Chapter 3
Nikolas and Ani headed toward the museum archives. They wound their way through the maze of hallways that connected the various parts of the museum. The archives were in a semi-public section across from the labs, forcing the two to walk through several exhibit halls along the way.
Most days, Ani loved to walk among the classical artwork and artifacts from across early human civilization. To call herself a cultural anthropologist or an archaeologist would be an insult to both. She loved to marry myth to hard evidence and analyse the cultural imprint of both.
Growing up near Boston, a constant theme had been the separation of her Armenian community from their ancestral homeland. During her university years, she began visiting sites in eastern Turkey, trying to piece together fragments of her family’s destroyed history. What she found was a difficult and painful path without many of the answers she sought.
On that path, she found herself continually drawn to the spread of Christianity through the Caucasus, Anatolia, and Greece. She found her Sunday School lessons and high school history books left out a significant part of the story. In her search for the region’s “Hidden Armenians”, she also found a complex history of shadow religions, betrayal, and oddly enough, practicality.
She found that history’s transitional periods, be they religions or empires, were rarely clean breaks. While that was standard fare for the first day of an undergraduate history class, what fascinated her was documenting the games of survival, where old beliefs were folded into new dogmas to keep them alive. She learned to look past official narratives and hunt for the secrets that later cultures left hiding in plain sight.
Eventually, she’d been paired with Nikolas on a research assignment as a doctoral student. His tendency toward practical, evidence-based research paired well with her talent for understanding the ‘feel’ of historical events, making them a dynamic research duo. They’d spent field seasons together ever since attempting to unpack the complexities of myth and culture. One of her famous pastimes was to nitpick the displays of museums that hosted them for research.
On this walk through the museum, Ani was distracted. The pins and needles that had shot up her arm had not abated but had turned into a different sensation—almost as if her veins were filled with champagne. She shook her hand, trying to settle the hum of it. It wasn’t unpleasant, just disconcerting.
As she looked down at her hand, Nikolas startled her. “I must say. I am not sure where to even begin, Ani.” He paused, waiting for her to respond. Ani was never quiet, and yet they’d walked through several exhibition halls, and she had yet to say anything. When she didn’t respond after a beat, he continued, “You’re being exceptionally quiet. Usually, you’re pointing out the historical inaccuracies in the curation by now.”
“I could say the same to you. It’s a little jarring to see you so flustered. It’s not like you.” She smiled at him, glad he hadn’t noticed her rubbing her hand.
“I deal in the measurable, Ani, the documented. Adam is happy as long as he has a shovel and dirt to poke around in, and you—” He gestured towards statues taken from the frieze of the Arch of Galerius for preservation, “You’re happy to let the myths lead the way. I have to reconcile the two. And this?” He shook his head. “A magnet of that power would’ve been mentioned in the historical record. And a magnet that turns on and off? Out of the question. It doesn’t match science or lore.”
“Maybe the lore just hasn’t caught up yet,” Ani said.
“Or the science hasn’t,” Nikolas admitted, continuing to think about the strange artifact and the context in which they’d found it. It was a rare concession. He usually found meaning and evidence where others saw unrelated fragments, but this artifact had left him adrift. For the first time in his life, he felt uneasy about a discovery.
He’d known since childhood that he wanted to be a Classicist. Always at the top of his class, walking around the streets of Thessaloniki, he’d imagined what the city must have looked like throughout its history. By twelve, he was translating inscriptions he found along the streets.
That same year, his uncle was renovating their summer cottage only to find that one of the foundation stones had both Latin and Koine Greek writing on it. Nikolas had presented the findings to his class. While his classmates met the discovery with their usual eyerolls, the principal and a young professor at the local university ensured that the boy wonder was invited to lectures and given access to research.
From there, he was off. University in Athens. Graduate school in Oxford and post-doctoral studies at Harvard, where he’d met Ani and Adam.
Nikolas shook himself free of his spiraling theories on the object. They’d always been able to come to concrete conclusions on old mysteries. He spoke to break the silence again. “The Basilica and the area around it have been studied and pillaged for centuries. At best, we were supposed to get some insight into the older periods of the site. At worst, I’d hoped we’d just validate the instrumentation and methods Sara is so obsessed with.”
