensuous gloom of his martyrdom.

-3-

Cairo 1840

Dropping from sight with a whoop precisely as the clocks chimed midnight and announced the arrival of the Queen's birthday.

When last seen and recognized as himself, in Cairo at the age of twenty-one, Strongbow was described as a thin broad-shouldered man with straight Arab features and an enormous black moustache. Summer and winter, no matter how hot the weather, he wore a massive greasy black turban and a shaggy short black coat made from unwashed and uncombed goats' hair, these barbaric garments said to be gifts from some wild mountain tribe in outer Persia. His face was proud and fierce and melancholy, and when he smiled it was as if the smile hurt him.

In the streets of Cairo, even in the most elegant European districts, he carried a thick heavy club under his arm as if on guard, some kind of polished twisted root. But by far his most striking characteristic was his piercing stare, which seemed to look through a man and see something beyond.

It was said he slept only two hours a day beginning at noon. One of his pleasures in those days was floating down rivers on his back, naked, at night. In this solitary nocturnal manner he had explored all the great rivers of the Middle East and he was fond of repeating that no single experience could compare to arriving in Baghdad under the stars after long hours drifting on the dark languid waters of the Tigris.

His professional work, which was still assumed to be botany, occupied only three hours of his day.

Specimens were examined and catalogued from eight to nine-thirty in the morning and again from ten-thirty until noon, the rest of his time being given to thinking and walking or floating.

He seldom spoke to Europeans and if one of them said something irrelevant to his needs he either turned his back or menacingly raised his polished twisted club. Yet he would tarry for hours in the bazaars with the poorest beggars and charlatans if he thought they had something interesting to tell him.

It was claimed he ate almost nothing, restricting himself to a small raw salad at sunset.

His drinking habits were even more abstemious. Alcohol in any form was out of the question, as were Bovril and dandelion brews, milk, coffee and orange presses and mild malt mixtures. But what was most disgusting to his countrymen, he absolutely refused to drink tea.

Instead, at teatime, he sipped mare's milk warm from the animal, a cup then and another at sunrise.

When last seen and recognized as himself, Strongbow had also begun to acquire scars from his travels.

A javelin thrown by a tribesman in the Yemen transfixed his jaw, destroying four back teeth and part of his palate. With the weapon still in his head Strongbow fought off the tribesmen with his club and spent the rest of the night walking to a coastal village where there was an Arab with sufficient understanding of anatomy to remove the javelin without taking his jaw with it.

The work was done but the jagged mark down the side of his face remained.

While swimming across the Red Sea under a full moon he fell victim to a fever that blistered his tongue with ulcers and made it impossible for him to speak for a month.

Near Aden, after secretly penetrating the holy sites of both Medina and Mecca disguised as an Arab, only the second European to have done so, he was stricken with another fever that he treated with opium. While largely unconscious he barely escaped being bled to death by a local midwife who solicitously shaved his body and plastered his groin with a thick mass of leeches.

Groin and palate and tongue, Strongbow early acquired scar tissue from his strenuous explorations. But it wasn't these Levantine wounds that were to determine his future course in the Middle East. Rather it was certain unsuspected conversations he had on both love and a haj in Timbuktu, and not long after that, love itself in Persia.

Strongbow first learned of the man known as the White Monk of the Sahara in Tripoli, where the former peasant priest from Normandy had been an insignificant White Father missionary for some years before abruptly deciding one evening, after a long lonely afternoon spent lying in the dust under a palm tree, that the Christian dictum to love thy neighbor meant what it said. Abandoning his order and traveling south, he eventually crossed the wastes to Timbuktu.

There Father Yakouba, as the renegade peasant priest now called himself, became a nefarious legend throughout the desert because of his heretical message that love should be all-encompassing, so complete as to include sexual relations between large numbers of people all at once, strangers and families and whole neighborhoods tumbling together whenever they chanced to meet.

When many bodies are pressed together, preached the White Monk, the need for vanity vanishes. The alpha and the omega are one, coming and going are one, the spirit is triumphant and all souls enter holy communion. So God is best served when as many people as possible are making love day and night.

It is especially important, preached the White Monk, that no one should ever find himself alone and unoccupied and feeling excluded on a hot afternoon, gazing longingly at passing groups of people. Nor should passing groups of people stare defiantly at a solitary outsider. Instead both sides should mix at once in the love of God.

Even though Timbuktu was strictly a Moslem city, Father Yakouba's Christian message was well-received from the beginning, perhaps because that caravan outpost was far from nowhere, perhaps as well because so many of its inhabitants were displaced villagers accustomed to knowing everyone they met.

In any case Father Yakouba was increasingly surrounded by enthusiastic converts of all ages and colors ranging from light brown to deep black, who in time produced a growing community of children until his polysexual commune accounted for fully half the population of Timbuktu, surpassing in size all but the largest towns between central Africa and the Mediterranean.

The story fascinated Strongbow the evening he heard it in an Arab coffee house. Before midnight he was out in the desert beyond Tripoli, magnifying glass in hand should any rare specimens appear in the moonlight, tramping south along the ancient Carthaginian trade route that led through Mizda and Murzuk to Lake Chad, a distance of thirteen hundred miles.

There he paused to soak his feet at dusk and dawn before turning west to Timbuktu, a distance of twelve hundred miles.

As one of the first six or seven Europeans to arrive in the city since the Roman era, Strongbow expected at least some kind of welcome or demonstration when he appeared in its streets. But to his surprise no one took any notice of him, the place apparently so remote all events were equally plausible to its inhabitants. Although disappointed, Strongbow recorded this fact for future use and began asking directions to the White Monk.

The replies he received were useless. A man pointed backward and forward, a woman nodded to the right and left. Wearily he sat down in a dusty square holding the flowers he had picked that morning in the desert. There was nothing else to do so he examined them through his magnifying glass.

They're very pretty, said a soft voice.

Strongbow peered under his magnifying glass at what appeared to be an elderly Arab dwarf. The tiny creature was smiling up at him. Some fifty or sixty children suddenly arrived to play in the square.

I'm an English botanist, said Strongbow.

Then you're new here and you're probably lonely.

At the moment I'm just tired.

Well won't you come play with the little children then? That always helps.

With his magnifying glass Strongbow adjusted the dwarf to life-size.

Little man, I've just walked two and a half thousand miles to meet someone called the White Monk of the Sahara, and now that I'm here I can't find him. So you see I don't exactly feel like playing with little children.

L'appétit, said the dwarf, vient en mangeant.

Strongbow dropped his magnifying glass and the flowers slipped through his fingers as the tiny old man merrily wagged his head.

Didn't they tell you I was a dwarf somewhat advanced in years?

No.

And so you pictured quite a different man?

Yes.

The dwarf laughed.

Well of course you're still very young. Would you care to come to my house for some banana beer?

Strongbow smiled.

Which is your house, Father? No one was able to tell me.

Oh they told you all right, you must have been distracted by your walk. In this part of town all the houses are mine.

Father Yakouba guessed almost at once that Strongbow was deaf, the first person ever to do so. But when Strongbow asked him how he had known, the elderly man only nodded happily and poured more banana beer.

Just then two or three hundred children ran by the bench where they were sitting in a courtyard, the dust rising high in their wake and settling slowly as they swept away.

My birds of the desert, said Father Yakouba, passing from one hour of life to another. Prettily they come with their chirpings, lightly they go on their wings. And who is to chart their course but me? And where would they alight if not in my heart? Now and then I may miss a rainy day in Normandy, but down here a rainy day is a memory that belongs to another man. You walked over two thousand miles to get here but do you know I've often made such journeys in an afternoon following the flights of my children? Yes, their footprints in the sky. You haven't begun it yet?

What's that, Father?

Your haj.

No. I haven't even considered one.

But you will of course, out here we all make one eventually. And when you do remember there are many holy places, and remember as well that a haj isn't measured in miles no more than a man is measured by his shadow. And your destination? Jerusalem? Mecca? Perhaps, but it may also be a simpler place you're looking for, a mud courtyard such as this or even a hillside where a few trees give shade in the heat of the day. It's the haj itself that's important, so what you want is a long and unhurried journey. A flight of birds just passed us, going from where to where in the desert? I don't know, but when they alight I'll have arrived at my holy place.

Father Yakouba leaned back against the mud wall, his face wrinkled into a thousand lines by the desert sun.

Will you go from plant to plant? he asked.

No, Father, I'm beginning to think not.

Good, from people to people then and a rich and varied journey is what you want, so pray you are slow in arriving. And when you meet someone along the way stop at once to talk and answer questions and ask your own as well, as many as you can. Curious habits and conflicting truths? Mirages as well?

Embrace them all as you would your own soul, for they are your soul, especially the mirages. And never question the strange ways of others because you are as strange as they are. Just give them God's gift, listen to them. Then you'll have no regrets at the end because you'll have traced the journey in your heart.

A haj, mused Strongbow, I hadn't thought of it that way.

Father Yakouba smiled shyly.

It's time for my afternoon nap now. Tell me, do you think you could do me a small favor when you return to Tripoli?

Anything at all, Father.

Do you think you could send me a bottle of Calvados? Would that be too much? It's true we change our lives and banana beer is fine, but now and again I do recall a rainy day in Normandy.

They laughed together on that hot afternoon in a dusty courtyard in Timbuktu, laughed and parted and talked for several more weeks before Strongbow left to cross the Sahara once more, pausing again at Lake Chad to soak his feet at dusk and dawn.

In Tripoli, Strongbow arranged for the first of many shipments of Calvados to his new friend and also began that enthusiastic exchange of letters, later assumed to have been lost during the First World War, that was to become the most voluminous correspondence of the nineteenth century.

The following spring in Persia, during a cholera epidemic that killed seventy thousand people, Strongbow contracted a temporary and partial blindness that made it impossible for him to read books, but not lips.

He made use of his time by having the Koran read to him so that he could memorize it. While convalescing he fasted and prayed and was subsequently ordained a Master Sufi when his eyesight returned.

But more important, at the beginning of that epidemic he had fallen in love with the mysterious Persian girl whose death was to haunt him for years. He only knew her for a few weeks, no more, before the epidemic carried her off, yet the memory of their tender love never left him. And it was while memorizing the Koran in his sorrow that he decided he would make a haj as Father Yakouba had suggested, when the time came, and that because of the gentle Persian girl it would be a sexual exploration into the nature and meaning of love.

Thus for many reasons Strongbow was considered morbidly vain and pedantic by Englishmen in the Levant. The opinion was general and even universal, although it also had to be admitted that no one knew Strongbow at all.

Nor wanted to, as was made apparent at the lavish diplomatic reception given in Cairo in 1840 to honor Queen Victoria's twenty-first birthday. The highest-ranking officials were there as well as the most important European residents in Egypt. Because of his imposing lineage Strongbow had to be invited, but of course no one imagined he would attend. A formal evening lawn party with reverent toasts to the queen was exactly what he could be expected to detest.

Yet Strongbow did appear, entirely naked.

Or rather, naked of clothes. As so often he wore his portable sundial strapped to his hip, a monstrously heavy bronze piece cast in Baghdad during the fifth Abbasid caliphate. But the huge sundial hung well to the side and its leather strap crossed his hips well above the groin, thereby concealing nothing.

Strongbow's entrance was dignified, his step measured and even ponderous. He presented himself to the reception line and bowed his way gravely down it, then chose to position himself at the end of the garden in front of the orchestra, as conspicuous a spot as could be found.

There, alone and erect, he stood displaying his full figure of seven feet and seven inches without saying a word or moving a muscle, in one hand a bulging leather pouch, in the other his familiar and gigantic magnifying glass, which he kept close to his eye while gazing down on the waltzers.

For perhaps an hour he stood studying the dancers until he was evidently satisfied with his performance.

Then he broke into a smile, laughed loudly and strode straight across the dance floor to the far side of the garden, where the wall was highest.

One leap carried him to the top of the wall. He shouted that he had once loved well in Persia and they could all go to hell, swung the sundial behind him and lingered a moment longer, dropping from sight with a whoop precisely as the clocks chimed midnight and announced the arrival of the queen's birthday.

But so commanding was Strongbow's presence and so bizarre his reputation, not one of the guests had seen his nakedness. All the comments made later had to do with his unpardonable rudeness in leaving at the moment he had, his raucous laughter and unseemly yelp upon doing so, his equally blatant reference to some obscene experience in Persia, his defiant exit over the wall instead of through a gate, the heavy bronze sundial he had once more insisted on wearing and tossing back and forth to impress people with his strength, and especially the great discomfort everyone had felt having that grotesquely large eye, two inches in diameter, staring down at them from its unnatural height.

