Veil of the Goddess (21 page)

"I will talk to my fellow priests,” Father Galen promised. “I have young Cejno's number. I shall call you in the morning and let you know what we have decided.

The eastern horizon didn't even hint at dawn when someone started hammering on the door to the apartment Ivy shared with Zack.

She pulled herself out of bed and stumbled to the entryway. Cejno peered into the apartment eyehole, probably trying to catch a glimpse of her running around naked. His brief experience with the French woman apparently hadn't satisfied Cejno's curiosity about the female form.

The hashish smuggler exploded into the apartment as soon as she opened the door. “Father Galen says the priests will help you. He says their Patriarch has heard of the Foundation."

"What did he hear?” Zack demanded.

Cejno shrugged. “He's heard of them and he wants to help you. Is that not enough?"

"Great. Does he say anything about where we should start looking?"

Cejno looked at the floor. “Father Galen says the priests will study their church records. Although the Turks destroyed some and the Venetians others, they have records that go back long before even those in the Vatican."

"Just what we need. A bunch of priests sitting around reading old books. If those books said anything about where the veil was hidden, someone would have found it by now. Which means we're on our own,” Ivy concluded. “Give me ten minutes to get showered and we'll head out and see what we can find."

"Father Galen also asked me to tell you that the Americans are still everywhere."

"Are they digging?"

"I have not heard that."

"Good. Why don't you see if you can round up something for us to eat while Zack and I get ready?"

Cejno nodded and headed out the door.

"Mind if I go first?” she asked Zack when she saw him outside the bathroom.

He shook his head. “I have a bad feeling about the Bishop's reaction, though."

"Why's that? He's going to help us. Didn't you see how Father Galen reacted when we told him how Smith used his crucifix as a dousing rod?"

"So how do you think he's going to take it when you use the True Cross as a door opener?"

Ivy hadn't thought about that. To her, it wasn't the same. The Cross
wanted
to be used as the Key. But she could see how a priest might not see things that way.

"We've got to go with the allies we can find.” She stepped into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Even a lukewarm scrub would feel good. If she ever got back to America, she planned on soaking for a week.

Father Galen met them at a pastry shop and proceeded to impress everyone by buying two-dozen cream-filled pastries and eating them all.

"We have found no indication that the Veil was hidden,” he admitted. “But we are quite certain that the Veil now in Russia is not the one that we held here. This does not mean the Russian one is inauthentic, of course. Mary may have had more than one garment."

"Got it,” Zack said. “So if it's hidden, you don't know where?"

"Correct."

"How many people can the Patriarch spare to help our search?” Ivy took one of the pastries and bit into it. The chocolate and cream concoction probably had five hundred calories all by itself.

Father Galen looked embarrassed. “I am that person."

"So, it sounds like we're outnumbered. We'll have to outthink the Foundation people.” Which wouldn't be easy. The Foundation had obviously been researching the artifacts for years. “If you were a Byzantine Greek and the Turks were about to take over your city, where would you hide the veil?"

"In the Great Church,” Galen said without pausing for thought. “The Hagia Sophia had already been the center of our faith for a thousand years."

"Too obvious."

Unfortunately, Ivy agreed with Zack on that one. Besides, if it were hidden in the Hagia Sophia, the Foundation would get there first. “When the Turks conquered Constantinople, the first place they went was the Hagia Sophia. The defenders would have known that. So, where else might they have tried?"

"The Great Palace, I supposed. Perhaps the church of the Twelve Apostles, or of Saints Sergius and Bacchus. Of course, there were hundreds of monasteries within Constantinople during those days. It could have been taken to any of them."

"Where was it kept before the siege?"

Father Galen rolled his eyes. “That I do not know. Doubtless there was a church built to hold it. Perhaps the Blachernae Church."

Galen seemed more interested in the future than in the past, as long as the future looked like his idea of the idealized past. Well, Ivy couldn't hold that against him. Lots of people thought that way.

"If it's in a church, the Foundation will find it. Tell me about the Great Palace. Is that what they call the Topkapi Palace?"

