FF (March 2013) Justine Saracen - Beloved Gomorrah

What if the ancient cities synonymous with depravity were in fact a paradise of harmony? What if the “one righteous man” who escaped their annihilation was a murderous fanatic, his “angels” genocidal terrorists, his daughters the victims of incestuous rape? Justice is a long time coming, but finally the serene waters of the Red Sea give up the ancient secret of a holocaust and of a millennia-old lie. Undersea sculptor Joanna Boleyn and film actress Kaia Kapulani discover that righteousness can conceal its own depravity, that art tells more truth than scripture, and that challenging authority can be mortally dangerous.

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Sample

Prologue

Ezion-Geber, later Aqaba, Jordan

Roused from sleep by the banging at his door, Maneshtu did not have his wits about him when he opened it. And thus he stood perplexed by the sight of two young women cowering in the doorway each carrying an infant.

“Forgive us, sir, for the intrusion and this late hour. We come in secret from our husbands, and no other time is possible.”

“In secret?” he repeated, his befuddlement deepening. But for lack of better wisdom, he bade them enter, raising the wick on his lantern the more to see them. Drawing them to his table, he offered water, but they declined. “For what reason, may I ask…” He struggled for a polite way to inquire why they had disturbed the sleep of an old man.

The one who seemed the older of the two spoke first. “Again, we beg forgiveness for this imposition, but our cause is just. We implore you, hear us out.”

“Yes, dear lady. I do so willingly.” The old scribe leaned forward on his elbows.

“I am Astari.” She held her infant close so that he slept. “And this is my sister Aina. We are the daughters of Lot, the son of Haran, who is the brother of Abraham.”

“Yes, I have heard of Abraham and of his nephew Lot.”

Astari said, “We fled from Gomorrah before it was destroyed and came to live in Zoar. There we met men who revered the One God, and hearing of the destruction of our city, they took us into their households, not knowing of our condition, and shortly we were espoused to them. They are merchants who do business in Ezion-Geber.”

He urged her on, trying to draw some wisdom as to how Gomorrah and “our condition” were connected to the secrecy of the visit.

“All was well in our new home, but within a two-month time Lot came unto Zoar with condemnation and forgiveness in one breath. For he gave report of how we were with child with his own seed, but that it was we who forced ourselves upon him. It was an evil tale, and our husbands gathered up stones to bring judgment against us. We were spared the stoning when Lot raised his hands and proclaimed it the will of God. The people took him at his word, for he was the nephew of Abraham, whom they held for righteous above all other men.”

She said “righteous” with venom, which stirred his curiosity. Maneshtu was nothing if not a judge of tales and the way they were told. This one had the ring of truth. “Dear ladies, why do you come to me, a stranger, and not to one of your own people?”

“Our own people will not hear us. But it is said that Maneshtu is wise and much trusted in the courts. The tribe of Abraham is growing strong and they proclaim the judgment of Gomorrah, yet we would bear witness here, with you, that the tale is false.”

“Gomorrah.” Maneshtu scratched under his chin. “Men say it was destroyed, and Sodom too, for the people’s iniquity.”

“No, teacher. That is a slander as great as the one that taints ourselves. Truly, it was the fairest of cities—a place of sages, shopkeepers, and honest men. Gomorrah was a crossroads. Its caravanserai sheltered merchants passing through from Egypt and Damascus. They haggled in the marketplace and said their prayers in many languages. The city had temples to Dagon, El, Anat, Ba’al, and Moloch, and shrines to all the lesser gods.”

“Indeed, that is a rare thing,” Maneshtu said, and the young woman shrugged.

“Our father called them idolaters, yet his own wife, our mother who was born in Gomorrah, was a follower of Anat. She renounced the goddess and converted to the True Faith upon her marriage to our father.”

“A place of great freedom, then.” Maneshtu furrowed his graying brow. “Perhaps too much freedom. I heard talk of depravity as well, of men who lay wantonly with men and women with women.”

“Yet more slander, teacher, by those with no understanding of the old ways, where family was more than kith and kin, and one might join by affection alone. Our mother had such a lover, whom she met at the fountain every day. It was a tender and enduring thing, not wanton at all, though it much enraged our father. He called her “daughter of Eve” and beat her for it, but she held fast to her love in spite of him. We too longed to have a companion in this way.”

“But then the angels came.” The younger woman spoke for the first time and with a certain melancholy. “And they told us this was an abomination in the eyes of the One God.”

