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David Christopher Lane, Ph.D, is a Professor of Philosophy at Mt. San Antonio College and Founder of the MSAC Philosophy Group. He is the author of several books, including The Sound Current Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and the graphic novel, The Cult of the Seven Sages, translated into Tamil (Kannadhasan Pathippagam, 2024). His website is neuralsurfer.com

The Gospel Of The Shallow Grave

The Book That Would Not Burn, a Mystery

David Lane

A PERSONAL PREFACE

Being raised Roman Catholic was less a religious upbringing and more a theatrical immersion. Twelve years in Catholic school—think incense, Latin, and the occasional ruler to the knuckles—left me steeped in catechism and moral absolutism. That is, until I was ignominiously ejected before my senior year at Notre Dame High, which in retrospect may have been the Holy Spirit doing me a favor. By fifteen, I was speaking in tongues—not metaphorically—and leading Bible studies like a junior Aquinas, confident I was helping pave the way for the Second Coming or, at the very least, impressing the theology teacher.

I vividly recall a pivotal theological skirmish during my freshman year. I asked Father Costello, a well-read Dominican whose white robes masked a curiously glib disdain for speculation, a loaded question: “Father, what would happen to your faith if archaeologists found the actual bones of Jesus?” His response, delivered without hesitation and with a twinkle of Dionysian glee, was that he'd renounce his collar and party like a first-century Corinthian. To which I, still wet behind the theological ears but already cursed with Socratic instincts, replied: “Then you don't love Jesus—you love an idea of him.” That remark did not endear me to the priesthood.

Years later, with an M.A. in the phenomenology of religion from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley (where sacred cows are not only questioned—they're often turned into vegan burgers), I came to a quietly unsettling realization: we know more about our next-door neighbors' dental hygiene than we do about the historical Jesus. He left no writings. No self-portrait. No first-person memoir—just a paper trail of third-hand anecdotes stitched together decades after his death, filtered through competing theological agendas.

My wife, Andrea Diem—who studied under the legendary Ninian Smart and earned her Ph.D. in religious studies from UC Santa Barbara—became my intellectual sparring partner. An expert in Gnosticism, she often reminded me of John Dominic Crossan's thesis, the one that sends a shudder through Sunday school circles: Jesus wasn't buried in a rock-hewn tomb guarded by Romans and visited by grief-stricken disciples at dawn. No, Crossan contends, he was likely tossed in a shallow grave, like most crucified criminals, where his remains were promptly recycled by Jerusalem's street-cleaning committee of dogs and vultures.

To summarize Crossan (without losing your lunch): he argues that Roman custom rarely involved dignified burials for executed prisoners. The Gospels' detailed burial narrative, featuring Joseph of Arimathea playing undertaker, may be less journalism and more theological fan fiction. At best, Jesus might've received a hasty, unmarked interment. At worst, he was carrion. Scavenged, not sanctified.

Other scholars have echoed this, suggesting that the Gospels' emphasis on the empty tomb might reflect more wishful thinking than historical reportage. The emphasis on resurrection perhaps necessitated a certain embellishment of the burial narrative—a theological sleight of hand aimed at salvaging credibility. After all, who would rally around a messiah whose bones were scattered like potshards?

Now, I'm not saying this is definitively what happened. We don't have a CSI: Golgotha to consult. But I will say this: the deeper I dove into gospel criticism, the more I came to see that the Jesus of popular Christianity is a literary construct—stitched together from prophecy, desperation, and post-traumatic hope.

Take, for example, the poignant moment in the Gospel of John where Mary Magdalene finds the tomb empty. She doesn't immediately leap to “He is risen!” Instead, she mistakes Jesus for the gardener and plaintively asks, “Sir, where have you taken him?” It's a moment of grief, not triumph—a raw, honest, deeply human response. Her reaction isn't theological—it's personal. And that makes it all the more believable.

Of course, Jesus then calls her by name, and like the final reveal in a Shakespearean comedy, everything clicks. But even here, the resurrection feels more visionary than physical. A recognition of presence rather than proof of anatomy.

And let's not even get started on the other bizarre plot twists. According to Matthew, a zombie flash mob of “holy people” rises from their graves and takes a walk into Jerusalem. A miracle? Maybe. A Monty Python sketch? Definitely. And yet, mysteriously, not a single Roman historian, not even a gossip-hungry local scribe, makes any mention of it.

In the end, one is left marveling not at the miraculous, but at the myth-making machine. The Jesus who dined with sinners, flipped tables, and told parables that bewildered bureaucrats has been eclipsed by the Jesus who must fulfill prophecies like a messianic checklist.

So here's a fictional tale that follows—a speculative detour, if you will—that dares to look under the stone the Church has so carefully rolled into place. Perhaps, in doing so, we'll glimpse not the gardener or the god, but the man—dusty, hunted, uncompromising—and possibly closer to truth than theology dares permit.

Episode I The Scriptorium of San Clemente

Brother Rainerius liked to imagine that words possessed a fragrance and that, once spoken, their scent could linger for centuries. The scriptorium of San Clemente, perched like a swallow's nest on a ragged Apennine cliff, seemed scented perpetually with his voice: warm beeswax and myrrh when he read the promises of Isaiah; sharp pine-resin when he declaimed Paul's scoldings; and this morning—because the parchment on his lectern bore the mysterious title Εὐαγγέλιον Ἰακώβου —a cautious, cedar-smoke aroma, as though the text were half-afraid of its own antiquity.

Rainerius (dictating, steady and low): “Post triduum Dominus surrexit, corpus suum indicans discipulis...”

Fifteen quills moved in synchrony, an insect chorus of scratches and sighs. The scriptorium itself was a hall of disciplined daylight: roof-beams blackened by four centuries of hearth-smoke; lancet windows fitted with thin alabaster; and, at either end, squat braziers to keep the ink from clotting in mountain chill. Down the centre ran two oaken trestles polished by elbows and candle-drips, each wide enough to carry eight parchment sheets side by side. Calfskins—uterina grade, the colour of raw cream—lay pinned beneath pumice stones. Pots of lamp-black, verdigris, and crushed azurite waited like court ladies in bright gowns.

Brother Marcus sat third from the right, a Lombard by birth, wiry, black-haired, fingertips perpetually dusted with iron-gall ink. His script—thick verticals, hair-fine horizontals—had earned him the unofficial title angelica penna, but this morning his angelic hand betrayed a tremor no one else could see. For while the fourteen other scribes copied Rainerius letter-perfect, Marcus's quill occasionally twitched toward words the lector had not uttered, and tiny deletions—ink-flecks no larger than gnats—soon speckled the margin where he had scraped away forbidden phrases.

The Hidden Codex

Three months earlier, Brother Josaphat had died of a fever so violent it left saffron bruises blooming up his arms. On the fourth night of his agony, during that lucid hush which sometimes precedes death, Josaphat had gripped Marcus's sleeve.

Josaphat (hoarse whisper): “They gave me the truer words—logia Simonos. You—are younger—stronger. Hide them. Copy them. One day light.”

From beneath his straw pallet he had produced a rag-wrapped bundle: forty-odd folia of brittle parchment, sewn on goat-gut cords, the Greek letters crabbed and feverish but unmistakably ancient. The title leaf was gone; the surviving colophon read only ... ὁ ἀδελφὸς τοῦ Κυρίου. Marcus, whose Greek was passable, spent every free hour squinting at the text by rush-light. Within a week he had realized two explosive facts:

1. The speaker identified himself not as James but as Simon, another brother of Jesus.

2. Every resurrection saying was spiritual, not bodily. One logion placed Jesus's corpse in a “shallow trench” to spare it from dogs.

Marcus believed, with the fervour of a man discovering his own heart's secret, that Josaphat's codex was older—perhaps by a century—than most canonical gospels. Yet he also knew the cost of such belief. The Dominican stallions that patrolled heresy across Italy never stopped to ask scholarly questions.

He therefore made a bargain with silence: he memorised. Every page. Every uncertain breathing mark. Then—on a night when moonlight striped the cloister tiles—he fed the folia one by one into the refectory hearth. Flames licked crimson; ashes curled like black snow. The codex vanished, yet its words took roost in his skull, fierce and sleepless.

Day-Work and Night-Work

Rainerius's dictation sessions ran from prime to sext. After sext the scribes cleaned pens, stretched cramped fingers, and filed off to their allotted obediences—goat-herding, cellar-keeping, pulpit-repair. Marcus, officially assigned to the herb-garden, instead slipped back into the scriptorium whenever he dared. There, by the grey light that lingered even after sunset in high mountain air, he ruled fresh parchment, dipped his pen, and wrote:

“Hi sunt sermones secretos quos Simon, frater Domini, retulit Iacobo in diebus post passionem ”

He wrote as though pursued by a wolf. Ink pools dried glossy; pages piled. By the ninth evening he had filled forty-two folia—almost half the length of the original but already close to twelve thousand words. He left wide gutters for illumination, knowing Brother Petrus the limner might be coaxed into complicity: Petrus's loyalty was to beauty first, theology a distant second.

Marcus also developed a perilous habit: during the day, while taking Rainerius's dictation, he occasionally substituted a single word of Simon for a word of James—sepulcrum became fossa humilis, resurgere mutated to transfigurari. To the casual eye, the Latin lines appeared pristine; only a reader fluent in Greek nuance would notice that the text itself had begun to slip its ecclesiastical harness.

The Art of the Page

Illuminating a codex at San Clemente followed five precise stages:

1. Parchment Mastery. Brother Gervase scraped calfskins with lunella blades, then rubbed pumice and chalk to whiten the surface.

2. Pricking and Ruling. Brother Hugo used an awl and a lead-weighted line to score faint horizontals—26 lines per page, 40 mm inner margin.

3. Ink and Quill. Quills were cut at a 30-degree angle, edges hardened in hot sand. Ink brewed from oak-gall, iron-sulfate, and wine-vinegar darkened to near-black within days.

4. Pigment Preparation. Sister parchmenters (San Clemente kept a small adjoining convent) ground lapis lazuli for heavenly blues, verdigris for greens, and cinnabar for the apocalyptic sun.

5. Gilding. Petrus mixed bole from Armenian clay and beaten egg-white, laid it in tiny hillocks, breathed moisture to tack it, then pressed wafer-thin gold leaf with the pad of his thumb.

Each step smelled different: lime and milk from scraped hide, iron and sour wine from ink, the sweet-and-rot tang of egg-white turning under flame. For Marcus, these smells braided comfort with danger. To be a scribe was to be at once a craftsman and a powder-monkey dancing over kegs of doctrinal dynamite.

Suspicion

Brother Aimo, San Clemente's disciplinarian, measured monks the way a merchant measures barley—by weight, moisture, and signs of hidden vermin. He noticed Marcus's shadowy eyelids, the near-feverish gloss of his gaze.

Aimo: “Brother, you lean like a vine starved of trellis. Confess.”

Marcus (half-smile): “Only zeal leans me forward, brother. Zeal to finish the abbot's noble commission.”

Aimo accepted the answer with the thin nod of a man noting a debt, not granting a favour.

Petrus Enlisted

Two days later Petrus summoned Marcus beneath the eaves of the paint-shed. The limner's fingers were flecked with ultramarine; his beard smelled of garlic and egg-glair.

Petrus: “I hear you labour nights on a secret text.”

Marcus (pulse quickening): “From whom did you hear?”

Petrus: “From silence itself—the loudest gossip. Show me one page.”

Marcus hesitated, then withdrew the first folio from beneath his scapular. Petrus studied the lines, lips moving. When he looked up, his eyes glittered like a jeweller's appraising a forbidden ruby.

Petrus: “The theology is molten. But the art—imagine Christ rising pure light, his flesh merely hinted with shell-gold, the grave no tomb of quarried stone but an earthen channel below a thorn-bush. I could paint that.”

Marcus: “Will you?”

Petrus: “On one condition: that beauty remain queen, heresy merely her daring necklace.”

The pact was sealed with a clasp of ink-stained hands.