Insofar as his attire or lack of it was concerned, it was assumed he had ignored propriety as usual and come in his normally outrageous costume, the massive greasy black turban and the shaggy short black coat made from unwashed and uncombed goats' hair.

Outrageous behavior as usual, but that night in 1840 when he climbed over a garden wall wickedly flashing a smile and shaking his sundial and shouting about love, his nakedness unrecognized, was the last time anyone would ever see the giant in his guise as Strongbow.

The sundial and the gigantic magnifying glass were both remembered from that night but not the other article he had with him, the bulging leather pouch. In fact he had to walk many blocks to a poor section of the city before he met a blind beggar who could relieve him of it.

Or rather a miserable old man sitting in a squalid alley with a cup in his lap pretending to be blind. When Strongbow's shadow approached the beggar began his whining chant, but when the apparition was closer the old man's eyes jumped even though he had trained himself for years never to let them register a thing.

By Allah, whispered the astonished man.

Yes? said Strongbow.

The beggar gasped and turned his eyes away. Foolishly he held up his cup and struggled to find the cringing words of his profession.

God give thee long life, he mumbled at last, for as truly as I come hither, by Allah I am naked.

The voice trailed off hopelessly, the cup wavered in the air. Strongbow nodded and intoned the stately words used to turn away a beggar.

In God's name go then with such a one for He will surely give thee garments.

Then he squatted and smiled and put his hands on the beggar's shoulders. He drew close and winked.

Now that we have that out of the way, my friend, what is it you were about to say?

The beggar also smiled.

For forty years, master, I've sat on this very spot in a stinking loincloth repeating those same words to thousands and thousands of passersby. And now.

Yes?

And now I face a man who really is naked.

Strongbow laughed. He opened the leather pouch and a shower of Maria Theresa crowns poured into the beggar's lap. The man gazed at the thick gold pieces in awe.

Bite one, said Strongbow. Timidly the beggar picked up a coin and bit it. His eyes widened. His hand was shaking so badly the coin clattered against his teeth.

They're real?

Quite so.

A fortune. A man could retire and live like a king for the rest of his days.

And I prophesy you will.

They're not to be mine?

Every last one.

But why, master?

Because I've been carrying them all night to give to someone blind enough to see the world as it is. Now on your way, beggar. Allah gives the blind man garments in abundance when he sees well.

Strongbow turned and marched down the alley laughing, the bronze sundial clinking against the stone walls. It was over. He was ready to begin his haj in earnest. Behind him a triumphant yell rose in the air.

A miracle, o sleeping Cairenes. God is great and Mohammed is His prophet

-4-

Sinai 1836-1843

And the building of the wall it was of jasper, and the city was pure gold.

It took Wallenstein seven years, working entirely from memory, to forge the original Bible. He also added two noncanonical books to his New Testament, the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas, spurious texts that would serve to assure experts his codex had indeed been written during the early unformed days of Christianity, before bishops had agreed which books were Holy Scripture and which belonged to the Pseudepigrapha.

In the summer Wallenstein's cave blazed with a merciless heat. In the winter ice hung in the air and torrential rains crashed down the mountain. Fevers blurred his brain and rigid pains crippled his fingers.

When he lost the use of one hand he switched his reed pen to the other and went on writing, letting the warped hand heal, something else he had taught himself in Jerusalem because he knew the work in the cave would surpass any man's endurance unless he could write with both hands.

From the wandering Jebeliyeh he received a little food and water as the Greek monks had ordered, placed in a small pot at the foot of the mountain where he could retrieve it every third day or so, unobserved in darkness. For although the monks honored the crazed Armenian's desire to see and be seen by no man, they also knew that God with His manifold duties might not always remember to replenish the suffering hermit's diet of worms and locusts.

From first light to last he bent over the sheaves of his thickening manuscript, unaware of the incessantly chewing sand flies and the swarms of insects that rose to feed on his frail body at dusk, so absorbed he no longer blinked when an ant crossed his eyeball, his act of creation witnessed only by an occasional ibex or gazelle or mole, a wildcat or jackal or leopard, the timid and ferocious beasts who came to stare at the unfathomable patience of this fellow animal, while in the invisible sky beyond the mouth of the cave eagles swooped through the thousand-year lives granted them in the desert and thin flights of quail and grouse and partridge passed briefly in their seasons.

Until one morning Wallenstein found himself raving about legions of locusts as large as horses, wearing lurid crowns and iron breastplates, atrocious beasts with the hair of women and the teeth of lions and the tails of scorpions, relentlessly charging the cities on the plain to trample and poison and dismember transgressors in the valley of his Book of Revelations, blood running in rivers in the name of God.

And reverently one evening he lifted his eyes from the riot of plague and slaughter to behold a great high mountain with a great city upon it, the holy Jerusalem descending from heaven amidst incandescent jewels.

And the building of the wall it was of jasper, he wrote in his stately fourth-century Greek, and the city was pure gold.

A few days later he made his final warning, saying that if any man ever took words away from this book of prophecy God would take him out of the book of life and out of the Holy City.

And then he wrote, The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all, Amen, and suddenly he found his enormous apocalyptic forgery at an end.

Wallenstein stared at the rags in his lap. He had turned the last sheet of parchment and his lap was empty.

All at once he was frightened. He reached out and touched the walls of the tiny cave.

No more pages in the book of life? What place was this?

He gazed at the reed in his hand. How straight and beautiful it was and how grotesque the bits of skin and bone that clasped it. Crooked repulsive fingers. Why were they so ugly now when the slender reed was unchanged?

Wallenstein shuddered. The reed fell from his hand. He crawled out of the cave and squinted up at the mountain. The sun had just set. A mole was watching him with wide eyes. Humbly Wallenstein knelt and the mole asked him a question.

What have you done today for God?

Wallenstein bowed his head. He drew his rags around him in the dying light and his head slipped lower until his brow rested in the dust, where the answer was given.

Today in His name I have rewritten the universe.

And there he remained all night, not stirring, accepting the last hours he would know on Mt Sinai, the last lucid moments of his life as well.

What he had done he had done only for God, yet all the same he knew what would happen to him now.

At dawn he gathered up his materials. Once more the cave was as he had found it, small and bare and crumbling.

Wallenstein limped down the mountain toward the gate of St Catherine's. The monks came running to appraise the wild hermit unseen in seven years, but when the gate was opened all but the older fell back.

What face was this? What body? No man could possess them. Had the soul already been taken up by God?

The older monks knew better. Meekly they bowed their heads and prayed as the abbot ordered the bells of the monastery to be rung in celebration. The bells pealed, the abbot stepped forward to address the twisted figure with the terrible face.

The task is done? You have found what you sought?

Wallenstein groped to find a voice men could understand. His contorted mouth opened and closed in agony. He made a harsh uneven sound.

Done.

The abbot crossed himself.

Then will you rest with us, o brother of the mountain? You have succeeded after all, you have accomplished what you set out to do. Nourish yourself now and let your wounds heal, and let us help you. It will be an honor to serve you, brother.

Wallenstein staggered. A jagged scar had appeared on the horizon of the desert, some indelible hallucination. He tried to wipe away the scar but his hand couldn't reach it God's creatures had done it, the ants in the cave crossing his eyes for seven years, tracing a path with their footprints. Each day the scar would grow more jagged until soon there would be no landscape at all and the scar would be all there was to see. How much time did he have? Weeks? Days?

You will rest with us? repeated the abbot.

One night, whispered Wallenstein. A cell for one night if you will.

The abbot crossed himself again. The hermit in front of him was clearly near death. He began to protest but the anguish in Wallenstein's face stopped him.

As you wish, he murmured sadly. Will you be traveling then tomorrow?

Yes.

Where must you go?

Jerusalem.

The abbot nodded. Now he thought he understood. The hermit was taking his soul to the Holy City to relinquish it. Who knew? Perhaps his task wasn't yet completed. Perhaps there was this last covenant he had made with God during his suffering on the mountain.

Jerusalem, he said softly. Yes I see.

That night while the monks slept Wallenstein's forgery of the Sinai Bible found its way to the back of a dusty shelf in one of the storerooms of St Catherine's. Most of the other books there were of little value, but not so insignificant that some future scholar would fail to examine them.

As for the original manuscript with its terrifying ambiguities, he was going to take that with him to Jerusalem, having no intention of destroying it. For although written by an anonymous blind man and an anonymous imbecile who had lost their way in the desert, hadn't the great St Anthony also gone into the desert in search of the Word?

Yes, Wallenstein told himself, St Anthony had also done that. And if other poor souls had made the same attempt and been confused by ghosts and mirages and succumbed to untenable visions, still their work couldn't be destroyed for they too had tried, only the Word as they heard it had been wrong. So it had never entered Wallenstein's mind to destroy the original manuscript, a work of God's like any other.

Rather it would be laid to rest in a dry dark grave just as his own once blank parchment had been before it.

And given his humility it also never occurred to Wallenstein that in the course of his long sojourn in a desert cave, following the example of St Anthony, he might have performed a monastic feat equal in magnitude to St Anthony's and thereby become a new St Anthony.

Or simply the real St Anthony, a hermit who knew no era in his love for God.

Or what could have been stranger still, that in the course of his trial of fatigue and hunger, tormented by the glaring sun and lonely stars and yet surviving in his cave, he had in fact relived the lives of those two unknown wanderers whose recitations in dusty waysides had finally led them to the foot of the mountain three thousand years ago.

That Wallenstein had thus found nothing and forged nothing.

That instead, in bewilderment and wonder, no less than a blind man and an imbecile, he had construed his own sacred chant to the mystical accompaniment of an imaginary lyre and flute and ram's horn.

Intricate possibilities and revolving speculations, in any case far beyond Wallenstein's ravaged mind. With the last of his strength he dragged himself out of the desert and up to the gates of Jerusalem, which immediately overwhelmed him with its multitude of sights and sounds and smells, so shocking after seven years of solitude in a Sinai cave.

In fact Wallenstein was totally lost in the maze of alleys. He wandered in circles and might have kept wandering until he collapsed in Jerusalem, an insignificant clump of rags on the cobblestones clutching a precious bundle in death, if he hadn't chanced to stumble upon the antiquities shop where he had once bought the parchment for his forgery.

The elderly owner of the shop, Haj Harun, didn't recognize his former acquaintance at first, but when he did he quickly offered food and water and a bed, all of which Wallenstein refused, knowing his time was almost at an end. Instead he begged Haj Harun to lead him to the Armenian Quarter, to the basement hole where he had acquired the skills for his task so long ago.

You're not going down into that again? said Haj Harun, disturbed as always by the filth and darkness of the hole.

I must, whispered Wallenstein, for my bundle's sake. Good-bye and God bless you, brother.

With that Wallenstein turned and painfully crawled down into the hole. He searched the dirt floor. Where should he dig?

A crack appeared in the dirt, the scar on his eyes.

He bent over the crack and pawed furiously at the earth, ripping his nails and tearing his fingers, desperately working to dig the well of memory while there was still time. Whenever another scar appeared in the earth he attacked it savagely, in dismay, boring ever deeper into the spreading cracks in his mind.

The bones in his hands broke against stone. He had dug down into a paved hole, old and dry and airtight, what might once have been a cistern before it had been swallowed up by the endless razings and re-buildings of Jerusalem. An ancient well in an underground horizon? Exactly what he needed.

He laid his bundle in the cistern and replaced the stones and repacked the well, trampled down the basement floor until it was hard and flat. No one would ever suspect. The heretical book was safely hidden forever.

Wallenstein screamed. The smooth earth at his feet had suddenly shattered and broken into a thousand scars. His terrible presumption on Mt Sinai had led to an end in the desert footprints of God's ants and now he had to flee, an outcast to the wastes, his Holy City lost to him forever because he had created it.

Moaning softly he dragged himself up the stairs and away from the basement hole, blinded by the scars on his eyes and thus oblivious to the thin figure who had been watching him from the shadows, the man who had led him back to his former home in the Armenian Quarter and then lingered on out of curiosity, a gentle dealer in fourth-century parchment and other antiquities, Haj Harun.

Deaf now to the raucous cries of Jerusalem and blind to its walls, Wallenstein stumbled out of the city and crawled north, reaching a first ridge and then a second. Each time he looked back he saw less and less of the great high mountain and the great city upon it. The jasper was gone and the gold, the domes were splintering, the towers and minarets were toppling.

