Chapter 5

"I wouldn't know where to start," Juliet sight. "So much happened on that trip. So much changed. Too much, really."

"You told me what happened when you landed," said Nikko. "Dad told me that he had to send you and Cal off to Damascus on your own. He said the journey should have taken a week. How about you start by telling me when things first started to go wrong?"

Seven Months Ago

They had managed to get a lift in a battered old jeep. It had been cross country on possibly the worst suspension Juliet had ever experienced, but it had got them further along the road to Damascus anyway. Now they were standing in what passed for a village square in these parts, their bags on their backs and their eyes darting about for signs of life. The drive had been a long one, skirting round the edge of the border until they were finally within sight of the sea of Tiberias, or Galilee. Juliet wasn't sure of the name of the village - she had been a little preoccupied with staying in the jeep as it bounced along - but Cal had assured her he knew exactly where they were and what direction they were headed in.

"We'll have to walk most of the rest of the way into Syria, though," he had said. "There are huge chunks of land around here with no roads at all, not to mention the massive buffer zone between the ceasefire lines."

"Any ideas how we get across that?" Juliet avoided Cal's eyes. She hadn't looked him directly in the eye for a week now. Not since her fall at the landing site. She wasn't exactly looking forward to spending so much time alone with him.

"There's a couple of possibilities," Cal shrugged. His grasp of the modern local languages was much better than hers and he had managed to maintain a conversation with their driver for most of the last few hours. "We could simply walk straight up to the UN Disengagement Observer Force ceasefire lines, knock on the door, wave our medic badges and hope they'll let us through."

"Somehow I doubt it!" Juliet raised an eyebrow.

"Or," Cal bent down and started drawing a map in the dusty ground, "we walk from here to Mevo Hama, find an acquaintance of our friend who brought us here, drive from there to Boutaiha then trek across one of the corners of the ceasefire lines and on to Jasim, then find some transport to take us from there up to Damascus."

"How far is that?"

"The longest hike is from Boutaiha to Jasim," Cal drew a line between the two points on his dust-map. "It's about 20 kilometres as the crow flies. On the ground, with the topology around here, considerably more. Plus we'll have to try and stay hidden. This hills have eyes, as they say. And around here, sometimes, the eyes have guns."

"We don't have supplies for that kind of trip, Cal."

"We'll pick them up along the way," Cal shrugged, obliterating the dust-map and standing up. He turned to Juliet, who suddenly seemed absorbed in adjusted the strap of her rucksack. "We'll get there, Juliet. We just have to be careful and plan for a long journey."

"Of course, he was right," Juliet told Nikko, leaning against the table and watching the doorway for any signs of approach by Cal or any of the rest of the team. "We did get there and it was a long journey, and if he hadn't stocked up on as much food and water as he did when we got to Mevo Hama, we probably wouldn't have made it. I could barely carry my pack, and his was twice the size nearly, but believe me we were glad of it in the end. I still don't know how we managed to avoid detection crossing that buffer zone, but we did. A few bribes, a secret tunnel or two and then there we were: in Syria, walking across open country towards Jasim. We spent the first night camped in the rubble of a ruined farmhouse about half way. At least, that's what we thought it was. It could have been anything: there was barely a wall left standing. The next morning, we started walking again. We had a few close calls getting past the borders, but nothing really untoward. We were following the line of an old Roman road for most of the time. Not one that had survived and been rebuilt to take modern traffic: that would have been far too risky. This one had become little more than a dust track used by local farmers and villagers. It had passed by a couple of villages, but now the land was empty. Just empty, as far as the eye could see. We followed the track until it petered out, then just kept going in the same direction. We spotted something odd ahead of us: a shape in the ground, like a dark circle. Cal thought it might be an old well, so we headed for it. When we got there, we saw there were two dark circles, each at either end of a depression in the ground. What was really odd was that another depression cut across the first at right angles, about halfway along. We walked the length of it. It was twice as long in one direction as it was in the other. If you were to draw the two depressions, with the circles in place, it would look like a cross. The cross of Christ, actually, with the circles at the points where his hands would have been nailed."

Nikko let out a breath he hadn't realised he had been holding. "So, what? You think there had been a cross there?"

"No, no," Juliet shook her head. "No, it was too big for that. Way too big. I mean we're talking cathedral size here, Nikko. A big, Gothic style cathedral like the ones in Europe. But the great Gothic cathedrals weren't built until over a thousand years after the time of Christ."

"Around about the time of the crusades, though, right?"

Juliet nodded, part of her still pleased when her ex-pupil spotted exactly what she had been hinting at.

"We stopped to investigate, obviously," Juliet continued. "If the Templars or anyone else had built a cathedral on the site, then there should surely be some sort of sign of it further down if not above the topsoil. I took one of the corners of the join of the two depressions. Cal started work on one of the dark circles. We'd been digging half a day when it happened."

"What?" Nikko cut in, enthralled.

"The entire circle Cal was working on caved. I looked up just in time to see him disappear down into the hole. Luckily he'd left his pack with mine in the centre of the two depressions, so I could use both our ropes if I had to and we hadn't lost anything. I lowered a rope down to him and called out. I couldn't see how far he'd fallen and he didn't answer me at first, so I was starting to panic when he finally shouted back. He said he was okay, but he couldn't move, which isn't exactly my definition of okay, but this is Cal we're talking about here. I lowered the packs down first, then myself. I was lucky the rope held: there wasn't much up there for me to tie it on to. I found Cal on top of the rubble that had fallen with him. I'd expected him to be trapped, but no: he just literally couldn't move. Again: not my definition of okay!" Juliet's features hardened angrily. "I checked him over. There were no obvious breaks. He had a bad cut on his head, with a lump forming under it, where he had hit it on landing. It was nowhere near as bad as it should have been though. There was no obvious nerve impairment to his hands and feet: he could feel with them okay, he just couldn't move them. Then I asked him if there was anything else I should know, medically that is. And that's when he decided to drop the next little bombshell on me."

"Why, what was wrong?" Nikko asked, frowning.

"Oh nothing, nothing at all. He had no pain, no dizziness, no nausea. He was absolutely fine apart from the two small facts that he couldn't move a muscle and was totally blind!"

"Cal went blind?" Nikko's voice went up an octave.

"Probably thanks to the bump on his head," Juliet shrugged, "but that's not what he'll claim caused it."

"Why, what does he think?"

Juliet turned and looked directly at Nikko. "He said that, as he fell, he saw a bright light all around him. In the light, he heard a voice. He wouldn't tell me then what the voice said, and he never has since. He said it wasn't my voice, though: it was definitely male. There was nobody else around, Nikko, and I didn't see any bright lights. What's even weirder is how long the blindness lasted."

"Just the blindness?"

"Yes, the paralysis wore off after about half an hour. The blindness took three whole days. To the exact minute!"

"That is a little weird," said Nikko, frowning.

"Tell me about it," Juliet sighed. "It's exactly the same length of time that Saint Paul is reputed to have gone blind for after seeing a bright heavenly light and hearing a voice that nobody else heard, during his famous conversion on the road to..."

"Damascus," Nikko finished when Juliet left the sentence hanging. "You don't think you were in the exact same spot, do you?"

"It sure would give the Templars a reason to build a cathedral over it!" Juliet shrugged.