The Seven Stars Read online

  The Seven Stars

  By Simon Leighton-Porter

  All rights reserved

  © Simon Leighton-Porter, 2012

  The right of Simon Leighton-Porter to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Cover artwork

  Copyright © Berni Stevens 2012

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book is dedicated to my dear wife, Wendy.

  Chapter One

  Patras, Greece. AD 60

  Gasping for breath, the Galilean dashed between the market stalls, pulling down awnings, lines of washing and baskets of produce as he ran. Anything to buy time, anything to slow them down. To the left a narrow opening between the mud-brick walls, partially hidden by a curtain: he pulled it aside, moving from bright sunshine into the cool depths of the passageway beyond. Now in his fifties and overweight, he knew he couldn’t out-run them; he would just have to try and lose them in the warren of lanes and alleys surrounding the port. As he ran, lungs bursting, he heard once more the sound of pursuit closing in: they had seen him. A bend in the passage hid him from sight and at the end, emerging into the sunlight once more, he turned right and forced his unwilling legs uphill towards the acropolis. It would take him away from the port, in completely the wrong direction, but perhaps they might not expect him to head that way. Perhaps.

  Glancing behind, he never saw the outstretched arm which caught him across the throat like a rope, slamming him down onto his back. Winded and in pain, he tried to ward off the kicks that seemed to be coming from all directions: a vicious blow to the ribs and then rough hands pulling him upright. ‘Not planning on leaving us so soon, Andreas?’ said a short, wiry young man who had pushed himself to the front of the crowd. ‘Aegeas would like a little word with you first.’ A fist caught him flush on the side of the head.

  He struggled but there were too many of them; thirty or more, the usual band of dockside toughs, marshalled by five Roman soldiers who looked on in contempt as more blows rained down.

  The soldiers dragged him, bloodied and groaning, into the presence of Aegeas. Tertiary syphilis had rendered the Roman governor of Achaea’s face a hideous mask and had twisted his mouth into a permanent rictus grin. He stood up from behind his desk and, using his cane for support, hobbled round to Andreas. ‘Release him,’ he said.

  The soldiers obeyed but the Galilean’s feet went from under him and he slumped down onto the cold marble floor. He looked up at Aegeas in supplication and through lips swollen from his beating, tried to speak. ‘I can explain –’

  The Roman moved closer and one of the soldiers bent to pick Andreas up. ‘Leave him,’ said Aegeas, gesturing them away. They stepped back at once: Obedience to Aegeas was instinctive; a life-preserving reaction. For a moment he stood over Andreas, saying nothing and then struck him across the face with the heavy cane, causing his victim’s hands to come up in an effort to protect himself. After ten, maybe a dozen blows he stopped, caught his breath and then spoke as though they were discussing the price of olive oil.

  ‘If there’s one thing I cannot abide, it’s disrespect, Andreas.’

  ‘Please sir, let me explain –’

  ‘No, please, kindly allow me. Interrupt again, Andreas,’ he said without a trace of emotion, ‘and I’ll have your tongue cut out. Now, talking of tongues, it’s your stupid tongue that’s landed you in this mess, isn’t it? Answer me, man.’ As his voice rose, his disfigurement caused the words to run into a menacing cobra’s hiss.

  ‘Yes, sir, it has.’ Andreas spoke as though every word was an agony.

  ‘Yes.’ Another venom-laden hiss. ‘I very politely asked you to stop preaching sedition. Nero himself has made it clear that filling the plebeians’ heads with nonsense about your imaginary Jewish god and about Christ and his stupid conjuring tricks, is punishable by death. I’ve been lenient with you, Andreas, I could’ve had you crucified but I gave you a chance, didn’t I?’

