Solomon's Jar (6 page)

“But it was my understanding—forgive me, my impression—that the lodge practiced a traditional Western form of nature worship.”

“That much is certainly true. But that does not make us Wiccans, dear lady.”

He leaned forward, and his passion seemed to glow from his eyes and radiate from his prominent teeth, which were themselves a shade of off-white, she couldn't help noticing.

“Leave aside the truth or falsity of the ancient worship of the Great Mother and the horned god,” he said. “We subscribe to the
true
old religion,” Sir Martin proclaimed.

“Don't the Wiccans make similar claims?” Annja asked.

He dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. “I mean the religion of the dawn men. From before the druids, before the pyramids, before the great crime of agriculture. Ours is the primal religious ecstasy expressed by the cave painters of Lascaux. Our worship is devoted to the earth's very self—we do not profane and diminish the earth by personalizing it as a mere human. Especially now, when humans have covered much of the beautiful face of the planet with their concrete canker sores, and the waters with their muck and ooze.”

He sat upright again with a half-rueful smile. “You must forgive my vehemence,” he said.

“You certainly have the courage of your convictions, Sir Martin.”

“Thank you, my dear. You are most kind.”

“So the lodge believes that our modern technological civilization is a mistake?” she asked.

“A desecration,” he said.

Then his near white eyes slid past her. She turned her head but slightly. Far enough for her peripheral vision to register the direction of his gaze. He was looking straight at the brass jar on the mantel.

He knows, she realized. Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, she thought. She drew in a deep breath. Then she plunged in head first.

“Given your institute's focus on prehistoric native beliefs,” she said, “I admit I find its interest in a relic such as the alleged jar in which King Solomon bound the demons to be quite curious.”

He looked directly at her for a moment. It seemed that his expression hardened, and that his eyes went from silver to steel.

“So,” he said—softly, as to himself. “The margin of error is small, so small, in this terrible modern world of ours. As you observed, Ms. Corbett, I am passionate in my convictions. Sometimes my passions overwhelm me. Especially when my dearest expectations are raised, only to be cruelly dashed.”

He stood. “As to my interest—our interest—the
earth's interest in the jar of Solomon, it would be pure waste to tell you now. No point, really.”

Either his disdain for modern technology did not forbid him from carrying some kind of wireless communicator hidden on his person, or he possessed strong psychic powers. Annja did not discount the latter possibility as readily as she might have a year earlier. The door opened suddenly and two men, dressed in rough, soil-stained workman's garb that seemed itself to belong to an earlier century, stepped in.

“Mal, Dave,” Sir Martin said. One newcomer was short and broad, with dark hair on his balding head and sticking from his prominent ears. The other was a huge, near shapeless mound of muscle. He was an albino with skin as chalky as the famous cliffs nearby and hair whiter than anything else in the white room. Both wore silver lodge medallions. The squat dark man carried a double-barreled shotgun under one arm.

“My Purdey, Dave?” Sir Martin inquired.

The squat man shrugged. “It'll do the job, won't it, Squire?”

“Ms. Corbett is leaving us,” Sir Martin said. “Permanently, I fear. Reginald, I fear we need to clean up after my…indiscretions. See to it, won't you, there's a good lad?”

“Of course, Sir Martin,” Reginald said coolly.

“Please take our guest into the back garden, kill her
and bury her in the churchyard where none will be the wiser. And for nature's sake, do it quietly!”

 

T
HE HUGE ALBINO
, Mal, picked up a shovel leaned against the moss-grown stone wall as they passed beneath a gateway arch at the back of the great white house. Annja didn't know whether it was intended to kill her or inter her. Probably both she guessed. The White Tree Lodge did not seem to disdain modern concepts of efficiency. She wondered, idly, how they justified their reliance on the techniques and technologies they so despised.

The derelict abbey reared to the right. Ivy practically encrusted the limestone walls, which had fallen in at the top. A passageway led between rosebushes just beginning to bud with spring. Beyond lay another arched gateway. Through it the granite-and-limestone headstones of the churchyard were visible, jumbled gray-and-white shapes in the thickening twilight.

“We really don't have to play it this way, gentlemen,” Annja said when there were walls all around. Flying things fluttered about, shadows tracing oddly irregular paths, bats or swallows she could not tell. The sun no longer shone here this day. It felt as if it never had.

