The Stolen Gospels (16 page)
She sat in it to get the feel of it, caressed the sun-warmed, timeworn leather armrests and inhaled the patrician smell of fine old leather. With a deep sigh of satisfaction, she held the Sword of She-God, and in the gleaming blade she saw her own smiling reflection.
“I am the Sword of She-God,” she murmured. “Nothing can stop me now.”
* * *
As Lori lay in bed that evening, she felt herself slipping into another dimension, but not of slumber. She was afraid to sleep. The mysterious word mouthed by Veronica, “
Iktol
,” continued to disturb her, and she recalled the agitated expression on the innocent little face.
Murder
.
But how do I know what it means? And how do I know it is not Aramaic?
Being with the special child had triggered something Lori didn’t understand. Something that terrified her. A chain reaction in the depths of her soul. She sensed it bubbling, percolating inside . . . growing, moving through her body back and forth, repeatedly traversing her cellular structures, intensifying. . . .
A powerful presence.
The new
Bible
project was big.
Huge
, in fact. Any doubts she had felt in the beginning, upon learning of the she-apostles, had been dissipated quickly by the evidence all around her. Lori felt as if she was in the eye of the most powerful hurricane in the history of the planet. It was relatively quiet at the center now, but a tremendous force was being generated.
She didn’t know what her part might be in all of this, but knew she couldn’t escape it. She needed to be with Veronica again, to protect her . . . and to shelter the other she-apostles. It seemed an impossible thought to Lori, the image of a teenage girl safeguarding the children against Dixie Lou and her cohorts.
Lori also wanted to question Veronica, to learn if the awful word had really been on her lips, or if it had only been imagined, some residue—a flashback?—of the drugs Lori used to take.
What do I know anyway? How could I possibly read the lips of anyone speaking an ancient, perhaps secret language? It’s preposterous.
And yet, the presence-within was speaking to her now. Silently, but not in the same fashion as Veronica’s message. This was a wordless communication within Lori Vale’s cells, contained within every fiber of her being. It told her to sleep, to rest her troubled, fatigued brain.
She slipped into REM slumber.
And dreamed of being a baby herself, of struggling through her mother’s birth canal, of trying desperately to reach the light. She felt large, strong hands around her, shifting her tiny, fragile form, guiding her to safety, and heard her mother scream out in pain, a muffled sound that was replaced by the cry of a baby. Her own voice.
I am born.
In Lori’s dream she heard the urgent voices of women. Strangers in a shifting haze of light. They cut something, and she was no longer connected to her mother. The women spoke of a breach birth and their success at getting the baby turned around so that it didn’t strangle on its umbilical cord. They said it had almost become necessary to take the mother’s life to save the baby.
An odd comment, Lori realized, the reverse of what medical attendants usually said.
They were bathing her now, and Lori felt the cool, fresh wash of clean water spreading over her skin, like an ablution. Then something else, being rubbed all over her tiny body. A small amount touched her lips and she tasted it. Salt.
In her dream Lori was all things at once, a teenager and a baby, a person with knowledge of medical procedures, clean water, and salt, and a person who had never before experienced these things.
The newborn Lori was warm now, having been wrapped in swaddling clothes. A woman cradled her, murmuring, “
Tkehet erab, tkehet nahira
.”
She was speaking in the secret language of Veronica. The ancient, mysterious tongue.
Servant of darkness, servant of light.
From a nightmare, Lori screamed for her mother.
There was no response.
She awoke, pushed away the blankets and sheets. Much too hot. The pillow was wet; sticky perspiration covered her body.
Chapter 17
Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.
—Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:17,
The New Testament)
BOI headquarters, eastern Washington State . . .
Styx was in quite a sweat. Not wearing his eyeglasses, he alternately pulled and pushed on the rubber-wrapped metal bar, and with his legs he lifted a connected bar, so that the abdominal machine did its best to harden his flabby stomach. It was part of a regimen Styx had been following for four months, and included the ingestion of fruit, vegetable, and protein capsules twice a day.
Located in a room adjacent to his office, this was a private exercise room that had formerly been occupied by a subordinate, and which Styx had appropriated for his own purposes. Equipment lined the walls, including weight machines, aerobics units, and an exercycle. Now he could work out any time he felt like it, followed by a refreshing shower in his private bathroom.
It was, admittedly, a rather retro collection of equipment, since there were new health maintenance techniques available, including fat-melting electronic fields, injections and implants, surgical procedures, and any number of ways to get physically fit without having to work hard at it. But he preferred old-fashioned ways and things. His antique Lear Fan prop-jet was another example. Old things were available; you just had to search for them and have them rebuilt or constructed new, according to original specifications. That was how he felt about religion, too. The old ways were best, when women knew their place.