“You’re telling me. Every crackpot and treasure hunter this side of the Atlantic has picked it over. The legends about it don’t even match. It’s complex. That’s Europe for you. Layers of civilization atop one another. But this myth about the massacre, all of a sudden, is much more interesting. The events of 390 locally were about Roman imperial might, not clerical authority. It was the brutal massacre and overstepping of power that the church used to flex its authority over the empire.”
“We should start there. Let’s review all accounts of the 390 events and look for any mention of this site. In all honesty, it may just have been overlooked.”
“That doesn’t jibe,” countered Ani. “Why did no one find this thing before us?”
“You make a fair point,” Nikolas responded.
They stepped into the archive wing only to meet the local department chair just inside the door. The friendly old department chair, gray hair askew and glasses in his mouth, quickly shuffled his bundle to meet the pair.
“Menelaos, what a pleasant surprise,” said Ani.
“A surprise to see me in my own museum? I think you’ve spent too much time in the sun, Ani,” he replied.
“Yes, well,” Ani laughed, recovering, “you see, we want to do a bit of research on the site. Sara’s map has yielded a few interesting results. Nikolas and I are here to try and find some older maps if we can.”
“Well, well! Good show,” said the old man, a broad smile coming across his face. “Do tell, I dropped by, and it seems Adam is excavating a small room off the bath complex. What is so interesting there?”
Nikolas opened his mouth, but Ani quickly cut in. “Ah, it looks from Sara’s results that there might be something more underneath the Roman bathhouse and earlier temple foundations. Something older, perhaps.”
“Interesting. Interesting. Well, do keep me informed. Good day,” he said as he walked away from them down the hallway.
Ani quickly pulled Nikolas down the corridor toward the Roman archive room, leaving Menelaos behind.
“What was that?” Nikolas whispered, looking over his shoulder.
“Nikolas, you are a brilliant scholar, but you are a terrible liar and an even worse blabbermouth.”
“Really, Ani, you don’t think I could have a simple conversation and leave out certain facts, as opposed to directly lying to Menelaos?”
“I didn’t lie; I bent the truth,” Ani whispered.
Nikolas adjusted his glasses, looking genuinely pained. “Bending implies a curve, Ani. You bypassed the truth altogether. If the records don’t support ‘something older,’ I’ll have to spend three months writing a retraction just to sleep at night.”
“You’re joking, right?”
“I don’t joke about these things,” he said. Mostly, he thought to himself. He tapped his key card against the electronic lock and opened the door.
Inside were row after row of shelves and sealed drawers. Each shelf contained hundreds of priceless manuscripts and maps.
“You know, Adam would call this a waste of an afternoon,” Nikolas said, carefully opening a drawer. “He’d say if you can’t carbon-date it or hit it with a shovel, it isn’t real.”
Ani smiled, still rubbing her arm. “And you think it’s real?”
“I think Adam misses the soul of the site, and you...” he paused, glancing at her hand, “...you sometimes find too much of it. I’m just here to make sure the ink matches the story. Let’s start with the dispatches. See if there are any. In all honesty, the massacre isn’t something I’ve studied extensively. I’ve always focused on the pre-Christian period. This is your wheelhouse more than mine.”
“Agreed. But I know there are texts from Sozomen or Theodoret. They chronicled church history in the 5th century. I’m not sure how direct their knowledge would have been, though,” responded Ani.
Secondhand accounts from church history didn’t feel quite right to Ani, but she couldn’t put her finger on why. The Roman dispatches tended to be dry but factual. After all, one of the earliest historical records of Jesus of Nazareth had been a mundane local report from Jerusalem, dryly referencing a minor uprising and the execution of a local prophet. Maybe those dispatches would yield similar results?
“Can we check if there are any Roman dispatches? Maybe an official one related to the massacre? You check that. I’ll see if there are any church missives or letters.”
Both researchers went about the long and tedious business of pulling records. The cold, quiet environment of the archives was stark when compared to the street outside and the dig site. Instead of street food and car exhaust, the whole room smelled of aged leather and old vellum.