Astari interrupted gently. “But we would not burden you with tales of our youth. We wish only to leave a true account of Lot and the cities of the plain, so that one day, when the story is widely told, you or another can say, ‘No, this tale is false, for here is the word of the maids themselves.’”

Maneshtu scratched his beard, uncertain.

“Teacher, we are prepared to pay. Our husbands prosper, and we have saved money from our allowances.” The young woman untied a small cloth from her waist and poured out four pieces of silver. “We need only a few hours of your time.”

The silver pieces glimmered in the candlelight, and Maneshtu made up his mind. “Let me fetch some clay and cut a new stylus.”

While he gathered his tools, the child of Astari began to whimper, and she stood up. “Forgive me, teacher, but my son Moab cries for hunger. With your permission, I will go into the other room to let him suckle. My sister can tell her tale, and when she is finished, I will tell mine.”

*

At the end of two hours, the tales were told. Maneshtu took his payment, led the two young women to the door, and bade them farewell. Mechanically, he threw the bolt into the lock and returned to his worktable, shaking his head in amazement. Fifty years he had carried on his craft, and thirty of those years he’d kept a library, but he had never been called upon for a task such as this.

He raised the wick on the lantern a second time, for his eyes were weary. Then, careful to protect the still-damp clay, he reread the cuneiform texts he had so carefully incised. The tale seemed fanciful, yet both the women’s voices held a somber conviction. He himself was a follower of Marduk and cared not a whit about the desert tribes and their ways, yet it troubled him that any man should be called righteous who had acted thusly. He might indeed have good reason to save the two testimonies.

He slid the four damp clay tablets onto wooden planks and took them to his kiln. Once the fire hardened them, he would cement them back-to-back, making two double-sided documents. Then all that remained was to keep them in his library and await the day that someone asked for them.

He rubbed his neck, and glanced up through the window. The position of the moon told him it was nearer the morning than the night. But just as he returned to his bed and was about to extinguish the lantern, another knock sounded at his door.

The night had already proved remarkable, so he was not perturbed to open to another stranger. But this one hunched forward, his face concealed under a cloak, as if fearing to be seen. Maneshtu waited quietly for explanation.

“Master,” the man said in muted tones. “This night, you have received the daughters of Lot and they have surely told you their story. But another part to the tale wants telling, which is unknown to them, and so I beg you to hear me as well.”

Maneshtu sighed. “Come in,” he said, and went to fetch a new clay tablet.

*

Maneshtu waited long for someone to inquire about the tablets of Gomorrah, but no one ever did. They languished in a corner of his library until his death, when his house passed to his son, and then to his descendants, unto the tenth generation. Finally, none could read the scrolls and tablets, and the library was given over to store grain in.

When the family line died out, the house, which was on the outskirts of the town, fell into such disrepair that it was pillaged of its furnishings and abandoned. The land around it became a scrap heap that rose ever higher with broken crockery and objects that did not weather or rot. Desert creatures took up residence and rats scampered in the pitch-dark chambers, consuming whatever was of parchment or of wood. Asps and scorpions made their colonies around it, discouraging interest in the bit of wall that jutted out of the pile of rubble.

*

The desert is discreet. Its sands blow equally over mankind’s feats and follies covering them for centuries or millennia. But men are curious, and they penetrate the darkest places in search of things. And so it was, fifteen hundred years later, when Ezion-Geber returned to life as the city of Aqaba, that an Egyptian merchant named Ibn Yunus al Qasim arrived. Ever watchful for opportunity, he sent his men into the rubble field outside the town and they came upon the crushed remains of a house. The roof had long disintegrated into powder, and only fragments of the stone walls stood. But under the sand they uncovered a cache of tablets, in hieroglyphic, hieratic, Greek, and in cuneiform.

Al Qasim could read none of it but believed he had a treasure and resolved to ship the tablets back to Luxor. It made no difference that their contents were a mystery. They were documents of an ancient time and would surely have value. Many scholars dwelt in Luxor, and even more in Cairo, who would pay well for such antiquities.

In good time, he packed his treasures in a crate and set sail on an Egyptian dhow, bound for Safaga. It was the month of May and the Red Sea was calm. Al Qasim stood each evening with a Persian scholar who also made the passage, and they talked of weighty things: of faith and reason, of God and science, and of the stars by which they navigated.

The scholar pointed toward a band of three stars low in the sky. “There hovers al jabbar, the giant whom the Hebrews call Kesil, the fool, and the Greeks have named Orion. See how he raises his arm and menaces? He swings the mace, rigid and arrogant in his strength. Some say that he aims to kill all animals who, in their variety, somehow offend him. Others say it is the Pleiades, the daughters of Atlas, that he pursues, but perhaps, in his brutishness, he does both. Giant that he may be, the tiniest of creatures, the scorpion, fells him.”

