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  Sinai Tapestry

  ( Jerusalem Quartet - 1 )

  Edward Whittemore

  Tales of a blind man, written down by an imbecile. Such is the genesis of the Bible in this raucous, unsettling account of recent and not-so-recent history with its richly entwined odysseys:

  Plantagenet Strongbow, twenty-ninth Duke of Dorset, seven feet, seven inches tall, the greatest swordsman, botanist and explorer of the Victorian age, who disappears in the Sinai in 1840 with his magnifying glass and portable sundial to reappear forty years later as an Arab holy man, after writing a scandalously accurate study of Levantine sex in thirty-three volumes, and disappears again only to emerge before his death in 1914 as the secret owner of the Ottoman Empire.

  Skanderbeg Wallenstein, linguistic genius and fanatical Trappist monk from Albania who discovers the original Bible in the Sinai early in the nineteenth century and finds it "denies every religious truth ever held by anyone." Horrified by this, he forges an original that will justify faith and buries the real Sinai Bible in Jerusalem, where it remains hidden until retrieved in the twentieth century by Hai Harun, former antiquities dealer and ethereal wanderer through history, born three thousand years ago, a shy knight wearing a rusty Crusader's helmet and faded yellow cloak while pursuing his hopeless mission as defender of the Holy City, and who, among many jobs in the service trades, has been a stone carver of winged lions during the Assyrian occupation, proprietor of an all-night grocery store under the Greeks, a waiter when the Romans were in power, and distributor of hashish and goats for the Turks. Discredited since the time of Christ, he has only one friend in modern Jerusalem, his loyal companion .?..

  O'Sullivan Beare, the wily thirty-third son of a poor Irish fisherman, survivor of the Easter Rebellion and heroic guerrilla fighter against the Black and Tans, who flees to Mandated Palestine in 1920 disguised as a nun, uses false papers to take up residence in the Home for Crimean War Heroes though he's only twenty years old, and smuggles the first arms to the Haganah in a giant hollow stone scarab while working for.?.

  Stern, son of Strongbow and a Jewish shepherd's daughter, exponent of a homeland for Jews and Moslems and Christians in the Middle East, witness to the massacre at Smyrna in 1922, and finally an ineluctable victim of the blood feuds of the area.In the years leading up to World War II, the separate journeys of discovery begun in the Sinai a century earlier involve many lives in many places as the unending search goes on for the real Sinai Bible: the lure of a Holy City, the promise of the desert, the bewildering varieties of love and the hopes and failures given to time, the bright somber colors of invincible dreams and dying days, together weave the chaos of events into a whole and decades into an era

  Sinai Tapestry

  by Edward Whittemore (1977)

  For Cat

  PART ONE

  -1-

  Strongbow

  Standing straight out in front of him, thick and menacing, was a medieval lance twelve feet long.

  The Arabic Jew, or Jewish Arab, who owned the entire Middle East at the turn of the century passed his early life exactly as had his English forebears for six hundred and fifty years.

  At the family estate in southern England he was taught to care for flowers, especially roses. His parents died while he was young and his aunts and uncles moved into the manor to raise him. In due time he would receive his title and become the twenty-ninth Plantagenet Strongbow to bear it, merely one more Duke of Dorset.

  For it seemed that destiny had found a resting place among the Strongbows. At one time, thought to be about 1170, one of their line had helped subdue eastern Ireland and been given a title because of it. Since then the family had lapsed into patterns. Confusion had been lost or forgotten. Instead there was repetition and order.

  The oldest son in each generation always married on the day he assumed his majority and became the new lord. His wife matched him in wealth and shared his concern for flowers. Children appeared at regular intervals until five or six had been born, more or less equally divided between males and females.

  By that time the duke and his duchess were thirty, or nearly thirty, and both abruptly died by accident.

  The accidents were routinely silly. After drinking an excess of mead late at night they might fall asleep and fall into the fireplace. Or they might doze off in a trout stream and drown in a foot of water.

  Following the flight of a butterfly after breakfast, they would wander off a parapet. Or they would absentmindedly swallow a mutton joint whole, causing suffocation. Or a mild sexual diversion such as dressing up in medieval armor would lead to fatal hemorrhaging in the pelvic region.

  In any case both husband and wife died at the same time, at about the age of thirty, and it was then the duty of the deceased lord's younger brothers and sisters to return to the manor to rear their five or six nieces and nephews.

  It was a family custom that these younger brothers and sisters never married, but being close in age they had no difficulty resettling in the manor of their childhood and enjoying one another's company. At the beginning of the Christmas season they gathered together in the large banquet hall for twelve days of festivities that had come to be called the family game, a traditional sport in which the hall was cleared of furniture and opposing teams were formed with the goal of running a satin pillow from one end of the hall to the other.

  During the first hour of play each day intensive grappling was permitted. But thereafter a firm grip on the genitals of an opposing player was sufficient to stop the advance of the pillow and bring on a new scrimmage for its possession.

  Under these conditions, despite their wealth and genuine concern for flowers, it was unlikely the Dukes of Dorset would ever have distinguished themselves in the world even if they had lived beyond the age of thirty, and in fact none ever did.

