Silas eased Celeste to the hard stone stairs, then stood. He stared up at Pryce, jaw clenched, eyes narrowed. He remained still, his legs like cedars. Heavy, planted, unmovable.
“Run along, Grey. Time is running out.”
He looked down at Celeste. Pryce was right, time was running out. He quickly walked up the stairs, taking them by twos. Pryce eyed him skeptically, training his weapon on him with each step.
Silas parted the thick, heavy, crimson curtain in front of the entrance, but was confronted by an even heavier wooden door, solid and constructed with care. He tried the iron handle. Nothing.
“We already tried that,” Pryce said.
Silas sighed. “Hand me my gun.”
“Excuse me?”
“My gun. To blow the lock.”
“Do you take me for an idiot, Grey?”
“Time is running out!” Silas yelled. “Look, I’m not going to try anything. Scout’s honor. Put a gun to my head if you want, but the only way I’m getting through there and securing your precious Ark is if I blow it open.”
Pryce looked at Tulu and nodded. The man handed Silas back his weapon, then the two trained their guns at his head. He snatched it, then aimed for the door lock. He pressed the trigger three times. The sound was deafening, but it worked. The bullets chewed through the wood, and the iron handle fell off inside. There was a reason why the Beretta remained his weapon of choice.
Silas looked back at Pryce, his hand was outstretched. He handed his weapon back, parted the curtain, then pushed through the heavy wooden barrier to the other side.
Just beyond the door laid a small antechamber, the width of the square building and about ten feet in. The air was stale and still. Two sconces on either side of the entrance provided dim, orange light in the windowless room. The room was heavy with heat and humidity, the cramped space suffocating and closing in on him.
Before proceeding, he quickly brought out his phone and texted a mayday to Radcliffe: Pryce/Tulu showed up, with shootout. Celeste hit and bleeding. Need extraction ASAP! An extraction team was at least an hour out, but he breathed a short sigh of relief knowing the cavalry would arrive soon, and it would all be over.
But would he succeed in time to save Celeste?
The thought made him suck in heavy, rapid breaths for support. He felt a wave of suffocating panic begin to crest over him, but he closed his eyes and shook his head.
Get it together, Grey!
Standing between him and the rest of the space was another curtain. Silas approached it and stretched out his hands, laying them upon the heavy, fine linen woven with strands of indigo, violet, and crimson yarn, adorned with cherubim. He caressed it carefully, reverently. It was as if the room beyond hummed with a magnetic power that both repelled him and drew him inward.
He took a breath, then parted the heavy curtain, separating the outer entrance from the inner, sacred chamber.
The air inside hung thickly with incense. He could taste the spices in his mouth, a miasma that symbolized the Lord's presence. He started trembling slightly, his stomach a knot of butterflies with the realization that he was standing in a complete replica of what was once the Holy of Holies in Yahweh's Temple. He stood in awe of the massive inner sanctuary that stretched as long as the Solomon Temple itself had been wide, formed to its exact specifications from the Bible. There was barely enough light to make out the inside, an original feature intentionally designed to prevent people from looking upon the glory of the Lord as it hovered over the object of their pursuit. What little light existed came from twelve struggling candlesticks, symbolizing the twelve original tribes of Israel. The inside shimmered in undulating waves as the light ebbed and flowed over the twenty-three tons of beautiful gold overlaid upon its walls.
Commanding the room were sculptured cherubim, large and imposing, with wings outstretched and overlaid with more fine gold. One of the wings of the cherubim was seven-and-a-half feet and touched the inner wall, while its other wing touched the second cherubim's wing; the other cherubim had a similar wingspan and touched the first winged creature and the other temple wall. Their entire wings spanned thirty feet, and they faced inward, toward Silas and the object that lay below.
The Ark of the Covenant, the box of acacia wood overlaid with pure gold, both inside and outside, and decorated with molded gold.
His pulse quickened, his breath caught in his throat. There it was.
It was real.