Exercise, Styx was discovering, had an unadvertised bonus: good ideas came to his busy, troubled mind as he worked out, apparently as his endorphin-relaxed brain developed solutions to complex problems that had been troubling him.
So engrossed was he in the machine now and in such thoughts that he didn’t notice a uniformed orderly who appeared at his side and stood stiffly at attention, awaiting recognition. Receiving none, the orderly, a young man in the silver-and-black uniform of the BOI Quick Reaction Force, inched forward a little, until he was into the periphery of his superior’s line of vision. When he finally caught the Vice Minister’s attention, he spoke quickly and nervously.
“Sorry to interrupt, sir, but this appears to be important.” He handed over a single sheet of white paper, but held onto an envelope.
A message in bold print proclaimed, to the Vice Minister:
Glory be to She-God Almighty, Creator and
Destroyer. Her power shall last forever.
—Gospel of the Apostle Mary Magdalene,
Holy Women’s Bible
“The Apostle Mary Magdalene?” Styx roared. “There was no such apostle!
Holy Women’s Bible
? She-God Almighty? What is this filth?”
“It came from an unknown source.” The soldier handed him the envelope, which bore no return address and no post mark.
“Get out!” Vice Minister Tertullian thundered. He rolled the sheet of paper and the envelope into a ball and hurled it across the room, toward a wastebasket. It missed its target and rolled behind a weight machine.
* * *
In his office, Minister Culpepper read an e-mail report on what had transpired in the exercise room of the Vice Minister of Minority Affairs.
Voice activating it, the Minister read the blasphemous
Holy Women’s Bible
quotation, which had been scanned into the system. With cigarette smoke curling around him, he looked out the window at the barren terrain. A large black vulture flew low in the sky, its wings flapping slowly as it searched the ground for prey.
With another voice command, he opened a folder and wrote an e-mail to Tertullian, saying : “Did you know about this women’s
Bible
? What in the Hades is it?”
Forty minutes later he received a response: “Nothing to worry about. I’m taking care of it.”
But gnats of worry swarmed through Culpepper’s thoughts. These women were proving resilient and surprisingly enterprising. Maybe the Vice Minister wasn’t up to the challenges of the job. He would bear even closer monitoring.
* * *
In the days following Lori’s visit with the she-apostle Veronica, the Scriptorium hummed with increased activity. The anecdote related by Veronica in Lori’s presence had only been the beginning, the translators reported. Suddenly all of the she-apostles were talking more, revealing additional stories from ancient times. The presence of Lori when Veronica poured forth new information was only a coincidence, the councilwomen were saying. The teenager had not been an influence on the child, after all.
One apostle, Abigail, told the Scriptorium scholars that their original
Testament of the She-Apostles
had been compiled and written during the lifetime of Jesus. During a period of persecution against women after the death and resurrection of the Christ, these gospels were placed in pottery jars and secreted in a cave. Subsequently they were found and destroyed by Sadducee priests. There were no other copies—except in the memories of the she-apostles.
With mounting excitement, editors organized the material into the burgeoning
Holy Women’s Bible
. More than seventy new pages were added in a matter of days, to the less than forty that had existed previously. As part of this monumental project, Scriptorium editors were also revising the King James Version of the
Bible
, deleting and rewriting anti-feminine passages based upon the new information that was being received. When complete, the
Holy Women’s Bible
would consist of three books,
The Old Testament
,
The New Testament,
and
The Testament of the She-Apostles
. It was a structure that had been set in place during the lifetime of Amy Angkor Billings, and many women in the monastery were saying it was a shame Amy wasn’t here to see this glorious time.
Through it all, Dixie Lou had been reading and editing printed pages, instead of reading them on computer screens, because she found the hard copies easier on her eyes. She felt an increasing sense of unease, which she kept to herself. As head of United Women of the World, she directed the gospel recovery project, but everything seemed to have developed a life and energy of its own, entirely independent of her, a situation that didn’t provide her with adequate credit. She could go to sleep or walk away and it would all continue apace. This bothered her immensely.
Stories surfaced about the demons who plagued Mary Magdalene before Jesus exorcised them—more details than the sketchy information provided by St. Luke in the New Testament. There were tales of Mary, mother of Jesus as well, who was not an apostle but was an inspiration for the other women. Sarah, who loved Jesus as a brother even though they were not siblings, was described. So was Abigail, whose frail child was nurtured and taught by Jesus, and Lydia, an adulterous woman who had been scorned by her villagers and cast out . . . and Kezia, Hannah, Esther, Rhoda, Priscilla, and Candace. Each she-apostle, it was said, had a special relationship with the Son of God.