“Coo,” said the short, squat Dave. “I fancy hearing what the bird has to offer. What about you, Mal?”

The albino grunted.

“Not a bit of it, lads,” Reginald Smythe-George called out, coming along seven yards or so behind as if pulling rear guard. Maybe he didn't want to risk getting his expensive trousers splattered, Annja thought. “This is lodge business. No time for frivolity,” he said.

“What's the point of belonging to a fertility cult,” Dave groused, “if you can't enjoy a few rites o' fertility—if you know what I mean?”

Mal smiled.

“So this is the way it has to be?” Annja asked. She walked toward the churchyard with head down and shoulders slumped.

“That's right,” Dave said, “and a damned dirty shame it is. But there it is. Just take it easy, now, and it'll go easy, if you know what I mean.”

“Sure,” she said, and spun.

Mal's bulk and slow, shambling motion conspired to suggest slow-wittedness. But there was nothing slow about his response. No sooner had Annja begun to turn than he raised the shovel in both hands. Even as she came around to face him the blade descended to split her head.

But her right hand was no longer empty. She hacked across her body right to left with the sword. She felt two moments of resistance.

Blood hosed her from the stumps of two thick, severed arms.

Mal's mouth opened and closed. His tongue looked
red as blood in contrast to his colorless face. Or perhaps he had bitten it in shock. He made gobbling sounds, quick and bubbling with desperation as he stared at his massive wounds.

“Bloody hell!” Dave exclaimed. He brought up the Purdey.

Annja was on him. A backhand slash severed both barrels of the priceless double shotgun with a belling sound. Reflex made the man yank the now-sawn-off shotgun skyward. Reflex clenched his finger on both triggers. The barrels gouted pumpkin-sized flames into the dove-gray evening air.

Dave roared in surprise and pain as the unexpected recoil broke his trigger finger and possibly his wrist. He had not been gripping the gun properly when Annja amputated two-thirds of its barrel. The giant muzzle flames blossoming so close to his face had ignited the front of his curly hair.

His cry was cut short as Annja took the sword in both hands and raced past him to his right, swinging horizontally as she passed him.

He froze. Blood gushed from his mouth and jetted from his chest. He fell to flagstones half-buried in the turf.

A flash snapped her eyes forward. Simultaneously Annja heard a
pop,
not particularly loud. Then another. Something plucked like fingers at a lock of her dark hair hanging by her left cheek.

Young Reginald Smythe-George had a tiny black pistol in his hand and was shooting at her from twenty feet away.

Her instructors had always told her to run away from a knife but charge a gun. Of course, they might not have been so cautious about the knives had they known she had a very large knife indeed, carried in the otherwhere where an act of will could bring it to her hand at need. But the advice for firearms remained sound. Fast as she was, she couldn't outrun bullets. Nor even appreciably dodge them.

She
could
try to dazzle the shooter with footwork, throw off his aim—which was lousy anyway—and perhaps even startle him too much to shoot. She ran two light steps toward him and threw herself into a cartwheel, neat as a high-school cheerleader.

She heard no shots, felt no slap or sting of impact. Her hair flying loose about her shoulders, she landed on her feet and flowed instantly into a lunge.

The sword entered Reginald's chest right between the wings of his natty coat.

For a moment they posed there, eyes locked on eyes. Smythe-George's were very surprised. He tried to say something, but it came out as a large slurp of blood that ran down his chin and made his wine-colored necktie darker. Then his eyes rolled back and he slumped over as life left him.

Annja turned her hips away as his knees gave way beneath him, pulling the blade from his body. Then she
flicked her wrist, clearing the mystical blade and dewing the broad leaves of the ivy on the passage wall with blood.

“You gave me no choice,” she said.

With a push of her will she put the sword away. She looked around. The western sky looked as if the blood she'd shed had stained it. The manor showed no light nor sign of life. If anyone had witnessed her reversal of circumstance, they were keeping mum about it.

Gathering herself, she climbed to the top of the six-foot side wall. Then she dropped down to the lawn outside. She hoped to have cycled most of the way back to the bike shop before Sir Martin thought to miss his lackeys.