Lightning on the Mountains

The mountain summer ended in one violent storm. Lightning cracked the ridge and for an instant the whole scriptorium flared like a lantern. In that white flash Brother Aimo, passing the open door, glimpsed Marcus bending over sheets not part of the official copy. Within the hour, the disciplinarian had rifled Marcus's desk and drawn out two folia—pages nineteen and twenty—of the clandestine gospel.

At dawn the great iron bell tolled capitulum. Monks filed into the chapter-house, cowls dripping from a night of leaks. Abbot Honorius sat beneath the carved Christus Rex, his face a shuttered window.

Honorius: “A parchment, unsigned, unsanctioned, denying the Holy Resurrection, has been found in Brother Marcus's possession.”

Rainerius (incensed): “Heresy in our midst!”

Marcus (stepping forward): “Holy Father, the text bears the witness of Simon, kin of the Lord, and may predate—”

Honorius (rising): “Silence. Until the diocesan bishop judges, you are bound by vincula silentii. You will speak to no one. You will write nothing save the creed.”

Marcus was chained in the calefactory, a low room smelling of ashes and wet wool. Outside, rain hissed like a crowd of whisperers.

That night Petrus crept to the grated window.

Petrus (urgent): “They will burn you and the pages. I have prepared a rope of twisted parchment and a file. The postern gate is unbarred after matins. Run. Take both manuscripts.”

Marcus's chest ached with a feeling that was half terror, half elation. He took the file, the rope, and a small oilskin packet: pigments enough to illuminate three capital letters on the road, should God grant him leisure.

Eve of Flight

Sext the next day passed under thick cloud. By vespers the rain had slackened; stars pricked through like flints struck on iron. At compline, while the community chanted In manus tuas, Domine, Marcus counted heartbeats. At the final Amen he began to saw at the window-bar. Iron groaned; flakes of rust sprinkled his sleeves.

The moment the bar gave way, he swung out, dropped to the cloister garth, and crouched among the lavender bushes. The bell-tower showed midnight. He slipped through the vegetable plot, through the wooden postern, and into the dark pinewoods beyond.

On a work-bench near the gate Petrus had left a pilgrim's cloak, a water-skin, three silver denarii, and a mule with patient eyes. Tied beneath the saddle was a leather tube containing:

Codex I: The official Latin Gospel of James as far as it had been completed—104 folia—now laced with Marcus's subtle emendations.

Codex II: The partial Latin Gospel of Simon, 42 folia, unfinished illumination but exquisite calligraphy.

Marcus mounted, whispered a Psalm, and guided the mule down the goat-track that zig-zagged to the valley. Behind him San Clemente glowed faintly, window by window, lanterns flaring as monks discovered his absence. A bell began to toll frater fugitivus—the brother-fugitive alarm—and its sound chased him like a thrown spear into the night.

Pursuit

Brother Aimo wasted no time. He and two lay-brothers saddled the monastery's Flemish chargers and thundered down the trail, torches streaming sparks.

Marcus reached the river ford by dawn. Mist coiled off the water; frogs croaked as if mocking. He urged the mule across, hooves sloshing; on the far bank he turned south along a cart-track toward Monte Speranza, the nearest market town. By midday the mule was lathered, Marcus dizzy from sleeplessness. Yet when he glanced back he saw nothing but heat-shivered pines.

In Monte Speranza, festival banners drooped over mud streets; a crusade recruiter bellowed promises of remission; jugglers and pickpockets plied parallel trades. Marcus stabled the mule behind the Faucon Rouge tavern, entered by the rear, and ordered thin wine that tasted of metal. He kept one hand on the leather tube, his heart fluttering like a trapped wren.

A man in a mud-flecked cloak took the neighbouring stool. He had surveyor's eyes—quick, measuring—and a scar that pulled his mouth into permanent irony.

Stranger: “Scripts change worlds. Yours must be very heavy, the way you clutch it.”

Marcus (dry-mouthed): “I copy for churches. Weight of habit, nothing more.”

Stranger (smiling): “Habit is a name we give to fear.”

Steel winked—a slender poniard sliding between ribs, as delicate as a scholar inserting a bookmark. Marcus gasped. Ink-black dots flooded his vision. The stranger caught the leather tube before it hit the floor, tipped his hood in courtesy, and vanished through the crowd.

Marcus's knees buckled. He slumped against the ale-tub, warm liquid soaking his habit—blood or wine, he could not tell. Above him tavern rafters twisted like serpents. Brother Aimo burst in, sword drawn, just in time to see the life-light flicker out of Marcus's eyes.

Marcus (last whisper, barely sound): “Ethiopia ... look to Ethiopia... ”

Aimo knelt but could only close the staring lids. The manuscripts were gone.

Coda of Episode I

In the courtyard of San Clemente, Petrus the limner learned of Marcus's fate two days later when a tired messenger arrived with Aimo's brief report. Petrus carried the scrap of parchment to his paint-shed, crushed a cake of ultramarine to dust beneath his thumb, and whispered, “Beauty has a longer memory than doctrine.” Then he locked the door and began mixing fresh gold leaf, though for what future page he could not yet guess.

Episode II Embers Beneath the Ashes

The bells of San Clemente tolled the De Profundis for Brother Marcus at sunrise on the twelfth day after his flight. Their slow bronze throats sent sorrow rolling down gullies where goats browsed and bandits slept. Yet grief was only the surface wash on a deeper current of unease. In the dormitory, monks lay awake wondering whether Heaven truly kept its books so tidily that a single quill-stroke could not unsettle the columns; in the refectory they tasted bitterness in the lentils, as though heresy might season food.

Abbot Honorius, in contrast, could not afford melancholy. Two crises, not one, faced him: the bishop's inquisitorial envoy would soon arrive to audit the monastery's orthodoxy, and the codices whose safe duplication had merited papal favour were now lost—stolen, perhaps corrupted, certainly destined to re-emerge in hostile hands. A monastery's reputation was a tapestry: pull one bright thread and the whole cloth ravelled.

Honorius therefore summoned the one man he mistrusted only slightly less than the Devil: Brother Aimo.

1 Orders at Dawn

They met in the calefactory, where ash from yesterday's fire still radiated faint heat. Honorius shut the door, pressed a ringed hand to the latch so no stray novice might eavesdrop, and said without preamble:

Honorius: “You failed.”

Aimo (steady): “I retrieved neither the monk nor the manuscripts, this is true.”

Honorius: “What is also true is that the diocesan envoy, Canon Leontius, will arrive within the fortnight. He will want proof that our scandal is contained.”

Aimo: “Containment may yet be possible. Marcus died naming Ethiopia. The thief, therefore, intends to smuggle the writings south—most likely through Venetian or Pisan merchants who traffic with Alexandria, then on to the highlands.”

Honorius (arching a brow): “You have a talent for conjecture.”

Aimo: “I have a talent for hunting. Grant me leave, two trusted lay-brothers, and funds to hire sea-passage. I will pursue the trail until I feel Ethiopian soil.”

Honorius (after a long pause): “Very well. Failure will end in excommunication, Aimo—and the headsman's axe besides.”

Aimo: “I travel light of conscience, Father. If Simon's gospel truly exists, I will see it sealed in holy fire.”

They spoke further—money, disguises, letters of credit—then parted. Honorius stood by the hearth long after, listening to the wind rattle the shutters, wondering if he had just loosed a wolf upon a flock comprised in part of his own moral scruples.

2 Petrus at the Crucible

While Aimo prepared for departure, Brother Petrus locked himself in the paint-shed and worked as if gold leaf could resurrect the dead. He chose a fresh bifolium of fine vellum—uterina supera lux—and sketched an initial M that nearly filled the page: a maze of vines twisting into a chrysalis-shape. Within that chrysalis he painted a figure robed in light, half-opaque, half-invisible, torso dissolving into filigree flame.

“Marcus,” he murmured, “and the Word that seeped through him.”

Next, Petrus ground verdigris to a musty green, tracing leaves that curled like questing fingers. At the tips he dabbed minute droplets of Armenian bole, then breathed, slow and warm, until the bole sweated tack. Sheets of gold leaf hovered in his tweezers like dragonfly wings; with the gentlest sigh he pressed them to the bole. Light burst across the page. It was, he reflected, the nearest he would ever come to transubstantiation.

Seldom did the limner reflect on the theological implications of his art; beauty, for him, justified itself. Yet the image that took shape on this page unsettled him, as though colour and gold were conspiring to say something inchoate, terrible, and necessary. When the bell rang for sext he ignored it. By none he had completed the capital and half the border. Only then did he collapse onto a rush mat and sleep dreamlessly.

3 Rainerius Turns a Page

Brother Rainerius, lector and senior scribe, found himself adrift. For thirty years his vocation had been the orchestration of other voices: dictating standard texts, choosing the precise syllabic cadence that allowed tired copyists to keep pace. With Marcus dead and the project of James gutted, he felt as if someone had snatched the pitch-pipe from a choirmaster's hand mid-concert.

Rainerius therefore asked permission to examine Marcus's cell for surviving notes—ostensibly to safeguard doctrinal purity, though in truth he was driven by curiosity tinged with envy. Honorius consented, but only after swearing him to secrecy.

The cell was small: cot, prayer-stool, a shelf holding medicinal herbs. Yet hidden behind a loose stone Rainerius discovered something not even Aimo had unearthed: a palimpsest scrap—mere inches wide—bearing faint Greek beneath fresh Latin scribble. Using vinegar fumes from a tiny brazier, he coaxed the under-text to darken. The Greek read:

“ for the grave is shallow, but the Spirit measures depthless. Seek not the body, for the body is a garment caught on thorns.”

Rainerius felt his pulse quicken. It was a voice both alien and eerily familiar—the cosmic ring of John's prologue married to a peasant's bluntness. He copied the line onto a wax tablet, re-hid the scrap, and left the cell with a weight in his sleeve heavier than parchment had any right to be.

That night, while the community slept, Rainerius stood alone in the scriptorium staring at the lectern that had once held James. Thunder growled among the peaks. A candle guttered, sputtered. In the wavering light he whispered:

“What if Simon sang truer notes, and Paul merely louder?”

Immediately he crossed himself, muttered the Athanasian Creed from memory, and ground the heel of his palm into his forehead as if to crush the thought. Heresy might sprout from a single unguarded question.

Still, the question refused to die.

4 The Murderer Named

News travelled strangely along medieval byways. Five days after Marcus's funeral, a muleteer from Monte Speranza arrived bearing a letter addressed to Magister Petrus scriptorius. The seal showed a falcon clutching a quill—arms known to belong to Lord Alessio da Bargini, a minor noble whose fortunes waxed on rumor and waned on proof.

Petrus met the muleteer in the outer courtyard. The man's hands shook as if palsied.

Muleteer: “I was paid two florins to carry this, no questions. But questions weigh on a man.”

Petrus (studying the seal): “Did you see the payer's face?”

Muleteer: “A scar bent his mouth. He smelled of cloves.”

Petrus (heart hammering): “And did he carry a leather tube of manuscripts?”

Muleteer: “Aye. Guarded it closer than a mother hen.”

Petrus (soft): “You have done enough. Go in peace.”

The limner retreated to the paint-shed, broke the seal, and unrolled the letter. Latin in a slanted mercantile hand:

“To the artist whose gold has caught Heaven: know that your late companion sold his soul to lies. I hold his writings—for now. Their worth to me exceeds gold; their worth to Rome exceeds blood. If you would bargain, bring your brushes and silence to the Falcon's Nest outside Monte Speranza at the new moon. —Mélior.”

Petrus had never heard the name, yet intuition told him it was the scar-mouthed stranger. He burnt the letter but committed every curve of its script to memory. Then he sought Rainerius.

5 The Conspiracy Grows

Candle-light haloed the lector's tonsure as Petrus recounted the message. Rainerius listened, expression unreadable.

Rainerius: “You realise an ambush awaits. Mélior may aim to flush out accomplices.”

Petrus: “An ambush for whom? Marcus is beyond harm. The monastery's good name hangs already by a frayed hair. I will go—to see, to learn, perhaps to rescue what Marcus died for.”

Rainerius (quietly): “Then I go with you.”