  Andreas tried to shift position, but the pain from a broken rib caused him to cry out. ‘But you don’t understand, sir. I serve a higher authority –’

  ‘A loose tongue and a disrespectful one. You disobeyed an order from the Emperor, you turned down a polite invitation to come and speak to me and then had the discourtesy to try and leave my province without permission. And then when you are brought before me, you fail to remain standing in my presence.’ He gestured once more to the guards. ‘Pick him up. I want to make sure he hears this.’ They heaved Andreas to his feet and Aegeas hobbled towards him, so close that the Galilean could almost taste the foul odour from the governor’s rotting gums. ‘Together with your friends, the boatmen, you will be scourged and crucified tomorrow on the beach. For you, however, we have a little treat. No nails, just ropes. And before you thank me, understand that it will take you twice as long to die. Get him out of my sight.’

  Expressionless, Aegeas watched the soldiers drag him away, his pleas for mercy echoing down the corridor. Once they were out of sight he returned to his desk and picked up a folding bronze frame no bigger than a man’s hand. On each interior face was a layer of hardened beeswax. With a stylus he carved two simple figures: A.X. Pulling the leather strap tight around the frame, he applied his wax seal and shouted for his personal slave. ‘Tell the captain of the guard,’ said Aegeas, ‘that he is to deliver this into the hand of the emperor himself. He will be expecting it.’

  The slave disappeared at a trot down the same corridor, closing the door at the end. A few moments later, Aegeas was joined by the young man who had spoken to Andreas from the crowd. The governor turned to greet the new arrival. ‘You did well, Josephus.’ he said. ‘The emperor will be most grateful.’

  ‘A pleasure as always, sir.’ he replied, his slightly accented Latin betraying his Judean origins.

  Andreas’ fate was sealed and with his execution, the newly-fledged Christian church would have its first martyr – Saint Andrew. Few but Josephus knew the crimes of which Andreas was guilty: and for Josephus this was personal.

  Chapter Two

  Oxford University, the present day.

  Flora Kemble glared at the ringing telephone. The evening out with her girlfriends had already been organised so this had to mean work and more delays. Who else but a fellow academic – and probably one of the many at the university without a social life – would call at six o’clock on a Friday?

  At twenty seven she was the youngest member of the department and Friday had been an eternity in coming. After a long week teaching a summer school class whose members made up for their lack of knowledge by an overdose of enthusiasm, she was tired, hot and wanted to go home. With a sigh she put down her briefcase, pulling her long dark hair away from her face, first into a pony-tail then away from her left shoulder as she put the receiver to her ear. ‘Department of palaeography, Dr Kemble.’ In response, a man’s voice greeted her in Italian, a language she spoke fluently, but none the less, it took her a few seconds to work out who was speaking. Then she recognised the voice and a tiny but palpable frisson ran through her, something she couldn’t define, a spontaneous warmth that caused her attractive, heart-shaped face to break into a smile. Flora hadn’t spoken to Dr Francesco Moretti for nearly a year and the pleasure at hearing the handsome archaeologist’s voice put aside all thoughts of leaving the office. ‘What a lovely surprise, Francesco. Not like you to be working so late on a Friday,’ she said, gently teasing.

  ‘That’s why I’m calling.’ It’s so good
I don’t want to go home.

  Flora smiled again and looked at her watch: six o’clock in the UK meant seven in Naples. ‘For you to be at work at this hour on a Friday, it must be good. What have you found?’

  ‘Well, it’s not 100% certain, but we’ve found a villa at Pompeii….a villa that looks like it belonged to Josephus.’

  ‘Josephus!’ Flora sat upright and almost dropped the phone in shock. ‘There’s no evidence of his ever having set foot in Pompeii. Are you sure?’ she asked, her hands trembling with excitement.

  ‘Pretty sure, but we’re going to need your help,’ said Moretti. ‘How quickly can you get here?’

  ‘Well, I’ll have to check with the Dean but tell me what you’ve got and I’ll call him.’

  ‘What we’ve got is the ground floor and cellar of a villa, about three hundred metres south of the main site, just off the Via Tenente Ravallese. They’re redeveloping some flats and the guys putting in the foundations hit archaeology.’

  ‘Hardly surprising.’

  ‘No, and we thought it was going to be a routine conservation job too. But then we found a lintel with “T. Fl. Ios fecit.” on it.’

