David Morrell - The Covenant Of The Flame

Tess winced.

Priscilla continued, 'In the case of Mithras, the bull dies not only to become the moon but to give life to the earth. The ritual execution probably happened during the vernal equinox… the arrival of spring… to regenerate the world. It's a traditionally sanctified time of the year. Most Christians don't know it, but that's the reason Easter is so important in their religion. When Christ leaves the tomb just as the earth comes back to life. And Mithras, too, came back to life in the spring.'

Tess struggled to concentrate, her forehead aching with intense frustration.

'Regeneration,' Priscilla said. 'Out of death comes life. That's why Mithras slices the throat of the bull. There has to be blood. A great deal of blood. The blood cascades toward the ground. It nourishes the soil. You can see grain sprouting from the ground near the bull's front knee. Many ancient religions required blood – sometimes human, sometimes animal – to be sprinkled on the fields before the crops were planted.'

'But that's repulsive.'

'Not if you believed. It's no more repulsive than the implications of communion in the Catholic Church, swallowing bread and wine that symbolize the body and blood of Christ to regenerate your soul.'

'Okay,' Tess said. 'Point granted, although I never thought about it that way before. But what about the dog in the statue? Why is the dog lunging toward the blood? And why is the serpent - ?'

With a tingle that swept from her feet to her head, Tess abruptly realized. Dear Lord, Priscilla had been right. Everything was suddenly, vividly clear. The dog and the serpent!'

'What about them? Can you tell me?' Priscilla's eyes gleamed.

'They represent evil! The dog is trying to stop the blood from reaching the ground and fertilizing the soil! The serpent wants to destroy the wheat! And the scorpion's evil, too! It's attacking the bull's testicles, the source of the bull's virility!'

'Excellent. I'm proud of you, Tess. Keep going. Can you tell me about the torch bearers?'

The flame pointing upward signifies Mithras. The flame pointing downward represents his evil competition.'

'You must have been a brilliant student.'

'Not according to your husband,' Tess said.

Professor Harding set down his teacup. 'What I said was, you weren't my best student. But you were bright enough and certainly enthusiastic.'

'Right now, "enthusiastic" doesn't describe what I'm feeling. I'm grieving for my mother. I'm desperate. I'm scared. The raven, Priscilla. Tell me about the raven.'

'Yes.' Priscilla sighed. The raven. On the left, from above the upraised torch, on the side of good, he watches the sacrifice. You have to understand. Mithraism had seven stages of membership, from beginners to priests. And the first stage was called "the raven". As it happens, the raven was also the sacred bird in their religion. It was a messenger sent from heaven, ordered to witness the ritual sacrifice, to observe the renewal of the world, the death of the bull, the blood cascading toward the earth, the return of spring, the fertilization of the soil.'

'Now I understand too well.' Tess quivered. 'It's what I've devoted my life to. Mithras wants to save the planet, and his evil counterpart wants to destroy it.'

Lima, Peru.

Charles Gordon, a short, frail importer-exporter, slumped behind his desk. Although his office window overlooked the impressive Rimac River, he ignored the dismal view and did his best to concentrate on a catalogue of the various American products that he'd tried, with little success, to sell to local merchants. His gaudy bow tie and ill-fitting suit had attracted smirks from the local population when he'd rented this office a month ago, but his clothes were now an accepted, tired joke that made him in effect invisible.

Bored, his only consolation was that Lima was only seven miles from the Pacific. This close to the sea, the temperature was moderate, the drab city far enough from the towering mountains to the east that the air was breathable. No high-altitude wheezing for him. In that respect, this assignment wasn't bad. Except that the operative who called himself Charles Gordon got tired of the charade involved in pretending to conduct a profit-earning business.

He had a business, all right.

But it wasn't import-export.

No, his business was death, and profit, in the normal sense of the word, had never been his motive.

As the brochure in his hands drooped, the trilling bell on his fax machine made him jerk upright. He quickly stood, crossed toward a table on his left, and watched a page unroll from the fax machine.

The message was from the Philadelphia office of his American supplier, notifying him that a shipment of laptop computers would soon be arriving. The message gave the quantity, the price, and the date of shipment.

Well, finally, Charles Gordon thought.

It didn't trouble him that so sensitive a message had been sent via his easily accessed telephone line. After all, his American supplier was, to all appearance, a legitimate corporation, and the laptop computers would arrive as promised. Even if someone suspected that the message was in code, no one could decipher its true meaning – because the code had been chosen arbitrarily. Kenneth Madden, the CIA's Deputy Director of Covert Operations, had explained it to Gordon the evening before the operative had flown to Peru.

The date of the shipment had nothing to do with the date of the mission. The quantity and the price of the laptop computers were irrelevant. What the message referred to was President Garth's imminent trip to Peru for a drug-control conference. The president's intention was to attempt to convince the Peruvian government to pay subsidies to farmers who switched to less lucrative crops than the easy-to-grow coca plants that local drug lords, among the world's major suppliers, needed to make cocaine.

But the president would never reach the conference.

Tess hesitated. In the study in the Victorian mansion near Georgetown, a memory nagged at her subconsciousness. In a flash, it surfaced. 'But what about the treasure?'

Priscilla frowned, puzzled by Tess's abrupt change of topic.

'Before I used the phone, you mentioned a mysterious treasure,' Tess said. 'In southwestern France, in the thirteenth century.'

'Ah.' Priscilla nodded. 'Yes. When the Catholic crusaders killed tens of thousands of heretics to eradicate a new version of Mithraism."

'You called it Albigensianism,' Tess said. The last stronghold of the heretics was a mountain fortress.'

'Montsegur.' Priscilla squinted.

'And you said that the night before the final massacre' – Tess trembled – 'a small group of heretics used ropes to descend from the mountain, taking with them a mysterious treasure.'

'A rumor. A persistent legend, although as I mentioned, it could have some basis in fact. Since Mithraism survives in India, it might have survived in Europe as well. A small group conducting its rites in secret. To avoid the Inquisition.'

' If so' - Tess raised her voice in frustration – ' what would the treasure have been?'

Priscilla shrugged. 'The obvious answer is wealth of some sort. Gold. Precious gems. Indeed, as recently as the Second World War, the Nazis believed that such a treasure existed and was hidden in the area near Montsegur. Hitler sent an archaeologist, a team of engineers, and an SS unit to search for it in the numerous caves in the region. Evidence of their excavations can still be found. However, the treasure was not. At least, no one ever indicated that a treasure had been discovered, and surely, given something so dramatic, word would have spread. Then, too, another theory is that the treasure was the Holy Grail, the chalice from Christ's Last Supper. And still another theory claims that the treasure was a person, that Christ – contrary to tradition – married and had a son, a descendant of whom was the leader of the Albigensians. Those latter theories were made popular in a book called Holy Blood, Holy Grail . But those latter theories are nonsense, of course. Because the Albigensians had only a superficial resemblance to Catholics. They descended from a tradition much older than Christianity, one that happened to use rituals similar to those of Christianity, but that in fact was based on the theology – opposing good and evil gods – of Mithraism. The heretics would have had no respect for the so-called Holy Grail, and they wouldn't have cared if Christ had a son who established a bloodline. No,' Priscilla said, 'whatever the treasure, assuming it even existed, it more than likely was the obvious: wealth.'