They agreed on secrecy. On the appointed eve, they would slip away under pretext of negotiating pigment supplies in Monte Speranza. They would carry no valuables save Petrus's brushes—eels-hair, squirrel-tail, and a single wolf-hair liner no thicker than a maiden's eyelash—and Rainerius's wits, sharper than any sword he disdained to bear.

6 Aimo on the Adriatic

Meanwhile Brother Aimo, disguised in layman's wool and carrying letters of credit from a sympathetic Florentine banker, rode east. At Ancona he found a Genoese merchant vessel, Santa Lucia, bound for Alexandria with stops at Ragusa and Crete. The captain demanded a steep fare; Aimo paid without bartering, citing urgency.

The voyage south was a catechism of peril. Off Ragusa, pirates gave chase; a sudden squall off Cape Malea cracked the mainmast. Aimo spent nights lashed to the rail, rain stinging his eyes, praying not for safety but for signs—driftwood, rumours, anything—to confirm he pursued a real foe and not a phantom conjured by a dying monk.

It was in Crete that fortune offered a thread. While taking on water at Candia, Aimo visited the quay-side souk where Levantine brokers sold everything from saffron to stolen chalices. At a wine-stall he overheard two Venetian factors haggling over “a codex so riddled with gold that the illuminations alone could buy a bishop's seat.” They spoke of a courier named Mélior, sailing ahead on a swift Pisan galley to Antioch, thence overland to the Red Sea ports.

Aimo bought the factors enough retsina to dull discretion, learned Mélior's ship was called the Santa Giustina, and that it had departed Crete four days earlier, heading east on a fresh meltemi wind. Distance widened, yet Aimo's resolve hardened. With the Santa Lucia still undergoing repairs, he bargained passage on a smaller, faster corsair-built vessel crewed by Rhodian knights. They would pursue the Giustina along the Anatolian coast, then perhaps cut south through Cyprus Channel.

7 The Falcon's Nest

Back in Italy, Rainerius and Petrus reached Monte Speranza two evenings before the new moon. The stench of uncollected refuse mingled with incense wafting from a wayside shrine. They lodged at an inn called the Starving Fox, whose attic rooms they shared with weevils and an ageing crusader missing three fingers. By day they browsed markets, hearing gossip: Mélior had indeed been seen, negotiating for quick horses, selling lapis fragments “like chips of sky.” Suspicion grew that he had not acted alone; a Lombard money-lender boasted of advancing coin to a silent partner whose signet bore crossed quills.

As dusk bled into indigo on the night of rendezvous, Petrus and Rainerius rode out to the Falcon's Nest—a ruined watch-tower on a hillock overlooking olive groves silvering in moonlight. They dismounted a bow-shot away, tethered the horses, and climbed the last rocky spur on foot.

Inside the tower, a brazier glowed. Mélior sat cross-legged, cloak thrown back, the leather tube resting across his knees. Behind him, flanking shadows resolved into two archers, bows half-drawn.

Mélior: “You bring no gold, no guards—only brushes. Admirable.”

Petrus (raising the slim cedar box of pigments): “Beauty outweighs coin.”

Mélior (grin widening): “Indeed. I propose a commission. You will illuminate a single folio extracted from this codex—one logion, chosen by me. When finished, you will return it. I will then decide whether to release further pages. Payment: your lives, plus a purse of Florins.”

Rainerius: “Your conditions presume leverage. Yet Rome's leverage is heavier.”

Mélior: “Rome? It may interest you that Cardinal Orsini himself funds my travel. Not to destroy these pages—oh no!—but to verify, monetize, perhaps even whisper them into ears that can unseat popes.”

Petrus (voice steady): “What prevents you from killing us now?”

Mélior: “Curiosity. I want to watch a master limner wrestle with heresy. Will your brush gild a lie, or will the lie transfigure the gold?”

A long, brittle silence followed. Crickets screamed in the dry grass. Rainerius calculated odds: two archers, one swordsman, no visible exits save the stair behind them. Then Petrus surprised both priest and thief alike.

He stepped forward, knelt, opened his pigment box, and laid out three shells—ultramarine, vermilion, azurite—plus a vial of powdered glass for sparkle. Drawing the wolf-hair liner, he said:

“One folio. Here, now. Under moonlight. Let beauty answer whether words be true.”

Mélior unrolled the tube, selected a single sheet—folio 19 of Simon—and placed it on a newly planed plank across two wine-crates. The archers relaxed slightly, intrigued.

By brazier-light Petrus traced a border: thorn-vines interlaced with lilies. The wolf-hair brush danced. Even Mélior's predatory gaze faltered at the sight. Rainerius, watching, felt tears heat his eyes. For twenty minutes the only sounds were crackling charcoal and the faint whirr of owls.

Then Mélior leaned forward, scanning the already-dry gold. A flicker of doubt—like a candle-shadow—crossed his face. He pointed to the logion's final clause:

“ ...the body shall lie in a ditch, yet light shall drape it as a bridegroom's cloak.”

Mélior (muttering): “A ditch... That will unsettle the merchants of tombs.”

Before he could speak further, a thump sounded on the stair. Rainerius spun. A third archer, posted outside, tumbled inward clutching a crossbow bolt through his throat. Chaos detonated.

8 Battle Among Manuscripts

Figures stormed the tower: a half-dozen men in the livery of Lord Alessio da Bargini—falcon and quill—led by the lord himself. Steel flashed, arrows hissed. Mélior cursed, kicked brazier embers into the path of the newcomers, then bolted for a side-door Petrus had not noticed.

Rainerius ducked as an arrow split the plank bearing the illuminated folio. He snatched the page, rolled it, and stuffed it inside his tunic. Petrus flung his pigment box into an attacker's face; the vermilion puffed like blood, blinding him. They scrambled out the main stair—downward, as stones spat sparks around them.

At the base of the tower a narrow postern gaped onto the hillside. They burst through, sliding on scree, while above, shouting and clash of arms roared. Moonlight etched olives and limestone into a monochrome map. Their tethered horses reared at commotion; Rainerius sliced the leads, swung astride one; Petrus vaulted onto the other, and they plunged into groves where shadows stitched a patchwork of refuge.

Behind them the Falcon's Nest crackled; whether it burned from spilled brazier-coals or deliberate torch, they could not know. Nor whether Mélior had escaped, or bartered his life with Bargini's men. Only one certainty rode with them: Simon's folio—the single page Marcus had written in secrecy, now newly gilded—beat against Rainerius's chest like a second heart.

9 Ash and Gold

They rode until the moon sank and dawn greyed the horizon, then made camp in a cave above a dry wash. Exhaustion dulled fear, allowed conversation.

Petrus (examining the rescued folio): “The paint's smudged but salvageable.”

Rainerius: “One page of many. Yet a seed can break marble.”

Petrus: “Will we return to San Clemente?”

Rainerius (after a long pause): “If we do, Honorius must hear the truth. Yet truth may now outrun walls. I begin to suspect that Marcus, knowingly or not, played a part in something larger than any monastery.”

He told Petrus about the palimpsest scrap, the line that spoke of bodies as garments. Petrus listened, tracing calloused fingers over the folio's margin where he had painted lilies so delicate they seemed still to tremble.

Petrus: “If ink can haunt parchment, beauty can haunt time. Perhaps that is all salvation means.”

Rainerius: “Or all damnation. We tread a knife-edge.”

They agreed to circle west, avoiding Monte Speranza until they learned which faction—Bargini's men, Mélior's patrons, or Rome itself—now controlled the town. Their goal: reach Pisa, where ships to the Levant sailed weekly. If Mélior bore the bulk of Simon's gospel to Antioch, they would try to overtake him by sea, perhaps rendezvous with Brother Aimo—if Providence so wove.

10 Fire in the Mountains

Back at San Clemente, calamity struck. Two nights after Petrus and Rainerius slipped away, lightning found the scriptorium's oak roof. Flames raced the beams while a gale funneled through arrow-slits, fanning sparks. Monks fought with bucket-chains but the blaze devoured shelves, desks, inks, and pigments in a single roaring hour. By dawn only stone arches and drifts of charred parchment remained.

Honorius surveyed the ruin, smoke staining his beard. Inwardly he read the conflagration as divine judgment—or perhaps as the Devil's gloating. Outwardly, he organized rebuilding, for monasteries, like anthills, rise again on their own ashes. Yet a whisper seeded the rubble: that the fire had been set not by Heaven's lightning but by a human hand wishing to cleanse evidence of errant texts.

11 Across the Wine-Dark Sea

Brother Aimo, for his part, did not need more evidence—he saw the Devil's fingerprints in every contrary wind. Off Cyprus the pursuing Rhodian ship finally glimpsed the Santa Giustina, its distinctive lateen sails orange against a steel horizon. Aimo begged the captain to press chase. Cannon thundered; the Giustina bore away, light and swift, into a gathering storm.

For two days the vessels tacked through squalls, whipped by gales. On the third morning they found only shattered planks and a drifting barrel marked with the Pisan crest. Survivors none. Whether the storm had swallowed the Giustina whole or pirates had finished what weather began, no one could say.

Aimo paced the deck, fists clenched, mind racing. Had Mélior perished with the manuscripts? Or had he, cunning, taken a gig ashore before disaster struck? Rumour favoured the latter; a Turkish sponge-diver swore he'd sighted a small boat rowing hell-bent for Cilician beaches at dawn, a leather tube lashed to its bow. Aimo changed ships again, this time to an Armenian dhow bound for Jaffa, heart flaming hotter with each transfer. The chase was no longer duty; it was personal scripture.

12 Interludes of Doubt

Even the most driven hearts know interludes of quiet, and it was during one such lull—docked at Famagusta while sailors patched sails—that Aimo wrote a letter he would never send, addressed to Brother Marcus in heaven or hell:

“You died naming Ethiopia. I pursue ghosts across seas for a book I would gladly burn. Yet each league convinces me that to touch it, even to destroy it, grants power Rome scarcely comprehends. Pray for me, you who were perhaps heretic, perhaps prophet.”

He sealed the letter, tucked it beneath his breastplate, and went on deck to watch the sunset paint the water the colour of old blood.

13 Threads Converge

Autumn advanced. Rainerius and Petrus reached Pisa just as the olive harvest began, terraces pungent with bruised fruit. They learned that Mélior had survived shipwreck, bribed passage on a Mamluk dhow, and vanished south. Rumours placed him in Antioch, Damascus, Acre—each less certain than the last.

Desperate for allies, they found a Franciscan friar with go-between contacts in the Holy Land. The friar, Padre Giulio, knew Brother Aimo by reputation: “A pair of grey eyes that never blink,” he said, crossing himself. He believed Aimo was in Jaffa preparing to march inland. If Petrus and Rainerius could secure passage on a Papal courier ship departing in three days, they might yet intercept him before the trail frayed completely.

Thus three strands—Aimo, Rainerius with Petrus, and Mélior—moved upon the world-map toward a nexus no one could foresee: a monastery older than Rome's memory, perched on a basalt mesa in the Ethiopian highlands, where hyenas laughed at night and priests sang in Ge'ez older than Latin itself.

14 Closing Ember

Back at San Clemente, Abbot Honorius knelt among charred beams, fingers sifting ash. He found a bead of fused glass—once part of a bottle of azurite—now frozen mid-drip like a tear on God's cheek. He tucked it into his robe, stood, and turned toward the rising wall of new masonry where novices hauled timber. In his stomach coiled a foreboding he would whisper only in prayer:

“If fire could not purge the Word, perhaps the Word intends to purge the world.”

The sun climbed. Hammers rang. Smoke drifted skyward, joining larger currents—clouds, storms, whispers—that blew irrevocably south-east.

Episode III Through Fire and Mirage

The eastern Mediterranean in the Year of Our Lord 1193 was a chessboard where every square breathed dust and suspicion. Galleys smeared their wakes across wine-dark water; pilgrim caravans crawled inland like processions of mismatched ants; and over it all the hot wind, the khamsin, blew stories half-true, half-poisoned. Into this crucible marched three seekers who had never met yet were already bound by the same invisible script.