The landscape cracked a final time and the city was lost in haze and dust. As promised, the raw network of scars had engulfed his brain.

Wallenstein sank to his knees and collapsed on the ground. A white film covered his eyes, fevers shook him, open sores spotted his skin, his hands were immovable claws, one ear hung by cartilage and his nose was eaten away, to all appearances a leper in the final stages of decay, utterly broken by his nineteen years in the Holy Land.

And untouched by the world. So of course he never knew that a German scholar, searching the shelves of St Catherine's a short time later, came across the issue of his unparalleled devotion and proudly announced the discovery of the most ancient of Bibles, a beautifully written manuscript that both refined and authenticated all subsequent versions, irrefutable proof of the distant origins of traditional Holy Scripture.

Scholars were entranced, the young German was world-famous. And after some decent haggling the exquisite manuscript was acquired by Czar Alexander II, at that time as powerful as any defender of any faith and appropriately enough, like the now insane lost hermit, a namesake of one of the military heroes the original storyteller and scribe had seen fit to have die at the early age of thirty-three along with one of their spiritual heroes.

Alexander the Great and Christ, a blind man and an imbecile, the czar and Wallenstein all steadfastly sharing their profane and sacred concerns over the centuries.

-5-

The Haj

In the end nothing could be said of his work except that it was preposterous and true and totally unacceptable.

After Strongbow disappeared from Cairo his botanical monographs appeared less and less frequently. A year might go by with only one page published in Prague. Yet his exercises were so masterful and obscure it was generally believed he had begun some extraordinary project of which these meager presentations were but random footnotes. Given his brilliance in botany, no other explanation could be found for his apparent indifference to it.

After the middle of the century this opinion was strengthened when nothing whatsoever was heard from Strongbow for a dozen years. By then botanists everywhere were convinced the eccentric scholar had taken refuge in some remote corner of the desert to assimilate his findings, which he would soon present to the world as a monumental new theory on the origin of plants, much as his contemporary Darwin had recently done with the origin of species.

And indeed Strongbow was assimilating findings and formulating a theory but it had nothing to do with plants, a phenomenal change brought on by his brief encounter with the gentle Persian girl. And there was no way his subject could elude him in his endless disguises as a poor camel driver or a rich Damascus merchant, a harmless haggler over pimpernel or a desert collector of sorrel and similar spring herbage, an obsessed dervish given to trances and an inscrutable hakim or healer, dispensing quinine and calomel and cinnamon water, a few grains of rhubarb and one of laudanum.

It was true no European had the opportunity to speak with him during those decades of wandering, yet there were suggestions of what was to come.

In one of his flower monographs, published in 1841, he hinted that Englishwomen in the Levant were known to sweat and that their sweat had a strong odor. If anyone at the time had considered the unholy implications of this statement it might have been realized that Strongbow was already moving inexorably toward some vast and unspeakable indecency.

But no one did notice. Scholars concentrated on his daring descriptions of new flowers, and thus while his peers rummaged through the English countryside awaiting a botanical study, Strongbow continued his epic journey across a quite different landscape.

Then too, all the accounts of Strongbow brought back to Europe over the years were more than misleading. Without exception they were totally false, the ludicrous fancies of other Europeans.

With genuine Levantines his behavior was prodigious and volatile. With them he devoured whole lambs and braces of pigeons, washing down these mountainous meals with gallons of banana beer and quarts of a frighteningly powerful alcohol he made by tapping certain palm trees and letting the juice ferment, which it did rapidly, doubling its potency every hour.

When the eating bout had been a serious one he often slept for a week, his immobile and immensely long frame stretched out like a python digesting a kill. And if the alcohol consumption had been greater than usual he might lie in his tent for as much as two weeks letting his head and organs repair themselves.

Nor did he disdain tea. On the contrary, Strongbow probably consumed more tea than any Englishman who had ever lived. Regularly each month a tea chest ordered from Ceylon arrived for him in Aqaba. In the course of a single month he drank it to the bottom, then packed the tight dry chest with the notes and journals he had accumulated during the same period.

Tea out. A great stream of piss. Notes and journals in.

As for conversation of any land, he could find no end to it. For three or four weeks he would sit with a man, any man, feverishly discussing cryptology or music or the course of an invisible planet, the manufacture of transparent beehives, the possibility of a trip to the moon or the principles of a nonexistent world language. Wherever he found himself he would instantly seize on any stray topic that chanced to arise in the flames of a campfire or the dimness of a smoky tent, in a bazaar back room or under the stars in a watered garden.

In Tripoli, having long noted the affinity between sleeping and mysticism, wakefulness and madness, he learned the techniques of hypnotism while curing some prostitutes of their price-reducing habit of snoring.

In Arabia he observed that the temperature in the summer at five thousand feet was one hundred and seven degrees in the shade at midday, while in the winter all land above three thousand feet was covered with snow.

Miracles of rain occurred in the desert but not in every man's lifetime. The Wadi er-Rummah, forty-five camel marches or one thousand miles in length, had once become a mighty river with lakes three miles wide where Strongbow had lived for a time on a raft, ferrying stranded bedouin from side to side.

On one day alone, a twenty-third of June, he recorded sixty-eight varieties of a minor sexual act practiced by a remote hill people in northern Mesopotamia. And in a single small notebook he catalogued no less than one thousand five hundred and twenty-nine types of sexual activity practiced by an even more remote tribe unvisited by an outsider since the age of Harun al-Rashid, a people who had spent their entire history circling an oasis on the tip of the Arabian peninsula.

Darwin was said to have performed a feat similar to the first of these with a species in Brazil, and a feat similar to the second with specimens in Uruguay.

But Darwin's species had been a minute beetle and his specimens had ranged from fish to fungi, which he then shipped home in wine for later classification, whereas Strongbow's Levantine subjects were life-sized, could only be plied with wine on the spot and even then tended to alter their characteristics incessantly before his eyes.

Deep in the Sinai, Strongbow sat with the elders of the Jebeliyeh tribe and asked them what unusual information there might be in those parts. They replied that not too long ago a hermit had spent ninety moons in a cave on the mountain above the monastery of St Catherine's.

The monks had thought the hermit was praying but the Jebeliyeh knew better. Actually the hermit had been scribbling on old paper, composing a thick volume which also appeared to be very old. They hadn't seen it closely but they knew it was written in ancient languages.

How do you know? asked Strongbow.

One night, they said, an old blind man familiar with many tongues happened to come to our camp and we led him up the mountain to hear what he could hear. The old man said the hermit was muttering a mixture of archaic Hebrew and archaic Greek and some tongue he'd never heard before.

Did the old man just listen?

No, being blind he was also clever with sounds. He listened long enough to know the hermit thought he was talking to a mole, then he cast his voice as if speaking for the mole, making the squeaks but using words as well. Since the hermit was mad he wasn't surprised at the mole's questions and he answered them. But of course the answers didn't make any sense.

The mole asked what was being written?

He did, and the hermit replied that he was rewriting a sacred book he had unearthed nearby, perhaps in the monastery.

Why was he rewriting it?

Because it was chaos, a void containing all things.

And what was he going to do with his rewritten copy?

Leave it where the world would discover it.

And the original?

Bury it again so the world wouldn't discover it.

Strongbow leaned back by the fire and considered this dialogue between a mole and a hermit. As he knew, the Bible manuscript known as the Codex Sinaiticus had only recently been found in St Catherine's. But what if it was a forgery? What if the real document presented a totally different view of God and history?

After a time he took a Maria Theresa crown from his cloak and placed it on the ground in front of the Jebeliyeh elders.

This marvelous tale well pleases me. Is there more to it?

Only that the old man who was the mole forecast the hour of his death upon his return from the mountain and went to bed to await it. He never woke up. Subsequently the hermit left the cave and never came back. We can take you up there if you like.

Strongbow agreed and they climbed the mountain in darkness. Outside the cave he lit a candle. The opening was too small for him to crawl inside but he pushed one arm in and took measurements. Then he thanked the elders for their information and left toward midnight for Aqaba, normally a distance of eight marches. But Strongbow was intrigued by what he had heard and the next thing he knew a dog was yapping around his heels, a sure sign he was near an Arab village. For the first time he laid aside his speculations and raised his eyes from the ground. A shepherd boy was watching him.

What place is this?

Aqaba, answered the boy.

And the day?

He was told. He looked back at the desert and smiled. He had walked through two sunsets and three sunrises without noticing them. The shepherd was saying something. He turned to the intent little face.

What's that, son?

I asked, master, whether you're a good genie or a bad genie?

Strongbow laughed.

And why might I be a genie?

Because you're twelve feet tall and because you've just walked out of the Sinai without a waterskin or a pouch of food or anything else.

Nothing?

Only your empty hands.

Yes only those, said Strongbow slowly. But a genie isn't always tall, is he? He may be small and live in a tiny cave and never go anywhere in ninety moons. And in all that time he may speak only once and then only to a mole.

The boy grinned.

So that's what you were doing out there, master, and now you've just changed your shape and size again the way your kind is always doing, from a mole to a giant as it pleases you, in an instant or after ninety moons. Well the water is that way if you want to wash your face, I know you don't need to drink it. But before you go, genie, won't you tell me the one thing you said to the mole?

How's this? Confide the whole truth to a shameless scamp, a mere slip of a rogue?

I'm not a rogue, master.

Promise?

Yes, please tell me.

And you won't repeat a word of the secret to anyone?

No, master.

Briefly then Strongbow recounted an obscure tale from the Thousand and One Nights and walked on, leaving the little boy gazing dreamily down on the gulf where a dhow was approaching with spices from India and a bulky wooden chest bearing a familiar inscription in Singhalese stating that therein was to be found the finest selected tea from Kandy, site of the temple that housed a tooth of the Buddha.

After the middle of the century there was a period of a dozen years when nothing was heard from Strongbow, the time he spent producing his study, not in a remote corner of the desert as was generally assumed but rather in the very heart of Jerusalem, where he both lived and worked in the back room of an antiquities dealer's shop.

For Strongbow those were peaceful years. The sturdy tea chests filled with his notebooks lined the walls.

He used several tea chests as his desk and a giant Egyptian stone scarab, cushioned with pillows, was his seat. An antique Turkish safe was his filing cabinet and a rusting Crusader's helmet served as an object of contemplation, much as a skull might have rested in front of a medieval alchemist.

With its heavy masonry the vault was snug in the winter, cool in the summer and nearly soundproof.

When he was at his desk small cups of thick coffee were sent in every twenty minutes from a shop down the alley along with a fresh handful of strong cigarettes. During that period of concentration he seldom spoke with anyone but the antiquities dealer who was his landlord, and, less frequently, with a fat oily Arab in the bazaar from whom he bought his writing paper on the first Saturday of every month.

A cognac with your coffee? asked the stationer as Strongbow settled himself on the cushion indicated, at the front of the shop.

Excellent.

The usual order of fifteen reams?

If you please.

The man shouted instructions to his clerks and then arranged his robes on the cushion opposite Strongbow, where he had a clear view of the narrow street outside. He patted his glistening hair and puffed lazily on his hookah while they waited for the order to be counted out.

The composition goes well?

It seems to be on schedule.

And it still concerns the same subject? Only sex?

Yes.

The sleek Arab listlessly applied a fresh coat of olive oil to his face and gazed at the passing crowds.

Occasionally he exchanged a nod or a smile with someone in the alley.

In all truth, he said, it seems extraordinary to me that seven thousand sheets of paper a month could be required to write about such an ordinary matter. How can that be?

Indeed, said Strongbow, sometimes I don't understand it myself. Do you have a wife?

Four, Allah be praised.

Of all ages?

From a matronly housekeeper down to a mere feather of a girl who giggles life away in brainless inactivity, praise Him again.

Yet you are often not home in the evenings?

Work demands it.

And in the evening who are those young women I see parading near Damascus Gate?

The barefaced ones who gesture obscenely and sell themselves? It's true, Jerusalem's appalling.

And the young men there in equal numbers?

Painted no less? Winking as they curtsy? Shameless.

And the little girls in the shadows so young they only reach a man's waist?

Yet who make all manner of suggestive signs? Yes it's shocking for a holy city.

And the swarms of little boys no taller, also in the shadows?

Yet who are so lascivious they will hardly let a man pass? Disgraceful.

Who was that old crone who passed the shop just now wagging her toothless smile in this direction?

