Eric Lustbader - The Testament

The interior of St. Pierre's was cool and dim. The air was faintly tinged with incense and massed voices raised in hypnotic liturgical chant. Rule led them to a particularly gloomy side chapel dominated by the emaciated figure of Christ, body bent backward, eyes raised heavenward.

They stood close together, listening for hurried footsteps or stealthy movement in the shadows. Bravo felt the Voire Dei close around them, as if they had sunk beneath the Bay of St. Malo. From time to time, he saw small groups of tourists, or a priest striding past on some unknown business, and he was struck by how removed he felt from them. It was as if they existed in an old, dim print he was being shown. And he thought Jenny was right, he could never go back to their reality.

At length, Rule took off his sunglasses and said very softly to Bravo, "You must listen to me closely because I suspect that there may be no other time for me to tell you what your father entrusted me to say. The secret the Order has guarded for centuries, the secret Rome has wanted above all others is this: we have a fragment of the Testament."

"Testament?" Bravo said. "What testament?"

Rule's eyes flashed with a kind of fervor Bravo had never before seen. "The Testament of Jesus Christ."

Bravo's heart seemed to give a painful lurch against his rib cage. "Are you serious?"

"Never more so," Rule said.

A priest walked by, saw them and nodded with a smile. All three fell silent until he had disappeared from view.

When Rule spoke again, his voice was both lower and more urgent. "Tell me, Bravo, in your studies have you come across the Secret Gospel According to Mark?"

"Of course," Bravo nodded. "In 1958, a scholar discovered it in the library of the Mar Saba monastery near Jerusalem. He found a handwritten text on the endpapers of a 1646 edition of Isaac Voss's 'Epistolae genuinae S. Ignatii Martyris.'"

Rule grinned. "Full marks, as usual."

"And they came into Bethany," Bravo recited from the Secret Gospel. "And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and said to him, 'Son of David, have mercy on me.' But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightaway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him…"

Rule laughed. "Of course, your eidetic memory."

"Basically, the Secret Gospel has been derided by Bible scholars because it depicts Jesus as a miracle worker, which runs counter to formal Church doctrine. It describes in detail how Jesus resurrected not only Lazarus, as is told in the eleventh chapter of Clement, but this boy and others as well."

"That's correct," Rule said. "And so dangerous was the Secret Gospel deemed that it was secretly suppressed by the Church in the fourth century, and then destroyed. Or so they thought."

"This is one of the secrets in the cache my father was guarding?"

"That's right," Rule said.

"Are you saying that you think it's true?"

"I know it is," Rule said, "because the fragment of the Testament of Jesus Christ confirms it. This is why it is vital that it and the other documents so closely guarded for centuries not fall into the hands of the Knights of St. Clement, for they will surely destroy all trace of them as if they had never existed."

"If what you're saying is true," Bravo said, "then why are you holding on to this secret? It's not only a religious artifact-it's an archeological miracle, a part of history. Why not reveal it to the world?"

"Bringing the Testament to light would violate our basic tenets, and this we will not do."

"I don't understand."

"It's not only the Testament that we possess," Rule said. "We also have the Quintessence."

"What?" Bravo had started, as if pricked by a needle.

Rule nodded. "You heard me."

"The fabled fifth element," Bravo breathed. "Medieval philosophers were convinced that the celestial regions were composed of earth, air, fire, water and the Quintessence-the essence of life itself. I always assumed that the Quintessence was a myth, like alchemy and turning water into wine."

"It's quite real, I assure you," Rule said.

"But what exactly is it? Can you see it, feel it, taste it, or is it beyond man's ability to observe and to quantify?"

"In His Testament, Jesus describes it as an 'oil,' but that term may or may not bear a resemblance to what we think of as oil." Rule leaned in, lowered his voice. "What makes the fragment of the Testament so explosive, so potentially dangerous to the Church, is that in it Jesus writes that it is by means of the Quintessence that he resurrected Lazarus and the others."

"But that goes against Church doctrine. The scriptures say that Jesus resurrected Lazarus by His divine power."

"Indeed, that has been the accepted interpretation since time immemorial," Rule said. "But the Testament of Jesus Christ clearly states that it is the Quintessence that brings Lazarus back to life. Christ makes no mention of a divine power."

Bravo was stunned. "Wait a minute-"

"Yes, yes, you see the mind-boggling implications. If it was the Quintessence that resurrected Lazarus and not Jesus's divine power, then the stories of him being a healer, the stories that the Church has systematically repressed, are true. And it might also be true that when he died his disciples resurrected him using the Quintessence."

Bravo's mind was reeling. At last he understood. "The entire structure of the Catholic faith would crumble because it would call into question whether Jesus was, in fact, the son of God."

"This is why over the centuries kings have been assassinated, regimes have been toppled, countless lives have been lost, blood has been spilled." Periodically, Rule tried to decode the shadows beyond the columns. "Your father told me he read the Testament, authenticated it. There is no doubt it's a fragment of the Testament of Jesus Christ, none at all."

Bravo stood absolutely immobile. To someone with his training, the idea of finding even a fragment of the Testament of Christ was akin to suddenly unearthing the Holy Grail. And, on top of that, to have the Quintessence, as well! The very possibility that Uncle Tony was right took his breath away.

"If the Order has had the Quintessence for all this time, if it actually exists," Bravo said, "then why didn't you use it to heal the sick and infirm?"

"That precise point was the subject of much heated debate in the twelve hundreds between Fra Leoni, the Keeper, and Fra Prospero, the Order's Magister Regens." Rule kept shifting his gaze to areas of the interior. "Two reasons for keeping the Quintessence secret prevailed over all the others: One, man was not meant to be immortal, or even to have his lifetime unnaturally extended. Two, news of the Quintessence would bring out the worst in people. What do you suppose would happen? A stampede, a panic in the general populace. But it would never get that far, because the rich and the powerful would contrive to steal it, to keep the secret for their own benefit, to extend their own lives. By applying the Quintessence at intervals they would live virtually forever."

Bravo's mind was moving at lightning speed. This was why the Knights were in a sudden lather to find the cache-the Vatican was pushing them to find the Quintessence. The pope was gravely ill. Was he ready to die? If so, the Quintessence was his only hope. The closer the pope came to death, the more pressure the Vatican would put on the Knights, the more of their power would be wielded. He'd have to remember that. Even in this day and age, the Vatican's power was a net flung far and wide across the globe wherever Christ had been introduced.

"And so power, already concentrated, would become ever more so," Rule continued. "And then there would be governments, rogue individuals, terrorists who would wish to use the Quintessence for their own ends, rather than for the betterment of mankind. Unmitigated disaster." He shook his head sadly. "No, the Quintessence is too powerful for mankind-it only seems like a gift, but that's the nature of all corrupting influences."