Intriguingly, these eleven had even provided the name of the twelfth she-apostle—Martha of Galilee—who had as yet not been located in her modern incarnation.
It was revealed that at the age of ten a heroic Jesus saved an elderly couple from a fire, and as a young man he became involved with a Hindu mystic who was charged with sedition by the Roman government. Jesus helped the mystic escape imprisonment, and traveled with him to India, where the Son of God observed the ways of non-violent protest and studied the Hindu concept of karma and the resurrection of the soul. Afterward he traveled to China, where he learned about Buddhism and the important links between humans and nature. In his mid twenties, Jesus returned to his homeland, where he became a follower of John the Baptist and later began his own ministry.
In the new information, the scriptorium scholars found many points of agreement with the traditional
Bible
, including parables of Jesus that matched, word-for-word. Other accounts of Jesus were either slightly different or previously unknown, with new beatitudes, admonishments, and stories that revealed his close ties with a variety of organized religions . . . and with women.
Then a most disturbing piece of information surfaced, involving Martha of Galilee, the missing twelfth she-apostle. Upon hearing it, Dixie Lou called for an emergency council meeting, in which she would move to suppress the material from the
Holy Women’s Bible
.
Chapter 18
No one was happy about having to kill the Apostle Sarah’s birthparents, but they refused to give us the child. We had no alternative.
—Report of the Commission on the She-Apostles
It was late afternoon, a frost cool day with wispy clouds drifting over the mountaintops. At the arched doorway of the old Byzantine church, Dixie Lou Jackson watched the councilwomen file past her and enter, wearing their dun-colored, hooded robes. It was the first council meeting under her new regime, and she felt exhilarated.
After following them inside she took a deep breath and strode to the red chair she had coveted for so long. She sank into its softly pliant padded leather, and slowly swiveled to face the others, as they opened their hoods.
“You’re all familiar with the new material from the Apostle Lydia?” she asked.
“I’m not,” the petite Fujiko Harui said. “I was helping out in the clinic.” A former doctor, she had once managed the Monte Konos medical clinic, until her broader skills were recognized and Amy Angkor-Billings invited her join the council. Occasionally the clinic doctors still asked her for advice.
“Lydia says there’s a She-Judas,” Bobbi Torrence explained. Though not much taller than Harui, she weighed more than twice as much. “A she-apostle who conspired with Judas Iscariot to betray Jesus.”
Several councilwomen shook their heads in dismay. Some, particularly Fujiko, appeared to be shocked.
Reaching into a pocket of her robe, Dixie Lou removed a sheet of paper and said, “Here are the sacred words of Lydia: ‘Only with the testimony of Martha of Galilee will the gospels be complete, and only then will the identity of Jesus’ betrayers be known. Judas Iscariot did not act alone. He and a female apostle conspired together.’”
“Lydia doesn’t know which one it is?” Fujiko asked.
Dixie Lou shrugged. “She said only Martha can tell the story.”
Katherine Pangalos folded her wrinkled, age-spotted arms across her chest. “Odd. She’s not saying Martha did it, only that the missing child
knows
who did. Assuming Martha is innocent, that points to the other eleven.”
“Or ten,” Deborah Marvel noted, gesturing with a slender, long-fingered hand. “If Lydia was guilty she would never have brought the matter up.”
“Don’t assume anything,” Dixie Lou cautioned. “This is a potential bombshell that could destroy our project. We can’t let it leak out.”
“No argument there,” Katherine said.
“I move for suppression of the information,” Dixie Lou said, “at least until we get input from the last she-apostle. All records of Lydia’s remarks must be immediately removed from the Scriptorium, with everyone sworn to secrecy, under penalty of death.”
“Including us?” Katherine asked.
“
Especially
including us,” Dixie Lou responded, a razor edge to her tone.
Shifting in her chair, Katherine said, “Funny how this all happens after the appearance of the American teenager.”
“It’s just coincidence,” Dixie Lou said.
“I’m not so sure. What if it was a chain reaction? When Lori was with Veronica, the child told us a new story. A short while later Veronica was playing with the other children, and new gospels flowed from
them
—more in a few days than in months before.”
“We have no evidence of a link,” Dixie Lou said.
“Every guard assigned to Lori says she’s been asking to see the she-apostles,” Deborah said. “She wants to see her own mother, too.”
“Why don’t you at least tell her the truth about her mother?” Deborah asked, “that she’s
dead
.”