It wasn't a large box, measuring less than four feet long and just over two feet wide and high. If it was indeed the Ark, it contained the sacred objects associated with God's presence with Israel in the desert, and serving as witnesses to future generations of the Lord's relationship with his people: the essential element of the covenant God forged with Israel, the pair of stone tablets with the Ten Commandments inscribed by Yahweh; the almond-wood staff of Aaron the high priest, which had miraculously budded and led to Israel’s defining, redemptive event, the exodus; and a golden pot containing the last traces of the mysterious manna that fell from Heaven to sustain the Israelites during their forty-year desert journey before reaching the Promised Land.
Draping it was what appeared to be a thick, blue cloth, embroidered with an emblem. He couldn’t quite make it out in the dim light, but it looked to be a dove. He recalled that in Wolfram’s Parzival the dove had also been the emblem of the Grail.
Silas instinctively started toward it, drawn to it by some holy power, but movement out of the corner of his eye made him stop short.
“Who's there?” he called out, squinting through the incense fog, struggling to see in the dim light.
“I should ask of you the same thing, perhaps.”
An older man emerged, his skin was dark and weathered. He was tall and lanky with a thick, gray beard down to his chest and wearing a gold-embroidered, pure white robe. His arms were folded in front of him, and he made no movement.
The Guardian Monk.
Silas stumbled for words, not knowing what to say. “For—Forgive me for invading your sacred space. I am a professor of Christian theology and religion. A Christian man myself, actually. I teach people about the memory of Christ and his Church. Anyway, my friend…” He turned toward the curtain, motioning toward the world beyond. “You see, my friend…she’s been shot. And taken captive—”
“By men who would seek the hidden covenant,” the man interrupted.
“Yes. I was told to secure it so that it could be retrieved and then exposed for the world to see. To give up its life for hers.”
The old man said nothing.
“Tell me.” He continued, taking a step forward. He hesitated, looking down at the floor, feeling foolish for even entertaining the question, but then he looked up and said, “Is it real? Is…Is it truly the Ark of the Covenant?”
The man continued looking at him saying nothing for the longest time, the silence of the moment filled by a sort of holy hum. Then he took a breath, and said, “What think you?”
Silas hesitated, looking from the man to the blue-draped, rectangular box. "I'm not sure. There is so much mystery surrounding it. So many different signs are pointing in several possible directions. But still leading here."
The man smiled, bright teeth gleaming in the barely lit darkness. “Ethiopians know that if you wish to hide a tree, then place it in a forest.”
He understood the analogy. “Show me the tree. Tell me the story.”
The old man stared back with weary eyes, as if he had been carrying a tiresome burden for half a century. “The story I will tell you, knowing a holy man you are, a servant of the Church you are. But with you, and you alone, the secret must remain.”
Silas quickly nodded, his mouth going dry from the adrenaline surge of anticipation, his eyes wide and transfixed on the man. “I understand. The story is safe with me.”
The tall man sat down and crossed his legs. He motioned for Silas to do the same. He hesitated, but dropped to his bottom. Then the man started:
“At the heart of the forest of clues and signs lies the golden Ark, which God directed Moses to build at the foot of Mount Sinai, the vessel of Yahweh’s covenant carried through the wilderness and across the river Jordan. The one that brought Yahweh’s people their victories in their struggle to win the Promised Land, and then was taken by King David up to Jerusalem and deposited by Solomon in the Holy of Holies of the First Temple.”
To Silas, none of this was disputed. He sensed the true story of the Ark about to emerge.
“Some three hundred years later, the vessel of Yahweh's covenant was removed by faithful priests who wished to preserve it from pollution at the hands of the wicked, pagan king Manasseh. Hide it away in safety on the far-off Egyptian island of Elephantine they did, along the mighty Nile. There, a new temple was built to house Yahweh's hidden covenant, one that lasted for two hundred more years.”
He recalled the crude drawing in Pryce’s journal, the one with the line snaking down the center with what looked like a body of water to the east. Now he knew that wasn’t a road, as they had thought, but a river. And the dot wasn’t Luxor, but another Egyptian city, Elephantine. The Ark had gone west, not east to Babylon—not to mention down beneath the Temple, as most had assumed.
