Nelson DeMille
The Quest
To My Three Creative Geniuses — Lauren, Alex, & James
Author’s Note
An earlier version of this book was published almost forty years ago, and when I wrote The Quest, the historical events that take place in this book — the Ethiopian revolution and civil war — were recent history. The old emperor, Haile Selassie, known as the Lion of Judah, had been deposed and died in captivity, and Ethiopia was plunged in chaos.
As a history and political science major in college, and as a news junkie all my life, Ethiopia interested me as an ancient isolated, almost biblical civilization that was being dragged bloodily into the twentieth century. Also, according to family history, some of my Italian forebearers had fought with the Italian Army when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1895, and again when Mussolini invaded in 1936. Thus, my interest in this country was piqued by that family history, and I thought a novel set against this background of a three-thousand-year-old royal dynasty coming to an end at the hands of Marxist revolutionaries would make for a great epic story in the vein of Doctor Zhivago, which I had recently read. Now, forty years later, I see that this story of war, love, and loss is timeless.
There is always some literary license taken when writing a novel, but the historical events in this story happened — or at least happened according to the news media of the day whose reporting was my main source of information as I was writing The Quest. I did take some license with the terrain and geography for the sake of drama, but the country I described in 1975 was still very much uncharted and dangerous — a perfect setting for an adventure into the heart of darkness.
PART I:
Ethiopia, September 1974
“What is it?
The phantom of a Cup which comes and goes?”
“Nay, monk! What phantom?” answered Perceval.
“The Cup, the Cup itself, from which our Lord
Drank at the last sad supper with his own.
This, from the blessed land of Aromat…
Arimathaean Joseph, journeying brought
To Glastonbury…
And there awhile it bode; and if a man
Could touch or see it, he was heal’d at once,
By faith, of all his ills. But then the times
Grew to such evil that the Holy Cup
Was caught away to Heaven and disappear’d.”
Chapter 1
The elderly Italian priest crouched in the corner of his cell and covered himself with his straw pallet. Outside, screaming artillery shells exploded into the soft African earth, and shrapnel splattered off the stone walls of his prison. Now and then, a shell air-burst overhead and hot metal shards pierced the corrugated metal roof.
The old priest curled into a tighter ball and drew the pitifully thin pallet closer. The shelling stopped abruptly. The old man relaxed. He called out to his jailers, in Italian, “Why are they bombing us? Who is doing this thing?”
But he received no answer. The older Ethiopians, the ones who spoke Italian, had gradually disappeared over the years, and he heard less and less of his native tongue through the stone walls. In fact, he realized he hadn’t heard a word of it in almost five years. He shouted in snatches of Amharic, then Tigregna. “What is it? What is happening?” But there was no answer. They never answered him. To them, he was more dead than the ripening bodies that lay in the courtyard. When you ask questions for forty years and no one answers, it can only mean that you are dead. But he knew they dared not answer. One had answered, once, when he first entered his cell. Was it forty years now? Perhaps it was less. The years were hard to follow. He could not even remember the man who had answered, except for the skull. His jailers had given him the skull of the one who had answered him. The skull was his cup. He remembered the man and his kindness each time he drank. And the jailers remembered when they filled his cup; they remembered not to speak to him. But he asked anyway. He called out again. “Why is there war? Will you release me?”
He stared at the iron door on the far wall. It had closed on a young man in 1936, when Ethiopia was an Italian colony, and the door had not opened since. Only the small pass-through at the bottom of the iron door was ever used. His sustenance came in and his waste went out once a day through that small portal. A window, no larger than a big book — really just a missing stone — above eye level, let in light, sounds, and air.
His only possessions in the cell, aside from his tattered shamma, were a washbasin, a pair of dull scissors that he used to cut his hair and nails, and a Holy Bible, written in Italian, which they had let him keep when he was first imprisoned. If it weren’t for his Bible, he knew, he would have gone mad many years ago. He had read the holy book perhaps a hundred, two hundred times, and though his eyesight was growing weaker, he knew every word by heart. The Old and New Testaments brought him comfort and escape, and kept his mind from dying, and kept his soul nourished.
The old man thought of the young man who walked through the iron door in 1936. He knew every detail of the young man’s face and every movement of his body. At night, he spoke to the young man and asked him many things about their native Sicily. And he knew the young man so well that he even knew what went on inside his mind and how he felt and where he went to school and the village he came from and how old his father was. The young man never got older, of course, and his stories were always the same. But his was the only face the old man knew well enough to remember. He had seen that young face in the mirror for the last time close to forty years ago and not again since, except in his mind’s eye. He wept.
The old priest dried his tears on his dirty native shamma and lay back against his cell wall and breathed deeply. His mind eventually came back to the present.
Wars had ebbed and flowed around his small prison and he imagined that the world had changed considerably in his absence from it. Jailers got old and died. Young soldiers grew old as they paraded through the years in the courtyard of the small fortress outside. When he was younger, he was able to hang from the sill of the window much longer. But now he could no longer gather the energy to pull himself up for more than a few minutes a day.
The shelling had jarred loose many things in his mind. He knew that his imprisonment was at its end; if the explosions did not kill him, then the guards would, because he knew they had standing orders to kill him if they could no longer continue to guarantee his incarceration in this place. And now he could hear the sounds of fleeing garrison soldiers. And the jailers would soon open that never-opened door and do their duty. But he held nothing against them. Those were their orders and he forgave them. But it did not matter if they or the explosions killed him. His own body was failing him anyway. He was dying. There was famine in the land and the food had been poor for over a year. His lungs made a liquid sound when he coughed. Death was here. Inside his cell and outside his cell.
The old man’s biggest regret, he thought, was that he would die in ignorance — that as a consequence of the two score years of being held in darkness, he knew less than the simplest peasant did about his world. He did not regret the dying — that held no special terror for him — but the thought of dying without knowing what the world had come to in his absence was a peculiarly sad thing. But then again, his calling was not of this world, but of the next, and it should have made no difference what the world had come to. Still, it would have been nice to know just a little something of the affairs of men. He could not help wondering about his friends, about his family, about the world leaders of his day.