“I can see why the Saudis don’t want his message to spread.”
“It’s sad, really. Tragic. It’s a message that could do a lot of good out there right now.”
Reilly stared at the fresco again. “Okay, but heretic or not, we still have a Muslim-lite line of poetry on a thousand-year-old church wall. Which, like you said, is pretty weird. What does it say anyway?”
“Abdulkerim read it out for us.” She highlighted the Greek writing above the wall painting and translated it aloud, remembering the Byzantinist’s words. “’As for pain, like a hand cut in battle, consider the body a robe you wear. The worried, heroic deeds of a man and a woman are noble to the draper, where the dervishes relish the light breeze of spirit.’”
Reilly shrugged. “’A hand cut in battle.’ There’s your reason. Can’t be that many poems with that line in them.”
“Sure. But Rumi died in 1273. He had to have written it long before Conrad lost his hand.”
Reilly reflected on the lines. “What does it mean anyway?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve got the rest of the poem here, I pulled it up online.” She fished a bunch of printouts from her rucksack and found the right sheet. “Here we go. The poem is called ‘Light Breeze.’ It says, ‘As for pain, like a hand cut in battle, consider the body a robe you wear. The worried, heroic deeds of men and women seem weary and futile to dervishes enjoying the light breeze of spirit …‘ “ She stopped. Her face crumpled up with confusion. “Wait a sec. This is different from what’s on the wall.”
“Read it out again?”
Tess concentrated on the Greek letters, comparing them to what was on her printout. “The mural says the heroic deeds are ‘noble,’ not ‘weary and futile.’ And it’s the deeds of ‘a man and a woman,’ not of ‘men and women,’ plural. The rest of it’s very different too.” She paused for a beat, concentrating on the parallel sentences. “Whoever put that inscription up there must have been trying to tell us something.” Her breathing quickened. “Maybe it’s telling us where the rest of the chests are.”
“The result of Conrad’s ‘worried, heroic deeds’?” Reilly asked.
“Not just Conrad’s. It says the deeds of ‘a man and a woman.’ Could that mean Conrad and some woman?” She frowned, deep in thought. “Was there a woman with him? And if there was, who was she?”
“Hang on, weren’t the Templars monks? Like with vows of chastity and all that?”
“You mean celibacy, and yes, they were celibate. No women allowed in their world.”
“And they did this voluntarily? At a time when there was no ESPN?”
She ignored him and brooded over it for a few seconds, then pulled out a pen from her sack and scribbled down the version from the mural on the sheet of paper, next to the printout of the original.
She compared them again. “Okay. Let’s assume the changes were made for a reason. To point us somewhere. So whoever wrote this changed the deeds from being ‘weary and futile’ to being ‘noble.’ What if that refers to recovering the stash of Nicaea and keeping it safe?”
“Keep going.”
A wave of heightened awareness flooded through her. It was a sensation she loved, the feeling of being in the zone and knowing it. “The deeds aren’t weary and futile, they’re noble. To ‘the draper.’ ‘Where’ the dervishes relish the light breeze of spirit.”
“I’m all ears, Yoda,” Reilly said.
“What if it’s telling us who was looking after them?”
“The ‘draper’?”
“A draper where the dervishes live.”
“Which is …”
“In Konya, of course.”
Reilly shrugged. “I knew that.”
“Shut up. You don’t even know what a dervish is.”
His expression turned mock-sheepish. “It’s not something I’m proud of.”
“A dervish is a member of a Sufi brotherhood, you Neanderthal—a Sufi order. Rumi’s followers are the most famous of them. They’re known as ‘whirling dervishes’ because of the prayer ritual that they do where they whirl around like spinning tops, which they do to reach a kind of trance-like state that lets them focus on the god within them.”
“‘The god within them,’” Reilly noted, serious now. “Sounds kind of gnostic, doesn’t it?”
Tess raised an eyebrow. “True.” She flashed him an impressed look and said, “Maybe not so Neanderthal after all,” then mulled the idea over for a beat. The spiritual message was indeed similar. She parked the thought for the time being and said, “Rumi and his brotherhood were based in Konya. He’s buried there, his tomb is now a big museum.” Her mind was already two steps ahead of her mouth. “Konya. It’s got to be in Konya.”
“Conrad died here. Konya’s—how far is it from here?”
Tess tried to remember what Abdulkerim had said. “A couple of hundred miles west of here.”
“Not a small distance to cover in those days. So how did it get there? Who took it there?”
“Maybe the same person who wrote this,” she said, gesturing at the Greek lettering on the mural. Her mind was still leapfrogging ahead in search of answers. “But Konya was Sufi territory back then. Still is. If Hosius’s stash was taken there, whoever did it must have been close to the Sufis—or been a Sufi himself.”
“Him- or herself,” Reilly corrected her. “Remember, a man and a woman. Could our mystery woman be this Sufi?”
“Could be. Men and women are considered equal in Sufism, and many Sufi saints were mentored by women.” She thought about it for a long second, then said, “We’ve got to go there. We’ve got to go to Konya.”
Reilly gave her a deeply dubious look. “Come on, you don’t really think that—”
“These changes were made for a reason, Sean. And I really think there’s a strong chance it’s telling us that Hosius’s trove was handed over for safekeeping to some Sufi draper in Konya,” she insisted. “That’s where we’ll start.”
“How?”
“Professions are often handed down from generation to generation in this part of the world. We need to find a draper whose ancestor was in one of Rumi’s lodges.”
Reilly seemed far from convinced. “You really think you’re going to find a family of drapers that goes back seven hundred years?”
“I know I’m going to try,” she taunted him. “You got a better idea?”
Chapter 53
KONYA, TURKEY
A few precocious stars were ushering out the setting sun as a taxi dropped Reilly and Tess off in the heart of one of the oldest settlements on the planet.
Every stone in the city was soaked in history. Legend had it that it was the first town to emerge from the great flood, and archaeological evidence showed people living there continuously since Neolithic tribes settled in the area more than ten thousand years ago. St. Paul was said to have preached there three times from as early as A.D. 53, setting the city onto a stellar path that reached its peak when it became the capital of the Seljuk Sultanate in the thirteenth century—the same time that it was home to Rumi and his brotherhood of dervishes. The city had declined precipitously since its glory days under the sultans, but it was still home to the second-most visited attraction in Turkey, with more than two million visitors streaming in every year to pay homage to the great mystic. His mausoleum, the Yesil Turbe—the “Green Tomb”—was the spiritual epicenter of the Sufi faith.
It was also where Tess decided they’d start their search.
She knew it wouldn’t be easy. Sufism was still banned in Turkey. There were no lodges to poke around in, no elders to ask. At least, not out in the open. Sufi spiritual gatherings were only conducted in strict privacy, away from uninvited eyes. The threat of prison sentences still loomed large for potential offenders.