Veil of the Goddess (24 page)

One church had been built on the ruins of another, which in turn had been constructed on even more ancient foundations. All shined with the blue glow Ivy equated with the faith in the Queen of Heaven, although the Queen might have been worshipped under different names.

Ivy touched a hand to the blue glow of the outer church and felt a tingle as her fingers passed through the glow. But they didn't really enter the church. Instead, they remained in normal space.

No change there. She still needed the key, the Cross, to open the gates between the normal world and that strange world where the past lingered on, and where magic and power lay waiting to be tapped.

"I'm going to have to lean on you,” she told Galen.

"Good. But move quickly. We threw the Foundation agents off track with the switch, and many of them followed Zack and Cejno, but some are starting to return. And they've called in reinforcements from the police and from their other agents around the city."

She nodded, then used him for support as she pressed the Cross piece to the closed doorway of the immaterial church.

It penetrated easily, even more easily than it had done when she'd entered the area holy to Hera. Either the Cross was somehow learning, gaining power, or maybe
she'd
changed. Each time she crossed between the dimensions, the barriers seemed weaker.

With the Cross halfway between the physical world and the spiritual world, she let go of the Priest and, hand on the Cross, stepped across.

"Ivy, I can't see you."

Father Galen's voice was excited.

She couldn't blame him. While the discovery of the True Cross was a wonder, seeing a woman step through an invisible wall and vanish was the kind of thing that could reinforce faith in even the strongest doubter. She suspected Father Galen could break free of hashish now that he had been given a true vision.

Without the priest to lean on, Ivy's right leg couldn't support her. She half-hopped and half limped toward the inner temple.

She left the Cross behind her, guarding the portal between mundane and holy, so she reached out her hand and touched the inner temple's door.

It felt as solid as fresh-cut wood and barely resisted when she pushed it open.

Even though it was bright day outside, the thousands of burning oil lamps around it seemed to outshine the mundane light of the sun. In the very middle, surrounded by the glow of magic and oil lamps, stood a low altar of polished stone.

Unlike the altar to the hawk-headed god they'd found in Kurdistan, no sacrificial knife or thick-crusted blood lay here. Surrounded by flowers, a gossamer strip of silky fabric draped over the four-horned altar.

The old story of Mary returning the veil to her own place had more truth than anyone had guessed.

Reaching out and physically touching the holy object somehow seemed even more profane than carrying the Cross. Ivy glanced at her hands to make sure they were clean, that she hadn't carried in the filth of the mundane world to pollute this holy object, then reached out to the altar and picked up the veil.

It was longer and wider than she would have guessed from its thin shape. The material seemed to be silk, or perhaps a linen so fine it could pass for silk. Bright eight-sided stars of silver and gold ran down each side, making the deep sapphire blue of the fabric even more jewel-like.

Its touch sent shivers through her body. For just a moment, she saw through Mary's eyes as Roman soldiers brought Jesus's body from the Cross. Even older visions, of ancient cities and blue-clad priestesses mingled in, hinting that Mary was a part of an ancient tradition.

"Ivy. The police are beating the pilgrims. They'll be on us soon. You must come out now.” Father Galen's voice sounded desperate.

Ivy took the veil, then hobbled back to where the Cross sill penetrated the ancient blue walls.

"Hand it to me,” Galen urged. His face and hands shimmered through the barrier and she guessed he was holding onto the Cross section.

"I'll hide it."

That sort of made sense. Ivy passed the veil to the waiting priest.

As he touched it, his face lit. “Oh, holy."

Before she could react, say anything, his hands and face disappeared—followed by the Cross. She made a grab for it, held onto it briefly, but her loss of blood had made her too weak. The crossbeam was jerked out of her hands, and it disappeared beyond the misty blue wall.

"Wait. Father Galen!” Didn't he realize she needed the cross to exit this dimension? Then, with horrific certainty, she realized he did.

He'd done this to her on purpose. Worse, he'd deliberately sent Zack and Cejno to their deaths.