  From the end of the twelfth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century, successive Plantagenet Strongbows grew up with a sound knowledge of roses and a vague memory of their parents, learned the family game by watching their aunts and uncles, passed into manhood and sired an heir and a new brood of aunts and uncles before succumbing to another silly accident, thereby perpetuating a random family scheme which was their sole contribution to God and man and England.

  Until in 1819, the year of Queen Victoria's birth, a different sort of infant was born in the Dorset manor, different either because of a mutation in genes or because of the terrible disease he suffered at the age of eleven. In any case this slight boy would one day end six hundred and fifty years of placid Strongbow routine by becoming the most awesome explorer his country ever produced.

  And coincidently the most scandalous scholar of his era. For whereas other famous theoreticians of the nineteenth century formulated vast, but separate, concepts of the mind and body and society, Strongbow insisted on dealing with all three.

  That is, with sex in its entirety.

  Not sex as necessity or diversion or in the role of precursor and memory, not even sex as an immediate cause or a vague effect. And certainly not in terms of natural history or inevitable law.

  Sex neither as habit nor suggestion but simply sex by itself, unplanned and chaotic and concomitant with nothing, beyond all hope of conspiracy, previously indistinguishable and now seen in infinity.

  Sex as practiced. Sex as it was.

  At the time, an inconceivable proposition.

  In addition to the family game in Strongbow Hall there was also a family mystery. In a manor so old it was only to be expected that some arcane relationship must exist between the structure and its inhabitants, its source secret, probably a hidden sliding panel that opened onto dark passageways leading down into the past.

  In fact the huge manor was said to i
nclude in its foundations the ruins of a major medieval monastery, unnamed, thought to have been desecrated when its monks were discovered practicing certain unmentionable acts. And close beside those ruins were the ruins of an underground Arthurian chamber, vaulted and impregnable, which had also been desecrated when its knights were discovered practicing other unmentionable acts.

  Even deeper in the ground, according to legend, there were the ruins of a spacious sulphur bath only fitfully dormant, built during the age of the Romans.

  Next to these baths was a small but impressive sacrificial circle of stones from the even more distant era of the druids.

  While lastly, surrounding all these subterranean relics, was an immense erratic design of upright monoliths, astronomical in nature, erected in antiquity by a mighty people.

  No one had ever discovered the secret passageways that led to these buried remnants beneath the manor, even though they had always been hunted. For centuries Strongbow aunts and uncles, on rainy afternoons, had armed themselves with torches and organized search parties to try to find them.

  Of course minor discoveries had been made. In any given decade a group might come across a cozy unused tower cubicle heaped with furry rugs or a small snug cellar hideaway just big enough for three people.

  But the family mystery remained. Tradition claimed the secret sliding panel might well be found in the dark library of the manor, yet strangely Strongbow aunts and uncles never led their search parties there.

  When a rainy afternoon came they invariably went in other directions.

  Thus the aunts and uncles who became the overseers of the manor early in the nineteenth century might have sensed irrevocable changes afoot when they saw the eldest of their wards, the future lord, spending his afternoons in the deserted library.

  The awful truth became clear when the boy was eleven, on the winter night set aside each year for the family's heritage to be recounted by the older generation to the younger. On that night everyone gathered in front of the great fireplace after dinner, the aunts and uncles with their snifters of brandy, sitting solemnly in large chairs, the boys and girls absolutely still on cushions on the floor. Outside the wind howled. Inside the little children stared wide-eyed at the crackling logs as the ancient lore of the place was recounted.

  A shadowy medieval monastery, began an aunt or an uncle. Hooded figures thrusting yellow tapers aloft.

  Chants in archaic syllables, incense and bats, rites at the foot of a black altar.

  Underground chambers from the age of King Arthur, whispered another. Masked knights riding through the mists in eternal pursuit of invisible combat.

  Roman legions fresh from the land of the pharaohs, hinted a third. Barbaric foreign gods and pagan battle standards. Luxurious baths wreathed in steam behind the walls of sumptuous palaces.

  Druidical rituals, suggested a fourth. Naked priests painted blue clinging to mistletoe, a single towering oak in a lost grove, apparitions in the gloom on the moors. From the deeper recesses of the forest, eerie birdlike cries.

  And long before that, whispered another, massive stones placed on the plains in a mystical pattern. The stones so gigantic no ordinary people could have transported them. Who were these unknown people and what was the purpose of their abstract designs? Yes truly we must ponder these enigmas for they are the secrets of our ancestors, to be recalled tonight as so often over the centuries.

  Indeed, murmured an uncle. So it has always been and so it must be. These undying marvels are hidden in the ancient library of our manor, reared by the first Duke of Dorset, and there lies the secret within all of us, the impenetrable Strongbow Mystery.

  A rustle passed around the fireplace. The children shivered and huddled closer together as the wind whined. No one dared think of the maze of lost passageways spiraling down into the earth beneath them.

  A thin voice broke the silence, the voice of the future lord.

  No.