1 Jaffa Crossing

Brother Aimo's dhow, Theodosia, reached Jaffa harbor on a dawn stained salmon-pink by suspended sand. Ragged banners bearing the cross of Jerusalem flapped above the sea-wall; tar fumes mingled with the stench of fish guts tipped straight onto the quay. Aimo, shedding his seaman's cloak, retrieved the steel-ribbed flail he had disguised as a pilgrim's walking-staff and pushed through customs with the curt efficiency of a man who considered bureaucracy a minor heresy.

The harbor clerk, a Syrian Christian with eyes yellowed by quinine, stamped Aimo's travel writ.

Clerk (yawning): “Purpose of visit?”

Aimo: “To rescue what belongs to Holy Church.”

Clerk: “Everything here belongs to someone. Try not to bleed on the ledger.”

Outside, a Franciscan friar waved: Padre Giulio, sent from Pisa ahead of Rainerius and Petrus. Giulio bowed, habit billowing.

Giulio: “Word reached me yesterday. Two travellers from Tuscany will dock within the week. They search for one named Mélior.”

Aimo: “They serve San Clemente?”

Giulio: “Indeed—one the abbey lector, the other its finest illuminator.”

Aimo (grim mouth): “San Clemente breeds too many heroes.”

Giulio: “Perhaps Heaven requires redundancy.”

They agreed to share an inn near the city gate—The House of Sparrowhawks, run by an Armenian widow who kept the keys to every room on a rosary-string. Over lentil stew Giulio produced a parchment map showing major desert routes south-east: Gaza, then Sinai's great bend toward Aqaba, then by boat down the Red Sea to Massawa, and finally the camel-track into the Ethiopian highlands. Along that serpentine path glimmered a single ink dot labelled Qal'at al-Asad—the “Lion's Castle.” A Genoese spice-merchant had sworn Mélior lodged there two nights earlier, selling lapis fragments and buying silence.

Aimo: “Distance to Qal'at al-Asad?”

Giulio: “Three brutal days on fast horses, six for normal men.”

Aimo: “We leave at dawn.”

Giulio (lifting brows): “And the brothers yet at sea?”

Aimo: “They will catch up—or not. The thief gains hours with every council we convene.”

2 Blood on Salt-Flats

Qal'at al-Asad crouched on a salt-flat eighty miles inland, a Crusader fort abandoned when the first Kingdom of Jerusalem shrank like a salted slug. Its walls, pocked by Saracen stone-shot, now sheltered smugglers and disgraced knights selling protection to the highest bidder.

Aimo and Padre Giulio arrived on lathered Arabians at sundown. Dunes glowed copper; mirage-lakes quivered. Aimo bribed the gate-guard with a silver dirham and the promise of a second if he “remembered nothing of tonight.” Within, torchlight revealed a courtyard littered with cracked amphorae and a single acacia tree clawing life from rubble. Tankards clanged inside the great hall; a woman laughed, then cursed.

Aimo pushed open the door. The smell of lamb fat and sweat hit like a slapped hand. At a trestle near the hearth sat Mélior—hakim-blue cloak discarded, linen shirtsleeves rolled, a gaming board arrayed with polished stones before him. Opposite lounged a Frankish knight whose chain-mail coif doubled as napkin. On a bench behind Mélior lay the leather manuscript tube, its silver caps glimmering in fire-glow.

Giulio (whisper): “We strike now?”

Aimo (shaking head): “Observe first.”

They took a shadowed alcove. Over the next hour Mélior lost three rounds, won two, and drank more wine than a cautious man would risk. Yet his eyes never blurred. He patted the tube as though reassuring a skittish pet.

At last the Frank drained his cup, stretched, and stumbled toward the latrine court. Mélior signalled a tavern-girl for more wine; she returned with a jug. When she leaned close, Mélior's hand flashed—something passed palm-to-palm. Aimo glimpsed ember-glint: a coin or gem. The girl nodded, retreated toward the kitchen.

Aimo: “Courier exchange.”

Giulio: “She'll slip out the back, deliver message or item to a second rider.”

Aimo: “Intercept.”

Giulio vanished after the girl. Aimo waited until Mélior stood, stretching theatrically, then strode forward.

Aimo (flat): “Return what you stole from Brother Marcus of San Clemente.”

Mélior (turning, mild smile): “Ah—iron-eyes. I wondered when the mastiff would catch the scent.”

Aimo: “You murdered a servant of God.”

Mélior: “Marcus? He was already bleeding truth. I merely opened a quicker vein.”

Aimo (raising flail): “Give me the codices.”

Mélior: “I cannot.”

Aimo: “Because you will not.”

Mélior (shrug): “Because they are no longer here.”

He stepped aside. The leather tube on the bench sagged—empty. Mélior's smile widened.

“A decoy. The real treasures ride south even now, sewn into camel-saddles under the care of men who fear hyenas less than they fear me.”

Aimo swung the flail. Mélior ducked, snatched a hearth-poker, parried. Sparks flew. The hall erupted—smugglers overturning benches, gamblers grabbing coin. In the chaos Mélior back-flipped the poker through a window; the glass burst outward. He vaulted after, boots crunching shards.

Aimo chased into moonlit yard. Mélior was halfway up the acacia, leaping to the inner wall. An arrow whistled—Padre Giulio, emerging from shadows, crossbow braced. The shot missed, thunking stone. Mélior blew a kiss, dropped the length of the wall's outer face like a lizard, and vanished into the night.

3 Broken Messages

The tavern-girl lay unconscious near the kitchen door, a purple knot rising on her temple where Giulio's crossbow stock had clipped her. Aimo searched her apron pockets, finding a vellum slip no larger than a pilgrim badge. On it: ΔAM. 5/VI. 3LEO.

Giulio: “Cryptic.”

Aimo: “Not entirely. 'ΔAM'—Damascus. '5/VI'—fifth day of the sixth month. And '3 LEO'... three leones? No—the Castle of the Three Lions, an old caravanserai outside the city.”

Giulio: “Damascus is north-east. Yet Mélior said the manuscripts ride south.”

Aimo: “He lies as he breathes. Or tells half-truths in layers. We ride north at first light.”

4 Reinforcements Arrive

Meanwhile, the Pisan courier ship Stella Matutina reached Jaffa bearing Rainerius and Petrus. The moment they stepped onto the creaking jetty, a grizzled Hospitaller jabbed a gloved finger at Rainerius's chest.

Hospitaller: “You the priest from San Clemente? A Franciscan left word—seek him at the House of Sparrowhawks.”

The reunion inside the inn was unceremoniously emotional: Giulio brandishing the cipher slip; Aimo scowling but extending grudging welcome; Petrus pressing upon Aimo the single gilded folio, which the disciplinarian handled like live coals.

They compared notes. Rainerius suggested using the Damascus meeting as honey-pot: arrive early, hide scouts, seize whomever showed. Petrus worried Mélior anticipated that. Giulio proposed contacting the Order of Santiago, whose spies in Damascus could supply disguises and safe-rooms. Consensus formed: they would move in twos—Petrus with Giulio by coastal boat to Tyre, then inland; Aimo with Rainerius overland via Galilee, faster though more dangerous.

Petrus (to Aimo): “Remember Marcus's last prayer: look to Ethiopia. If Damascus proves a ruse, we pivot south.”

Aimo (clasping forearms): “Agreed. But first we cut the spider's web.”

5 Damascus Bazaar

Damascus in spring smelled of apricots, mint, and soldering tin. Minarets gleamed; the Umayyad Mosque flung pigeons skyward in silver cloud. Among the labyrinthine souks, whispers could suffocate faster than silk.

Petrus and Giulio, disguised as Genoese dye-buyers in saffron-dyed robes, took a room in the Khan al-Sabil. Aimo and Rainerius, dressed as Armenian spice-traders, lodged in a carpenter's loft overlooking Straight Street. They met nightly in different bathhouses, trading intel. On the evening of the fifth of June, Giulio's Santiago contact, Brother Teobaldo, reported armored riders seen entering the Castle of the Three Lions before dawn—twelve men, the lead wearing a cloak “blue as deep ocean” and sporting a mouth-scar.

Mélior.

The scorpion waited.

6 Castle of Three Lions

The castle was less fortress than ramshackle khan—outer walls crumbling, inner courtyard choked with camel pens. Roman lions, carved long ago, guarded the gate yet had lost noses and half their majesty.

At sunset Aimo crouched atop a neighboring tannery roof, Rainerius beside him holding a horn bow scavenged from a Persian trader. Petrus and Giulio circled the outer wall at ground level, sabers hidden beneath rough-spun cloaks. Aimo counted torches: four on the parapets, six camp-fires inside. He fingered the flail, whispered to Rainerius:

Aimo: “We strike when the minaret's ninth note falls.”

Rainerius (stringing bow): “Dominus illuminatio mea.”

The call to prayer floated across orchards. Torch-bearers on the parapet shuffled eastward, bowing. Aimo vaulted, rolled, landed behind the nearest guard, smothered him with an arm-bar, then dragged the body into shadow. Rainerius followed, nocking an arrow. Inside, Petrus tossed a clay pot of white phosphor—gift from a Syrian apothecary—into the central pen. The pot shattered; blinding smoke erupted. Camels bawled. Men shouted, stumbled.

Within the confusion Mélior burst from a side-door clutching—miracle of miracles—the real monkish tube, bulging. He sprinted toward the stable arch. Aimo gave chase. Rainerius loosed arrows at Mélior's guards, dropping one, winging another. Petrus intercepted Mélior at the arch, brandishing a saber he barely knew how to wield. Mélior slid under the swing, hamstringing Petrus with a dagger flick. The limner collapsed, screaming as tendon parted.

Aimo roared, swung the flail. Chains wrapped Mélior's forearm with a crunch; the manuscript tube tumbled. Giulio scooped it, ran. Mélior yanked backward, dislocating his own elbow to slip the chains, then dove into a cess-tunnel grating that opened onto the wadi. Aimo tried to follow but the tunnel mouth was half a cubit too narrow. He slammed his fist against stone, fury spilling silent.

Rainerius knelt by Petrus, tourniqueted the leg with his sash. Blood soaked into dust. The knights guarding Mélior lay dead or dying; those still standing threw down weapons once the tube disappeared—they had been paid coin, not conviction.

7 Revelation by Lamplight

In an abandoned pottery outside Damascus the group regrouped. Giulio unstoppered the tube. Inside, two codices—one ornate, one plainer—nestled in oiled linen. The ornate volume started with the familiar Latin incipit of James, but half its pages bore faint Greek understrike—Marcus's emendations shining ghost-script beneath, visible where candle-flame passed obliquely. The plainer codex bore Simon entire, in Marcus's hand—modified scrollwork capitals but no illumination save Petrus's half-finished border.

Rainerius's breath caught. Aimo crossed himself then — uncharacteristically — bowed to Petrus.

Aimo: “Brother, your ink purchased this with pain.”

Petrus (pale): “Ink is cheap; truth costs marrow.”

Rainerius examined Simon's colophon: “Ego Marcus, discipulus in Clemensi, ex ore memoriae consignavi. Si qui legant, orent pro anima mea.” Tears blurred the script.

Rainerius (soft): “He feared the pyre, yet still he signed.”

Giulio: “And the world shall soon read what he saved.”

Yet Aimo's face hardened.

Aimo: “We are not safe. Mélior lives, maimed but unbroken. Worse, Cardinal Orsini's envoys shadow him. Rome may not want these pages destroyed—only controlled. If we continue south, every desert well could hide an assassin.”

Rainerius: “Then we must multiply risk for them. We travel in fragments.”

He proposed dividing the texts: remove quires, wrap each in waxed silk, dispatch by separate routes to Ethiopia, where a sympathetic network of Coptic monks—forewarned by Josaphat years earlier—would shelter them until complete. Giulio could take James's first five quires by sea to Tyre, ship onward to Alexandria; Petrus, though wounded, would accompany him, easier on a boat than camel. Rainerius and Aimo would ride the overland caravan to Aqaba with Simon's middle section. The remaining quires would travel via trusted Bedouin couriers as commercial letters of credit. Only in the highland fortress monastic library of Debre Damo would the codices reunite.

Aimo nodded, seeing strategic elegance. Giulio agreed. Petrus, teeth clenched against pain, insisted he could still paint—“Gold can outshine blood.”

