The Blue Hackle (33 page)

Fergie unlocked a second cabinet and removed
what looked like a gray breadbox. Although, since he strained to
lift it, it was more likely a metal chest stuffed with several
generations of coin collections . . . no. It was a oblong stone
coffer, a fairy-sized sarcophagus containing not fragile bones and
disintegrated wings, but a sprinkling of black dirt, gray dust, and
either threads or cobwebs.

“The Crusader Coffer, I presume?” This time
Jean leaned so near the stone she could smell it, cold, damp,
redolent of decay and long-dead fires.

Alasdair took another picture, the flash
dazzling the corner of her eye.

Fergie’s expression reflected dazzlement to
the point of dazed. “We found this in one of the cellars whilst
laying pipes for the new kitchen. I’ve managed to keep it under
wraps, so to speak, but it’s time it made its appearance on the
world stage.”

“You were after selling it to Greg MacLeod?”
asked Alasdair.

“Yes. He was hinting about making a grand
offer, if he liked what he saw—we both knew he was talking about
the Coffer. I would have hated to let it go, but then, it doesn’t
have the family history the Flagon does. And it might well be the
most expensive, even priceless object we’ve got. It could be
Dunasheen’s salvation, no pun intended.”

“Priceless?” Alasdair asked. “Pun?”

“It’s an ossuary, isn’t it?” asked Jean.
“Without its lid. People would bury their dead, then come back
later, gather the bones, put them in a chest and re-bury them.”

“A Jewish burial practice at the time of
Jesus,” said Fergie.

Alasdair looked sharply around at him.

Jean’s glee was deflating beneath an
all-too-familiar weight in the pit of her stomach. She’d hoped
Fergie’s odd notions would be more digestible than some of the
others she’d tried to swallow this past year, but if he was heading
where she thought he was heading, dyspepsia was going to be the
least of her worries. “There are several famous examples from that
era. One contains the heel bone of a crucified man. Others have
intriguing inscriptions, although the most famous, supposedly
naming Jesus and his brother James, is pretty much assumed to be a
fake.”

Unfazed by that caveat, Fergie switched on a
lamp and angled the long side of the chest toward it. “This one’s
inscription is more than intriguing. Have a look.”

To the accompaniment of The Chieftains’ “The
Rocky Road to Dublin,” Jean dropped to her knees, not in prayer,
but to see the gouges and scratches straggling across the face of
the stone. All she could make out at first were the tiny grains of
the rock, a micro-miniature field of stars.
As above, so
below
—but that was a phrase from magical tradition, not
Judeo-Christian.

Barely aware of Alasdair’s warm breath on her
ear, Jean squinted and tilted her head back and forth until at
last, in the lamplight raking the side of the chest, she either saw
or imagined she saw lettering, not in Hebrew or Aramaic but in
Latin. “Well, it could be the INRI inscription, the words of the
indictment placed above Jesus’s head on the cross, telling
onlookers what he was convicted of doing. Or, in his case, of
claiming, according to authorities such as Pontius . . .” Bones
rattled in the ossuary of her memory. “. . . Pilate.”

“Eh?” Alasdair’s question rippled through her
hair and set her earring to swinging.

“It’s Latin,
Isus Nazarenus Rex
Iudaeorum
. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. At least, I
think I can see
Isus Nazarenus
. I’m guessing at
Rex
Iudaeorum
, because that’s usually what comes next.” She looked
up at Fergie, hovering like a tartan-swathed blimp above a sports
stadium. “If this had been found in the Holy Land, with proper
provenance and documentation, and examined by scientists and
peer-reviewed, then it could be an early occurrence of the INRI
phrase, carved on the ossuary in the days when Christianity hadn’t
separated from Judaism. Or it could even be independent
confirmation of the Biblical account of the crucifixion, but that’s
a leap. A leap of faith.”

With the aid of Alasdair’s large, strong
hand, she regained her feet and brushed at the bits of dog hair
clinging to her dress. “Even though it has no provenance, no
documentation, and has never been reviewed,” she went on, “I can
see Greg wanting this for—for his museum.”

“Ah,” said Alasdair, his keen hearing picking
up the chalky rattle of her memory. “But surely that’s natural
cracks in the stone. Your eyes, your mind, they’ve got a tendency
to apply order to random shapes. See early astronomers thinking
they were viewing canals on Mars.”