  Sitting erect, farther from the fire than anyone else, the boy gazed gravely at the heavy swords suspended above the mantle.

  No, he repeated, that's not quite correct. In the last year I've read all the books in the library and there's nothing like that there. The first Plantagenet Strongbow was a simple man who went to Ireland and had the usual success slaughtering unarmed peasants, then retired here to polish his armor and do some farming. The early books he collected were about armor, later there were a few dealing with barnyard matters. So it seems the family mystery is simply that no one has ever read a book from the family library.

  The disease that felled him the following day was meningitis, which killed his younger brothers and sisters.

  Thus there would be no aunts and uncles in the next generation and a comfortable routine dating from the reign of Henry II was suddenly shattered.

  In its place lay a sickly wasted boy, dying, who made up his mind to do what no Strongbow had ever done, to enter confusion and not let destiny rest. His first decision was to live and as a result he became totally deaf. His second decision was to become the world's leading authority on plants, since at that early age he wasn't fond of people.

  Before the attack of meningitis his height had been average. But the revelations that came with the approach of death, and his subsequent bargaining with fate, brought other changes. By the time he was fourteen he would be well over six feet tall, and by the age of sixteen he would have reached his full height of seven feet and seven inches.

  Naturally his aunts and uncles were utterly bewildered by these strange events in his twelfth year, yet they tried to go on living as the Strongbows had always lived. Therefore while he lay recovering in bed, it being the Christmas season, they gathered in the great banquet hall for the customary pillow match. And although fearful and disturbed they bravely carried on as usual, resolutely polishing family tradition just as the first duke had once polished his armor.

  While the furniture was being cleared away they picked their teams and playfully jostled one another, smiling and nodding and politely guffawing and lightly patting a bottom or two, patiently forming queues and just as patiently reforming them a moment later, stolidly standing one behind the other as they commented on the rain and tittered hopelessly in agreement.

  The hour closed to a few minutes before midnight on Christmas Eve, what should have been the beginning of twelve companionable days of nuzzling and scrimmaging. But when the playing field was cleared, precisely when the satin pillow was ceremoniously placed in the middle of the floor and the fun was ready to begin, a dreadful silence swept through the hall.

  They turned. In the doorway stood their gaunt nephew, already an inch or two taller than they remembered him. Standing straight out in front of him, thick and menacing, was a medieval lance twelve feet long.

  The boy went directly to the middle of the room, skewered the satin pillow and hurled it into the fireplace, where it burst and blazed briefly. Then in words alternately booming and inaudible, for he hadn't yet learned to modulate his voice without hearing it, he announced they were all dismissed from his house and lands forever. Any aunt or uncle found on the premises when the clock struck midnight, he shouted, would receive the same punishment as the pillow.

  There were shrieks and a rush to the door as the future Duke of Dorset, twenty-ninth in his line, calmly ordered the furniture returned to its place and assumed control of his life.

  Young Strongbow's first act was to make an inventory of the artifacts in the manor. With his botanist's interest in cataloguing he wanted to know exactly what he had inherited, so with a ledger in one hand and a pen in the other he went from room to room noting everything.

  What he found appalled him. The manor was an immense mausoleum containing no less than five hundred thousand separate objects acquired by his family in the course of six hundred and fifty years of doing nothing.

  There and then he decided never to encumber his life with material goods, which was the real reason, not vanity, that when the time came for him to disappea
r into the desert at the age of twenty-one, he did so carrying only his magnifying glass and portable sundial.

  But such extreme simplicity was for the future. Now he had to master his profession. Methodically he sealed off the rest of the manor and moved into the central hall, which he equipped as a long botanical laboratory. Here he lived austerely for six years, at the age of sixteen writing to the Rector of Trinity College stating that he was prepared to take up residence at Cambridge to receive a degree in botany.

  The letter was brief, attached to it was a summary of his qualifications.

  Fluent ability in Early and Middle Persian, hieroglyphics and cuneiform and Aramaic, classical and modern Arabic, the usual knowledge of Greek and Hebrew and Latin and the European tongues, Hindi where relevant and all sciences where necessary for his work.

  Lastly, as an example of some research already undertaken, he enclosed a short monograph on the ferns to be found on his estate. The Rector of Trinity had the paper examined by an expert, who declared it the most definitive study on ferns ever written in Britain. The monograph was published by the Royal Society as a special bulletin and thus Strongbow's name, one day to be synonymous with rank depravity, made its first quiet appearance in print.

  Almost at once three sensational incidents made Strongbow a legend at Cambridge. The first occurred on Halloween, the second over a two-week period prior to the Christmas holiday, the third on the night of the winter solstice.

  The Halloween incident was a fistfight with the most vicious brawlers in the university. After drinking quantities of stout these notorious young men had adjourned to an alley to pummel each other in the autumn moonlight. A crowd gathered and bets were taken while the sweating fighters stripped to the waist.

  The alley was narrow. Strongbow happened to enter it just as the brawlers went into a crouch. Having spent a long day in the countryside collecting specimens, the wild flowers he now carried in his hand, he was too exhausted to turn back. Politely he asked the mass of fighters to stand aside and let him pass.