Father Galen laughed. “The Turks wish it were so. No, the Great Palace was a whole city for the government of the entire world. Built by Constantine, it was much larger than Topkapi. Indeed, a major piece was recently found well outside the Topkapi."

"So, if the veil was taken to the Great Palace, it could be pretty much anywhere in the old section of the city?” Zack said.

"But of course. This was a city within the city."

"Is there anyplace sacred to Mary? Maybe the legend of Mary coming to earth and retrieving her veil was meant metaphorically, or even as a clue."

Father Galen crossed himself—it wasn't quite the same sign her Catholic priests used, but it was similar, just as his robes were different but similar. “That is an interesting thought. There are many sites in the city sacred to the Queen of Heaven."

"Which would be the oldest?"

Father Galen looked at Cejno. “Perhaps I could have just a small amount for the pipe. Thinking is heavy work."

Cejno shrugged. “All of the hashish is dispersed, Father. I merely stay here to help my friends."

"Ah, well. I feared it was to be so.” Father Galen removed a tiny pipe from a pocket he had hidden somewhere in his robes, sniffed at it, then put it back without lighting. “In Constantinople, the ‘oldest’ can be very old indeed. Many of our churches were built on Greek temples. Although it is not always political to remember this, the pagans once had their own Queen in Heaven."

Ivy felt the same surge of rightness she'd felt when she'd been dragged into the temple of Aphrodite in Anamur. From what she'd seen of Smith and read in the Foundation papers before they'd been destroyed in the Predator attack, the Foundation seemed to be made of exactly the kind of Christians who would deny the earlier heritages and the truths that had shaped their faith. “So, what place was sacred to those pagan goddesses?"

Father Galen looked at Cejno again, but without much hope. “Who can say? The Hagia Sophia was built on a pagan temple. Even Christian Emperors saw themselves as conservators of the Greek culture and collected statues and other works from the pagan Greeks."

They were no better off than they had been when they'd started this adventure. Ivy refused to give in to despair.

"Which of the Greek goddesses would have been Queen of Heaven?” Zack asked.

That wasn't a bad question, although Ivy suspected that the truth was complex. Just as Catholics insisted on the separate yet indivisible nature of God, so Ivy now understood that the separate goddesses of the pagan Greek faith were not completely separate individuals but could also be seen as aspects of one Goddess. The legend of Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena seeking to be selected as most fair might also relate to the aspects of the Goddess—virgin, mother, and crone. Bits of mythology that had never made sense to her before suddenly fell into place with new insights.

"Probably Hera."

"And is there a site most associated with Hera?"

Father Galen raised his eyes. Not to the heavens, Ivy realized, but to the counter. He'd finished his pastries and was seriously considering buying more.

"There was a famous statue of Hera once,” Cejno said. “Part of the Hippodrome. It was stolen by the Catholic invaders."

"Stolen and destroyed,” Father Galen said.

Great. And now Catholic invaders were looking to steal the veil of Mary. No wonder the Orthodox were suspicious.

"The Foundation guys have already been over the ruins of the Hippodrome,” Zack reminded them. “If it's there, they've got it."

Nobody else had any ideas and Father Galen had pretty much cleared out the pastry store so they agreed to meet again for lunch at a nearby restaurant and went their separate ways.

"You've got a plan, right?” Zack bought coffees from a sidewalk merchant and they were pretending to be tourists along the wall that had protected Greek Constantinople for so long before the great Turkish cannon,
Basilica
, had crashed through the ancient gates and doomed the city to Turkish rule.

"Let's just say I've got an idea."

Although the city walls were over fifteen hundred years old and had been prayed over by countless defenders and invaders alike, they lacked the distinctive colors of power that Ivy thought she would find. Apparently there was more to the magical powers than just prayer. Perhaps there needed to be an enclosed area to hold that power inside rather than let it leak out. Or perhaps the walls, important as they were, were simply not regarded as holy objects. She was pretty sure it wasn't the violence those walls had seen that kept magic at bay. That yellow temple to the hawk-headed god they'd found in Kurdistan had seen plenty of violence, of human sacrifice, yet it still reeked with power.