Ivy was trapped in the other world—a world without food, without any contact to her everyday Earth.

Without Zack.

Trapped.

She should have recognized the fanatical look on Father Galen's face. She should never have handed over what he clearly saw as a symbol of rightful Greek ownership of this ancient city.

Recriminations didn't help, though.

Ivy fought the urge to surrender, to sink to the ground and let the power of the invisible church creep over her, subsume her into its embrace and make her a part of something that had endured for hundreds of years while the city outside, the ordinary world of man, hurried by.

But surrender, even surrender to a force that seemed benevolent and loving, wasn't in her. Growing up in the shadows of old Appalachian coalmines, Ivy had learned to fight before she'd attended kindergarten. She wasn't going to stop fighting just because she was locked inside a prison whose walls were not stone or iron, but hundreds of years of faith and prayer.

She closed her eyes and made herself remember exactly where the Cross had penetrated the church wall. Surely some residual weakness would remain.

It made sense, but if there was any breach, Ivy couldn't feel it and certainly couldn't push her way past.

"Think, Ivy,” she murmured to herself. “You're a woman. That means you get to outsmart problems rather than bull through them."

One thing the National Guard taught was that the obvious solution was generally the right solution. And the obvious way to get out of a church was to use the doors.

The doors in the little temple in the middle of this larger church had opened easily enough. Would the larger doors on the outside of the church?

She limped over, inspected the latch, threw it, and then opened the doors.

Sunlight flooded in. “A lot of worry for nothing."

The first step was easy. The second step was harder. The third was impossible. The blue glow gave, but like elastic, the harder she pulled against it, the more firmly it pulled her back in.

With her wounded leg, Ivy wasn't up for tug-o-war. She went back into the church and sat on the base of one of the tall Doric pillars that supported the imposing dome overhead.

The talent the Cross had given her really was amazing, she mused. Archeologists and historians would probably pay big bucks to learn about the various layers of the old church—and to get a second look at a building that had been destroyed when Columbus was still wearing short-pants.

She got a start when a Turkish policeman, nightstick in hand, burst through the blue haze of the Church's walls and stepped directly toward her.

"I was just resting,” she said in English. “I got a little overwhelmed by all of the things to see in your city."

He ignored her.

"Interesting,” she breathed.

The policeman looked around. Some part of him must have sensed that something wasn't right, the type of feeling Ivy's grandmother had claimed was someone “walking over your grave.” Then he shook his head and walked on, his feet sometimes sinking beneath the stone floors of the church and sometimes floating a few inches above it.

Ivy hobbled after him, then reached her hand to touch him.

Her hand and arm passed right through him.

Okay, she really was on a different plane or dimension. That made as much sense as anything. The question was, if she stayed close to him, overlapped with him, would she be able to follow him out of the church and back into the world of the mundane?

She didn't have a lot of other thoughts and this one seemed worth a try.

She stepped even closer, until their torsos actually overlapped.

The cop yanked out his handgun and spun around. Clearly he'd sensed more than a vague feeling. Equally clearly, he couldn't see anything because he growled what could only be a Turkish curse, shoved his handgun back in its holster, and strode from the church like a man who wants to get away from a graveyard but doesn't want anyone to know he's frightened.

Ivy's bum leg made it hard for her to keep up, but she forced down the pain and stumbled after him—and slammed into the stone wall of the church as the cop walked straight through it without even noticing it was there.

"Oh, hell,” she moaned. “I am so dead."

Cejno and Zack used the cover of thousands of pilgrims to stay down, get away from the rampaging cops, and finally duck into the massive Istanbul Bazaar.

Cejno insisted on paying as they both bought a change of clothing—Cejno unzipping the Telekom coveralls he'd worn to put on a western-cut shirt and cowboy hat and Zack a pair of tan slacks and a shirt that looked like it had already seen more than one owner but was at least clean.

Strengthened by a package of dried apricots, Zack was ready to get back to work.

"Where do you think Galen would take Ivy?” he asked.