Nikolas, his hands newly sheathed with nitrile gloves, carefully separated pieces of vellum. Dispatch after dispatch. There were tax records, tax increases, tax compliance, and tax investigations. A lot of taxes. In addition to the tax documents, there were inane reports of troop strength and readiness. These would be expected. Bureaucracy is bureaucracy regardless of era.
“More taxes,” he muttered, his voice sounding oddly loud in the dead air of the room. “If the Romans were as efficient at governing as they were at counting grain, the empire would never have fallen.”
Ani didn’t look up. Two books that had seemed promising didn’t yield anything relevant. Finally, she’d opened a third book whose title practically sucked the breath from her body. It was inconceivable both that she’d never heard of the book and that it somehow sat in front of her at this moment. She hunched over the heavy, wood-bound volume—a 6th-century compendium titled Adversus Haereses Thessalonicensium (Against the Heresies of the Thessalonians). It was a secondary source, written by a Bishop named Dorotheus, who had clearly made it his life’s mission to catalog every “wrong” way to worship.
As she read, tracing her fingers along the words, she could feel the energy. She couldn’t say how, but deep down, each word she read made something click in her brain, as if something told her she was looking in the right place. The tingling in her hand changed as well–a cold sense that slowly crept up her forearm. As it reached her shoulder, a sort of pressure emerged, but she couldn’t discern what. Should she tell Nikolas? What might he say? She decided to read the passage to him instead.
“Nikolas,” she whispered, her finger tracing a line of faded, cramped Greek. “Listen to this. Dorotheus is ranting about a group he calls ‘The Servants of the Lost Way.’ He says they were an abomination, hiding their rites within the public baths near the Kassandreiotic Gate.”
Nikolas paused, a scroll halfway unrolled. “A bathhouse? Our bathhouse? You’re kidding.”
“No, it’s more specific than that,” Ani countered, her eyes widening as she read ahead. “He claims they didn’t just meet there. He calls it a ‘mockery of the holy mysteries’ because they performed their rites in the dark, washing the feet of the unclean.”
Nikolas moved to her side, his gaze locked on the page. “It couldn’t possibly be,” he muttered. “How has no one seen this before? You of all people would have been all over this in post-grad.”
“Trust me, I am as astonished as you that I’ve never heard of it. Look at the date, Nikolas. Look at when he claims their ‘final purification’ occurred.” Ani’s voice dropped, barely a breath. “He doesn’t mention the riot or the charioteer. He says the Goths were sent to the baths to ‘extinguish the light of the Way’ while the city was in chaos. He calls the massacre at the Hippodrome a ‘necessary veil.’”
Nikolas looked at the rows of shelves, then back at the manuscript. The administrative dryness of his tax records suddenly felt sinister. “The seven thousand,” he murmured. “They weren’t the target. They were the noise.” He looked at her, the realization hardening in his eyes.
She flexed her hand and rubbed her arm, which continued to feel icy cold.
“Are you all right?” asked Nikolas.
“Yes... no,” she responded, unsure of how to answer. The cold had moved toward her heart center, and she suddenly found herself filled with... what? Sadness? Despair?
She breathed out again, “Nikolas, I know you deal in black and white, but ever since I hit the artifact, the feeling in my arm hasn’t gone away. It keeps changing. This is out there even for me, but it’s like it awakened my ability to feel things from the text.”
Nikolas looked at her seriously, “Feel what things?”
“It’s like I feel the loss of the sect, but also the creepy evil of the bishop.”
“I deal in evidence, Ani,” he said, his voice dropping low. “And the evidence says that for sixteen hundred years, that room was sealed, keeping these two stories apart from being connected. It’s a lot to take in.”
“I know. It just feels like, I don’t know — more.”
He stepped closer, his shadow stretching long against the page. He reached out as if to touch her arm, but hesitated, his fingers hovering just an inch from her sleeve. Then he pulled back and straightened.
“Tell me of any changes you feel from here on out. And keep it under your hat for now. Maybe share with Adam and Sara if it happens again,” he put his hand on her shoulder and gave her a reassuring look, “We need to get back to the site. I need to see Sara’s new scans. We can’t jump to any conclusions, but we need to tell Adam that this dig just got more technical. We must do everything by the book from here on out. I don’t know how no one ever connected the dots before, but we’re on shaky ground if this isn’t airtight.”