"I thought it possible that there would be some trace of the veil's power in the last place where it was positively known to have been,” she admitted. “But I'm not seeing anything."

Zack looked concerned. “Do you need to connect to the Cross again? We haven't touched it in twenty-four hours. Could you be losing the sight?"

She couldn't help laughing. “Trust me, that isn't the problem. All of the power in this city has nearly blinded me to ordinary sight. But I'm not seeing anything here."

"What color are you looking for?"

"It would be red, wouldn't it? That's the color of Christianity and Islam."

He nodded. “But Mary's traditional color in church art is blue."

Blue was also the color of the temple of Aphrodite she'd unlocked. “You know, Zack, I think you've hit on something. Let's get going."

She bought a tourist map, then flagged down a taxi and ordered the driver on a long trip through the alleys of old Constantinople.

As she'd told Zack, the city was a mosaic of power. Colors radiated from mosques, churches, city parks, scattered ruins, and, in one case, an apparently empty spot in the sky fifty feet above the nearest building.

Most of the power gleamed red—the heritage of nearly two thousand years of rule by Christian and then Islamic empires.

But there were other colors. Yellow glowed sullenly from doorways leading down into subterranean hiding places. Orange brightened the rooftops of truly ancient buildings that still bore telltale marks of the Bull's horns. Green glistened from grottos and treed parks. And blue tantalized and teased from a few churches, from ruined temples, and from behind the walls of the Topkapi Palace complex.

Zack marked up the map with Ivy's descriptions and also kept up a running description of the numerous sailors and accompanying black-suited Foundation types wandering through the city.

After an hour, he slapped his forehead. “I can't believe I just noticed this."

"What?"

"Wherever you spot a blue power source, there seems to be a group of sailors and SP forces nearby. That hasn't been universally true of the other power colors, although there are plenty of sailors around some of those, too."

Which meant the Foundation had set a trap for them.

"Let's go meet the guys for lunch,” Ivy said. “There's something going on here we haven't figured out yet."

"They're guarding the sites while they bring in their detectors,” Father Galen said when he'd finished putting down most of a side of beef and an entire chocolate cake. “They must have followed the same logic you did, decided that the veil would be hidden in a place sacred to the Queen of Heaven, and identified those spots. But they wouldn't dare just start digging. Our Turkish government may roll over for the Americans, but this would be too much, even for them. I would have heard if they'd started digging and I haven't heard anything. This can only mean they haven't found anything."

He punctuated his speech with a long draught of beer.

"If we can guess which of the ten spots Ivy found is the right one,” Zack said, “we might be able to get there before the Foundation's diggers. Even so, they'd be on us before we could recover the veil."

A sense of unease had been percolating through Ivy since Zack had recognized the Foundation men scattered near the blue power sites. The priest's words finally gave her the missing pieces.

"We aren't ahead of them. They're ahead of us. They aren't waiting for permission to dig, they're waiting for us to walk into their arms."

Father Galen smiled and shook his head, then waved to the waiter for the desert tray. “How could they be waiting? And why? If they know how to find the veil, they would take it. What could be more holy? What could be more important than the very veil of the Mother of God?"

Zack shook his head slowly. “I think Ivy has a point. Has the Patriarch learned anything more about the Foundation?"

Father Galen gave another of his massive shrugs. “He contacted one of his fellow students from the old days, a Russian Bishop. The Russians have more experience with the radical Protestants because some groups of them have been trying to convert the Orthodox of Russia since the fall of the Soviet Empire. Anyway, his friend says The Foundation is an offshoot of one of those radical Protestant groups. The Russian spy agency, the SVR, says the Foundation has gained influence in U.S. government circles. But no one seems to know what their beliefs are, what they seek, or whom they proselytize. Indeed, they seem only to approach those who are already believers and already secure in their power. It is a mystery."