Fergie’s laugh split the difference between a
knowing chuckle and a rapturous giggle. “Early astronomers didn’t
have the telescopes we have now, just as early archaeologists
didn’t have the microscopes and other equipment. But you haven’t
quite got it, Jean.”

“I’m usually not quite getting it,” she
returned.

“What if the words carved on the chest,”
Fergie stated, “on the coffer—coffin, eh?—are
Isus Nazarenus
Ignis Salvator
.”

Jean peered again at the scratches and
gouges. “I don’t see—well, Alasdair’s right, you see what you want
to see . . .” Which is what Sanjay Thomson had said about Fergie.
An intelligent lad, Thomson. “
Ignis Salvator?
Fire Savior?
Savior, sure—aha, that’s your pun, Dunasheen’s salvation. But why
fire?
”

“Therein lies a tale. Sit down, be
comfortable.” Fergie gestured toward two wingback chairs beside the
fireplace, their fabric faded and frayed.

Smoothing his kilt beneath him, Alasdair sat,
but his body language hinted at anything but comfort—he perched on
the edge of the chair like a little boy outside the principal’s
office. Jean sat down and, surprised to find her notepad and pencil
still in her hand, scribbled an outline dense with question
marks.

Fergie posed on the hearth, in front of the
flaming peat, hands folded behind his back and face almost
feverish—not only from strong drink or the heat of the fire. “The
Crusader Coffer. Perhaps it was brought to Dunasheen by Norman the
Red’s father, who found it, like the Flagon, in Alexandria.
Crossroads of the world, Alexandria, and famous for its catacombs,
both pagan and Christian.”

“True,” said Jean, and wrote
listen
on
her page.

“Perhaps the Coffer was brought by crusaders.
Perhaps—well, this is a bit over the top . . .”

“Is it now?” Alasdair murmured.

“. . . perhaps it was left here on Skye two
millennia past, by the Romans who sailed round the British Isles,
the ones who left Roman coins here. They knew of Skye, Ptolemy of
Alexandria wrote of it. Alexandria again, founded by Alexander, and
your name’s the Gaelic version of Alexander, Alasdair.”

“Like as not,” said Alasdair, “those coins
were lost by some lad just back from a Grand Tour, no more than two
centuries ago. Or it could be that your wee chest was brought here
by soldiers serving in Palestine in the nineteenth or twentieth
centuries.”

“No provenance,” Jean reiterated. “No
documentation.”

But Fergie was in full flow. He rocked back
on his heels, kilt swaying. “You’re eager to get to the crux of the
matter, understandably enough.
Crux
, Latin for cross, right?
This is it, then: I not only believe the chest is an ossuary of the
time of Jesus, I believe that it contained relics of Jesus Christ
himself. Now, I know what you’re thinking.”

“No, Fergie,” said Alasdair faintly, “you do
not know what I’m thinking.”

Jean was beginning to feel like a hostage,
except she was trapped by courtesy and curiosity. With no choice
but to play along, she squeaked, “Um, the, er, crux of the
Christian faith is that Jesus was resurrected. There were no
remains to put in an ossuary.”

“Got it in one,” Fergie said with a sage nod.
“We know from studying the Shroud of Turin that Jesus’s body
discorporated in a burst of energy. That’s the only deduction you
can make from the singe marks on the cloth. A remarkable event, one
that we’d call a miracle. There’s no saying how many times a
similar event may have happened over the course of history, but
this is the one suitably documented.”

It might not be logical, Jean thought, to use
the Bible to document the Bible, but logic had left the building
along with Gilnockie and Young.

“The cloth that was pinned round Jesus’s head
is in Oviedo, Spain,” Fergie said. “The bloodstains and singe marks
on it correspond to those on the Shroud.”

“Well, yes, they do,” conceded Jean, more to
Alasdair than to Fergie.

Slowly, expressionlessly, Alasdair reached
out, placed the camera on the table, and let his hand fall to the
arm of the chair.

“No one knows how many other cloths were in
contact with his body, stained with blood and sweat, when he
discorporated. But one thing we do know. The disciples of Jesus
were eager to gather relics of his time on Earth. They would have
swept the stone slab where he was laid, the stone slab where the
Shroud and the Oviedo cloth were found, and saved every loose
thread, every grain of dust or ash.”

“And,” Jean said on a long sigh, “put them in
an ossuary labeled ‘Jesus of Nazareth, fire savior.’”

