The Tenth Saint (2 page)

Hairan had put the man on his own mat and covered him with all of his woolen blankets to reverse his plummeting temperature. The stranger’s skin was cold and dry to the touch, as if life was slowly departing. The chief had never seen a man with skin the hue of bleached bone or hair the color of the sun. It did not matter. Whoever the stranger was and wherever he had come from, they were the same, just as man and beast and grain of desert sand were the same.

With the vacillating flame of an oil lamp as his sole guidance, the old man placed some herbs on a stone and rolled them between his fingers. He picked up a pinch and put it to his nose. “Not enough,” he muttered and continued crushing until the healing oils of the leaves were released.

When he was satisfied with the consistency and aroma of the paste, he rubbed a handful on the stranger’s cheeks, forehead, and lips and another on his chest. The remaining pulp he placed inside the man’s hands, closing them in loose fists.

Hairan lifted his own hands to the sky in deference to the powers. “I am a simple man who knows nothing,” he chanted softly. “Whatever wisdom has been granted me I gladly share with my pale brother. But he is not mine to save. His fate is known only by the Great Spirit, the keeper of all life.”

He curled up on the ground next to the stranger. That would be his bed tonight, cold and inhospitable as it was. Discomfort was not appalling to the Bedouin. It was as much a part of existence in the desert as the beating sun or a camel’s foul breath or the endless expanse of dunes gilded by the last streaks of daylight.

Hairan stared at the man who lay battling for his earthly life. With his sharp-angled nose, pale pink lips, long fingers and limbs, and unpigmented hide, he was neither Bedouin nor Arab, nor Jew for that matter.

Taneva walked in with a glass of warm goat’s milk. “Will he live?”

The chief shook his head. “Of this I cannot be certain.”

“Is he one of those savages from the East, Shaykh?”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps he is from the other side of the Red Sea, a trader. There is no need to ask such questions. All things will be revealed if it is time and if we are ready.”

“You are a wise man, Hairan. A generous man.”

“I do only what is required of me. We are all one, and we live to serve each other.”

She threw her own blanket on Hairan and stroked his hair tenderly in a rare display of affection. Before the other inhabitants of the goums, he was the shaykh and she an old woman. Only when they were alone was she his mother. “Your father would be proud. Good night, my son.”

The stranger opened his eyes on the morning of the seventh day. The veil of unconsciousness still weighed heavily on his eyelids, and his body ached so much he could do no more than lie still.

He surveyed his surroundings in the stupor of long slumber, like a bear awakened from hibernation. The walls were thick burlap, the roof held up by a tree trunk in the center of the room. There was no floor. He lay on blankets stretched out on sand. In the far corner was a small bench carved from wood holding some stone implements. At his bedside were an earthen pot, blackened from fire, and a pile of filthy gauze. His blankets were woolen and so heavy he did not have the strength to lift them, but they were beautiful, obviously woven by an artist’s hands, with images of stars and scorpions and all-seeing eyes in indigo, saffron, and crimson.

Though he tried to sort out what was happening, his brain was not processing it. The images were unfamiliar. He knew he was inside a tent, but whose, where? Was he in danger? And how had he gotten here? His head ached as he tried to recall the circumstances that had brought him to this place. He could not. He was looking around in frustration, desperate for a clue to spark his memory, when a man ducked in.

The man nodded at him but said nothing. A tight smile crossed his weathered lips, and his face contorted to reveal a network of furrows.

“Who are you?” he croaked in English. “What is this place? Why am I here?”

The chief said something in an incomprehensible language, dipped gauze in liquid, and wiped his brow.

He started to pull away but lacked the strength to put up a fight.

The chief handed him a small clay pot, pointed to his own lips, and spoke again.

Still bewildered, he turned his head away. “Leave me be, old man. Go tend to your goats or something.”

The chief slipped out of the tent in silence.

With eyes closed, he tried to summon a memory. Random images raced through his mind, and it was impossible to make sense of them. He saw faces— faces he did not recognize, their features erased by memory’s cruel hand. Metallic voices banged around his head, mocking him with their sinister pitch. There was darkness, then a bright orange light, amorphous and violent, like fire. The image chilled his blood. A woman’s voice emerged from behind the darkness. He could not see her face, but her voice was calm and comforting. She spoke a single word:
Gabriel.

He knew with all certainty that the name was his own, but his memory cheated him of all else. No amount of effort could muster the recollection of who Gabriel was and what he had been.

Two

A
t high noon, the sub-Saharan sun baked the earth to a brittle dust. The ground was fragile and dry, like old parchment. Every time a shovel crunched into the dirt, the dust rose in great swirls and hung in the air. Sarah Weston took a break from digging and wiped the grime and sweat from her brow. She was exhausted after working since dawn, as she had every morning for the past five months, trying to find something—anything—to confirm her theory that beneath the hot earth and granite lay a royal necropolis the likes of which no archaeologist had discovered intact in this part of the world.