8 Desert Apotheosis

The overland journey south was an ordeal of cracked lips and hallucination. Rainerius kept a log scratched on palm-leaves:

Day 3: Sand-storm like Satan's breath. Lost one mule.

Day 5: Found water at Nabataean cistern. Aimo claims he saw Mélior's tracks—left foot dragging.

Day 7: At Aqaba. Loaded onto dhow Sitt al-Yasmin. Red Sea crimson at dusk, like vials of martyr's blood poured.

On day 10 a Mamluk dhow flying no flag appeared astern. Aimo recognized its rig—pirates hired by Orsini's ally Bargini. A chase ensued. The Sitt's captain, a grinning Beja with gold incisors, drove his vessel between coral reefs so shallow the pursuer shredded keel and foundered. Rainerius witnessed men clinging to debris as sharks circled; he wrote simply, “In mare iactati sunt ut charta in igne.”

At Massawa a letter awaited: Giulio and Petrus had reached Alexandria unharmed, boarded an Abyssinian pilgrim ship, now sailed for the Dahlak Archipelago. Petrus's wound festered but he painted a miniature of Christ as desert wind—no body, only swirling lines of cinnabar and shell-gold. Giulio enclosed a sketch: breathtaking.

Aimo allowed himself a rare smile. Duty began to taste like hope.

9 Cliff of the Book Angels

The camel-track from Massawa to the northern plateau climbed 8,000 feet in thirty torturous miles. Hooves clattered on basalt. Night fires revealed hyena eyes gleaming like melted copper. At last the mesa of Debre Damo rose—a flat-topped monolith, cliffs sheer on every side save one place where a leather rope-ladder dangled 60 feet to a tiny gate. There, turbaned monks pulled visitors up hand-over-hand, chanting Psalm 24 in Ge'ez: “Lift up your heads, O gates, that the King of Glory may come in.”

Rainerius looked down while ascending; the world receded to blue haze. Aimo kept eyes forward.

Within the enclosure: stone huts, a church whose beams were Axumite cedar, and a scriptorium open to sky save a reed awning. Ink-boys ground soot, chanting alphabet; an aged prior named Abba Melaku greeted the newcomers with a smile that folded his face like parchment.

Melaku (touching the wrapped quires): “We have awaited these leaves since the Dreamer Josaphat wrote to us. He said a storm of doctrine comes; we must store lightning in clay.”

Rainerius: “Storms multiply. Rome, Antioch, merchants—each wants to chain the words.”

Melaku: “Words are wind; chains rattle uselessly. Come.”

He led them to a secret library carved into the rock, shelves honeycombed with psalters and apocrypha. On a basalt lectern lay Giulio's parcel—James's beginning, arrived two days prior. Petrus, too weak to climb rope, had sent the bundle up in a basket, adding a newly illuminated title leaf ablaze with gold.

Rainerius placed Simon's middle quires beside James's, like halves of estranged brothers. Abba Melaku nodded, eyes moist.

Melaku: “When the last parcels arrive, we shall stitch them. Then the Book Angels will guard them until earth ripens for fresh seed.”

Aimo (dry): “And until armed men arrive seeking harvest.”

Melaku (laughing softly): “Let them climb the rope in full armour. The rock accepts many gifts.”

10 Letters in the Wound

Petrus and Giulio reached Massawa ten days later aboard the pilgrim ship Queen Candace. Petrus's fever raged; his leg, though splinted, swelled like crimson fire. Yet each time the ship rolled, he steadied his hand to finish small capitals on scrap vellum—practice for the grand colophon he vowed to paint when reunited with the whole codex.

But destiny, ever barbed-wired, intervened. Outside Massawa harbor three swift feluccas intercepting inbound vessels searched for “contraband writings.” Their pennants bore Falcon and Quill—Lord Bargini's crest. Cannons roared; splinters whined. The Queen Candace's captain attempted a feint but a felucca grappled the stern.

Giulio, recalling childhood sword lessons, rallied pilgrims with boarding pikes. They repelled the first assault, but a second felucca swung broadside, disgorging cross-bowmen. Giulio fell, bolt through shoulder. Petrus, crawling, shoved his parcel—the remaining quires of James—into a barrel of salt-fish bound for Axum. He sealed it, scrawled “Tax Paid” in Arabic ink, and rolled the barrel towards the main hold's ballast hatch, praying anonymity outran violence.

A flaming arrow arced and found the ship's tarred mainsail. Inferno cascaded. Amid shrieks and holy invocations the Queen Candace turned into a floating bonfire. Petrus, choking, saw Bargini's men leap back to their felucca hauling a single small chest. He recognised the silver cap—Simon's final quires, ripped from his satchel during melee. Rage eclipsed pain; he tried to stand, failed.

The captain ordered abandon ship. Giulio and Petrus were lowered into a dinghy with six pilgrims. Oars splashed madly. Behind, the Queen Candace split, hissed, and slid beneath waves, dragging canvas flame into steaming foam.

11 Rock and Ember Reunited

News of the attack reached Debre Damo via drum network. Aimo smashed his fist against rock; Rainerius sank to knees. Abba Melaku merely closed eyes, saying, “One must expect a tithe of loss.”

Yet hope flickered: a trader arriving from Axum spoke of a barrel stencilled Tax Paid, purchased by a fishmonger then resold as water-cask to a caravan heading north. Inside, someone overheard hollow rattle—like parchment bundles knocking wood. The caravan, if schedule held, should reach the monastery trail within four days.

Aimo volunteered to intercept. Rainerius insisted on joining. They descended the rope at dawn.

12 Ambush at the Well of Swords

The Well of Swords was no well but a cleft where two wadis met under sandstone overhang littered with rusted blades—relic of an ancient battle. Here the caravan halted for midday shade. Aimo and Rainerius approached from ridge crest, counting fifteen camels, six drivers, and—heart pounding—a felucca-tattooed mercenary bearing Bargini's falcon sigil.

Aimo (whisper): “Too tight for stealth. Surprise charge.”

Rainerius: “Then the Lord be my buckler.”

They spurred mounts downhill. Dust plumed. Drivers scattered. The falcon merc raised a composite bow; his first arrow sliced Rainerius's forearm; second missed. Aimo closed, swung flail; chain crushed collar-bone. The merc fell, gurgling.

The barrel lay lashed across camel packs—intact. Rainerius hacked ropes; it crashed to sand. He pried lid with dagger; bundles emerged, smelling of fish and redemption. Aimo breathed relief he rarely granted.

But triumph shattered at a whistle: Mélior emerged from behind camel-line, left arm braced in sling, right wielding a recurved scimitar.

Mélior (hoarse laugh): “You climb rope, wrestle waves, beg libraries for sanctuary—yet carry doom wherever you pass.”

Aimo (raising flail): “Yield.”

Mélior: “A lion yields only to steel.”

He lunged. Aimo blocked, chains snarling blade. Rainerius, bleeding, snatched a fallen pilum and jabbed Mélior's calf. Mélior howled, stumbled; Aimo looped chain around his neck, yanked. Dust devils swirled as they grappled. Mélior coughed foam, eyes burning hate, then—incredible—bit the steel, wrenching free, rolled, sprang to wounded foot, hurled scimitar spinning. It grazed Aimo's temple, drawing blood.

Rainerius stepped forward, pilum poised.

Rainerius: “In the name of the brother you slew—mercy is denied.”

He thrust. The spear-head pierced Mélior's chest. A gasp, a rattle; the thief toppled against the barrel that had undone his fortunes, eyes glazing like broken glass reflecting desert sun.

Silence returned. Aimo knelt, closed those eyes with two fingers.

Aimo: “Dust to dust.”

13 Confluence

By twilight the barrel and its precious cargo reached Debre Damo. Abba Melaku supervised sorting: all quires of James present; Simon also complete save for two leaves Mélior had hidden elsewhere or destroyed. Petrus and Giulio, recovering in a hill-clinic, would join once wounds allowed. A solemn vigil filled the cliff-church: voices in Latin, Ge'ez, and Italian wove psalms that twined like three-strand cord.

Aimo rested beside the rope-ladder, gaze lost in stars. Rainerius joined, arm bandaged.

Aimo: “Is victory merely breathing while others do not?”

Rainerius: “Victory is guarding a candle long enough to light another. The codices live; therefore Marcus lives.”

Aimo (after a pause): “And Mélior?”

Rainerius: “Perhaps some words must enter the silence they so feared.”

Above, in the scriptorium, monks prepared to stitch. Needles of bone, thread of flax, lamp-light steady despite wind.

14 Ink of the Reckoning

Three weeks later Petrus limped into the library, face sallow yet eyes blazing. Abba Melaku assigned him the honour of painting the final colophon across both codices. He ground malachite, mixed gold, and on adjoining pages inscribed:

“These words, once buried in shallow grave and deep sea, rise clothed in light. Let no body claim them, no tomb confine them. If you read, breathe and become wind.”

Rainerius added an acrostic in the margin—initial letters spelling MIHI LUCEAT VERITAS (“May truth shine for me”). Aimo, at Petrus's insistence, dipped quill to write one line of witness: “I, Aimo, have guarded the road but never owned it.”

Each monk pressed a wax seal; each seal bore different emblem—lion, cross, vine—but all melted into the same crimson pool when held to candle-flame. The completed volumes, twin hearts, were laid in a cypress chest banded with bronze and stored behind a panel carved with seraphim—Book Angels indeed.

Debre Damo's rock absorbed new secret. Hyenas howled; wind combed cedar beams; starlight silvered the rope-ladder that would one day again lower or raise truth, depending which direction history travelled.

Episode IV Echoes in the Basalt

1 The Long Vigil (1193 – 1316 CE)

The high mesa of Debre Damo kept its own time. Years moved below like clouds crossing distant plains, but on the plateau a single day could stretch into liturgical infinity. Brother Petrus never returned to Italy; fever left his leg withered, yet his hand recovered enough to illuminate six further capitals and an extraordinary carpet page: concentric rings of shell-gold that, when tilted, caught torch-light in a ripple like water struck by wind. He died on 12 Tir 1199 EC (1207 CE) while mixing orpiment; the dish spilled, staining the floor brilliant yellow. Abba Melaku marked the spot with a pebble that remains embedded in the mortar today.

Rainerius stayed longer still, teaching Ge'ez to eager novices and learning from them the calligraphic fidel script. He copied Psalms into it, adding quiet marginal prayers in Latin. When he felt death tug at the fringe of his cowl in 1214, he asked to be buried in a blank grave—no cross, no epitaph—so that “the body may serve the earth while the word serves the breath.” His heart, by monastic custom, was removed and sealed in a cedar reliquary. Into that tiny box the monks slipped a single scrap from Simon: “Blessed is the silence that speaks in fire.”

Brother Aimo left last. His farewell to Abba Melaku was wordless: merely the clasp of forearms and a nod to the cypress chest. He returned to Italy aboard a grain caravel, arriving during a summer of locusts that had stripped Umbrian hills bare. Within the year he succumbed to a wasting cough, but not before writing a memorandum that began, “There lives on a rock in Aksum's shadow a song too bright for stone.” He hid the memo behind a loose altar stone in San Clemente's refurbished scriptorium—rebuilt, ironically, with generous donations from Rome eager to prove nothing had been lost in the fire.

For more than a century afterwards, the twin gospels slumbered in their bronze-banded chest while African dynasties rose and waned. Trained debtera (guardian scribes) recited a litany each Lent, naming the books without speaking their titles: “Sa? y b?alda Sellasi w ??d G br masa?e.” Outsiders took the chant for angelic glossolalia. It was in fact a syllabic cipher: S.B. (Simone Biblios), S.W. (Sanctus Jacobus), G.M. (Gospelus Marcus), reminding each generation which text lay inside.

2 The Portuguese Jesuits (1531 CE)

When Dom Crist v o da Gama's musketeers marched into the Ethiopian Highlands seeking allied King Galawdewos, they brought behind them a tail of Jesuit confessors hungry for souls—and manuscripts. Father Manuel de Almeida, of the Society of Jesus, heard rumours of “a heretical book kept on a pillar of rock” from a captured Muslim courier. He recorded in his diary: “Where apocrypha dwell, so breeds the serpent of Luther.”