“Yes, yes.” Fergie grinned happily, his
glasses glittering in the lights on the Christmas tree—or, more
likely, in the lights in his eyes.

A female voice on the Chieftains album
launched into “O Holy Night.” Wrong season. This should all be
going down at Easter. Or Pentecost, when tongues of flame,
symbolizing the Holy Ghost, appeared on the heads of the
Apostles.

Alasdair’s own eyes went from fixed to
positively glazed. “You’re joking. You’re having us on. You’re
taking the mickey on account of Jean’s writing about, erm, weird
stuff.”

“No, not a bit of it,” Fergie assured him. “I
want Jean to write about the Crusader Coffer. That’s a misnomer, I
confess, but I had to call it something less, well, inflammatory,
if you’ll pardon the expression. I want Jean to write about it
because it’s weird. Because it’s uncanny. That’s the point. It
proves the existence of a world beyond ours.”

“Proves,” Alasdair repeated, his tone
dripping despair.

Jean sent him a sympathetic look, which
bounced ineffectually off the side of his face. Yes, her tolerance
for this sort of bafflegab was a lot higher than his—especially
when the person gabbing the baffle was one of his oldest friends.
She didn’t feel threatened by this sort of free association, a
gonzo tour of history and mythology. She enjoyed it the way Dougie
enjoyed catnip. It was intoxicating, even if you did feel a bit
foolish after you sobered up.

The problem, as Alasdair would quickly point
out, was not realizing this sort of thing was myth. Acting on it as
though it was chemistry rather than alchemy, astronomy rather than
astrology. A leap of faith could just as well be a leap of folly.
Or both.

Foolish.
She looked up at Fergie’s
guileless face. Foolish fire,
ignis fatuus
, was Latin for
will o’ the wisp. A supernatural light leading a traveler from a
sunburned land to his doom, while not saving a deeply rooted laird
from his. Jean tried again. “Why is the inscription in Latin? Jesus
and his followers spoke Aramaic.”

“But within only a few years of his, ah,
disappearance, St. Peter brought the faith to Rome.”

“And the Romans wanted to get rid of this
particular relic by dumping it here, at what they saw as the end of
the world? Why didn’t they just throw it into the ocean?”

“No, no, it’s the other way round. Early
believers brought it here to save it from the Roman persecutions.
The foundations of Dunasheen’s old church could have been laid
hundreds of years before those of St. Ninian’s church at Whithorn
in Galloway.”

“Which is thought to be the first Christian
foundation in Scotland,” said Jean.

“Exactly. Whithorn’s attracted excavations, a
visitor center—loads of attention. That just goes to show how holy
mysteries lead to heritage conservation. I’ll not mention the
worldwide interest in Rosslyn Chapel.” Fergie throttled back his
grin. “But then, let’s not go overboard. The Coffer was brought
here in the Middle Ages, I expect, along with the Flagon. No
matter. Finding the Coffer is a miracle, in its own small way, for
us here at Dunasheen.
Dun na sithein
, fortress of the
fairies. Maybe my uncle wasn’t far wrong about the provenance of
the Flagon, in a way.”

Alasdair’s head fell forward and he covered
his face with his hand.

“In a way?” Jean prompted.

“Suffice it to say now,” said Fergie, “that
tales of fairies are based on an ancient race of people who were
driven underground. By whom?”

Jean didn’t bother answering,
Celtic
invaders armed with iron swords
. She clutched her own weapon,
her pencil, braced for the next blow. The fire popped. A clock
ticked. A peal of bells sounded from the CD, foretelling the
midnight bells of New Year’s Eve, soon to come.

Again Fergie rocked back on his heels. “The
Ark of the Covenant supposedly held a sacred stone that fell from
the sky. The sacred stone in Mecca’s Kaaba fell from the sky.
Tut-ankh-Amun’s pectoral is centered on a scarab cut from glass
formed when a meteor, a stone falling from the sky, hit the
Egyptian desert. Some versions of the Holy Grail story say it’s a
stone that fell from the sky.”

“Fergie,” said Jean, “please do not tell us
the Fairy Flagon is the Holy Grail.”

“Oh! Do you think it might be?” Fergie
replied.

Alasdair darted Jean a baleful blue look from
between his fingers.

Fergie laughed. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist a
wee bit of a tease there. Of course it’s not the Holy Grail. That’s
a legend.”