Aksum. The Ethiopian empire that centuries ago was the most powerful kingdom in East Africa and Arabia. The fabled ancestral land of the Queen of Sheba. The home of kings and powerful warriors and untold wealth, all buried in great labyrinths beneath the broken stelae standing like silent eternal soldiers on the foothills of Mount Saint George.

Sarah confirmed her coordinates against the georadar readings. “This has to be the place.” She dug her flat-edge shovel into the earth.

This routine was nothing new to her. As an archaeologist with Cambridge University, she had been dispatched on expeditions around the world, from the tombs of Egypt to the Akrotiri site in Santorini to an unknown Mayan city deep in the jungles of Guatemala. In the field, no one would ever guess she was an aristocrat, the only daughter of a British baronet and an American actress as legendary for her beauty as for the vodka and Valium habit that claimed her life.

In spite of the notorious Weston name, Sarah kept her private life private and went to great lengths to stand on equal ground with her crew. She was the first to roll up her sleeves before dawn and the last to hang up her pickaxe at night.

She looked nothing like the debutantes she’d grown up with. She didn’t try to tame her cascading blonde curls, tucking them instead into cheap bandanas she bought from the sidewalk merchants. Her figure, as lean and lithe as a greyhound’s, she hid under baggy, shabby khakis and tattered Marks & Spencer T-shirts. Her eyes had the color and clarity of glacial ice, but no one would know it because she rarely removed the big black aviators she’d had since grad school. And she made no special effort to remove the dark crescent from the tips of her fingernails. The “noble dirt,” as she called it, reminded her of her connection to the earth and to the people who’d walked it before her.

She worked the dig like everyone else, even though she was leading the expedition—the first time in her thirty-five years she had been given that coveted opportunity. She knew better than to get on a high horse; it was too easy to fall or be knocked down—something she had learned from her mother the hard way.

“So frustrating,” said Aisha, an exchange student from Al Akhawayn University in Morocco. “It’s been, what, five months? You’d think we would hit pay dirt by now.”

“Patience, girl,” Sarah said without looking up. “This isn’t an Indiana Jones movie. The first lesson of archaeology: it always takes longer than you think. Second lesson: no matter how long it takes, you keep at it.”

With long, dark fingers, Aisha adjusted her hijab. She sighed with the impatience of youth and nodded toward the mountains beyond the work site. “Do you think there’s something out there?”

A light breeze whispered across the parched landscape. Sarah squinted toward the horizon. “I know so.”

“Is that your professional opinion or the famous gut feeling archaeologists are supposed to have?”

”Bit of both, I suppose. Look, if it were easy, chances are the site would be looted already. The fact that it’s taken us this long to find it is actually a good sign. Whatever’s down there has very likely not been seen by human eyes for fifteen-plus centuries. That’s a sexy prospect, don’t you think?”

“Only a Brit would think that’s sexy.”

Sarah laughed and patted the girl’s shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go into town to get some lunch. I’m absolutely famished.”

The modern town of Aksum had nothing of its once-great identity. Forgotten by all but the faithful, who kept guard over the churches, and the farmers, who insisted on scratching a living off* the arid earth, it stood as a sad reminder of an eminence long lost.

Still, the town claimed forty-seven thousand inhabitants, most of them out and about at midday. The place bustled. The spicy aroma of
wat
cooking emanated from clay courtyards. Old, toothless women, too feeble to cook, sat on benches on the sides of the road, spinning cotton for the looms. Children ran unchecked on the half-paved streets, shrieking their delight as they chased each other with thorny acacia vines. Villagers wearing white cotton robes and the gaunt countenance of poverty loitered in the streets with no other intent than to alleviate their boredom, the kind that is inevitable in a poor, isolated farm town.

Sarah’s favorite canteen was Tigrinya, a helter-skelter roadside stand that fed hundreds of Ethiopians at lunchtime. The food was not particularly good, but the energy was priceless. Everybody gathered there to see each other and share the gossip. This day was like any other: nowhere to sit, locals fighting with the cook over the wait for their meals, the stench of hot oil saturating the air, Amharic music blaring from an eighties vintage boom box.

“Try to snag a table,” she said to the others. “I’ll go order.”

She spoke Amharic better than any of her crew. Since childhood she’d had a flair for language, and her ability to pick up foreign tongues in mere months had given her an advantage among archaeologists. She liked to practice on the locals while standing in the lines, engaging the farmers in conversations about the brutal rainless summer and the teenage boys about their foosball strategies. Truth be told, she enjoyed talking with the Africans more than with her own people, whose cannibalistic gossip about one another she found insufferably boring.

Over her shoulder, an Ethiopian man whispered in broken English, “You are the English lady, yes? From the dig in the valley.”

She turned to face the stranger. He was tall and lanky, wearing torn Levi’s that hit above the ankle, a chain with a silver Menelik coin pendant, and an old Yankees baseball cap. She sized him up as the typical profiteer from these parts who would trade counterfeit antiquities for anything foreign, preferably American. She forced a stiff-lipped smile but did not reply.