"Father Galen is not the kind who is easily dissuaded,” Zack said. “I think we should find the parade and assume ourselves into it."

It took Zack a second to figure out what Cejno meant, but it was as good a plan as any. The parade had been scheduled to end outside the Hagia Sophia, so they could go there.

At least the Turkish police and Foundation agents would have to be careful there in an area where a thousand videocameras would be filming at any given moment. The Turkish police might not like Greek pilgrims, but they wouldn't want to spoil their city's appeal as a tourist destination by slaughtering a bunch of them either.

"Right. Let's go."

Pilgrims filled the square in front of the Hagia Sophia and a determined line of cops guarded the cathedral's enormous doors, presumably to prevent any attempt by the Archbishop to reclaim the ancient structure as the center of his see. That really would create a riot in this ninety-nine percent Moslem nation.

As the Patriarch led the assembled pilgrims in prayer, Zack and Cejno pushed their way to the front, ignoring angry murmurs and excited hand-gestures from those they disturbed.

"He is saying they have found something wonderful, a true miracle,” Cejno whispered. Apparently the kid spoke Greek as well as Turkish, Kurdish, and English. Zack felt like a provincial American.

"The Cross?"

"Perhaps. That doesn't feel—ah—"

The ‘ah’ was because Father Galen appeared from somewhere behind the Patriarch with a heavy relic box in his arms.

"It's got to be the veil,” Cejno announced unnecessarily as the Patriarch lifted the box's lid and raised a long strip of fabric into the air.

The hush from the crowd wasn't that of reverence, but of question. They'd come all this way to see some old piece of fabric? Clearly they'd been expecting something more dramatic. The head of John the Baptist, maybe, or the crown of thorns.

But when the Patriarch announced that they had rediscovered the very veil of the Virgin Mary, protected all these years from looters and invaders, the crowd went wild.

"He's inviting them to return to Constantinople,” Cejno translated, “to become a part of this most cosmopolitan city. I think they will like it better if he tells them to go and burn some automobiles."

Zack couldn't disagree with that. But he was getting an increasingly uneasy feeling. Father Galen had at least implied that he had given up on his quest for the veil and that he would take Ivy for help. If he'd been lying about one, he might have been lying about the other as well. Either way, where was Ivy?

He shoved his way through the increasingly dense crowd that gathered to get a closer look at one of the most holy relics of Christianity.

The relic was odd, he thought. Sure it would have been strange if Mary had crosses on her veil. For one thing, the Cross hadn't been adopted as the symbol of the religion until long after Mary's ascension into heaven, and Mary was often associated with stars. But he would have expected six-pointed stars of David rather than the eight-pointed stars actually embroidered into the veil.

Also, while medieval paintings might portray Mary as a Queen, crowned and sceptered, she was still the carpenter's wife, carpenter's mother, wasn't she? So, where had the gold and jewels come from?

"Pretty nice,” Cejno said. “The sainted mother of the Prophet Jesus, peace be upon him, is well respected in the Koran."

From what Zack could see of the Patriarch's face, he had some of the same questions Zack did. Of course, the answer was probably that the simple garment of a carpenter's wife had been decorated and made more ornate over the centuries it had been a worshipped object. Six-sided stars of David would not have been used because of the antipathy that had existed between the Christian and Jewish faiths in the middle ages. The five-sided star had sometimes been associated with magic and paganism. He couldn't remember anything about an eight-sided star. Could they have picked that to avoid confusion?

The crowd thinned out as Zack headed for Father Galen rather than for the relic itself.

"Where the hell is Ivy?” he asked without preamble.

Father Galen jumped. “Ah, Zack. I thought you were going into hiding."

"And I thought you had given up finding the veil. I guess we were both wrong. Now, do you want to answer my question, or should I just tear that answer out of you?"

"Saint Ivy was transformed into the heavenly domain,” Galen reported with a solemn face. “I witnessed this myself."

"She's dead?” He was glad he wasn't armed because he would have been tempted to start shooting.