An elderly slattern who runs a private establishment near here.

She comes to visit you on occasion?

In the slack periods of the afternoon.

To barter?

Allah be praised.

Offering to arrange spectacles and diversions?

Quite so, praise Him again.

But also in her toothless state to act in confidence on a specific matter?

Quite specific.

Continuing vigorously, this crone, until business revives?

Very vigorously.

And the leering old man in front of her who also threw a secret smile in this direction?

Her brother or cousin, who can remember.

He also comes to barter on occasion?

Work must go on, Allah be praised.

This man has ingenious episodes to recount?

Very ingenious, praise Him again.

Tales offering unheard-of excursions?

Quite unheard of.

Yet he always visits at different times from his sister or cousin?

If acts and tales were to coincide we would be dizzy.

And in addition to all else, both this man and this woman have innumerable orphans of every description at their disposal?

Innumerable. Every. In addition.

A clerk bowed and announced that Strongbow's order was ready. He rose to leave. The sleek stationer smiled through half-closed eyes.

Won't you have just a puff or two of opium before you go? The quality is excellent this month.

Thank you but I think not. It tends to cloud my work.

Are you sure? It's only ten o'clock and you have the whole day ahead of you, a whole night too. Ah well, perhaps next month.

Strongbow nodded pleasantly and stepped down onto the cobblestones, leaving the fat man languidly massaging olive oil into his face as a clerk refilled his hookah.

The owner of the antiquities shop whose back room he rented was quite a different sort of man. Meek, thin and otherworldly, he seemed to live more in the past than in nineteenth-century Jerusalem. With objects that dated back to 1000 B.C. he had a phenomenal familiarity, but when a piece was older than that he was always confused and had to ask Strongbow's opinion.

When Strongbow returned, the dealer, Haj Harun, was examining some of his better jewelry, transferring the stones and rings from one tray to another. Strongbow bent his long frame over the counter to admire the splendid gems sprinkling light to all sides, dazzling him with their colors.

Would you mind? asked Haj Harun timidly, holding up a ring. I just acquired it from an Egyptian and I'm not sure at all. What do you think? More or less the middle of the New Kingdom?

Strongbow pretended to study the ring, with his magnifying glass.

Did you make a haj twenty-one years ago?

Haj Harun looked startled.

Yes.

But not in a caravan? Not following the regular routes? Keeping by yourself to remote tracks that weren't tracks at all?

Yes.

Strongbow smiled. He remembered the dealer although of course the man couldn't remember him since he had been disguised as a dervish at the time. The man had stumbled across him one afternoon near the great divide of the wadis of northern Arabia and remarked that the sky seemed strangely dark for that hour, which indeed it was, because a comet happened to be passing overhead.

In fact Strongbow had been in that particular spot precisely for that reason, to take measurements with a sextant and chronometer and prove to himself that the unknown comet actually existed, Strongbow before then only having deduced its cycle of six hundred and sixteen years from certain celestial evidence to be found in the lives of Moses and Nebuchadnezzar and Christ and Mohammed, in the Zohar and the Thousand and One Nights. That afternoon he had explained this to the frightened Arab, who had then nodded vaguely and gone dreamily on his way.

Strongbow's Comet. He hadn't thought about it in years. For a moment he considered the possibility of writing it up in an astronomical monograph, but no, it would be an idle indulgence. His method for dating the comet was difficult, he already had enough to do and couldn't afford to be deterred by heavenly matters.

Strongbow licked the ring. Older, he announced.

Really?

Yes.

The Arab sighed.

I can't see it. The very oldest I might venture would be early New Kingdom.

No. Older still. End of the XVII Dynasty to be exact.

Ah the Hyksos, an obscure people. How did you know?

Taste.

What?

Metal content.

Haj Harun thanked him profusely. Strongbow smiled and disappeared into his vault. To him it seemed appropriate and comfortable here. Out front the Arab dealer was trading baubles from the past while in back he was cataloguing the evidence for the present on a mountaintop called Jerusalem.

And more than once as he sat down at his desk he recalled a conversation between a mole and a hermit in the moonlight on another mountain. Who had he been, that recluse? What had driven him to undertake such an incredible task?

Of course he would never know. There was no way to know.

Saturday morning. Another fifteen reams of paper for the month ahead. He drew a file from the antique safe and drank a cup of thick coffee and lit a strong cigarette. Briefly he gazed at his rusting Crusader's helmet, then patted the nose of his giant stone scarab and went back to work.

Only once did Strongbow falter in the course of those dozen years of work in Jerusalem, but the consequences were so significant it caused his study to be almost three times longer than he had planned originally.

The episode occurred one hot summer Sunday afternoon in his vaulted room at the back of the antiquities dealer's shop. Toward midnight the night before he had finished a chapter as usual, and the next morning at six o'clock, also as usual, he had arranged himself on the giant stone scarab and gazed at the rusting Crusader's helmet before picking up his pen.

Sometime later he found himself still gazing at the Crusader's helmet. The pen was in his hand but the two hundred and thirty sheets of paper scheduled to be covered with handwriting that day still stood untouched in a neat pile. With his sundial strapped to his hip Strongbow marched outside to see what time it was. He brought the bronze piece up to the level and gasped.

Three o'clock in the afternoon? He couldn't believe it. Frowning deeply, he wandered back inside.

Haj Harun was stretched out in a corner of the front room perusing old manuscripts, as he often did on Sunday afternoons. Although he was always respectful of his tenant's privacy, the man's face looked so troubled at that moment he decided to venture a few words.

Is something the matter? he asked in a voice so low the question could have been ignored. But Strongbow abruptly interrupted his stride and stopped, causing the sundial to swing into the wall and noisily knock loose a shower of plaster.

Yes. Time is. It seems I've done nothing for the last nine hours and I don't know what to make of it. It's unheard of for me to do nothing.

And you were doing nothing at all?

Evidently. It seems I was just sitting at my desk staring at my Crusader's helmet. Nine hours? It's incomprehensible.

Haj Harun's face brightened with hope.

But that's not nothing. That's daydreaming.

He waved his arms enthusiastically at the shelves which were crowded with artifacts.

Look at all these memories from the past around us. I spend most of my time daydreaming about them.

Who owned that and why? What was he doing then? What became of it after that and what became of it later? It's enchanting. You meet people from every era and have long conversations with them.

But I don't daydream, said Strongbow emphatically.

Not even today?

Well it seems I did but I can't imagine it, nor can I imagine why, it's simply not my way. If I'm walking to Timbuktu I walk there. If I'm floating down the Tigris to Baghdad I don't get out of the water before Baghdad. And if I'm writing a study I write it.

Well perhaps you're leaving something out of your study that should be included. Perhaps that's why you were daydreaming.

Strongbow looked puzzled.

But how could I be leaving something out? That's not my way either. I don't do that.

The old Arab smiled and disappeared into the back room. A moment later he stuck his head out and Strongbow burst into laughter at the ludicrous sight.

Haj Harun had put on the Crusader's helmet, which was so big on him it floated around on his head.

Here, he said happily, a regular thinking cap, this will help us. When I want to daydream I gaze at one of my antiquities and pretty soon I'm slipping back in time and seeing Romans and Babylonians in the streets of Jerusalem. Now let's see what you see. What's your study about?

Sex.

Then it must be a woman you've left out. Who was she? Look deeply.

Strongbow stared at the old man in the helmet and it worked, suddenly he saw her again as clearly as if she were standing in Haj Harun's place. He clasped his hands and lowered his eyes.

A Persian girl, he whispered.

And you were young?

Only nineteen.

A gentle Persian girl, mused Haj Harun softly.

Yes, said Strongbow, so very gentle. There was a stream in the hills far from any city, where I chanced to pause in a glen one day to rest, and singing to herself she came upon me there. She wasn't frightened, not at all, it was as if she had expected the meeting. We talked for hours and laughed and splashed in the water, played in the water like two little children, and when darkness fell we were lying in the shadows promising each other we'd never leave that beautiful place we had found together. The days and nights that followed were boundless in their minutes of love, they seemed to stretch on forever, but then one day she returned briefly to her village and soon after she came back she collapsed on the grass, cholera, and I could only whisper to her and hold her helplessly in my arms as the life ran out of her and all at once she was gone, simply that. I buried her in the glen. A few weeks we had, no more, yet I remember every blade of grass there, every spot of sun and every sound made by the water on the rocks. A memory by a stream, the most rapturous and wretched moments I have ever known in life.

Strongbow sighed. Haj Harun came over and rested a frail hand on his shoulder.

Yes, he said, a gentle Persian girl. Yes, you certainly must include her.

Strongbow got to his feet and shook himself out of the mood.

No it's not that kind of book. And anyway, that was all too long ago.

Too long ago? said Haj Harun dreamily. Nothing is ever too long ago. Once I had a Persian wife myself.

She was Attar's daughter.

Who do you mean? The Sufi poet?

Yes.

But he lived in the twelfth century.

Of course, said Haj Harun.

Strongbow studied him for a moment. There was something startling and transforming about the old Arab shyly smiling out from under the large Crusader's helmet. Haj Harun was rubbing his hands and nodding encouragement.

Won't you do it? Please? At least a few pages? Just to prove to yourself that nothing is ever too long ago?

Strongbow laughed.

All right, why not, I will include her. But I think you should keep that helmet. You'll obviously be able to put it to better use than I can.

Strongbow turned and went into the back room humming to himself, eager to begin on this whole new aspect of his work. Behind him he saw Haj Harun already beginning to nod over the faded manuscript in his lap, the helmet slipping slowly down over his eyes as he drifted away on some reverie in the stillness of that hot summer Sunday afternoon.

A curious man, thought Strongbow. He actually seems to believe what he says. Perhaps someday there'll be time to get to know him.

Strongbow's forty-year haj ended with the publication of his gigantic thirty-three volume study, the volumes containing some sixty thousand pages of straight exposition and another twenty thousand pages in fine type listing footnotes and allied contortions, all together a production of well over three hundred million words, which easily surpassed the population of the Western world.

Most of the footnotes could only be read with a magnifying glass equal in power to Strongbow's own, but a glance at any one of the volumes was sufficient to convince the most skeptical reader that Strongbow had immersed himself in the details of his subject with unerring scientific skill, making full use of the rational premises of the nineteenth century.

And this at a time when the authoritative English medical manual on sex stated that the majority of women had no sexual feelings of any kind, that masturbation caused tuberculosis, that gonorrhea originated in women, that marital excess led to a full spectrum of fatal disorders, and that other than total darkness during a sexual act caused temporary hallucinations and permanent brain damage.

Strongbow's dismissal of these and other absurdities was nothing compared to the demented esoterica that followed, such as the Somali practice of slicing off the labia of young girls and sewing their vulvas together with horsehair to assure virginity upon marriage.

Nor was the massive presentation in any way hampered by the engraving on the frontispiece which showed a scarred determined face swathed in Arab headgear, permanently darkened by the desert sun yet still undeniably that of an English aristocrat whose family had been honored in England for six and a half centuries, despite a certain inherent lethargy.

Nor was the impact lessened by the author's note in the preface that for the last forty years he had been an absolute master of every dialect and custom in the Middle East, and that he had spent those forty years variously disguised in order to penetrate freely every comer of the region.

Strongbow's study was the most exhaustive sexual exploration ever made. Without hesitations or allusions, with nothing in fact to calm the reader, he thoughtfully examined every sexual act that had ever taken place from Timbuktu to the Hindu Kush, from the slums of Damascus to the palaces of Baghdad, and in all the shifting bedouin encampments along the way.

All claims were substantiated at once. The evidence throughout was balanced in the Victorian manner.

Yet the facts were still implacable, the sense and nonsense inescapable, the conclusions terminal.

Given his subject matter, it was only to be expected that the great majority of people would find the work revolting. For even if such practices did occur in the infamous hot lands of the Eastern Mediterranean, there was still no reason to put them into words.

And especially such explicit words, wogs for example, which had always been used to designate everyone east of Gibraltar but had never before appeared in print, even in the most scurrilous publications. But here was Strongbow making it the contents of his entire first chapter, tirelessly repeating it line after line and page after page together with its customary prefix bloody, bloody wogs bloody wogs bloody wogs bloody wogs bloody wogs bloody wogs bloody as if to signal the utter contempt for all known standards of decorum that was to follow.