Roux pushed his sunglasses halfway down his nose to look at Annja as she walked toward him along the Riviera beach. She wore a green tube top with a hint of blue, shorts in an explosion of colors, red, yellow, blue, white. With her lithe shape and panther poise, she could. Silver-framed sunglasses hid her eyes behind dark lenses. Her hair blew free in the brisk Mediterranean morning breeze.

“You certainly took your time,” the old man said querulously.

He had a metal-and-yellow-plastic-mesh chaise longue unfolded on the sand beneath a green-and-white parasol. He wore a Panama hat with a red-and-black band, a bush jacket, Bermuda shorts and sandals. He sipped a tall iced drink through a straw.

Annja sat next to him on a towel he had spread out beside him in anticipation of her arrival. She drew her long legs up under her chin, and gazed out to sea, where the surreally long low shape of a supertanker made its way west toward the Straits of Gibraltar.

“I thought I was here on time.”

“I don't mean today, girl. I mean, what in the name of merciful God took you so long to think to come and visit me? You've left half of Europe in an uproar in your wake. You're more like a hurricane than a force of good.”

A pair of adolescent girls emerged from the surf wearing nothing but bikini bottoms. They ran past, giggling in the self-consciousness of their scandalous near nudity. Annja shook her head.

“You disapprove?” Roux asked.

“I'm thinking about the sunburn.” She shuddered.

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Will you remain covered?”

“Of course. I don't need that kind of sunburn.” She tipped down her own shades and studied him. “Are you being a dirty old man?”

“Who knows? Perhaps I would disapprove.”

They sat a moment in silence. Above them the sky was clear but for a few faint brush-strokes of cloud and a contrail making its way south across the sea. Gulls swarmed above the water like white scraps of paper
borne on the breeze. The beach smelled of hot sand, salt water, seafood somewhat past its sell-by date, semirandom petroleum fractions. Roux smelled of sunscreen with aloe vera and coconut oil, old man's sweat and faintly of alcohol.

“What about Peru?” she asked.

“The manuscript has been duly sold to an Asian consortium that will ensure its discoveries are brought to the world at reasonable price, not coopted by either greedy governments or the Western pharmaceutical cartel.” He sipped and smiled. “We realized a tidy sum on this transaction. Altogether a good thing; we certainly have expenses to defray.”

“What about the people?” she asked impatiently.

“No further harm came to them.” He shrugged. “For the most part drug barons cannot afford to act the way their counterparts do in the movies. They sacrifice too much of their support among the populace that way. They start to act like outlaws.”

“What about those mercenaries? What happens to them?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Annja was outraged.

“Nothing. Their operation is very highly connected in the United States.”

Annja shook her head in disgust.

“You must learn to accept what is beyond your
power to change, child,” Roux said. “You cannot save the world.”

“I thought that was my mission.”

“Perhaps. But you must learn to prioritize. Nothing is more certain than that you cannot save it all at once.”

At that she turned a frowning face out to sea. A few sails stood up above the water like white fins. The supertanker had almost dissolved into the haze. The seagulls cried like lost souls.

“Tell me,” Roux said at length.

So she did. She held back nothing, from the first hint on the Usenet of the discovery of Solomon's Jar; to her adventures in Amsterdam and subsequent escape from the Netherlands into Germany posing as the relief driver for a friendly, and well-bribed, Belgian lesbian trucker; to her visit to Ravenwood Manor.

At the last Roux grunted. “Does the expression, ‘leading with your chin' suggest anything to you?”

She tipped down her shades and grinned at him. “Apparently a course of action.”

He nodded and looked at the water. His expression was dark. “I have lost one champion already,” he said. “I don't want to mislay another and spend the next half millennium looking for
her
replacement. Try to learn a modicum of caution, if you please.”

“It's on the to-do list. You know what puzzles me?” Annja asked, quickly changing the subject.

“Of course not. I make no pretense at clairvoyance,” Roux said, perturbed.

“It's not important at all, but it keeps niggling at my attention. Who or what was ‘trees'?” Annja asked.

“Terry.”

“Huh?”

“Don't say ‘huh,' young lady. It indicates muddy and undisciplined thinking,” Roux scolded.

Fleetingly Annja wondered just how much her predecessor had personified lucid and disciplined thinking. Not much, from Annja's reading of history. She chose to say nothing because it was a tender subject for Roux and she had no desire to hurt him with flippancy. Also, because he took gloomy satisfaction in lecturing her about her forerunner and her unpleasant demise, and it always made Annja acutely uncomfortable to hear the facts surrounding Joan of Arc's destruction.