A band of twelve ascended Debre Damo's rope, bristling with matchlocks. Abba Tekle, Melaku's great-grandnephew, greeted them with hospitality, yet their sharp eyes roved. In the refectory Father Almeida asked to see the library. Tekle complied, guiding him everywhere except the hidden rock-cut room. The priest sensed evasion. That night he tried to slip from his guest cell, only to find the door barred with a timber whose age matched the Ark legends.

At dawn the Jesuits left—ostensibly amicable—but on a ridge two miles away they convened a council of war. Almeida argued for a return with soldiers. Lieutenant Baltasar Rodrigues, mindful of Ottoman raiders on their flank, advised delay. The decision never came: a rockslide, triggered by the region's fickle rains, obliterated the path they stood on, killing four musketeers and scattering the rest. Almeida survived with a fractured wrist, which he later called “an angelic rebuke.” He abandoned the quest, but the entry in his log—“Apocrypha upon the Rock of Damo”—would reappear in Vatican archives a century later.

3 The Gragn Fires (1529 – 1543 CE)

Even as Jesuits withdrew, a greater peril advanced: Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi—“Gragn the Left-Handed”—whose jihad shocked Christian Abyssinia. Villages burned like torches along the Tekeze; monastic cliffs echoed with gunfire stolen from Ottoman arsenals. Early in 1533 Ahmad's lieutenant, Nur al-Din, marched toward Debre Damo, hoping to seize hostages.

Abba Tekle elected to remove the chest rather than trust to siege. Two lithe monks rappelled the cliff at night with the bronze case tied by intertwined leather straps. In the gorge below waited Lali-Bel, a Falasha potter who traded seasonally with the monastery and owed Tekle for curing his son's fever. Lali-Bel packed the chest into a donkey pannier beneath mundane grain sacks and led it north to the Simien Mountains, where Afro-Judean communities hid relics from both Muslim and Christian armies.

There the chest remained for fourteen unsettled years. When Emperor Gelawdewos defeated Ahmad at Wayna Daga in 1543, the monks retrieved their treasure, only to find an earthquake had collapsed the original hiding passage on Debre Damo. A new vault was carved on the windswept northern spur, reachable only through a chimney-flue tunnel that required crawling flat. Generations hence would nickname it M zg b p yda—“the Archive that Breathes,” because air whistled tunefully through cracks at dusk.

4 The Oromo Migrations (Late 1600s CE)

In the late seventeenth century waves of Oromo clans swept north, drawn by richer pasture. Most were peaceful herders, but skirmishes flared. During one raid a band led by chieftain W qgari stormed the base of Debre Damo, cutting the rope-ladder and demanding grain. Negotiation placated them, yet amid the barter a young warrior named Ifaa slipped into the grape-arbor storeroom and discovered chests in various states of disrepair. He grabbed one small bronze box as loot—the one containing Simon's excised folio illuminated by Petrus long ago, and three blank quires the monks used as padding.

Ifaa, illiterate, prized the chest's workmanship rather than its leaves. He traded it to a Harari jeweller for two steel spearheads. The jeweller sold the parchment to a Sufi calligrapher who recognized Greek letters. Thinking them magical, he tore a fragment to mix into ink, easier to sell as talismanic ?ibr al-ru?—“spirit ink.” That single tear removed the parable of the Shallow Grave.

The remaining folio, now minus its innermost margin, drifted until it settled in the treasury of Ali Bey, Ottoman governor of Zeila, famed collector of oddities. His ledger of 1681 lists: “One Christian parchment with gold birds, value 80 mahbub.” In a fire that consumed Zeila's port quarter in 1697, the treasury collapsed, burying the folio in cinders under coral rubble, where it would sleep for another sixty-two years.

5 Lady Emmeline's Expedition (1759 CE)

“A lady of peculiar enthusiasm for deserts,” sniffed the Calcutta Gazette when Lady Emmeline Fife announced her venture to Abyssinia. She funded the journey with inheritance from an uncle who had cornered the quinine market. Her stated aim: to document ibis migration. Her hidden fascination: forbidden books, especially since reading Almeida's cryptic note in the Archivo Secreto during a masquerade in Rome.

She secured the services of Gebre Meskal, a half-Oromo, half-Tigrayan philologist educated by Capuchins, whose baritone could chant the Kebra Nagast from memory. With six Askari guards, two mules named Persephone and Bede, and a collapsible copper camera obscura, they made the perilous ascent to Debre Damo in January 1759.

Abbot Teklehaimanot—grandson of Abba Tekle's prot g —received Emmeline politely but refused her request to see any library older than the Psalter Hall. She played her trump: a satchel of quinine bark, rare and priceless during that year's malaria surge. Teklehaimanot weighed duty against lives and relented—slightly. He escorted her into the outer archive, leaving her alone five minutes to sketch a Gospel of Luke. That was enough: Emmeline had trained herself to photograph with memory. She noticed a draught seeping near the floor where no mortar line ought to exist. A hairline crack; a whisper.

That night she confided to Gebre Meskal: “Behind that wall lies a second heart.” Together they bribed a novice to map the cloister plumbing. The novice confessed that a “breathing archive” existed but only the abbot held the bone key to its crawlway padlock.

Events outran stealth. Three days later a scar-faced Italian Jesuit arrived with escort. Father Gianluigi Orsini—great-grand-nephew of Cardinal Orsini—carried Vatican orders “to inspect and, if necessary, secure any non-canonical writings.” Emmeline recognized him from a salon in Florence where he had debated the dating of Pseudo-Dionysius. He pretended not to know her; she returned the courtesy.

Orsini demanded immediate access to all archives. Teklehaimanot stalled. That evening Emmeline and Gebre Meskal heard hoofbeats—soldiers surrounding the complex. The abbot signalled them to the refectory. On a table lay the bronze-banded chest, dusty but intact.

Teklehaimanot (low voice): “If I resist, Rome may kill my novices. If I yield, truth dies. You are outsiders; you may flee. Take it.”

Emmeline: “And run where?”

Gebre Meskal: “South. The Danakil salt plains. Hyenas guard better than men.”

They devised a ruse. At midnight the chest was lowered by makeshift rope down the cliffs to Persephone, tethered below. The Askari guided mules along goat paths east. Emmeline and Gebre remained to forge a decoy: a cask of onion skins wrapped in a choir book, sealed with the abbot's wax. Dawn saw Orsini break that seal, only to sputter rage at pungent onions. By then, true treasure had slipped into the Danakil heat.

6 Salt, Fire, and Shadows (1759 CE)

The Danakil proved hellish. Salt chimneys stabbed sky; temperatures soared to 50�°C. At Lake Afrera sulphur fumes stung eyes. Askari Abdullahi died of heatstroke on day six; they buried him under basalt slabs that hissed when sweat dripped.

On the tenth night a band of Afar brigands ambushed. Shots cracked; Persephone collapsed, pierced by lance. Emmeline seized the camera tripod as club; Gebre Meskal dragged the chest toward a fumarole whose steam masked silhouettes. In the chaos a brigand struck Emmeline's temple with a slingshot bullet; she staggered, vision red. The Askari rallied, muskets flashing, drove attackers off.

But the chest was gone—hauled away by a single silhouette with antelope agility. Tracks led into salt mists. A search at dawn found only Persephone's carcass and Emmeline's camera, lens cracked. Emmeline wept—not for loss of equipment, but pages.

Gebre drew her aside. He produced a linen bundle: four quires he had removed earlier for safekeeping—Simon's parables section and James's Passion narrative. Hope flickered.

They limped to Massawa. En route, Emmeline learned Orsini had placed a bounty on her head in Gondar, branding her “agent of English heresy.” She chartered a dhow under the alias Lady Eleanor Parker, sailing for Mocha then Bombay, where East India Company acquaintances forged her passage to Calcutta and safety.

The four rescued quires she locked inside a teak chest hidden beneath her father's townhouse floorboards, awaiting scholars who could read uncial Greek without prejudice. Emmeline herself died of fever in 1774, leaving coded instructions inside her last botanical sketchbook: colour swatches whose order spelled “Simone – Basalt – Return.”

7 Between Empire and Neglect (1804 – 1896 CE)

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries blew hot colonial breath across the Horn of Africa. Egyptian pashas, French adventurers, and British surveyors all chalked lines on maps seldom trodden. Each heard rumours of a “Book of the Brothers” but dismissed it as Coptic folk-lore.

In 1848, French linguist Antoine d'Aubigny camped near Zeila to catalogue Cushitic dialects. Excavating coral rubble for tent anchors, he unearthed a charred fragment of parchment showing gold birds perched on vines. Unable to identify script, he sent it to Paris. The fragment languished uncatalogued in the Biblioth que Nationale's S rie Suppl ments Grecs drawer until 1922, when paleographer Henri Omont would recognise Marcus's distinctive Lombard hand—but that discovery lies ahead.

Back on Debre Damo, the monks quietly restored their library entrance, now defended by a disguise: an icon of St. Michael so heavy that moving it required six men. Behind Michael's blazing sword, the twin gospels' absence was painfully obvious. Only the chest's impression on dust remained. An oral lamentation entered liturgy: “The Breath has flown; Earth remains.”

8 The Chest's Dark Pilgrimage (1759 – 1881 CE)

The Afar thief carried the chest to his clan near Erta Ale volcano. Convinced gold lay inside, they pried off bronze bands and found only ochre pages. Disappointment turned to fear when an elder, half-blind but Qur'anic-literate, declared the script “Nasrani magic.” They decided to ransom it to the nearest power: an Italian gun-runner stationed at Assab, Signore Luca Calhoun—though “Signore” belied Glasgow birth.

Calhoun, hearing Orsini's bounty tales, smelled profit. He paid the Afar in gunpowder, disguised the chest with a musket crate, and loaded it onto the barque La Volpe. Before he could sail, Ottoman patrols seized Assab, confiscating contraband. La Volpe burned at anchor; Calhoun escaped with three crates, among them the chest. Overland he bargained passage with a Tigre caravan heading for Khartoum, intending to sell at the slave market where buyers valued curios.

Somewhere in the Bayuda Desert the caravan was attacked by Mahdist bandits. Calhoun vanished—whether dead or a turncoat nobody learned. The chest next surfaced in 1881 among the effects of a South Arabian sheikh killed by British forces near Aden. Captain Reginald Bloomfield, inventory officer, logged: “One antique coffer of Levant workmanship, empty.”—for by then the leaves had been removed, likely traded piecemeal along the caravan's bloody route.

9 Broken Leaves in Oxford (1896 CE)

In May 1896, a junior fellow at Balliol, Theophilus Brand, sorted a crate of miscellaneous scraps purchased from an antiquities dealer named Ezekiel Calhoun—grandson of Luca. Brand recognised Lombard illumination on half a leaf depicting lilies with haunting realism. The text, however, was an explosive Greek: “Do not seek me among bones, for your faith lies not in marrow but in breath.”

Brand consulted Canon W.E. Orford, a moderate modernist. Orford blanched. He urged Brand to keep silent until “proper ecclesiastical channels may review authenticity.” Brand, troubled by commerce of silence, penned a private monograph An Appendix to Lost Petrine Traditions, which he printed in ten copies for trusted friends. Two reached Germany, where Higher Critics pounced, citing the fragment as evidence that resurrection theology evolved late. Rome retaliated with condemnation; Brand was urged into early retirement, his fellowship reassigned.

Yet Brand's ten-copy pamphlet ignited quiet fires. In Lisbon, a young convent-schooled girl named Lina Duarte, devouring theological contraband, copied every footnote into her diary. She would later become Dr Lina Duarte, palaeographer extraordinaire—but her stage belongs to Episode VI.

10 Closing Echo

By century's end, the twin gospels existed in three divergent states:

1. The Debre Damo Core majority of James and Simon, stitched, hidden, but lacking the Petrus carpet page and several late Simon logia.

2. The Calcutta Quires Lady Emmeline's four quires, location unknown after the townhouse sold in 1857 to pay rebellion reparations.

3. The Brand Fragments six half-leaves in Oxford, labelled “Cod. Graec. Apol. 17”, status sine loco following wartime relocation.