Yet other revolutionary thinkers in the nineteenth century were also confronting topics subversive to society, and what was surprising at first was that unlike them, Strongbow solicited no initial support whatsoever. Instead his thesis outraged both the contemporary defenders of Darwin and Marx and the future defenders of Freud.

And always for the same reason. In both cases Strongbow contradicted the new masters by denying all precepts and mechanisms whether subtle or bold. He had the effrontery to suggest that far from there being any laws in history or man or society, there weren't even any tendencies toward such laws. The race was capricious, he said, thrusting or withdrawing as its loins moved it at the moment.

Nothing else was discernible. In the framework of Strongbowism events were random and haphazard and life was unruly and unruled, given to whimsy in the beginning and shaken by chaos at the end, a kind of unbroken sensual wheel made up of many sexes and ages revolving through time on the point of an orgasm. Thus those who courageously held liberal views, and who might have been expected to be Strongbow's natural champions, found themselves forced to denounce him bitterly with personal cause.

For there was an unmistakable hint in Volume Sixteen, and again twenty million words later in Volume Eighteen, that all unorthodox thinkers were being indicted for secret crimes. Under the tenets of Strongbowism, these seemingly brave believers in modern times stood accused of an abominable retreat into respectability because they embraced grand schemes of order.

This they did, said Strongbow, solely to conceal from themselves the rank disorder of their true natures, the inner recesses where sexual fantasies somersaulted down slippery slopes with the gamboling abandon of lambs drunk on spring grass.

So much for his possible defenders, Darwinians and Marxists alike. Having been apprehended as undercover sex maniacs, they had no choice but to become vehement enemies of Strongbowism.

As for the great bulk of his countrymen, who were traditionally in favor of dispatching large armies overseas, they were appalled by Strongbow's assertion that any military expedition was merely a disguised sexual sickness, more specifically a profound fear of impotence.

In Volume Twelve, repeated ninety million words later in Volume Twenty-two, he pointed out that fuck you and fuck them and fuck off were the common terms of hostility preferred by imperialists and patriots. Thus armies were raised, he said, because it was likely their raisers could raise nothing else.

As for the very foundations of imperialism, the profits accruing from military expeditions overseas, he likened them in a vulgar manner to excrement. The revolting passage appeared in Volume Eight.

There is nothing a young child values as highly as his own feces, for the simple reason that it is the only product he can produce at such an early age.

Therefore builders of empires and others with a concern for money are the perennial children of every era, at play with their feces, and in yet another guise we find men contriving to clothe their formidable sexual chaos in respectability.

For it is axiomatic in the West that it is improper to spend one's life playing with shit, whereas a thoughtful accumulation of lucre is seen commendable and even noble.

Nor did Strongbow limit his anal assaults to those caught with money in their hands. He also included all club members and anyone who propounded ceremonies or band music. The offensive material could be found in a few short sentences in Volume Twenty-six.

What are these enthusiasts actually up to? Could it be they fear the slippery and slithering and wholly unmarchable rhythms of true sexuality? Is that why they organize themselves into a counter-orgy of numbing rituals and dreary Sunday afternoon concerts? Because they are reduced to expressing pride in the only sensual act of which they are capable?

Taking a shit?

Strongbow's text was equally offensive to many who cherished romantic notions of the East, such as those who wanted to believe a rumor long current in the more exclusive London men's clubs that there was a unique male brothel in Damascus, with a special dungeon, where a man could pay to have Moroccan mercenaries cane him for the rest of his natural life.

Not true, said Strongbow, who then listed all the brothels in the Middle East along with their equipment and activities.

In addition many of Strongbow's more homely observations on life among the bedouin were simply misconstrued, such as a minor aside on camel cows. When they gave birth, he said, two of the four teats were bound with twine by the bedouin so the family could share the food by halves with the new calf.

This was seen to imply incest complicated by bestiality, the whole further debauched by mutilation and bondage and aberrant lactation methods, the striking multiple perversions at work so complex as to be unthinkable.

So too some of his simpler travel notes. A passing remark that shrimps eight inches long were generally available in the markets of Tunis, only one entry among tens of thousands on food and eating habits in the region, was singled out as a confession that proved for all time the patient treachery and general depravity long associated with the Eastern mind, trapped as it was in an erotic coma caused by excessive sun and blue skies, deprived of the fogs and mists and rain that maintained human composure in Europe.

But above all there was that major aspect of Strongbow's work that had been suggested by his landlord of twelve years in Jerusalem, the shy antiquities dealer Haj Harun. As a result of their brief discussion on daydreaming one hot summer Sunday afternoon, when the old Arab had put on the rusting Crusader's helmet and smilingly insisted that no event was ever too far in the past to be forgotten, Strongbow had devoted two-thirds of his entire text to his memories of the gentle Persian girl he had loved so long ago.

These tender passages described his few weeks with, her in exquisite detail, the stream in the hills where he had found her and the new flowers of spring and the soft grass where they had lain under the sun and under the stars, the words they had whispered and the joy they had shared in those endless minutes of springtime when he was only nineteen and she a few years younger, love from long ago recalled now in a tale that spanned two hundred million words and was thus the most complete love story ever told.

Yet that part of Strongbow's work was completely ignored. The beautiful passages devoted to the gentle Persian girl were passed over in their entirety as if they didn't exist, of no interest at all to his Victorian audience when compared to such possibilities as a Damascus dungeon where Moroccan mercenaries could be hired to administer secret canings for life.

Clearly Strongbow had already abused most occupations and all political positions. But he refused to let matters rest there. Indomitably he pushed deeper into a licentious morass of insults until in Volume Twenty-eight, provoked by his own obscene ardor and raving out of control, he went on to pose the possibility that everyone alive, regardless of status or opinion, was sexually suspect.

Men have a tendency to project their own personal cause as the general cause at large. Thus a cobbler sees the world as a shoe, the state of its sole dependent upon him.

A naturalist with the wit to realize he has evolved upward since infancy by selecting this and not that, or that and not this, views all the species of the world as having done the same thing. And lastly a political philosopher with heavy immovable bowels finds the past turgid and ponderous, the future necessarily destined to experience explosive upheavals from the lower regions or classes.

Of course each of these hypothetical men is right as far as he goes, which is to say all men are right when describing themselves.

As seen by a cobbler, the world is a shoe. Men do evolve out of their infancies and pent-up bowels may well and probably will explode. But all these innumerable individual acts must not be allowed to obscure what they only take part in, a chaotic universe boundlessly mad.

Strongbowism, it was apparent, ranged wide. It could and did attack every sort of person. And it was especially damaging to those who wanted to believe there was some kind of scheme operating in the universe, preferably an imposing or dramatic scheme that could provide an overall explanation for events either through religion or nature, society or the psyche.

Or at least a partial explanation. And if not daily events then events that occurred once in a lifetime. Or once in a century. Or even once in an epoch.

Or at the very least one reassuring explanation for some event somewhere since the beginning of time, some tiny structure no matter how pathetic. For otherwise what did it all mean?

And here Strongbow appeared to be smiling. Exactly the point, he seemed to be saying.

For nowhere in his thirty-three volumes was there to be found even a nascent conspiracy. Not even that.

On the contrary, as seen by Strongbow all yearnings for the existence of a conspiracy in life were hopeless illusions from childhood that surfaced later in idle moments, the illusions having been caused by a child's false perceptions of order above him, the subsequent yearnings arising from an adult's inability to accept the sexual chaos beneath him.

To the whore's interim statement, I'm sitting on a fortune, Strongbow now added a vastly enlarged final statement, I'm sitting on everything which is also nothing.

This argument appeared in its most cogent form in a barely legible footnote in Volume Thirty-two, printed in such fine type an acuity of eyesight worthy of a bedouin was needed to decipher it.

All of these various Levantine acts, heretofore described in detail and accounting for life as it is, I have found to be repeated incessantly among the nine sexes, in low stations and high, but never with a view toward organization or design.

The effect everywhere and at all times has been incoherent, and as much as I would like to think someone has known what he or she was doing at these most crucial moments in life, or even paused to consider the matter, I can't honestly say I do.

Rather the obverse obtains. Forty years of research have taught me that men and women fuck with great avidity. When they finish they fuck again and if they are not fucking when next you see them, or gathering the strength to do so, it is only out of some bizarre lack of opportunity.

In point of fact there is a great deal of fucking in the world but no one is in charge of it, no organization controls it, no recommendations affect it.

Instead men and women fuck right along as they always have and always will, paying no particular attention to kingdoms or dynasties, ignoring the universal theorems that are regularly announced over the ages as applicable to all when they aren't, in rapture and headlong chance, spinning round and round the sensual wheel.

It would be comforting news indeed if we could find a scheme or a plan or even a hint of a conspiracy in life, some stationary point where we could sit and be still at last But having long studied the spin of our wheel, I have to admit there is none. Alas we are only right there. Each of us.

Blasting away in another orgasm.

Nor did Strongbow defend his depraved attacks on everyone by claiming his aim was to diagnose the rampant sexual pathologies of his age in order for them to be cured. In fact cures were inconceivable to him, for it was obvious he believed man was insane by definition.

This he made plain in Volume Thirty-three.

Within the animal kingdom we are an incorrigible and lawless member, deathly ill, a species suffering from an incurable disease. Wise men of all ages have known this, ignorant men of all ages have suspected it. It amounts to congenital insanity and because of it man has always wanted to return to the orderly and ordered conditions of the animal state where he once found contentment.

All memories of lost paradises verify this, as do all visionary dreams of future Utopias.

Whenever a prophet or a philosopher speaks of a new man in a new age his creation is invariably the same, the old man in the old age, the animal in his animal kingdom, the beast in the grazing herd that browses for forage digesting and rutting and evacuating in a seemingly timeless eternity, untroubled because unaware of the troubles on every side, undying because unaware of death, unliving because unaware of life.

For an animal this is most certainly a happy existence. But for you and me it can never be again.

Yet in the closing lines of Volume Thirty-three, Strongbow revealed that in spite of everything he was still willing to live with his findings and even do so with a certain gusto.

It's true that life is crumpled and mindless and covered with hairs. But for the few years we have its good memories we also have to admit it remains as pleasantly soft to the touch as an old well-used wineskin.

Or for that matter, as an old man's well-used balls.

Thus Strongbow's thesis was nothing less than a vicious onslaught on the entire rational world of the nineteenth century, where sensible solutions were considered available to all problems. In his systemless universe no one was safe and there were no solutions, just life itself.

In proof of this he had offered three hundred million words in thirty-three volumes with no deviations from the facts.

So perhaps it was understandable that Strongbowism never acquired a single adherent in the West. In the end nothing could be said of his work except that it was preposterous and true and totally unacceptable.

When the manuscript was ready Strongbow sent it by caravan from Jerusalem to Jaffa, where a large chartered steamship was waiting to carry both camels and manuscript to Venice. There the caravan would be re-formed by its wild bedouin drivers and traverse a stately swaying course across the Alps to Basle, which he had chosen for publication because of traditional Swiss neutrality. Strongbow himself, feeling the need for a vacation after twelve years of uninterrupted work in the back room of the antiquities dealer's shop, left Jerusalem for the shores of the Dead Sea where the sun was both warm and perpetual.

At the lowest spot on earth Strongbow lolled comfortably in sulphur baths while his volumes duly appeared in a private edition of twelve hundred and fifty copies, the same number used by Darwin for the first run of the Origin of Species. But the only other comparison with Darwin's study was that Levantine Sex also sold out on its day of publication.

There was therefore no need for the British consul in Basle to attempt to have the remaining editions confiscated as he had been ordered to do by Her Majesty's government. Instead the consul went with his staff to the leading local British banker, who added his staff for the joint visit to the leading local Swiss banker, who closed for the day and collected his considerably larger staff for the march across town to Strongbow's printer.

Thus it was a large and mixed group that gathered at sunset behind the locked doors of a foundry on the outskirts of Basle. The furnaces were fired to maximum temperature and Strongbow's manuscript was dumped in and consumed. Then they began wheeling in the towering stacks of plates used to print the study and shoveled them into the furnaces, where they were reduced to huge identical ingots of solid dead metal.

The furnace doors clanged, shadows danced on the walls, sudden flashes of sparks shook the air and the printing history of Levantine Sex lasted less than twenty-four hours, over before the next sun rose.

Having learned patience in the desert, that much Strongbow might have accepted. But not the act that had occurred during the night

For it seemed that Parliament had secretly met on the night of publication to review his study, and to booming cries of Shame Shame had found it despicably un-English without debate, thereupon unanimously enacting emergency legislation stating that his title as the Duke of Dorset was from that moment forever null and void, that all rights not specifically granted him as a private citizen were to be ignored and denied him, and that he was to be deplored in perpetuity throughout the Empire.