  ‘Come on, Francesco, don’t tease. That’s not conclusive, you know as well as I do. What else have you got?’

  She heard him laughing down the line at her impatience. ‘Are you sitting down, Flora?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I’m in my office. Come on, this isn’t fair,’ she laughed. ‘What’ve you got? Tell me.’

  He paused for effect. ‘A largely intact codex on parchment of The Wars of the Jews and plenty of fragments from The Antiquities of the Jews: we may even have enough to put together a full copy, we’re keeping our fingers crossed.’ A piercing squeal of excitement forced him to hold the phone away from his ear.

  Flora could barely contain herself. ‘But that means –’

  ‘Yes,’ continued Moretti, ‘They predate the Martial codex by at least twenty years, maybe more, because although most of them are in Greek, some are written in Aramaic.’ Once again, he moved the phone away a few inches. It was a wise precaution.

  ‘But that’s unbelievable,’ said Flora, unable to control her excitement. ‘Has anyone made a start on translating them? Any textual validation?’

  ‘Yes. I was waiting for the results before I called you. They’ve just come in. Donald Sumter got here three weeks ago and he’s positive about the date – he says they were written within ten years of the eruption – but he’s still hedging his bets on the authorship.’ The line went quiet. ‘Flora, are you still there?’

  ‘Yes. I’m here,’ she said, all the enthusiasm gone from her voice. Donald Sumter, professor of ancient history at William Sunday University, Alabama: world authority on ancient Aramaic and Coptic, Bible scholar, TV evangelist and full-time pain in the neck: that’s all I bloody need, she thought. ‘Nothing like Donald to take the shine off things, is there?’

  ‘Look, I know you two don’t get on –’

  ‘Don’t get on?’ said Flora. ‘The man’s a bigot, a misogynist and a religious maniac. Why on earth did you use him of all people?’

  ‘Because he was available at short notice, he self-funds and he’s good.’

  ‘Does he know I’m coming?’ she heard Moretti’s voice catch and pause. ‘Well? Does he know or not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘Look, Flora, we can talk about that once you’re here.’

  Flora sighed. ‘OK, Francesco, it’s your dig, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. Now, come on, this is better than Christmas: tell me what else you’ve found.’

  ‘It’s simple,’ he replied. ‘As well as a domestic occupation layer we’ve got a scriptorium. Nearly everything in it looks like original texts by Josephus: some in Aramaic, others in Greek and a big heap of letters in Latin, but those are on papyrus and in a pretty poor state so the conservators are nervous about letting us near them yet.’

  ‘That’s brilliant,’ she said, all thoughts of the odious Sumter banished from her mind. The questions tumbled out. ‘What about the other finds, the codices, what’s the state of conservation like?’

  ‘Much of it’s in poor condition but some of the parchments are fabulously preserved – almost up to Egyptian standards. The roof of the building stayed in one piece when it came down. It obviously gave way early on during the eruption and there was a good thick layer of dry, compacted pumice and ash around everything. The pyroclastic surge doesn’t seem to have had much effect on the finds: too much insulation and too little oxygen at a guess, and the concretion layer has done an excellent job of keeping the humidity constant.’

  ‘Francesco, I’ll be there,’ she said. ‘Even if I have to pay my own way, I’ll come. Let me call the Dean.’

  When at last she tracked him down, the Dean of the faculty agreed to the trip at once such was the importance of finding new work by one of the few known eye-witnesses to the tumultuous history of first century Galilee and Judea.

  She phoned around her friends to let them know she wouldn’t be coming out that evening. But despite her excitement over the coming trip to Italy, she couldn’t help having slightly mixed feelings on what she would be missing. One of her old girlfriends from undergraduate days, who, after a long period of singledom, punctuated only by a succession of unsuitable men, had finally found what promised to be “the one” and so Flora and the rest of the gang were going along to give him the once-over. Herself recently single, at least she could savour the vicarious enjoyment of seeing a dear friend happily paired off. But instead, she was packing for at least two weeks in Italy, jumping up and down on her suitcase, trying to get the lid down on a several “just in case” items she knew she’d never need but would feel lost without.