“We may be able to control her by making her think her mother is still alive,” Dixie Lou said. “Just a feeling I have. I always like to keep leverage, and potential leverage.” She smiled. “You know me.”
“Yes,” Deborah said, with a grim smile. “Only too well, my friend.”
Katherine: “I think we should allow Lori to see the other she-apostles, to see what sort of connection she has with them.”
“What?” Dixie Lou said, so astonished that she half rose from her chair. “The last time we talked about this you said she shouldn’t be with the children, that it was potentially disruptive to the entire she-apostle program.”
“I changed my mind. A woman’s prerogative.”
Some of the women chuckled.
“Maybe Katherine has a point,” Deborah suggested. “I mean, there might be a connection. And Lori could get more information out of the children.”
A scowl crossed Dixie Lou’s face, and she plopped back into her chair. “I can’t believe you’re saying that.” A large black spider scurried along the floor in front of Dixie Lou. She tried to stomp it, but the spindly creature accelerated and got away.
“We should at least look into it,” Bobbi Torrence suggested.
Dixie Lou fixed her with an angry stare, then sat silently as other councilwomen chimed in to agree with Katherine.
A long silence ensued. Finally Katherine spoke, locking gazes with Dixie Lou: “I move to affirm your request to remove Lydia’s remarks from the Scriptorium.”
“And everyone is sworn to secrecy, under penalty of death?”
Katherine nodded solemnly.
The entire council assented, and decided to put new resources into locating the last she-apostle. They needed to keep her story from falling into the wrong hands.
“And the matter of Lori Vale?” Katherine asked.
Considering her options, Dixie Lou realized she had been boxed into the awkward position of arguing against something she had personally allowed Lori to do in the first place. If Katherine had set this up by design, she was a more formidable opponent than anticipated.
A series of no-win alternatives—a Hobson’s choice—faced the new Chairwoman, and she tried to select the one causing her the least personal damage.
“All right,” she said at long last. “I’ll go along with you on that, but let me set up a way to do it. And don’t rush me.” A shiver passed through her. Allowing Lori near the children again felt like a big mistake, and she almost wished she had never brought the girl back from America—the attempt to repay her for helping in the escape from the goddess circle. For now, Dixie Lou would stall, until she figured out how to deal with the matter.
As she voiced her conditional acceptance and the council ratified the decisions that had been made, Dixie Lou began to formulate a plan to get even with her principal opponents later, in a battle of her own design. A memory surfaced, something Amy had told her once, that Wellington had defeated Napoleon by luring him to an unusual, hilly battleground that was only familiar to the British general.
Katherine was moving quickly to solidify her new power base, and would need to be stopped.
For now Dixie Lou needed to clear her own mind. Utilizing another trick of leadership she had learned from Amy, she would make efficient use of her time by combining her daily workout program with something else she needed to do.
* * *
Shortly after sunrise in Washington state . . .
Styx Tertullian paced the length of his underground office, thinking back to the attack on the goddess circle, and his failure to kill or capture Dixie Lou Jackson. Minister Culpepper had been displeased. It had been a smudge on Styx’s reputation.
From a cabinet he brought out a large sack of effects taken in the raid and poured it out on his desk, as he’d done several times before. Wallets, purses, scarves, makeup articles, birth control pills, a plastic baggie of marijuana, cigarette paper, a drawing of a woman standing with Jesus . . . and the gray figurine of a different woman holding a sword-cross. This had to be their She-God, as Culpepper suspected. The sword-cross design was, after all, the symbol of United Women of the World.
He turned to the drawing of the other woman, which was captioned, “Mary Magdalene, companion of Jesus.”
Styx’s pulse quickened in anger. Because of his profession, he was well-versed in anti-Christian art and literature, including Satanic stories under the guise of scholarship that falsely linked the Savior Jesus Christ romantically with Mary Magdalene.
Lies
.
Some documents purporting to be authentic—Gnostic writings not included in the
Bible
—claimed that the Savior kissed Mary Magdalene and that the Apostle Peter was upset by the closeness of their relationship. It was all garbage, of the worst sort. Jesus was pure. He was born of a virgin and lived his life in chastity. In like manner, Styx and other devout Bureau of Ideology men abstained from sexual relations.
The
Bible
said Mary Magdalene was a woman of ill repute—at least this was the interpretation Tertullian placed on Luke 8:2. The holy book also said that after Jesus cured her of demons he accepted her as one of his followers, into a group that traveled with him during the few short years of his ministry.
In disgust, Styx turned the drawing over so that he wouldn’t have to look at it. Seething, he focused on the plastic baggie of marijuana, some of which had been rolled into cigarettes. More proof positive that these were evil women. Shoving the baggie aside, he stood the statuette up and gazed at it.