So a contest had been joined. But there was never any doubt who would be the victor.

-6-

YHWH

Undoubtedly God passed His time in some other way, but how?

Around the middle of the century a ghostly figure became familiar in certain villages in central Albania.

Barefoot and hairless and mostly naked, a skeleton with gaping holes in its head, this diseased apparition lurked near water holes muttering insanely in an unknown tongue.

Normally the peasants of the place would have wasted little time beating such a grotesque derelict with their staves, but the appearance of this apparent leper was so unworldly they offered him vegetables instead. Dumbly the ghost accepted their onions and carrots and floated away on an arcane route that always brought him back in a few days.

The language the peasants heard by the water holes was Aramaic and the ghost was none other than the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins, who in the course of six or seven lost years had somehow found his way home from the Holy Land. The villages where he now begged had once belonged to him and the mysterious circle he traced lay around the Wallenstein castle, although his eyes were too weak to make out the cliffs above, where it had once stood.

A change came when he chanced to be near a church where Bach's Mass in B Minor was being played.

The music stirred dim memories of a tower conservatory and the Albanian dialects of his youth, allowing him to ask questions that led him to the castle, where he collapsed in delirium. By then only two people were living there, a mother and her young daughter, the mother having once been a cleaning woman attached to the stables. All the other servants had long since died or moved away after Wallenstein had consumed the family fortune in Jerusalem.

The castle itself was in a terrible state of ruin. The roofs were gone and the upper storeys had fallen in.

Bushes grew where generations of Skanderbeg Wallensteins had once sneaked down corridors, peering suspiciously down at the surrounding countryside. One room alone remained intact in the foundations, a small kitchen in which the mother and daughter lived.

They too would have left had the mother not been crippled by kidney stones which made it impossible for her to walk. But as it was they had nowhere to go and couldn't have hired a cart to take them there anyway. So the daughter tended a meager vegetable garden in an upper storey and collected firewood from the debris of former window frames and furniture.

It was the daughter who found Wallenstein unconscious in the empty moat. Although a small girl she easily shouldered the light sack of bones and carried him down through the rubble to the kitchen, where she and her mother ripped their skirts into bandages and applied herbal plasters. That night they lay on the bare stones while Wallenstein slept on their pile of straw.

After being nursed for several months Wallenstein began to recover. His skin ulcers healed, his fingers uncurled and his eyes cleared, he could hear through one ear and control his bowels and spittle. He still lacked the other ear and nothing could be done about the nose eaten away by ants, but the daughter cleverly carved a wooden ear for him and a lifelike wooden nose, which were held in place by a thin leather thong tied at the back of his head.

The herbal remedies had a remarkable effect on Wallenstein's maladies save for one, a high fever of unknown cause. Wallenstein was running a steady temperature of one hundred and three degrees and would do so as long as he lived, yet for some reason he was capable of sustaining this feverish new condition. What worried mother and daughter alike was the way he talked upon emerging from his coma.

For it seemed that after completing the greatest forgery in history, Wallenstein had inexplicably been converted to the very heresies he had meant to correct. Twice before he had committed himself to extreme religious positions, once to the silence of the Trappists and later to the even more severe silence and solitude of a desert hermitage.

Now came this third upheaval, an absolute belief in the stupefying contradictions of the Sinai Bible he had nearly died rewriting. And since he felt he was living at the end of time, he was convinced he had to recite the entire text of the buried original lest its striking confusions be lost forever.

Thus did Wallenstein plunge from utter silence into utter volubility, talking and talking as if he could never stop.

When he awoke on the straw in the morning some of what he said was still comprehensible. As he sat up in bed he had the habit of shouting I am that I am over one shoulder, the shoulder below the wooden ear. And then as if to reinforce this notion, or perhaps simply because he couldn't hear through that ear, he would turn his wooden nose to the other side and shout with equal conviction over the other shoulder He is that He is, these primal announcements often repeated a dozen times before he was satisfied with their authenticity, whereupon he would leap from bed ignoring the breakfast laid out for him and go striding off naked through the barren ruins of his ancestral castle in search of the innumerable shifting characters once imagined by a blind man and an imbecile, inevitably finding a crowd of their faces in a collapsed wall and stopping there to harangue the blocks of stone tirelessly for the rest of the day.

Or he would lecture a tree for weeks, the crumbling castle and its wild grounds having become a mythical land of Canaan whose dusty waysides were thronged with shepherds and priests and cobblers and traders of every description, not to mention the forty thousand prophets rumored to have sprung from the desert since the beginning of time.

Darkness and snow, autumn and winds, spring and rain and the heavy heat of summer, nothing could keep Wallenstein from preaching his inspired message to the rocks and trees and bushes he mistook for the multitudes swirling through his brain, Isaiah and Fatima and Christ listening to him and munching olives, Joshua and Judas and Jeremiah listening and sharing a wineskin, Ishmael and Mary holding hands and listening, Ruth and Abraham sitting on the grass and listening while Mohammed's flying horse hovered overhead and Elijah and Harun al-Rashid eagerly pushed forward, everyone surging around him intent on not missing a word that fell from the lips of Melchizedek, legendary King of Jerusalem.

For Wallenstein now realized who he was. This secret of antiquity had been well kept, but he knew, so down the open galleries of the castle he marched casting blessings and warnings, raising a hand in hope or instruction, arms spread wide as he assayed meaningless proverbs and retold in an impressively loud voice, to no one, the thousand and one dreams tumbling through his mind.

As his body healed these verbal seizures increased in eloquence and speed, the words coming so fast there was no time to form them anymore. Powerful tirades were delivered as mere noise. Whole sermons were encapsuled in half a breath, where they disappeared before being uttered, the unspoken syllables solidly entangled and indistinguishable.

Until the slightest sound from the outside world, even his own footstep, might cause him to forget where he was. When that happened he thrust his wooden ear forward timidly and for a few seconds it seemed he might be lost, driven back once more to the profound silence of that tiny cave he had known near the summit of Mt Sinai.

But then just as suddenly he was all smiles. A hundred faces appeared in a rock, a thousand faces lined the trunk of a tree, a new sea of admirers surged around him.

Wallenstein straightened his wooden nose and adjusted his wooden ear. He was ready. Forcefully he launched himself into an even more incoherent monologue.

Sophia, the daughter, was eight years old when Wallenstein returned to the castle. Having always lived as a recluse in its ruins and never really known anyone but her mother, she had no reason to consider Wallenstein insane. Her mother had a bloated body and never spoke, Wallenstein had wooden features and never stopped speaking. Such was the world for Sophia, who was humble and retiring by nature.

Gradually she came to love him as a father and he was able to feel her tenderness despite the swarms of hallucinatory events clamoring for his attention.

When she was old enough she tried to teach herself the intricacies of business in hopes of repairing the castle to make his life more comfortable. Money could still be borrowed in his name but the moneylenders were shrewd and she was often humiliated.

Sophia the Unspoken she came to be called in the villages, because she never said more than a few words at a time. People thought this was due to shyness but actually it came from a simple and gentle fear that too many words on her part might somehow reveal the joyful secret of her new love, and in so doing, in some unexplained way, cause it to go away. At night she cried alone in the castle, the next day she went back to face the moneylenders, in time learning to manage the investments. Painstakingly she paid off the debts on the castle and bought back its farms and villages, so that eventually the Wallenstein holdings were as extensive as ever.

While Sophia was still young her mother's kidney stones finally burst through the organs and she died, leaving the adopted father and daughter alone in the castle. Almost at once they became lovers and remained so for twenty years. During that time, moved by a physical contact he had never known before, Wallenstein had moments of lucidity when he was able to recall the original Bible he had found and describe its wonders to Sophia, recalling as well the forgery he had made.

I had to do it, he whispered, I had no choice. But someday I'll go back and find the original again.

His voice cracked when he said those words and he began to cry helplessly in her arms, knowing he would never go back because the moments of lucidity were too rare, too brief, for him ever to do anything important again.

The Armenian Quarter? he said with hope. It's there where I left it. I can find it again can't I?

Of course you can, answered Sophia, holding him tightly and wiping away his tears, her simple love no match for the memory of nineteen years in the Holy Land and the terror of a mountain cave, the scars in the dirt floor of a basement hole in Jerusalem. You can, she said, you can you can, she repeated desperately as she felt his body loosen and he drifted away in her arms, the sorrowful cast of his face already lapsing into an imbecilic grin.

After twenty years Sophia became pregnant. She didn't want to have the baby but Wallenstein pleaded with her and finally she agreed. She also agreed to name the child Catherine in honor of the monastery where he had discovered his new religion.

The child was a boy and Sophia duly named him Catherine, but his birth was the great tragedy of her life.

From that day on Wallenstein never again spoke to her, never touched her, never saw her when she was standing in front of him. Unknown to her, behind his grin, he had been pondering for some time the possibility that he might not be merely Melchizedek, no matter how august that primary priest of antiquity.

Secretly, for some time, he had been considering the possibility he might be God.

Now with the birth of a son his own daring overwhelmed him and the already incredible profusion of his brain was pushed into an ultimate or original chaos. In his mind Catherine was Christ and he at once descended into the limitless prophecies of the Bible he had buried in Jerusalem, a vision from which there was no return.

And now that he was God the legions of his creation were so vast, the dimensions of his universe so grand, he could never stop talking, not even for an instant. Yet he also sensed it was beneath him to continue addressing rocks and trees and bushes. Those were the duties of Melchizedek, bringer of the divine message.

Undoubtedly God passed His time in some other way, but how?

Wallenstein raised his wooden ear hoping to catch a familiar sound. When he had become God, not surprisingly, he learned that God was also never silent. Not surprisingly, God talked just as incessantly as he had when he had been Wallenstein. But what was so important that only God could say it?

A name? The very name he had been invoking for years in his rapid deliveries? A name spoken so reverently, so quickly, there had never been time to include any vowels in it? A name, therefore, that could only be pronounced by Him? A name that was nothing but noise to anyone else?

Wallenstein tried it. He said it quite loudly.

YHWH.

It sounded right and he repeated it, astounded that he could sum up the entire universe and describe everything in it simply by identifying himself, exactly what he had been looking for during all those years of tirade, one unpronounceable word at the end of time, his own name.

YHWH.

Yes he had the timbre of it and it was a surpassing method for affirming the truth.

Suddenly he grinned. All at once he had advanced from the blind man's secret three thousand years ago in the dusty waysides of Canaan to the secret of the imbecile scribe. Now never again would he bother to lecture a stone or a tree or a bush. Never again would he eat or sleep or put on more or less clothing or march down corridors and gardens varying his accounts to verify the truth. Now there would be no more winters and summers for him or days and nights at the foot of the mountain.

He had finished his autobiographical footnote, saith end ending of endings end, and now he could stand absolutely still through all eternity repeating his own name.

Sadly Sophia watched him shouting his senseless noise and knew there was only one way to save him, only one way that he could live, so she took him by the hand and led him down through the deepest recesses of the castle to a soundless black dungeon many hundreds of feet below the ground, sat him down on the cot and locked the iron door, thereafter faithfully visiting him three times a day with food and water and lovingly stroking him for an hour or more as he shouted out his incomprehensible name to the entire assembly of worlds he had made, tenderly adjusting his wooden nose and his wooden ear before kissing him good-bye and locking the door once more so moments might come in the black stillness when he could forget his manifold duties as creator of all things and grow silent, finding at last each day the food and sleep necessary for life, which the former hermit and forger did for another three decades, surviving beneath the castle until 1906, through Sophia's love living to the advanced age of one hundred and four deeply buried in the boundless darkness or light God had found for Himself in the universe of His cave.

-7-

The Tiberias Telegrams

The desire of the stranger is to his people. Speed the stranger home.

News of the triumphant book-burning episode in Basle and Parliament's emergency legislation against him reached Strongbow by way of a Roman newspaper months out of date.

While tarrying in the cabalist center of Safad he had gone down to Galilee one morning to fish. The air was fresh, the land still, the water unruffled. In due time he caught a fish and searched his robes for something to wrap it in, but all he had with him was a worn copy of the Zohar.

A clamor from the hillside above attracted his attention, a noisy band of Italian pilgrims climbing up to have a breakfast picnic on the site where Christ had preached the Sermon on the Mount. As they trudged along one of the men impatiently broke out a large salami and ripped off a mouthful of meat, discarding the wrapping paper, which floated down the hill in Strongbow's direction.