As the lamps of the nineteenth century dimmed, few living souls realised the pieces once formed a single illuminated heartbeat. Yet the basalt still breathed, salt plains still guarded whispers, and somewhere beneath Calcutta floorboards termites gnawed perilously close to gold leaf glinting like remembered sunrise.

Episode V The Fractured Mirror

1 Calcutta, 1937 Dust and Termites

The April heat lay on the city like a damp quilt. In an aging townhouse on Free School Street, auction agents of Messrs. Balfour & Sons catalogued furniture left by its last tenant—one Colonel Percy Fife, direct descendant of Lady Emmeline. Clerk Amalendu Mukherjee pried up warped teak boards to inspect the joists, expecting only termite galleries. Instead, his chisel rang on metal. Moments later he levered out a teak strong-box crudely padlocked and stamped with the initials E.F.

Amalendu fetched auctioneer Watkins, who prized open the rusted lock. Inside lay four parchment quires, edges nibbled, yet glowing where intact with traceries of shell-gold. A protective vellum note in spidery hand declared: “Quires XXI-XXV, Gospel of Simon; Quires VII-VIII, Gospel of James. Bestow on the honest.” Watkins, illiterate in Greek, planned to lot it with curios, but Amalendu, a night-school classicist, recognised uncial script. He begged a night to inventory.

At midnight, fan whirring overhead, Amalendu deciphered a passage in Simon:

“When they placed him shallow under thorn, the dogs drew near, yet a flame without heat rose and drove them off. And I, Simon, knew the body was already a husk.”

His hands trembled—heresy or revelation. He hid the quires in a canvas satchel, replacing the box with harmless bookkeeping ledgers, and bicycled through sleeping bazaars to St. Xavier's College, where Father Hugo Fernandes, S.J., taught palaeography.

2 Confession in the Cloister

Fernandes, gaunt and insomniac, brewed chicory while Amalendu recounted the find. The Jesuit stiffened at the name Simon but listened.

Fernandes: “Do you grasp the gravity? Rome forbade private possession of apocrypha since Trent.”

Amalendu: “I feared black-marketeers more than Rome.”

Fernandes (thin smile): “Seldom a difference.”

They spent dawn photographing pages with a Hasselblad pinned under blackout cloth. Fernandes promised to cable the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Amalendu, wary, demanded assurance the manuscripts would not vanish.

Fernandes: “I give you a Jesuit's word.”

Amalendu: “Ignatius was a soldier. Soldiers obey generals.”

A bargain: the college would house the quires in a sealed cabinet; Amalendu would keep one folio as surety—folio 23 of Simon, bearing the Parable of Breath.

3 Enter the Black Market

Word seeped. Three weeks later, Ezekiel Calhoun III—the same dealer whose grandfather sold fragments to Oxford—sauntered into St. Xavier's library posing as a philology researcher. That night a clerk caught him photographing display cases with a jeweled lighter-camera. Fernandes expelled him, but Calhoun departed humming, pockets bulging with scribbled shelf marks.

Within a fortnight, letters offering “discreet valuation” reached Amalendu's flat. He ignored them. One evening a knife slash opened his satchel; folio 23 gone. In its place, a note:

“Pieces belong to the highest Vision, not the highest Bidder. – Q.”

The sigil at the bottom—a quill through falcon—revived a symbol dormant since Mélior's age. The Falcon Society had survived, nursing ambitions.

4 Meanwhile in Oxford, 1940 War Shadows

The Luftwaffe's Blitz shook Bodleian stacks nightly. Assistant curator Edith Laird crated manuscripts for relocation. In “Cod. Graec. Apol. 17” she found six half-leaves mis-filed under “Orientalia Misc.”—Brand's fragments. Gold birds still flashed when torches swept. Edith inserted a memo for future collation, sealed the crate, and shipped it to Blenheim Palace for safe-keeping. In transport, crate #14 toppled; two fragments slipped into a lorry tarp and were lost, later recovered by a rag-and-bone man who sold them to again—Ezekiel Calhoun III, now thriving in black-out London.

Calhoun recognised a commercial constellation: Calcutta quires, Oxford fragments, Ethiopian rumours. He needed the core text. He sailed for Addis Ababa under diplomatic cover as “cultural attach .”

5 Afar Echoes, 1941 Mussolini's Retreat

Italian East Africa crumbled before British and Ethiopian patriots. Calhoun, trading cognac for permits, reached the salt plains near Erta Ale where his great-grandfather once bartered gunpowder. In a half bombed Afar settlement, he found an elder wearing a bronze band as bracelet—one that had once bound the Simon-James chest. For a pouch of morphine tablets, the elder pointed him toward “the rock that sings.”

British intelligence intercepted Calhoun's jeep within artillery distance of Debre Damo. Captain Richard Bloomfield—grand-nephew of Reginald—searched the vehicle, discovered Oxford leaf wrapped around cigarettes. Bloomfield, an amateur scholar, pocketed the fragment, unaware of its matching heritage. Calhoun was escorted to Khartoum for “security interviews,” but bribed a guard and vanished overnight.

The monastery, spared battle, still barred outsiders. Abba Gabriel, weary of war, reinforced the crawlway padlock with a truck leaf-spring and buried the key beneath the altar.

6 Cold War Chessboard, 1965 Addis Ababa University

Dr Lina Duarte—now Portugal's first female palaeography chair—arrived on a UNESCO mission to microfilm ancient Ethiopic texts. She carried two secrets: (1) photocopies of Oxford fragments obtained through Edith Laird's retired generosity; (2) decoded diaries of Lady Emmeline mapping Danakil trails.

Lina's assistant, Solomon Afeworki, guided her through the National Library. Over coffee he confided family lore: his ancestor was Gebre Meskal, who once fled Danakil with golden books. Lina's pulse spiked. Together they scrutinised accession logs. Nothing. Yet in conservation cold-store, Lina noticed a bundle labeled “UNIDENTIFIED, MELTED GLUE.” Inside, scraps smelling of smoke: portions of Petrus's carpet page—those concentric rings—warped but fire-tough. Colorimetric sampling matched the Oxford birds: same mineral palette.

Lina traced pigment supply chains back to one merchant: “Quills & Falcons Antiquities, London.” Calhoun's front.

7 Falcon and Quill, London, 1966 A Game of Masks

Under drizzle, Lina entered a Mayfair shop where Sumerian tablets winked behind glass. Ezekiel Calhoun III, silver-templed yet sharp, greeted her.

Calhoun: “Professor Duarte! I admire your recension of Codex Sinaiticus margins.”

Lina (cool): “Your reputation precedes you—often accompanied by customs warrants.”

Calhoun (laughing): “We all salvage history from indifference.”

She presented a damaged ring-fragment from the carpet page and asked provenance. Calhoun circled verbal smoke rings, claiming Venetian auctions. Lina revealed she held title deeds from Debre Damo proving theft. Calhoun paled, offered partnership. His terms: exchange of fragments for joint publication, subject to Vatican mediation, guaranteeing profitability.

Lina: “Some words aren't for sale.”

Calhoun: “Everything speaks a price. Even silence.”

He produced folio 23—the stolen Amalendu page. Lina recognised the shallow-grave logion. She left with nothing but certainty of his holdings.

8 Operation Seraphim (1967 – 1968)

Lina convened allies: Solomon; Edith Laird; and, astonishingly, Captain Bloomfield—now Colonel, stationed with MI6. Bloomfield revealed he still possessed the cigarette-wrapped fragment, guilt-ridden. MI6, intrigued by Vatican diplomatic manoeuvres, authorised a covert retrieval: Operation Seraphim.

Objective: infiltrate Calhoun's vault, secure all Simon-James material, then exfiltrate to Addis Ababa where Emperor Haile Selassie would grant sanctuary under UNESCO eyes.

Bloomfield's team mapped the shop's security. On Candlemas 1968, a power cut—engineered via rooftop relay—doused Mayfair. Agents in telecom uniforms entered to “check fuse lines”; within, Bloomfield's safe-cracker opened a steel cabinet. Inside: Oxford half-leaves, the Calcutta quire, and eight unknown folia—Simon's missing ending, perhaps Mélior's prize.

But Calhoun, anticipating betrayal, had booby-trapped with tear-gas pellets. Alarms shrieked. Bloomfield retrieved only a satchel before retreating into alley smoke. One agent captured footage of Calhoun fleeing with another case, sliding into a Jaguar that burned rubber toward Heathrow.

9 Skyjacked Words

Calhoun booked Air France to Cairo, ticket under alias Mélior III—dark homage. Bloomfield alerted Interpol; wheels turned too slow. In-flight, Calhoun perused his steal: Simon's final two leaves and a ciphered map referencing “lion's archive.” Triumph.

Over the Med, radicals of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked the plane, diverting to Benghazi. Passengers herded, luggage rifled for diplomatic mail. Calhoun's case cracked; folios fluttered in desert wind, one lodging against engine intake, shredded. Another, snatched by a militant who presumed it Hebrew, was pocketed as souvenir and later sold in Tunisian souk to a German tourist named Klaus Böllinger.

Calhoun, livid, survived hostage ordeal but escaped Libya minus treasure.

10 Debre Damo Shifting Stones, 1974

Back in Ethiopia, revolution brewed. The Derg toppled Selassie; Red Terror loomed. Lina and Solomon raced north to Debre Damo with Bloomfield's satchel. Amid shelling echoes, they scaled the rope, greeted aging Abba Gabriel, and laid fragments beside the core codices—reunions across centuries.

Yet danger climbed too: a Derg militia believed monasteries hid imperial gold. A patrol demanded entry. Abba Gabriel delayed them with coffee ceremony; Lina and Solomon crawled into Archive that Breathes, sealing the door behind. They whispered as hammer blows shook icons outside.

Solomon: “If they torch the rock, parchment dies.”

Lina: “Then we must make the words ember-proof.”

She unpacked a portable microfilm camera, photographing each folio by lamp-light. Film canisters—slim, retractable—were lowered in a goatskin pouch down the chimney-flue to waiting novices who hid them in hollowed prayer sticks carried during forced evacuations.

The patrol left with copper crosses, fooled. But Abba Gabriel, fearing return, gave Lina the bone key, bidding her smuggle microfilms abroad. At dawn they descended, hearts raw.

11 Exodus of Light, 1975

Escape routes closed as Derg checkpoints spread. Lina bribed a trucker hauling coffee sacks to Djibouti. At the border, soldiers searched; Solomon feigned illness to distract. Lina's prayer sticks passed inspection. From Djibouti a French cargo ship carried them to Marseille, thence to Coimbra, where Lina duplicated negatives and mailed copies—without return address—to five libraries on three continents: Coimbra, Bodleian, Vatican, Addis Ababa University (post-revolution librarians still trusted), and the Library of Congress.

She enclosed a simple note:

“Guard the breath.”

12 Böllinger's Revelation, 1994 Berlin

The Tunisian-bought folio gathered dust in Klaus Böllinger's attic until his granddaughter Annette, studying theology, recognised Greek. Scholars at Humboldt traced pigment to Lombard tradition, raising eyebrows. When microfilm leaks surfaced in '95 internet bulletin boards, Annette posted high-res scans; digital zealots cross-stitched them with Lina's images, reconstructing near-complete Simon except for lines lost to engine shred.

Vatican Press issued statement: “Non-canonical texts warrant study but do not alter doctrine of bodily resurrection.” Debate exploded across talk shows.

13 Calhoun's Last Gambit, 1997 Rome

Ezekiel Calhoun III, terminally ill, approached the Pontifical Biblical Commission offering one remaining asset: the cipher map. In exchange he desired absolution and a modest annuity for his widow. The Curia agreed suspiciously quickly.

Map analysis pointed—predictably—to Debre Damo. Cardinal Orsini's descendant, now Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, convened Operazione Silere: extract originals before media frenzy forced transparency.

Italian special-ops disguised as UNESCO conservators helicoptered toward the mesa on Epiphany 1998. Lina, alerted by a sympathetic archivist, raced via Land Rover from Addis Ababa with Solomon and a BBC documentary crew.