The women of the UWW were worshipers of idolatry, tramplers of the Ten Commandments and all that was holy.
The statuette had a benign face with a beatific smile, concealing the evil of its followers’ souls.
She-God
! He spit on it and wanted to smash the figurine and the tiny sword it held, but decided against such a precipitous course of action. This was evidence, and might be useful at a later date.
* * *
A couple of hours before dinner, Dixie Lou led Lori down a worn stone stairway into the catacombs of Monte Konos. An escort of four armed guards followed them.
“What is it you need to discuss with me?” the teenager asked. She held a cigarette in her hand, which she had been smoking when Dixie Lou showed up at her door.
“Your uncertain future.”
Nervously, Lori took a drag on the cigarette, blew smoke out through her mouth and nostrils, then coughed. The Greek tobacco was still coarse to her, and she didn’t think she would ever get used to it.
In a rock-hewn tunnel at the bottom of the stairs, Dixie Lou removed her robe, revealing a black-and-tan jogging outfit and shoes with blue sports stripes. The guards climbed into two white electric carts.
“Think you can keep up with me?” Dixie Lou asked, looking appraisingly at the tall young woman.
“Keep up? You mean you’re going jogging now? But I’m not dressed for it.” While she did have on the proper shoes herself, she wore jeans and a blue-and-gold sweater.
“Those look like pretty good shoes to me. I know they are, as a matter of fact. They’re one of my extra pairs, which I sent to your room. You’re taller than I am, but we have the same size feet.”
“Gosh, I don’t know. Can’t we just stand here and talk?”
“I never stand still!” Dixie Lou exclaimed, and she began running ahead.
Another runner approached, a blonde woman. As she passed, Dixie Lou gave her the “W” salute. “That’s Deborah Marvel,” Dixie Lou said. “One of the councilwomen.”
“This is ridiculous,” Lori protested. But she ran to catch up, and fell into stride beside the enigmatic black woman. The electric carts of the guards could be heard whirring behind them. The rock walls and ceiling were streaked in black, with illumination provided by widely-spaced halogen light fixtures. The rock floor was smoother at the center where it had been worn down by foot traffic, eons of robed monks going about their daily business.
“Here’s the deal,” Dixie Lou said, her short legs propelling her forward, making scuffling sounds on the rock. “You’re not to discuss anything you saw in the Scriptorium or I’ll have you killed.”
“Well you don’t need to kill me because I’m already doing what you want. After seeing the heavy security around the Scriptorium I came to my own conclusion about what I should do.”
“Good. You’re a smart girl.”
God help me
, Lori thought.
This woman’s a lunatic.
“When can I see my mother?” Lori asked, stumbling a little on the rough surface.
“We’ll let you know when she’s able to have visitors.”
The girl felt her face flush hot. “I deserve better than that! I saved your life, and you won’t let me see my mother?”
“You don’t want to make me angry,” Dixie Lou said. “Having trouble keeping up?” She increased her pace.
“Not at all.” But Lori heard her own breathing grow labored and raspy. She flicked the burning cigarette into one of the gutters that ran along each side of the tunnel.
“If you never learn anything else from life, Lori Vale, remember this and remember it well: Things change. You must always be prepared for the unexpected. For example, no matter how pleasant I’ve just been, I could stop right now and order my officers to shoot you in the head. Or I could take one of their weapons and do it myself. What would you do then?”
“Die?” Lori said, with a winsome smile. She tried to display bravery, even though her insides were churning.
Caught off guard, Dixie Lou roared with laughter and slowed her jogging pace. “Yes, what else
could
you do?” Her glee faded. “There’s no way to get away from here, or from me. I can guarantee you that, so for your own sake you’d better stay out of trouble and do as you’re told.”
“I understand.” Lori stopped trying to conceal her labored breathing. She felt like saying a lot to this woman, but held her tongue.
“That’s all,” Dixie Lou said. She waved dismissively.
Lori stopped and moved over to one side to allow the electric carts to whir by her.
Dixie Lou ran on ahead of them.
Angrily, Lori watched the strange woman and her guards as they continued on their way. The way Dixie Lou treated her was infuriating—no matter who she was. Lori had more cigarettes in her pocket, and considered smoking them non-stop. But that would be an act of weakness, and she needed to be strong now.
Part of her wanted to attempt escape at the first opportunity, no matter the risk. But another part of her told her to stay here, for the sake of her mother, and of the children.
Something the translator had said stuck in Lori’s mind. Of the twelve reincarnated she-apostles, one was missing.