Strongbow was about to wrap up his fish in the newspaper page when he saw his own name looming up in a greasy headline that led into the fish's mouth. The dispatch was slimy but included all the essential facts.

At once Strongbow strapped his heavy bronze sundial to his hip and marched down the shore to Tiberias, where a small Turkish garrison was quartered. Without a word he pushed aside the guards and slammed his way into the private apartment of the Turkish commandant, a young man who was sipping his morning coffee, not yet dressed.

The commandant grabbed his pistol from the night table and wildly fired off all nine rounds at what he took to be an immensely tall old Arab holding a fish and wearing a sundial and carrying a book of Jewish mysticism. When the bullets stopped crashing into the walls the Arab calmly laid the fish on the night table and placed a Maria Theresa crown beside it.

I've just caught a herbivorous fish that thrives on algae and I want to send news of the catch to England.

What?

A St Peter's fish, rather bony but tasty. Are you in contact with Constantinople by telegraph?

Yes, whispered the terrified Turk, staring first at the fish and the book, then at the gold coin, then at the cryptic Arabic aphorisms engraved on the sundial.

Good. Send two telegrams for me to Constantinople, to someone you can bribe or trust, with instructions that they are to be taken to a commercial telegraph office and forwarded to an address in London I will give you.

But I don't even know who you are.

Strongbow placed a second gold coin on the table beside the fish. The Turk's eyes narrowed.

How can I be sure your catch is authentic and your fishing expedition isn't meant to harm the Ottoman Empire?

Strongbow placed another coin on the table and the Turk's eyes widened as he stared at the six glistening gold breasts of the former Austrian empress, largely bare and bulging impressively after having nursed sixteen children.

Or perhaps even meant to destroy the Empire?

Strongbow placed a fourth and last coin on the table, surrounding the fish with gold. He raised his sundial and studied it.

At this moment in your life the Prophet has presented you with a choice.

He has? What is it?

Pocket this money, send my telegrams, order the fish cooked for your lunch and shoot any of your men who are insubordinate. Or conversely, refuse the money and I will shoot you and all your men, send the telegrams myself and cook the fish for my own lunch.

The tall Arab checked his sundial again. In fact this apparition from the desert was so unnaturally tall and self-assured the Turk wondered if he might not be the Prophet himself, in which case it made no difference what he decided. And although he was still afraid to send the telegrams on his military circuit, the eight large breasts of Maria Theresa made a handsome sum of money.

Time, said the apparition, startling the Turk out of his thoughts. Instantly he reached into his night table for pen and paper.

Allah must have willed it, he sighed.

Indeed it seems likely, murmured Strongbow, who had begun printing rapidly in four-letter groups.

Naturally Strongbow's codes were unbreakable and could only be read by his London solicitor, who had certain sealed envelopes locked in his safe to be used for deciphering when so directed.

The first telegram instructed the solicitor to sell the Strongbow estate in Dorset and the numerous holdings that went with it. He was also to liquidate all the other Strongbow assets scattered throughout the industrial north and Ireland and Scotland and Wales, using hundreds of intermediaries so the enormity of these financial transactions would remain unsuspected.

The huge sums of money accruing from the sales were then to be forwarded in a devious manner to banks in Prague for eventual deposit in a Turkish consortium. Only when every shilling of the Strongbow fortune was safely out of England was the solicitor to decipher the second telegram that had been sent from Tiberias.

Whereas the first telegram had been long and detailed, the second was brief. And although Strongbow refused to address it properly, this second telegram was directed to Queen Victoria.

In it, citing his own family as an example, Strongbow noted that the quality of sexual life in England had deteriorated disastrously over the last seven hundred years. He admitted the queen was probably incompetent to do anything about it, but at the same time he said his self-respect would no longer allow him to participate in such a dreary decline.

Therefore he was renouncing his citizenship. Never again would he set foot west of the Red Sea. He then concluded with an array of scabrous allegations that surpassed even the obscenities found in Levantine Sex.

MADAME, YOU ARE A SMALL AND SMUG MOTHER RULING A SMALL AND SMUG

COUNTRY. CERTAINLY GOD MADE YOU BOTH SMALL, BUT WHOM ARE WE TO

BLAME FOR THE SMUGNESS?

IT WOULDN'T SURPRISE ME IF YOUR NAME IN THE FUTURE BECAME SYNONYMOUS

WITH UGLY CLUTTER AND DARK PONDEROUS FURNITURE AND HIDDEN EVIL

THOUGHTS, WITH ARROGANT POMPOSITY AND CHILD PROSTITUTION AND A WHOLE HOST OF OTHER GROSS PERVERSIONS.

IN SHORT, MADAME, YOUR NAME WILL BE USED TO DESIGNATE THE WORST SORT

OF SECRET SEXUAL DISEASE, A PRIM HYPOCRISY INCOMPARABLY RANK BENEATH

ITS HEAVY LAVENDER SCENT.

The address on the telegram was Hanover, England. It was signed Plantagenet, Arabia.

Thus the former deaf boy, lance in hand, who had once cleared his family manor of six hundred and fifty years of frivolous history, now felt he had found his vocation at last. The huge magnifying glass and bronze sundial were to be left behind. At the age of sixty he had decided to become a hakim or healer curing the poor in the desert.

Of course he had no way of knowing that the influx of his immense fortune into Constantinople, nominal ruler of the desert in his day but already corrupt beyond hope, would ineluctably cause repercussions far beyond that city, until by the end of the nineteenth century not only the desert but the entire Middle East would in fact be the property of one man, a lean barefoot giant who spoke humbly as an Arab and was occasionally humiliated as a Jew, who was by then both an Arab and a Jew, an indistinguishable Semite living in a ragged opensided tent tending his sheep.

From Galilee he walked to Constantinople and began to set up the banks and concessions and subsidiaries that would allow his fortune to run without him. One day he was a Persian potentate, the next an Egyptian emir, the third a Baghdad banker.

He obtained a controlling interest in the posts and telegraph system, bought up all government bonds and issued new ones, became the secret paymaster of the Turkish army and navy, bribed the descendants of the Janissaries, consulted with pashas and ministers and laid aside trust funds for their grandsons, acquired rights to the wells in Mecca and all wells on all routes leading to Mecca, bought two hundred of the existing two hundred and forty-four industrial enterprises in the Turkish realm, dismissed and reappointed the Armenian and Greek and Latin Greek and Syrian Greek patriarchs in Jerusalem and the Coptic patriarch in Alexandria, leased four thousand kilometers of railway lines, established dowries for the daughters of the principal landowners between the Persian Gulf and the Anatolian highlands, refurbished the gold mosaics and polychrome marbles of Santa Sophia, so that by the time he was ready to leave the city anyone who could ever be in a position of power in that part of the world was under his control.

Although no one knew it, he had bought the Ottoman Empire.

Nor did anyone know he had already assured the destruction of the British Empire by sending it into a slow decline from which it could never recover. Some might date the decline from the day when his barbaric caravan had disembarked at Venice with its monstrous load of Eastern lore. Or a dozen years earlier when he had first sat down on the giant stone scarab in Jerusalem to expound that ruinous lore. Or even many years before that when he had hinted in a monograph on flowers that Englishwomen were known to sweat in the Levant.

But all these dates were too recent. One hundred years was a more likely span for the disintegration of a great empire, so probably the irrevocable course had been set on that warm Cairo night in 1840 when a laughing naked young Strongbow had turned his back on the reception celebrating Queen Victoria's twenty-first birthday and leapt over a garden wall to begin his haj.

And now forty years later it was a rainy October afternoon when a tall gaunt man solemnly concluded his business in Constantinople and walked to a deserted stretch of the Bosporus, saw the clouds part and stood in a dripping olive grove watching the sun sink over Europe, then ceremoniously removed the rings and jeweled sandals and filigreed headgear of his last disguise, threw them into the passing waters and climbed back through the gnarled grove to disappear forever, barefoot now and wearing only a torn cloak, without even a bundle to carry, making his way south toward the Holy Land and perhaps beyond.

No one suspected the loss but Strongbow had taken far more than a great fortune away from Europe.

He had also taken an irreplaceable vision that saw new worlds and sought them, a spirit that fed itself on the raw salads of mirages.

Never again would the West send out another Strongbow. After him there would be delegations and commissions, engineers and army garrisons, circulating judicial bodies and stray wanderers on camelback. These events were still to come but the greatest of all conquests was over, the expedition that could only be launched by one man from the vast legions he found in his heart.

As a destitute hakim he no longer carried calomel or quinine or rhubarb grains. Now he cured solely through hypnotism.

His usual practice was to seat himself behind his patients so he couldn't see their lips and read the words they thought they were saying, thus freeing himself to use his knowledge of the desert to listen to their true feelings. After a time he told the man or woman to turn and face him.

By then the patient was thoroughly accustomed to an empty vista and the sudden confrontation with the hakim's huge immobile presence, especially his gaze, was overwhelming. Powerful, musing, contemplative, the great eyes bore down upon the patient, who was immediately under their control.

The hakim said nothing in words. With his eyes he reshaped and repeopled the barren desert from the rich landscape of his patient's mind, detecting distant drifts of sand and adjusting veils, adjusting costumes and revisiting forgotten corners, sampling the sound of the wind and sipping water from tiny wells.

As a botanist might, he planted seeds and nursed the seedlings into flowers. Gently he blew the flowers to and fro until their contours shimmered in the sun. Steadily he gauged the sweep of the horizons.

The eyes spoke a final time and the patient awoke from the trance. The hakim told him to come again in a day or a week, and if the asthma or astigmatism hadn't improved by then he would suggest they sit together once more staring at the desert.

At the same time the hakim took the opportunity to explore a more personal question. Ever since he had left Jerusalem he had pondered deeply that obscure conversation in archaic languages between a mole and a hermit outside a cave on Mt Sinai And having considered it carefully, he had come to believe that an astounding transformation had indeed occurred in that tiny cave, and that the Bible accepted as the oldest in the world was nothing more than a forgery of stupendous proportions.

Of course he had no way of knowing what was in the real Sinai Bible, he could only guess at its contents.

Yet for some reason he was convinced it held the secret to his own life. A strange idea came to him then and he began asking his patients the questions he had been asking himself for so long.

Have you heard of a mysterious lost book in which all things are written? A book that is circular and unchronicled and calmly contradictory, suggesting infinity?

His patients stirred in the depths of their hypnotic trances. Sometimes they were slow to answer but the answers seemed always the same. They thought they had heard of the book. Parts of it might have been read to them when they were children.

The hakim went on with his cures until the end of the day, when he sat alone and wondered at the sameness of these replies. Since so many people knew of the lost book, could it be they were all secret contributors to it? That the lost original could thus be retrieved only by probing the hypnotic trances of everyone on earth?

The hakim reeled under the weight of this revelation. The truth was staggering, the task without hope. For the first time in his life he felt helpless.

Bleakly he recalled his decades of ceaseless wandering through tides of sand in the wake of the moon in search of a holy place once mentioned by Father Yakouba. The memory of that serene and gentle dwarf now filled him with a terrible sadness, for his haj was over and he knew he hadn't found his holy place.

Why had he failed? Where were the footprints in the sky?

Enormous and solitary in the twilight, the greatest explorer of his age sank to his knees and gazed slowly around at the shadows, lost and knowing he was lost, remaining there until a young man approached him at dawn.

O revered hakim?

Yes, my child.

I am sick and weary.

Yes, my child.

Can you help me, as they say you can?

Yes. Sit now and turn your back and fix your eyes on that distant eagle as he swoops and soars in the first light of day living a thousand years. Are we able to follow such paths? Could it be his flight traces the journey of the Prophet, the actual footsteps a man takes from the day of his birth to the day of his death?

The swirls of the Koran shape and unshape themselves as do the waves in the desert and yes the oasis may be small. But yes, we will find it.

One afternoon a shepherd watched the hakim healing on a hillside in the Yemen and came to him when he was finished. He was a small plump man given to continual smiles who waddled more than walked.

The waddle carried him along the hillside where he stood dancing from one leg to the other.

Salaam aleikoum, respected hakim. And who might you be?

Aleikoum es-salaam, brother. A man astray.

Ah but we're all astray, yet isn't it also written that each man has an appointed place?

It is, and also that man knows not in what country he must die. Now what is it that ails you, brother?