  Next, she phoned her parents and then set off in search of the cat which was sunning himself in the small courtyard garden at the back of her two-up, two-down Victorian cottage just off the Iffley Road. It was her little refuge against the world: safe behind its shiny blue front door, she felt nothing unpleasant could ever reach her, and to leave it, even for something that promised to be the highlight of her professional year, was still a wrench.

  She bundled the protesting cat into his carrying box and put it into the back of her elderly Toyota before heading out of town towards her parents’ house which stood at the head of a wooded valley just outside the Oxfordshire village of Shipton-under-Wychwood. Despite her good intentions to return to Oxford straight away and spend the evening finishing off all the loose odds and ends of work, the prospect of cold poached salmon with her mother’s home-made mayonnaise for supper was just too tempting. She put up a brave fight, but then when her father brought her one of his eye-wateringly strong gin-and-tonics for “sundowners” she realised that resistance was futile and she’d be spending the night in her old bed.

  The main course was nearing its end when Flora’s father got up from the table. ‘I don’t know what it is about Chablis, but one bottle between three is never enough.’ Her mother pretended to disapprove but did nothing to prevent him reappearing with the slim green bottle, its sides dripping with condensation.

  ‘So what’s the hurry?’ her mother asked as the cork popped open. ‘You said you had to go to Pompeii, but why?’

  Flora took a sip of the cool, golden-green wine. ‘Well, I still can’t bring myself to believe it, but Francesco Moretti – I’ve told you about him before haven’t I –?’

  ‘I think so, dear,’ said her mother absent-mindedly.

  ‘Anyway, Francesco’s people have uncovered a villa that looks as though it belonged to Josephus.’

  ‘Is that good?’ her father asked.

  ‘Good? It’s better than that. Josephus is one of the only reliable – well reliable-ish – eye-witnesses to what happened in Israel during the second half of the first century. He was a Jewish priest who was very pally with Nero at one stage but then ended up as a rebel commander during the war against Rome in AD 66.�
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  ‘So what did they do? Feed him to the lions?’

  ‘No, that’s the funny thing. They captured him in AD 67 and somehow he talked Vespasian round into believing that he, Vespasian that is, would fulfil a religious prophecy by becoming a great leader and in the end they let him go.’

  Her father shook his head in disbelief. ‘Amazing what people will believe. Nothing changes, does it?’

  ‘It gets better,’ said Flora. ‘A few years later he went to Rome and became a protégé of the Flavians – that’s Vespasian, Titus and Domitian – and he didn’t do badly out of it financially either. And if Francesco’s right, at some stage he was given a house at Pompeii. Up till today there’s no record of his ever going there. What we do know, or thought we knew, is that he did most of his writing in Rome for a Roman audience, trying to spin the history of the Jews to make them seem a more significant civilization.’

  ‘He seems to have had a happy knack of changing sides when it suited him,’ her father said. ‘He’d have made a good spin-doctor.’

  ‘Let’s put it this way,’ said Flora. ‘History hasn’t been very kind to him and he doesn’t get a good press. But to answer your question, mum, the reason they’ve asked me to go is that they’ve found what look like original writings by him. Isn’t that wonderful?’

  Her mother’s eyebrows rose. ‘Well I hope it keeps fine for them, but if these bits of paper –’

  ‘Papyrus and parchment actually, mum.’

  ‘Well whatever they are, if they’ve been in the ground since Vesuvius erupted, why the rush?’

  The logic was inescapable and Flora smiled. Good old mum, she thought, sensible to the last: good job one of us is. ‘Well it’s a rush for us. It may not sound much, but for me it’s a bit like finding the Holy Grail. You see, not only is it some of the earliest ever surviving writing on parchment – it has to be AD 79 or before because that’s when Pompeii was buried – but it throws the chronology of Josephus’ writing up in the air. Plus there are some unidentified works which I’m hoping might give us some clues about The Seven Stars.’