“Do you mean to read a lesson of justice in that?” Al Qasim chuckled.

“Perhaps only that the prideful and the cruel look not at their feet, and the smallest of things can bring them down.”

“So you think the stars are there to instruct us.” Al Qasim twirled the hair at the tip of his beard. “I think they are indifferent. In any case, I leave the stars to the pilot for navigation and my fate to Allah.”

Having amicably disagreed, the two men curled up in their blankets under the gunwales for the night and sought to sleep.

But before the dawn, storm winds drove the dhow against a reef just off the coast of Egypt, near a tiny fishing settlement that one day would be called El Gouna. Within minutes, the ship foundered. All hands went down, and the cargo of salt, incense, hammered gold, and al Qasim’s tablets was given to the sea.

Chapter One

A shiver of pleasure went through Joanna Boleyn as she plunged into the warm water of the Red Sea. It was her two hundred-something dive, but she never ceased to experience a sense of wonderment at the first undersea moment. She allowed herself the leisure of turning once on her own axis, like an ice-skater, absorbing the bright-blue world that surrounded her and Charlie. The sense of three-dimensionality was so completely different from the horizontal experience of solid ground. She no longer stood across from things, detached and analytical, but was suspended in a sphere, in the primordial element, and wherever she looked she saw life.

The fish, some in such gaudy colors they seemed a cartoon, swam by indifferently, and a few hovered teasingly within reach. A shoal of silvery sweepers engulfed her, like a shower of coins, surrounding but never touching her, as if magnetically repelled, then swept away.

They descended farther, and for a brief moment she missed the chattering of the surface world and the ease of communication. The rasp of her inhalations through the regulator and the gurgle of the exhale-bubbles that rose in a column over her head did nothing to dispel the sense of silence.

Soon the concrete structures came into sight, dull gray-green walls and arches and domes, like a ghost city. Lone groupers darted in and out of the low doorways, and an eel snaked through without stopping, as if in a hurry. This was the audacious project that the Ministry of Culture had officially named the International Egyptian Underwater Exhibit of Ecological Art, but the local Egyptians simply called al medina, the city.

At an average depth of thirteen meters, and stretching over nearly a hectare of dead coral, the joint UNESCO/Egyptian art project had reached its final stages. When completed, it would be an underwater sculpture museum. Eventually, however, a new reef would form over it, while the public that had contributed to its original destruction would witness and help pay for its regeneration. Even now, when only a few of the art works had been installed, the surfaces of the buildings had a soft velvet growth. Three small gray reef sharks glided toward her from the side. They approached with animal curiosity, and when they were close, Joanna could see that the largest one had a badly torn dorsal fin, perhaps from a fight with another male. The sharks circled once and then swam off over her head, indifferent.

Charlie looked back over his shoulder, his trim beard flashing white against the black of his diving suit, and she quickened her pace. In a few moments they spotted the steel rod and signpost that identified Site 13, which had been assigned to her on the outer edge of the coral plain. They paddled closer and she reached for the measuring tape in her net bag, preparing to fix the optimum position of her fountain. But something was wrong.

The rod identifying Site 13 tilted at a forty-five-degree angle with scarcely a square meter of ground beneath it. Beyond that, the coral dropped away immediately at a steep angle into the abyss.

Baffled and annoyed, she swept in closer. Charlie paddled to her side and, through his mask, she could see his expression of What the hell?!

Where there was supposed to be ground she saw only a crevice. It appeared the designers had located Site 13 too far toward the edge of the coral shelf, and some blow, perhaps something as simple as driving in the identification rod, had broken away a porous section of coral. More astonishing was the size of the damage.

She followed the crevice downward as it widened and darkened increasingly with the depth. Damn. The site was useless for her sculpture. She would surely be assigned another spot, but that would mean delay, maddening delay, which she was already familiar with. For starters, she and Charlie would have to write a report of the damage to the committee in charge of the project, explaining how it precluded the installation of a fountain. Damn! Damn! Damn! She groused inwardly as she descended farther, fanning the ever-widening walls with her torch beam.

At thirty meters, she checked her tank pressure. No hurry. She still had plenty of air to allow time for the safety stop, provided they didn’t stay long at a great depth. She continued downward and Charlie followed. At thirty-eight meters the crevice flattened out to a shallow slope.

She made a sweep with the torch, trying to memorize what she saw so she could file a repo