The Testimonium (15 page)

Caesar, I have stood in the presence of majesty on many occasions. I can remember your noble father, the Imperator Augustus, speaking before his armies when I was just a young military tribune, and you know that I fought as a legate under you in Germany as well, and saw the honor your legionaries rightly accorded you there. I have stood in the presence of many foreign potentates as well, from Herod to Mithridates. As you know, most Eastern monarchs are grasping, venal creatures whose only nobility lies in the trappings they cover themselves with. Trust me when I say that this bloodied and battered Galilean itinerant radiated as much honor and dignitas as any Roman patrician. But there was also something . . . alien about him. Otherworldly. His statement, as ridiculous as it no doubt sounds when I recount it, made perfect sense to me as I stood there looking into his eyes. But he was not done—he continued: “If my kingdom was of this world, my servants would be fighting to rescue me as we speak. As it is, my kingdom is not of this realm.”

I asked the question more directly. “So you are a king, then?”

He nodded, and replied: “You say correctly that I am a king. For this purpose I have been born, and come into this world, that I might testify to the truth. Everyone who welcomes truth will hear my voice.”

I pondered his statement a moment, and I said out loud the thought that leaped into my mind. “Quid est veritas?” But I had heard all I needed for the moment, and did not wait for his answer. This man was no threat to Rome, I was convinced of that. I stepped out onto the balcony and addressed the mob below.

“Absolvo!” I cried. “I find no guilt in this man!”

The crowd exploded with rage.

Simone Apriceno rolled out of her sleeping bag and stretched luxuriously. Between collecting the dust core samples from the scabbard of the ancient
gladius
and then clearing the remainder of the dust from the back of the chamber, it was nearly midnight when she put away her equipment and sealed the chamber for the night. But the job was done, finally—the accumulated centuries of dust were gone, and the artifacts in the chamber, without having been moved or shifted a millimeter, were exposed and revealed exactly as they had been left when the chamber was sealed. It was one of the most challenging tasks she’d ever been entrusted with, and she was proud of the way she had handled it. Every single surface in the room had a core sample of the dust and debris covering it collected from top layer to bottom, labeled and arranged with photographs of the surface before and after its collection. Unless something truly bizarre showed up in the pollen samples, no one would be able to question that the site had been undisturbed since the chamber was sealed. Now her colleagues could study and catalog the artifacts, removing them from the chamber if necessary, while she devoted herself to the microscope.

She pulled on her boots over a pair of clean socks and buttoned a khaki shirt up over the Grateful Dead T-shirt she had slept in, and then brushed her teeth with water from a bottle she’d left by her bed for that purpose. It was 6:15 AM according to her watch. She walked over to the trailer and found a stale pastry from the previous day and bit into it while she started the coffee brewing. It was dry but still sweet and wholesome tasting. After the coffee was done brewing, she walked outside and talked to the two security guards.

“Anything worth noting happen last night?” she asked.

“Just some beautiful stars and a meteor shower after the moon finally set,” said al-Ghazi.

“That, and I learned the entire history of this Moor’s family, going back to the fourteenth century,” said Giovanni.

“I’m not a Moor, I’m an Arab-Italian,” al-Ghazi replied archly.

“Notice he doesn’t deny the three-hour lecture he inflicted on me,” his friend shot back.

“It was only an hour or so, and you asked for it,” the Arab replied.

Simone smiled at their banter and walked over toward the head of the trail. As if on cue, she heard the voices of the two male archeologists approaching. They were engaged in a heated theological debate, ambling up the trail together. Josh had a large box under his arm.

“I understand that traditions can be important,” Josh was saying. “Every church has them. But to allow human traditions to trump the clear teaching of Scripture has always struck me as dangerous. I mean, Paul clearly said that the pastor of a church should be ‘the husband of one wife and a good manager of his family.’ You know that most of the Apostles, including Simon Peter and the Lord’s brothers, were married. So why should the Church not allow men of God to also be family men?”

“We do ordain widowers,” said Father MacDonald, “but the priesthood is a holy office, and those of us who undertake it must be willing to renounce the privilege of having a family for as long as we wear the cloth.”