“Eventually,” the Guardian Monk continued, “those Jews destroyed this temple. And wandering with this sacred vessel, resumed carrying it southward into the Kingdom of Aksum they did, a land crisscrossed by rivers. Having left one island, the Ark was brought to another one, Tana Kirkos, where it was installed in a simple tabernacle based on the design from the Torah in the Hebrew Scriptures, and worshiped there according to the customs. For the next eight hundred years, the hidden covenant stood at the center of a large Jewish religious system, the ancestors of all Ethiopian Jews today they are.”
“Fascinating,” Silas whispered. A verse came to mind, from one of the minor prophets, Zephaniah: “From beyond the rivers of Cush my worshipers, my scattered people, will bring me offerings.” Cush was the entire Nile Valley, south of Egypt, including Nubia and Abyssinia—modern Ethiopia!
“It was in the fourth century that Christianity came to our lands. Abba Salama, the Ethiopian name for Friumentius the bishop of Syria, had led King Evan and the entire Kingdom of Aksum to faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Shortly after that, they seized the Ark for themselves and took it to Aksum, placing it in the great church that they had built there, a church dedicated to Saint Mary the Mother of Christ.
“As the weary centuries passed, the story of the memory of how the Ark had come to the people of Ethiopia dimmed. Legends begat more legends to account for how the Aksumite people had acquired the most significant religious relic in the history of the world, seemingly selected by God himself to hide away the memory of his old covenant. These legends were codified in the Kebra Nagast, a bedrock of history and truth concealed beneath layers of myth and magic.”
Silas nodded with understanding. It was as he said to Celeste: a kernel of truth wrapped in myth.
“That truth, however, was recognized by the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon—”
“Excuse me,” he interrupted, “did you mean the Knights Templar? They pursued and discovered the Ark?”
“Indeed, sir.”
Silas thought of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival story, where the Holy Grail served as a cryptogram for the Ark of the Covenant. In his story, the heathen Flegetanis revealed that there was indeed "a thing called the Gral." He revealed that it was guarded by a Christian progeny bred to a pure life, perhaps the lineage of Guardians of which this man was apart. Eschenbach concluded with these words: "Those humans who are summoned to the Gral are ever worthy."
So too were those who were summoned to hide the Ark, the vessel of God’s covenantal relationship with his people. For Ark and Grail are one and the same.
Silas wondered if he was worthy enough.
He recalled the description of the sacred object from his research: the 40 cm square tabot of stone. “Why,” he questioned, “has every Ethiopian church kept a copy of this relic? The tabot, you call it. And shaped as a stone slab? Why is it so important to your people to have a connection to the Ark in this way?”
The man smiled again. “What do the Holy Scriptures tell us about the two covenants between God known to mankind?”
The prophetic word from Jeremiah quoted by the writer of the Book of Hebrews came to mind. He recited it from chapter 31:
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.
“You are correct. A new covenant, authored by the Living Stone. The tabot is meant to serve as a reminder that the old covenant, written on tablets of stone has been done away, and that a new covenant, written on the hearts of men has been established through Jesus Christ. The one who casts his eyes upon it is invited to either believe in this Stone, trusting it as a cornerstone to their relationship with God and to life itself, never to be put to shame. Or they can disbelieve it, stumbling over it as a rock to make them fall into eternal destruction.”
Silas nodded in recognition, marveling at the true depths of this metaphor for the sacredness of Jesus' death, and offer of new life through the cross.
Suddenly, he heard a sound, like the rushing of the wind or a tidal wave coming into shore. It sounded like the chanting and shouting of a mob of people.
And it seemed they were heading straight toward the chapel.
“Go. Old Grey Hair and his African companion are about to be paid in full. Generations of church deacons have guarded our treasure, using strength when necessary. They are here to make sure the relic of the old covenant stays hidden.”
Silas got up to leave, but the man held up a hand. “I must caution you: do not share what you have witnessed, what we have discussed.”
He nodded, then started toward the chamber exit. Several pops of gunfire stopped him cold. His heart sank. He looked at the old man, face stricken with panic.
The Guardian Monk looked toward the heavy curtain and nodded knowingly. “Go. Your redemption awaits.”