Jack glanced up at the sky. Everything was now in train. The sun had disappeared behind a bank of grey cloud, and the air had an oppressive quality, humid and heavy. He mouthed a silent prayer for Morgan, and then followed Costas and Helena to the doors of the church. Two men in Arab headdress appeared on either side. Costas stepped back in alarm, but Helena put her hand on him reassuringly. One man passed a ring of ancient keys to the other man, who then proceeded to unlock the doors. They pushed them open, just enough. Helena glanced at the two men, bowing her head slightly, then led Jack and Costas forward. The doors closed behind them. They were inside.
‘There’s been a power cut in the entire Christian quarter of Old Jerusalem,’ Helena said quietly. ‘The authorities sometimes flip the switch. Helps to flush out the bad guys.’ It was dark inside, and they remained standing for a moment, their eyes getting accustomed to the gloom. Ahead of them natural light was filtering through the windows that surrounded the dome over the rotunda, and all round them the shadows were punctuated by flickering pinpricks of orange. ‘Joudeh and Nusseibeh, the two Arab custodians who unlocked the door, came in and lit the candles for us after I told them we’d be coming.’
‘Does anyone else know we’re here?’ Jack asked.
‘Only my friend Yereva. She has the key to the next place we’re going. She’s an Armenian nun.’
‘Armenian?’ Costas said. ‘And you’re Ethiopian? I thought you people didn’t get along.’
‘The men don’t get along. If this place had been run by nuns, we might actually have been able to get somewhere.’
She led them forward to the edge of the rotunda. Jack looked up to where the circle of windows let in the dull light of day, and peered above that to the interior of the dome, restored in modern times to the same position as the dome of the first church built by Constantine the Great in the fourth century. He thought of the other great domes he had stood beneath in the last few days, St Paul’s in London, St Peter’s in Rome, places that suddenly seemed far removed from the reality of the life of Jesus. Even here the momentous significance of the site, the truths embedded in the rock beneath them, seemed obscured by the church itself, by the very structures meant to extol and sanctify the final acts in life of one who millions came here to worship.
‘I see what you mean about the encrustations of history,’ Costas murmured. He was staring at the gaudy structure in the centre of the rotunda. ‘Is that the tomb?’
‘That’s the Holy Sepulchre itself, the Aedicule,’ Helena replied. ‘What you see here was mostly built in the nineteenth century, in place of the structure destroyed in 1009 by the Fatamid caliph al’Hakim when the Muslims ruled Jerusalem. That destruction was the event that precipitated the Crusades, but even before the Crusaders arrived, the Viking Harald Hardrada and his Varangian bodyguard from Constantinople had come here on the orders of the Byzantine emperor, to oversee the rebuilding of the church. But I think you know all about that.’
‘I thought we’d left Harald behind in the Yucatan,’ Costas murmured. ‘Is there anywhere he didn’t go?’
‘The ancient rock-cut tomb inside the Aedicule was identified by Bishop Makarios in AD 326 as the tomb of Christ,’ Helena continued. ‘You have to imagine this whole scene in front of us as a rocky hillside, half as high as the rotunda is now. Just behind us was a small rise known as Golgotha, meaning the place of the skull, where most believe Jesus was crucified. The hill in front of us had been a quarry, dating maybe as early as the city of David and Solomon, but by the time of Jesus it was a place of burial and probably riddled with rock-cut tombs.’
‘How do we know the bishop got the right tomb?’ Costas said.
‘We don’t,’ Helena replied. ‘The Gospels only tell us the tomb was hewn out of the living rock, with a stone rolled in front of it. You had to stoop to look in. There was room inside for at least five people, sitting or squatting. The platform for the body was a raised stone burial couch, possibly an acrosolium, a shelf below a shallow arch.’
‘All of which could describe a typical tomb of the period,’ Jack said. ‘According to the Gospels, the tomb wasn’t custom-built for Jesus, but was donated by Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy Jew and member of the Jerusalem council. It was apparently a fresh tomb, and there would have been no further burials, no added niches as you see in so many other rock-cut tombs. It was never used as a family tomb.’
‘Unless…’ Helena hesitated, then spoke very quietly, almost in a whisper. ‘Unless one other was put there.’
‘Who?’ Jack exclaimed.
‘A companion,’ she whispered. ‘A female companion.’
‘You believe that?’
Helena raised her hands and pressed the tips of her fingers together briefly, then gazed at the Aedicule. ‘It’s impossible to tell from what’s there now. Constantine the Great’s engineers hacked away most of the surrounding hill to reveal the tomb, to isolate it. By so doing, they actually destroyed much of the tomb itself, the rock-cut chamber, leaving only the burial shelf intact. It was almost as if Constantine’s bishops wanted to remove all possible reason for doubt, any cause for dispute. From then on, the Holy Sepulchre, the identification of the tomb, would be a matter of faith, unassailable. Remember the historical context, the fourth century. When the Church was first becoming formalized, some things that were inconvenient, contradictory, were concealed or destroyed. Other things were created, spirited out of nowhere. Holy relics were discovered. Behind it all lay Constantine the Great and his bishops. Everything had to be set in stone, a version of what went on here in the first century AD that suited the new order, the Church as a political tool. They were editing the past to make a stronger present.’
‘And behind Constantine lay a secret body of advisers, guardians of the earliest Church,’ Jack said. ‘That’s one thing we haven’t told you yet.’
‘I know,’ Helena replied quietly.
‘You know?’
‘As soon as you told me what you were seeking, I knew you would come up against them. The concilium.’
Jack looked at her in astonishment, then nodded slowly. ‘We had an audience with one of them, in Rome two days ago.’
‘At the tomb? The other tomb?’
Jack stared at her again, stunned, then nodded. ‘You know about that too?’
‘They’re tight, Jack. There are never any chinks. You need to be incredibly careful. Whoever you saw, he may have told you some truths, but he may not be who you think he was. The concilium has been stalled in the past, but never defeated. They’re like a bad dream, endlessly returning. We should know.’
‘We?’
‘The memory of that other tomb, the tomb of St Paul in the secret catacomb under St Peter’s in Rome, was not entirely lost. The truth was passed down by those who were there, and reached the kingdom of Aksum, Ethiopia. Remember, we Ethiopians are one of the earliest Christian communities, derived from the first followers of Jesus. There are others like us, on the periphery of the ancient world. The British Church, in existence since the first century AD, since the word of Jesus first reached the shores of Britain. We share the tradition of an emperor and Christ, the British story that an emperor brought Christianity to their shores, ours that an emperor and a king sought the Messiah in the Holy Land, during the time of the Gospels. And we have always been good at keeping secrets. You know we have the Ark of the Covenant, Jack.’