“I beg your pardon,” Annja said precisely and formally.

“That's better. ‘Trees' is short for ‘Theresia,' which is cognate to your English ‘Theresa.' Trees's Schatwinkel means, Terry's Treasure Shop,” Roux stated.

“Oh. I didn't know you spoke Dutch.”

“You'd be surprised what oddments one picks up in a few short centuries, my dear.”

He sipped his drink down until his straw slurped noisily in the ice at the bottom of his plastic cup. “So, has the true jar been found? What do you say?”

Annja frowned. “I don't know if we have sufficient evidence to say one way or another.”

“Evidence? Bah!” Roux produced a theatrically Gallic sniff. “You moderns, with your veneration of rationality.”

“Not everybody feels that way,” she said.

“You refer to the Paleolithic dreams of your friends in Kent? Those who would cast away all modernity and return us to squinting at graffiti scrawled on the walls of caves by smoky firelight are as superstitious as those who cannot imagine life before text messaging! What you fail to realize is that rational thought is a
tool.
It suits some uses and not others. It is no less—and certainly no more.”

She smiled at him. “I presume you had a point?”

“Of course! Use your intuition. You knew at once that the jar you found on Highsmith's mantel was false. What do you feel about the real Solomon's Jar?”

She expected to have to scrunch her face up and squint and concentrate. Instead she found herself answering, “It has been found,” without her own conscious volition.

Roux nodded his white-bearded chin. “Indeed.”

“You knew?”

“Of course. Otherwise, why would the crew of the fishing trawler who found it be murdered? A random maniac would be too coincidental,
non?
And the fact that six men were butchered in a manner which inevitably must have proven as noisy as it was messy implies
strongly the existence either of confederates or supernatural strength and speed.”

She cocked a brow at him. “You think demons were involved?”

“Perhaps. Not in the way you think.” He shook his head. “No. Those men were murdered, most likely, by other men possessed of ample evidence that the true jar of Solomon had been found.”

“Now you're using reason,” Annja said.

“Of course. Did I not say it was a handy tool indeed—when appropriately used?”

He stood and began to fold his parasol. “I must be on my way. There's a world poker tour tournament commencing in Monte Carlo this evening, and I don't want to be late to put down my entry fee. I believe I've spotted a tell in Phil Ivey on the television.”

“I'll never know how you square gambling with your service of the good.”

“It's not important that you do so,” he said. “Keep in mind that there are many paths to righteousness. And unrighteousness, as well. Your view of good will not always concur with that of others who may serve it as fully and diligently as you do yourself. That's another reason not to go looking for wrongs to right or, more precisely, not to go looking for witches to burn. You may find you have destroyed another great warrior for the cause.”

Annja winced. She knew he would not use that particular metaphor lightly. He of all people.

“We will ourselves not always see eye to eye, my child,” he told her, his voice gentler now. He folded up the chaise. “We may yet find ourselves at cross purposes, or even open opposition. And yet still fighting with true hearts for the same great cause.”

“So you admit to working for good? I thought you were indifferent. Or undecided, maybe.”

He ignored her. “The path of good is not supposed to be easy. That is the allure of the path of evil. Few who wreak great harm do so with any intention of working evil in the world. Most often their intent is exactly the opposite. And most who do lesser evils do so because it is the simplest and most expedient thing to do.”

“So what's my next move?” Annja asked.

“Must I tell you everything?” Roux said dismissively.

“Well, if you aren't willing to forgo the pleasure of picking my performance apart after the fact—”

He sighed. “Don't imagine your powers shield you more than they do.”

“I don't, by and large,” she said. “Otherwise I wouldn't have run away so fast.”

“I worry.”

She reached up and briefly squeezed his hand. The flesh was resilient, like any strong hand. Yet somehow she thought to feel in its dry grasp the strength of ages.

“Thank you,” she said.

“As for whence to proceed from here,” he said, “you are the archaeologist. But I would be so bold as to suggest the source. I bid you good day.”

He tipped his hat and walked off along the beach. His stride belied his years—the age he appeared, and vastly more his real age.

Seventeen hours later she was on an El Al Boeing 737 touching down outside Tel Aviv.