“But where does the Bible require that?” Josh asked.

“It doesn’t,” Father MacDonald acknowledged. “But tradition and Church doctrine does.”

They looked up and saw her smiling down at them from the head of the trail. Father MacDonald tipped his hat at her, and Josh gave a wave. “My apologies, dear lady,” said the priest. “This young rascal is determined to re-fight every battle of the Protestant Reformation with me!”

“Not at all,” said Josh. “I am just trying to understand the Catholic position.”

“Well,” she said, “the work is done. All the stone dust and debris are gone, and the chamber is just as Tiberius left it for us.”

“I hesitate to ask how long it took,” said Josh.

“I was in bed by midnight,” she said. “Or at least, in my bedroll. Tonight I claim one of those soft guest beds at Giuseppe’s house.”

“I would say you have definitely earned it,” the priest said. “So, have we heard from our illustrious leader?”

“Not yet,” said Simone. “Now, what is in that box?”

“We have fresh pastries, and some sort of meat and cheese wrapped inside a light fluffy bread roll,” Josh said. “I don’t know the name, but it smelled wonderful!”

“I had one of yesterday’s pastries,” said Apriceno, “but I wouldn’t mind something with a bit more substance.”

They were eating breakfast when Father MacDonald’s phone rang. He picked it up and listened to the greeting from the other end. “Good morning, Dr. Sforza,” he exclaimed. “I trust you had a pleasant and productive meeting with the board?”

“Productive enough,” she said. “We released a short press statement this morning, to let the world know that we have made a discovery up here. However, we are not yet letting anyone know what we have discovered. It mainly lets the public know why the Villa Jovis is closed. Were there any developments at the site last night?”

“We did make a wee little discovery while you were away,” the priest admitted. “I think you will be quite pleased when you see it.”

“I’m en route right now,” she said. “Send me a couple of pictures on my cell. Be there in about fifteen minutes.”

The priest looked at the cell phone with a bit of distaste. “I haven’t even learned to take pictures with this thing, much less send them. Dr. Parker, can you lend your technical expertise?”

“I took some shots with my iPhone as well as with the camera last night,” he said. “Let me shoot them to her. Do you have the number?”

The priest read him the number, and Josh sent the digital files to Isabella’s phone. Moments later, he got a text back. Reading it, he let out a chuckle.

“What does she say?” MacDonald asked.

“‘I hate all three of you. Be there in ten minutes,’” he read.

They finished their breakfast and walked to the upper level to watch the helicopter land. There were handshakes and high-fives all around when Giuseppe and Isabella climbed out of the chopper and joined them.

The first order of business was to see the chamber now that it lay revealed. Dr. Apriceno unzipped the plastic doorway covering the entrance and all of them filed in together and stood with their backs to the front wall where the writing desk had stood. She waited till they were all in place, then plugged in the high-powered halogen lights she had rigged up the evening before. There was a collective gasp as the tableau before them was illuminated.

Because of the slope of the stairs above it, the back of the chamber had a much lower ceiling than the front end. Where the ancient desk had been, the roof of the chamber was a good four or five feet above them. But the back, where the reliquary rested, was only a bit above five feet in height. The reliquary stood about four feet high and rested in the low end snugly, with about a foot of room on one side and somewhat less on the other. Because of the poor lighting and the shape of the room, not to mention the endless shower of stone dust from the steps above, the back of the chamber had been hard to see at first. The reliquary had simply been a large square object standing in the corner, coated with massive amounts of dust and dirt. The
gladius
had been so completely covered that Rossini and Sforza had not even noticed it on their initial inventory of the chamber’s contents.

Now the walls, floor, and artifacts were cleaned of the dust of the centuries, and stood there as they had been left twenty centuries before. The reliquary was a magnificently carved wooden box, about a foot deep and five feet wide. Carved into the dark wooden doors was a finely detailed Roman eagle, with the inevitable SPQR engraved beneath it. Latin letters above the eagle, along the top edge of each door, read “
Iuppiter Optimus Maximus, conservare dignitas de Iulii
.”