So businesslike, hakim, but you see it's not me. I only have the usual aches to be cured when that day arrives. It's you I've come to talk about.

Me, brother?

Yes. You're ailing and no one likes to see a kindly man ail.

As you said, when that day arrives.

No no, hakim, I didn't mean that at all. But won't you come to my tent for coffee? The day's over and it's time to leave the dust. Won't you come along now? Come.

The little man tugged the hakim's sleeve and when the hakim rose the little man laughed loudly.

What is it?

Why the two of us, don't you see? When you were sitting I was as tall as you but now suddenly I'm only half as tall. What's to be done? Must a hakim always sit while a poor shepherd always stands? A marvel, that's what it is.

What?

His variety, His gifts. But come, brother, as you call me, the day's over and there's good coffee to drink.

Yes come at once. Ya'qub is my name, come.

He laughed again and they started off, the tall gaunt hakim dignified despite his rags, the short plump shepherd humming happily as he skipped along trying to match the solemn strides of the man he had come to lead home.

The hakim arranged his rags, Ya'qub made coffee. And now the little man's face was serious and his voice urgent.

I've watched you curing the sick with your eyes, hakim, and it's good work you do. But don't you know your own eyes can be read as well? They can and today I read them. Would it be wrong to say you've traveled so much you've seen everything?

It may be so.

And that these things you've seen and done no longer interest you?

That's true.

Yes of course, because you're growing old like me. But we're not really that old, hakim, only sixty and a little more, not much of anything. And isn't it also true you're very rich? Not at all the poor man you appear to be?

How's that, brother?

Here I mean, in your heart, because you've seen so much. Isn't it true you're one of the richest men in the world? Perhaps the richest of all?

It may be.

No no, sadly for you it isn't true. You certainly should be but you're not at all. And when you said before you'd seen everything, that wasn't true either. You're a good man and kind but a sickness has come to you in the second half of your life.

I grow old, that's all.

No no it's not age, it's something else. With all your travels and your wisdom don't you know it? Don't you see it with those powerful eyes of yours, you who see so much in everyone else? Well if you don't I'll have to tell you. It's loneliness, hakim, that's your sickness. You're all alone. Haven't you ever loved a woman and had a child?

The first but not the second.

You mean you have loved a woman?

Yes.

But it was long ago in some faraway place?

Yes.

But how long ago, simply years and years? A very long time?

If forty years is a long time, yes.

And this faraway place, would it be strange to a poor shepherd from the Yemen?

It might be strange, yes.

You mean it has palaces and fountains and elephants? These and other wonders without count? All that and more? What could such a place be called?

Persia.

The little man clapped his hands and now all the gravity was gone from his face. He laughed and hugged himself.

Oh I've heard of it, hakim, I've certainly heard of Persia with its elephants and fountains and palaces but I've never known anyone who's been there. So won't you tell me all about it? About the woman too? It's good for men of our years to recall love, nothing is better save to have that love still. So please tell me everything, hakim. This is rich news you bring to my hillside.

Yes yes, he whispered, jumping to his feet and scurrying around the tent searching in vain for more coffee to boil, bumping into a lamp in his haste and knocking it over, laughing at the lamp and bumping into the tent poles and laughing at them, finding coffee at last and seating himself with great pleasure, rocking and smiling and wrapping his stubby arms around his body as if to feel the joy that would be his with a story of love and Persia.

The tale Ya'qub heard wasn't at all what he had expected. The hakim began slowly, for once unsure what he was going to say, not even sure why he was telling this stranger about the gentle Persian girl he had once known for a few weeks, no more, before she died in an epidemic and he too had fallen ill and been partially blind for a time, memorizing the Koran in his sadness and becoming a Master Sufi before moving on to encompass the rituals of a thousand tribes.

As Ya'qub listened to this tall gaunt man he realized he wasn't merely a hakim no matter how good and powerful, but a wanderer who had been many men in many places, a figure disguised in many robes, truly a vast and changeable spirit.

A genie?

Yes a genie, but that was before. Now he was a man with a sickness.

Ya'qub listened to his guest and watched his eyes. He nodded when the hakim ended.

You're deaf?

Yes.

No matter. Anyone can be deaf or something else and all men are.

Only one other person has ever guessed that.

And he heard it too, just as I did, and of course his name was also Ya'qub, wasn't it?

Yes, but why?

But why and why? repeated Ya'qub happily. How could it be otherwise? When things are a certain way that's the way they have to be. But you're smiling now, hakim, and why is that? How can a man who's done nothing and been nowhere make you smile? And there was more to your wandering than just wandering, wasn't there? All that time when you were pretending to be on a haj you were really looking for a lost book, isn't it so? The story of the gentle Persian girl was in it but also other things and that's why you picked up so many jokes and riddles and scraps of rhymes in so many holy places. Admit it, because you thought they were also part of the book.

Rhymes? asked the hakim. Jokes and riddles?

Ah I've caught you haven't I? Now listen to me retell your tale exactly as I heard it.

The little shepherd swelled himself up and began to hum. He rocked back and forth and whistled, spread his short arms and clasped himself, floated naked down the Tigris at night and swam the Red Sea and penetrated Mecca and Medina and tarried in Safad, walked twenty-five hundred miles to Timbuktu to meet the other Ya'qub and soaked his feet in Lake Chad coming and going, marched out of the Sinai oblivious to two sunsets and three sunrises and plotted the passage of a secret comet in north Arabia, conversed with an oily stationer and an ethereal dealer in antiquities while composing three hundred million words in a Jerusalem vault, acquired one empire and destroyed another and finally rode an elephant to a palace, finally sat down beside a fountain in the palace to rest, finally leaned back with a small cup of coffee to read the old new lines in the palm of his hand.

Do you see? said Ya'qub. Isn't that how it was? Scraps from a magical book that's always being written?

Or was written once? Or will be written someday? Well I know all about that book, hakim. What? Of course I do, I couldn't have been more than three or four years old when I first heard people talking about it. But the point is, hakim, why go on looking for it when we can write it ourselves? Or better yet, just talk it out in our old age? Why seek what can be lived? Could it be this very tent is the palace referred to in the tale? Don't the two of us know enough by now? An old man who's been nowhere, an old man who's been everywhere? Between us all the gifts and marvels, every one? Now admit it, hakim, you like this hillside don't you? Of course you do and that's why you're going to stay here. There must be an Arab saying for that. What could it be?

The desire of the stranger is to his people, said the hakim. Speed the stranger home.

Yes yes, good, speed the stranger home, that's it certainly. Yet it took you more than sixty years you say, and that's why you smile now when you look around your new home. Well that's just one of His little riddles, where would the world be without a few riddles and scraps of rhymes? All solemn ceremony, nothing but grave purpose. Anyway, how good you must feel to be with your people at last, to be home at last. Surely that's the greatest gift but one. No two.

And what are they, Ya'qub?

The first is the woman you love, the second is the child she gives you. But we don't have to think about that because soon you will have both.

I will?

Of course, it's in your eyes, nothing was ever clearer. Now just let me tell my daughter we have a guest for dinner, all this talk about faraway places has made me hungry. To find something at the end of the day that's been lost, how sweet it is. But there you go again and not just smiling but laughing as well. Why laugh at a man just because he's never been anywhere or done anything? There'll be laughter enough when people see us out walking, your head in the sky and mine on the ground. We'll look ridiculous together and they'll laugh but no matter, it can't be helped since that's the way it's going to be.

What is, Ya'qub?

What I glimpsed in your eyes just now, why were you trying to hide it? Your marriage to my daughter of course. One year from now or less, a son. But why are you laughing a third time, o former hakim? Hadn't you even read that in your lost book when I found you this afternoon? Didn't you know it was written long ago that this hillside in the Yemen would one day be your home? That what you have been seeking so long is the peacefulness of this very tent?

PART TWO

-8-

O'Sullivan Beare

We ourselves.

Some thirty years before the once great Generalissimo Wallenstein had become a fugitive in the mists of northern Bohemia, an Irish chieftain named O'Sullivan Beare was having his castle burned and his people slaughtered by the English in County Cork. He had no choice but to abandon his land and go on the run, which he did, from the south to the north of Ireland with one thousand of his people.

The month was January and the weather was severe as usual. Armies were in pursuit and the country was starving as usual. O'Sullivan Beare marched two hundred miles in fifteen terrible days and arrived in the north with only thirty-five survivors. After that heroic march the clan became famous in southwestern Ireland, where they were alternately known as the O'Sullivan Foxes when sober and cunning and the O'Sullivan Beares when drunk and blustering.

The bear and fox who would smuggle the first arms to the Haganah for Strongbow's son was born on one of the tiny Aran Islands that lay to the west of the country, a barren windswept outpost in the Atlantic so poor it had never been gifted with soil. The island had never supported a population of more than a few hundred souls, yet over the centuries fully one hundred saints had been born there. No area in Christendom had ever produced so many saints and it was generally believed this was because the place was so desolate its people had no choice but to be canonized or emigrate or stay drunk.

Or have large families, which they also did in abundance. Seven or eight children was normal and fifteen or twenty was not unknown, but Joe's family was unusual because he was one of thirty-three brothers, the youngest, this enormous brood fathered by one poor fisherman who was himself the seventh son of a seventh son, which meant he had an infallible gift of prophecy when moved to use it. Given the traditional shyness of the islanders it wasn't surprising he was so moved only when thoroughly drunk, which happened exactly three times a year, after mass on Christmas and Easter and June 14, the feast day of the island's patron saint.

On those days a barrel of stout was set in the corner of the room and all the men in the neighborhood dropped in to dance and sing and tell tales, since Joe's father was the undisputed king of the island, not only because he had the gift but also because he had thirty-three sons.

For young Joe there was magic in those special nights, the doings of the pookas and banshees and especially the little people, the trooping sly fairies who were seldom seen but often experienced, knee-high and dressed in bright green jackets and flat red hats and buckled shoes, mischievously passing the ages feasting and singing and holding their hurling matches brazenly on the strand. And then the doings of his brothers around the world with his father's prophecies interspersed, supernatural events to a young boy growing up on a bleak and rainy slip of land in the Atlantic where the rest of the year was spent at sea in a canoe made of cowhide, fighting the cold waves to lay miles of nets before daybreak.

Wondrous and special evenings for young Joe until the most fateful of all prophecies arrived on that June night in 1914.

That evening his father had neither sung nor danced, in fact he hadn't even spoken. Instead he sat by the hearth drinking and brooding until well after midnight.

Some of his friends made an effort at singing and dancing but nothing much came of it. The whole room was waiting for the king's customary accounts of miracles past and future, and without them they didn't know what to do. Yet still the king sat staring at the turf fire, downing his pints of stout and not saying a word.

It was ominous. This wasn't the king's way on a party night. Finally signs were made around the room in desperation and the oldest man among them broke the silence with a question.

Joe, would something be bothering you then?

For a long moment there was silence and then at last the king stirred. He muttered a word no one could hear.

What's that, Joe?

Trouble. I see trouble ahead.

What kind of trouble, Joe?

War.

But wars are always leaving or coming, Joe. What's that to us poor folk?

The king's face darkened. He prodded the fire.

Leaving or coming they are like the sea, but not like this one for me. In two weeks' time, you see, a duke is going to be shot in a place called Bosnia and they're going to use that as an excuse to make a great war. How great? Ten million dead and twenty million maimed, but that's not for me. What's for me is that seventeen of my sons are going to fight and die in that war, one in every bloody army that makes up that bloody war.

The silence deepened. The king took a long drink of stout and everyone took the opportunity to do the same. The king gazed into his mug and all the men in the room followed his example.

Terrible, whispered a voice.

Terrible? said the king. No they're men now and they can do what they want. What eats at this old heart is that not one of those seventeen sons of mine will die fighting for Ireland. Fight they will and bravely, die they will too for seventeen countries and not one of them my own. I sent them out and that's fair, it's their life to lead. But that's also our people for you, everyone's cause but our own. Fill the mugs now. We need a drink because I have something to say about this.

The men in the room quickly did so. Somberly they filed up to the barrel and filled their mugs and went back to their seats. The king's mug was refilled and returned to his gnarled hand.

He sat by the turf fire staring at the floor. When he sipped they sipped, when he cleared his throat they cleared their throats. Prophecy was a gift and couldn't be hurried. A man who was about to lose seventeen sons fighting in seventeen foreign armies had a right to weigh his thoughts. Still the question escaped once again from someone.