Sarah smiled.
‘I don’t really understand it fully yet myself. It may take a long time working with linguists and genealogists. But I think it works like this. There appears to be a sacred lineage that has continued at Wardabaha for a long time. Two thousand years, perhaps. Since the time the first Jewish settlers arrived here around AD 70. The line goes back further than that, though. If I’m right, Jesus fathered children, both sons and daughters. When Jerusalem was burnt, both lines left the city and wound up here. The female line took precedence, as it always has done among the Jews. Mary tells me that the women in the female line are always called Hannah or Mary, alternating. And when they have a male child, he is called Jesus.
‘You’ll be able to make DNA tests. But if I’m right, this little baby is in a direct line from Jesus Christ, through his daughter Hannah.’
Tears were streaming down Gavril’s cheeks. He had never dreamt of such a thing, but even imagining it was too much for him.
‘What do we do with them?’ asked Ethan.
‘Do?’
‘Do we take this young woman out of the only home she has ever known, take her child into an environment where he’ll become a target for every sensation-seeker on the planet? Look what happens to a mere celebrity like Britney Spears, how publicity destroys what it creates. This baby will be proclaimed the Son of God and who knows what else. He will never know a moment’s peace. Before very long, the world will crush him.’
‘What do you suggest, then?’
‘Let’s find a way to re-establish this settlement. We leave the relics here. We find a few young Tuareg men who will agree to come here to marry and have children. They will be placed under oath never to reveal the existence of Ain Suleiman or Wardabaha. The women here and the male survivors will instruct them in the stories of their ancestors. But this place will slip beneath the sands as it did before. In time, Jesus will marry and have sons or daughters, perhaps both. The lines will continue.’
It took a long time for Gavril to answer. His hopes had been dashed and fulfilled almost at once. He was seated a few yards away from the new Christ child. He could not guess what these people knew or what they did. Did the boys called Isa perform miracles? Did they raise the dead and heal the sick? Would the men and women Aehrenthal had murdered come to life if this little baby walked across to them and put his hand on them? Or did it not work like that?
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think you’re right. We’ll come back here again, just to make sure things go well for them. I would like to come often, to see Isa grow up. I would like to bring him gold, frankincense and myrrh. Or perhaps something more useful.’
The baby began to cry lustily. His mother Mary started to shush him. She gave him her breast, and he calmed down slowly. When the crying stopped, Gavril noticed something. The wailing of the women, that had been unbroken since the previous evening, had vanished like a cloud before the sun. A deep stillness pervaded the encampment. It rippled through the palm leaves and across the surface of the blue water, before heading out into the unending wasteland of the desert.
Mary stood up and handed her baby to Sarah. She looked at Sarah and spoke for some minutes.
Sarah cradled the baby and summed up what Mary had said. ‘I asked you before why you have no children, but I did not understand your answer. You said you are twenty-eight years old, and that you have no husband. It must be a very strange place where you come from. I have asked God to give you a husband, and for the husband to have a large penis and to give you many children. I have lost my husband. Now you must have one of your own.’
There was much amusement when this was translated. Sarah handed the baby back to Mary, then turned, still laughing, to Ethan.
‘Well, Ethan Usherwood, what do you say to that? Are you big enough for the job?’
She took him later to the synagogue that was halfway to being a church. They went down finally to the crypt underneath. Some of the monks had gone down before them to take away the harsh lights brought by Aehrenthal’s team and replace them with hundreds of candles.
The monks were praying silently, using the Jesus Prayer of the Eastern mystical tradition. Knowing what had taken place in the chamber not many hours earlier, Sarah shivered. The blood had been washed away and incense was burning everywhere, giving out clouds of spikenard and onycha and styrax. Later, there would be masses and prayers to cleanse the place of its newly come horror.
They watched for a while, then went back and out to the open air. There, she told him how she had pierced Aehrenthal with the pilum. When she finished speaking, there was a cold wind. The wind carried fragments of the voices nearby, the women and their keening.
‘Will you marry me?’ he asked.
‘You don’t have to ask.’
‘You are sure about that?’ he asked.
‘If you ask me that again, I’ll call it all off.’
‘You haven’t said “yes” yet.’
She looked at him.
‘Yes,’ she said in a whisper, ‘yes.’
Gavril married them that afternoon in the church-synagogue. Mary was there with her baby, with others of the women, and a choir of monks. There were clouds of incense, and candles in ancient candelabras, shedding a light that had not been seen in centuries. Neither Ethan nor Sarah understood a word of the Romanian rite, but they had passed far beyond understanding by then. Mary had given them rings to exchange. The women had taken Sarah to a private place, stripped her naked, washed her and hennaed her hands before sending her to be married in Tuareg robes. And when the service was finished and the last words spoken, Ethan kissed his bride while the women of Ain Suleiman broke the silence with loud ululations. Not of grief this time, but of joy.