Search: A Novel of Forbidden History by Judith Reeves-Stevens, Garfield Reeves-Stevens

ritual that Florian had never spoken of. A ritual that led to revelation.
    Composing herself, determined to succeed, Jess carefully studied the entrance to the shrine. “First, as a geologist, the stones appear to be limestone. Common for the area, easily obtained. When the shrine—the church—was first built, it would have been pure white. A beacon in a sea of mud and wooden huts. Impressive.”
    “What about the carvings?”
    Jess looked to the left of the main doors, where a robed female figure had been carved from a stone pillar. “Starting with her, that figure has attributes of Mary, mother of Jesus. She holds a radiant cross to her heart, a circle of light above the transept. Around her head, obviously the glow of a halo.”
    “Obviously.”
    “Behind the female’s right shoulder, looking on, a male figure.” Jess assessed the carving for a moment. It was badly weathered, more so than the female figure, which she found odd. The man’s hands and fingers appeared unnaturally long, even for the primitive style of the carvings. They had lost definition, but his thumb and forefinger were touching to form a circle, with the remaining fingers each curved to a different degree. “Not a lot of detail left, but he’s giving a blessing, so it could be Joseph. Maybe even John the Baptist. Definitely a male secondary to Mary.”
    She pointed to the figure’s other shoulder. The weathering wasn’t as bad in that section. “That sun with twelve rays of light coming from the center, no question but that’s the Holy Spirit.”
    “Now tell me what you really see.”
    Jess nodded. She looked past the veil in which her ancestors had wrapped this building: to the world, a Christian church, but to the Family, a shrine to different, older gods.
    “That’s not Mary,” she began, “and that’s our cross, not theirs.”
    The Family knew that the bladed cross the female figure carried owed nothing to Christianity. In the outside world, though, some historians recognized it as a Tuareg cross. The best-known example was
la croix d’Agadès
—the Cross of Agadez—symbol of the ancient trading city in central Niger. There were many variants of that early symbol, and they reflected many other nomadic communities throughout Saharan Africa.
    In modern times, the bladed cross was often seen as a symbol of Islam, though there was some thought that it might have originated as a Christian symbol prior to 700 C.E . Still other historians suspected the cross’s circle-and-diamond motif reached back a thousand years earlier, to the cult of Tanis, goddess of Carthage and wife of Baal.
    Only the Family knew the true history of the bladed cross. Its origins went even further back than the Phoenicians, to the time of the First Gods, whose symbol it truly was. Why that should be so, not even the Family’s scholars knew, but to this day, each member of the Twelve Lines continued to wear the distinctive symbol of their faith, whenever and wherever it would not draw undue attention.
    Florian’s cross . . . she’d wanted me to have it . . .
Jess wrenched her mind away from that dark thought. Her aunt’s body had not been found. Her cross was lost forever.
    “The male figure,” she continued, “his hand—that’s not a divine blessing. It’s our sign, of the Hidden Scroll, the traditions we follow.” Even now, with certain phrases, that sign was used to identify one MacCleirigh cousin to another.
    “And that sun,” Jess added, “is not the sun. It has twelve rays of light, the table of the defenders.”
    She paused, realizing that the familiar symbolism now had meaning for her
personally.
She would be written into the
Traditions
as an individual, for future Family lessons. She wondered if there’d ever be a keepsake and a story from her life to add to the wall of defenders.
    Her gaze shifted to a second pillar to the right of the doorway, to a figure of a robed male. The stones on that entire side, like the small section on