“Jupiter Greatest and Highest, preserve the
dignitas
of the Julii,” Josh translated. The cabinet was made of a very dark wood, and bore the nicks, scars, and polish of much use. It was obviously not a new piece of furniture at the time it was buried in this chamber.

“Amazing,” Josh finally said. “To stand in the presence of so much history is —”

“Humbling?” said Rossini. “If this box is what I think it is, it once held the funeral masks of Julius Caesar, his father and uncles, and perhaps even Augustus himself. Alone, without anything in it, this is the greatest discovery of Roman archeology since Pompeii was unearthed!”

“And look at the sword!” said Isabella. “That weapon had seen much service before it was laid to rest here. One of the Caesars may well have carried it in Gaul, Brittania, Spain, or Egypt. Giuseppe, did you have any idea when you found this chamber what a discovery you were making?”

“Not at all,” he said. “Do you think Howard Carter knew what he’d found when he uncovered those two limestone steps leading downward, buried in the accumulated backfill of a later tomb in the Valley of the Kings? Do you think Heinrich Schliemann realized he had actually found Troy when he first sunk his shovel into the earth of Asia Minor? My friends, this is a discovery for the ages.”

After a long look at the newly revealed artifacts, the five of them retreated out into the open air to confer. How to proceed from here?

“First things first,” said Rossini. “Let’s begin with the leather purse we found. It should be sufficiently rehydrated for us to remove the contents without damaging it. Then, we remove the sword to the lab for study and preservation. The scabbard is leather and will deteriorate if not stabilized. After we have analyzed both those items, we will need to figure out how to deal with the reliquary. The first determination we need to make will be whether to move it unopened, or open it up, see what is in it, and then decide if we need to remove the contents first, and then move the reliquary itself, or move it contents and all.”

Isabella nodded. “That seems to be a logical course of action,” she said. “Let’s repair to the lab.”

Once inside, Dr. Apriceno set about organizing the hundred or more vials of dust she had gathered from inside the chamber. She would conduct a preliminary examination on the samples collected from each surface in the chamber, and then fly the entire collection to the mainland for more rigorous analysis after her initial report was made. The other four headed over to the rehydration tank and watched as Professor MacDonald donned a pair of elbow-length, acid-free rubber gloves and selected two pairs of forceps from a drawer. He pulled out a section of the tank’s bottom, laid the forceps on it, then reached through the rubber-lined opening on the side of the tank and picked them up.

With great precision, he grasped one edge of the drawstring bag’s open end with the smaller pair of forceps, then took the other pair and gripped the opposite side of the bag’s mouth. He tugged ever so gently, and the ancient drawstrings, having regained a measure of their suppleness, slid through the holes, allowing the bag to open up a bit. He then used the larger pair of forceps to hold the bag open while he reached into it with the smaller pair. He gingerly lifted out the ancient key first. The actual key itself was made of iron, which was blackened from age but remarkably free of rust. The horse head effigy appeared to be carved from some soft stone, or perhaps very deeply stained ivory, inlaid with gold and gems. He laid it on the tray he had placed the forceps on, and then reached back into the purse again. The second item he brought out was the pointed object that had baffled them in the X-rays. Once it saw the light of day, though, its nature was apparent.

“An arrowhead,” laughed Josh. “I’ve picked up a few hundred of these back in the States, although all of mine were stone, not iron.”

“Why would Tiberius save a common iron arrowhead?” wondered Isabella.

The priest was already back at work, probing the purse’s interior with the small forceps. In short order he extracted four coins—two gold, one silver, and one bronze. Further probing discovered no more items inside the purse, but to be sure, he released the mouth of the drawstring bag with his forceps and picked it up by the bottom, shaking it gently to see if anything else fell out. Only the fragile, desiccated carcass of a spider tumbled out. He pulled the tray out and transferred the metal items onto the table for study, then slid the original tray back into the tank with a fine pair of tweezers and a clear plastic box. The spider carcass was dropped into the box for later study—if it could be dated, it would be a clue as to how open the chamber might have been in ages past.