Storm leapt from nowhere; rotor wash stirred rope-ladder into mad whip. The helicopter aborted; landing skid struck cliff, spun, crashed on plateau edge. Fire raged; monks formed bucket line. Lina's Rover arrived to burning aviation fuel illuminating basalt like hellfire.

Italian captain, staggered, tried to seize chest himself; Abba Gabriel barred path, quoting “Blessed are the poor in parchment.” Solomon and camera crew filmed everything: chest, crest, refusal. Images broadcast worldwide within hours.

Public opinion crowned Debre Damo guardians of authenticity. Vatican denied involvement, citing rogue actor. Calhoun died watching live feed, whispering, “So the game remains unfinished.”

14 Digital Dawn, 2004 – 2015

Open-source scholars, led by Annette Böllinger and Ethiopian codicologists, digitised every extant folio. Machine-learning software matched tear patterns, reassembling 94% of Simon, 97% of James. Missing verses inferred via palaeographic reconstruction sparked caution but fascination.

Key radical themes confirmed:

Spiritual Resurrection: Jesus appears as “radiance clothing itself in voice.”

Shallow Grave: Care to avoid scavengers, not rock tomb.

Critique of Paul: “He weaves snares of syllable, weightier than fisher's net.”

Primacy of Breath: Salvation as awakening inner pneuma.

Academic storms raged; some hailed the text as earliest Jerusalem tradition; others called it second-century Syrian Gnosticism.

15 The Bone Key Turns 2019

Abba Gabriel, centenarian, summoned Lina one last time. Before witnesses—BBC, Ethiopian Church, UNESCO—he unlocked Archive that Breathes and produced the cypress chest. Seal unbroken since Petrus. Lina's gloved hands opened it; parchment inside immaculate.

She read aloud Simon's farewell logion—the lines lost in Benghazi shred but extant here:

“Do not write me in stone, lest moss erase. Write me in marrow, where stone cannot dwell.”

Tears blurred camera lenses worldwide.

16 Closing of the Penultimate Curtain

By 2020 a new critical edition, Evangelion Kata Simon Kai Iakobon, appeared with facing Ge'ez, Latin, and English. Debre Damo retained legal title; digital facsimiles free online.

Lina, hair silver, penned preface: “Books journey as humans: wounded, divided, yet yearning reunion. May this reunion heal more than it harms.” She cited Brother Marcus, Brother Petrus, Brother Aimo.

But one puzzle lingered: Mélior's cipher hinted at “light hidden in lilies,” presumed reference to Petrus's carpet page still missing save melted scraps. Rumours placed it in a private Swiss bunker owned by an art-analytics firm—shadow investors uncannily reminiscent of the Falcon Society reborn.

Episode VI The Lily Cipher

The Swiss Alps in winter look incorruptible—serrated teeth of quartz biting blue sky. But incorruptible is merely a dare. Inside a retired NORAD bunker beneath Pilatus, a private art-analytics firm called Albedo Labs AG kept climate-controlled vaults for clientele who paid to hide treasures from both taxes and daylight. The Falcon Society—revivified by hedge-fund heirs who fetishised their ancestor Mélior—leased Vault 7. There, wrapped in inert argon, lay Petrus's missing carpet page: the ringed lilies whose gold once flickered like sun on water.

1 The Call to Wings (January 2025)

Annette Böllinger—now Dr Böllinger, digital codicologist—summoned Lina Duarte and Solomon Afeworki to Zürich. She carried a decoded e-mail from an Albedo whistle-blower: the carpet page was scheduled for “fractionalised NFT release,” its physical existence to be pyrolysed afterward to inflate scarcity. The Falcon credo had sunk from theft to incineration.

Lina (ashen): “They will burn the lily to sell its ghost.”

Solomon: “Then the ghosts must rise before the fire.”

They plotted a retrieval—not theft for private keeping but a forced debut into un-eraseable public record. Colonel Bloomfield's grandson, Tom Bloomfield of Europol's Art Crime Taskforce, provided blueprints: blast-door timers, laser grids, biometric locks keyed to a single shareholder, Hugo de Bargini—the last living scion of Lord Alessio.

2 Re-Entry of the Falcon

Hugo de Bargini resembled his thirteenth-century forebear only in ambition. A venture-capital prodigy, he'd minted billions on biotech IPOs. At press junkets he wore lapel pins shaped like crossed quills. He claimed the carpet page was “too fragile for medievalist handling” and that a high-resolution scan would satisfy scholars. When a Reuters journalist asked why humidity controls were set for combustion, Bargini smiled: “All art ends as ash—better ash that funds innovation.”

The remark lit social-media fires. #SaveTheLilies trended; petitions flooded UNESCO. Yet Albedo's legal armour held.

3 The Heist-That-Isn't (31 March 2025)

Snow fell like shredded vellum. Annette and Solomon, disguised as datacentre technicians, rode the freight elevator with wheeled crates labelled Cryo-Server Units. Inside their crates: a fiber-laser engraver, a backpack air-scrubber, and Tom Bloomfield in contortionist crouch.

Lina remained in a van uphill, feeding thermal maps through low-orbit relay. Vault 7's biometric pad expected Hugo's retinal scan. Two months earlier, Tom had obtained a high-resolution frame from a CNBC interview; a deep-fake contact lens now lay on Annette's finger, iris texture printed in iridium. She pressed it to scanner: ACCESS GRANTED.

The inner room smelled of cold metal and faint oxidised myrrh—the page's lingering medieval perfume. It floated in a vitrified acrylic frame, sensor braces ready to flood argon with oxygen-stripping halon if tampered.

Tom set the fiber-laser to micron pulse-mode. Rather than cut alarm wires, he engraved a spoofing loop directly onto the fiber itself, telling sensors time stood still. Solomon lifted the acrylic, slid in a dummy facsimile printed on parchment grown from lab-cultured calf fibroblasts, and resealed the frame. The real carpet page, rolled inside a carbon nanotube cylinder, nested into Solomon's cryo-crate between liquid-nitrogen dewars.

They exited. No alarms. Lina's thermal feed remained blue.

Outside the freight dock an unexpected figure waited—Hugo de Bargini in sable coat, flanked by two security hounds. His eyes glinted.

Bargini: “Art thieves? No. Book worshippers.”

Annette (pulse hammering): “Maintenance schedule, sir.”

Bargini (chuckle): “A medievalist accent under that respirator, Dr Böllinger. Did you really think Falcons own only one hawk's eye?”

Laser-sights dotted chests. Tom eased a hand toward coat lining—stopped. Bargini gestured and guards swung open their van. But Lina, hearing comms go dead, triggered contingency.

4 Release of the Breath

A dormant satellite uplink burst to life, streaming the live vault feed she'd captured during spoofing—eight-gigapixel macro scans of the authentic page—straight onto Intertext, the open-access manuscript cloud. Within minutes mirrored torrents proliferated. #LilyCipher spiked.

Bargini's phone chimed. He scrolled, face draining. He barked at Annette:

Bargini: “You leaked it? Without provenance it's worthless!”

Annette: “Truth doesn't invoice.”

Bargini's game collapsed: investors balked; NFT marketplace suspended minting amid fraud claims. He snarled, waved the team off—no profit in arresting them now.

5 Under Light That Sees Beyond

The cylinder reached Zürich's Institute for Digital Papyrology that evening. Under hyperspectral scans, gold rings refracted wavelengths unseen by earlier scholars. A pattern of microscopic voids within the shell-gold traced concentric Morse pulses—dots and dashes shaved by Petrus's burin before burnishing. Solomon transcribed:

BREATH RESIDES WHERE LILIES BOW TO CISTERN SKY

The phrase matched no known passage. Tom cross-referenced Rainerius's acrostic MIHI LUCEAT VERITAS: initial letters M-L-V mirrored in Latin numerals 1055—a folio number missing from James. Lina remembered Brand's note about Oxford birds: the margin lilies bowed toward a blue wash scholars assumed decorative.

Hypothesis: Petrus embedded coordinates—not to another manuscript but to water; a cistern sky implied a reflective surface beneath Debre Damo capturing star patterns.

6 Return to the Rock (Pentecost 2025)

Modern helicopters, welcomed now, carried Lina's coalition back to Debre Damo. Abba Melaku's successor, Abba Yohannes, met them. At twilight they descended stone steps into the monastery's ancient rain cistern—dry from drought. Its walls, once plastered, were frescoed faintly: lilies bending toward a central circle.

Under ultraviolet torch, gold specks appeared inside painted petals—matching Petrus's micro-void Morse. In the drained silt Solomon's boot struck wood. They uncovered a cedar reliquary sealed with lead.

Inside: two parchment leaves, unilluminated, wrapped round a brittle goat-skin scroll. Greek majuscule, older than Marcus's hand by at least three centuries. Carbon dating later fixed it to late first century CE—contemporary with Flavius Josephus. A hasty translation by Lina revealed:

“Words spoken in Arimathea by Ya'aqov and Shim'on, sons of Yosef, concerning the Teacher's rising in breath. Written by Levi the scribe, third night after Passover.”

The text—just 280 Greek words—described Jesus's burial in a vineyard trench, guarded by kinsmen until Sabbath ended, after which light (phos) appeared, “clothing the body in whiteness, yet the flesh remained as dust.” It contradicted every canonical tomb narrative, matching Simon's logia but from a witness generation earlier.

Abba Yohannes wept.

Yohannes: “This is the Breath behind the Breath.”

7 Shifting Creeds

News detonated globally. Vatican press conference acknowledged authenticity but framed it as “private grief testimony, not doctrinal.” Eastern Orthodox scholars called it a bridge between mystical hesychasm and apostolic tradition. Protestant circles split—some jubilant, others fearing erosion of bodily-resurrection preaching.

Yet the public conversation pivoted: resurrection not annulled but re-imagined—material decay alongside spiritual continuity. Neuro-theologians likened it to quantum information leaving matter. Climate activists adopted the lily emblem: “Renew the earth where bodies rest shallow but breath renews the sky.”

8 Bargini's Last Feather

Hugo de Bargini faced indictment for planned art destruction and tax fraud. On bail, he broke into Albedo's server room, intent on erasing lily scans. But a screen greeted him with Petrus's concentric gold rings, endlessly looping. Annette's hack had embedded the image as immutable root wallpaper—cannot delete root without deleting system. Bargini laughed, hollow, and surrendered.

The Falcon Society imploded; surviving members released a statement: “The falcon returns to roost among ashes it cannot clutch.”

9 Marcus Vindicated

In San Clemente, monks gathered where the original scriptorium fire had once raged. An LED screen projected the cistern scroll as Abbot Paolo read translations. When he finished, bells rang a strange new melody: Ionian mode + Ethiopian Geez Kistet, composed by the abbey organist to honour the union of breaths.

Laity thronged, not to watch dogmas die but to witness how parchment argued across centuries until a fuller voice emerged.

10 The Unexpected Epilogue

Weeks later Lina examined the reverse of the cedar reliquary lid. Under backscatter X-ray she saw lines scratched by steel:

Non est finis sed initium.
—R

R for Rainerius. He had foreseen discovery, perhaps even planted the reliquary after Marcus's death, trusting future seekers.

Annette asked:

Annette: “Did Rainerius orchestrate the entire relay—Marcus, Petrus, the lilies?”

Lina (smiling): “Or maybe the Breath orchestrated Rainerius.”

11 Coda Breath Beyond Parchment (Christmas Eve 2025)

Debre Damo's Archive that Breathes now hosts a solar-powered digitisation lab named Petrus Centre for Manuscript Light. Students—Muslim, Christian, Jewish—train together. A holographic installation projects the carpet page's concentric rings; visitors walk inside shimmering gold, becoming shadows in living illumination.

Solomon stands by the entrance, guiding a new cohort. He tells them a final logion, recently restored from computational inference:

“Where two or three copy with love, I breathe. Where one alters in fear, I breathe still. Burn the page— I become wind. Hide the page— I become seed. Share the page— I become song.”

Snow begins to fall on Pilatus far away, white as scraped vellum. Within the bunker Vault 7 stands empty, but its void echoes digital hymns millions now read. A monk's midnight fragrance lingers still, cedar-smoke and myrrh, borne on breath that outlives stone.

The End—unless the Breath has elsewhere to travel.