The Sword, the Book, and the Bone

By Greg Jones

This tale of adventure begins in the Middle East in 1920 and ends in 1990 in a mountain top monastery in Soviet Armenia. Tripp Shepard is grandson of a Middle Eastern scholar and former O.S.S. agent who leaves him three antiquities of enormous historical and spiritual importance. Among the three is a book telling the provenance of the sword and its role in history from the time of Caesar to the present. Among the episodes described is the sword's brief tenure in the hands of Ambrosius Aurelianus, the real King Arthur of fifth century Britain. Tripp must discover and ultimately deliver these treasures to their rightful home, a monastery in the mountains of Soviet Armenia in the tumultous last days of the Soviet Union.

Themes of freedom, humility and courage provide the philosophical and spiritual message of this short, exciting and intellectually vast debut novel from scholar priest Greg Jones.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greg Jones
• Release date: Jul 25, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466058460

Greg Jones

Greg Jones is an Episcopal priest in Raleigh, North Carolina. His scholarly work includes the book Beyond Da Vinci (Seabury Books, 2004), On the Priesthood (Anglican Theological Review), and a number of articles and essays. He plays bass in the indie-rock band Balsa Gliders, whose fourth studio album is soon to be released. Their third album, Danceable in Victor, is available on iTunes.

Book preview

The Sword, the Book, and the Bone

A Novel

By Greg Jones

Copyright 2011 by Greg Jones

Smashwords Edition

This is a work of fiction and its main characters and storyline are not real. However, great attention was paid to depict accurately all well-known historical events, places and persons.

Chapter 1

The sword that killed my father was his own, and he’d only had it for a day. That’s what my grandfather Shep told me over lunch on my 21st birthday, and it was a big surprise. It just wasn’t the kind of thing Shep talked about. He was never too personal, too deep. But on that day, the day he himself would die, he shared with me the things that would change my life forever.

I went to the University of North Carolina where he was a distinguished professor because I wanted to know him. I wanted to know his story, and from it, hopefully, to know more about my father’s story, and my story above all. The story I’d been born and raised into. The story I had not yet learned.

So Shep pulled strings to get me admitted, and we broke bread and talked at lunch or dinner at least once a month. Normally they began with a reading from his pocket diary in which he recorded his daily experiences. His tennis scores, local temperature readings and favorite news headlines were recorded at the top of each day’s journal entry. In truth his little diaries were the dullest of all chronicles, but they occasionally seeded interesting if not inspired conversation.

One conversation my sophomore year opened like this: Well, Tripp, let’s just see here. It was 54 degrees yesterday. Nice huh? In December? Your buddies in the northern colleges can eat their hearts out right? Heh, heh. I beat poor pitiful Professor Peterson like a red-headed stepchild, 6-1, 6-0. You know he’s ten years younger than me? Oh, and I’m sure you read about the terrible earthquake in Soviet Armenia? I was there once in ‘57 on an American Council of Learned Societies grant. Fascinating place.

From these table talks I gathered impressive biographical information about Shep, but little personal insight. His resume was a starry sky, glorious to behold, but his private history was a thing unseen. I knew he’d gone to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar after Virginia and Woodberry where he'd been a top athlete. He was a career diplomat before entering academia in the 50s. He was remarried, spoke several languages, authored several obscure books on the Middle East, and had blue eyes, silver hair and a snaggle tooth. He was never famous, but he’d known many famous or important people. He told me he'd known Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and both Kermit Roosevelts, elder and younger. He knew Harry St. John Philby (the Englishman who became a Saudi sheik) and his son Kim Philby (the Englishman who became a Soviet spy.) He shook hands with Josef Stalin in Tehran in 1943 and mixed Churchill a drink.

I knew all this, but little else.

We sometimes met in his house for dinner with his wife. It was a place of mystery for me ever since I was a boy. The house was dignified and stately on the outside, and faded and frumpled inside. Neither he nor his wife were house-proud people, and both spent much of their days working at the University. So it was a house largely kept cold in winter and hot in summer, with lights kept off, and shades often drawn. It had the smell of ancient furniture, old Persian rugs, and too many books. And while the décor was largely typical for upper middle class intellectuals, it challenged expectation by the interpolation of things fierce and foreign within the familiar. A room might be Southernly staid with the usual assortment of inherited and uncomfortable antiques, but here and there would abide an Roman deathmask, a newspaper in Arabic, or a mason jar of something pickled and horrible.

Two items were of particular importance. On the wall above his chair hung a picture of his dad, and our shared namesake, the Rev. W.B. Shepard – handsome, mustachioed and hugging a Middle Eastern boy with large brown eyes. In the frame with the photo was a short paragraph-long New York Times clipping whose headline read: Missionary Men Victims: State Department Hears Shepard and Perry Killed by Turkish Brigands. The paragraph below it read:

CONSTANTINOPLE - Two clergymen, W.B. Shepard and James Perry, YMCA workers in charge of a fifteen-wagon convoy of American relief supplies, at 8 a.m. February 2, 1920, east of Aintab, were set upon by a band of irregulars. The victims were robbed and slain by gunfire and the sword. Two Armenian boys fled the scene, calling upon a nearby French detachment of 300 troops for aid who were repulsed by machine-gun fire, according to French accounts. Bodies were recovered by French soldiers yesterday and will be buried in the American mission in Aintab when the dead men’s families arrive from Beirut. United States High Commissioner Rear Admiral Mark L. Bristol to begin investigations.

Of all the things in Shep's house that had captivated me as a boy on infrequent birthday visits was what he kept hidden in the top drawer of his ancient captain's desk. It was wrapped in oilcloth, bound by purple string and could be seen by special invitation only. It was a sword. And I loved it. From the day I first saw it, on my sixth birthday, the small sword in Shep's desk was a looming figure in my imagination, where I wielded it daily in my thoughts.

But in the several birthday presentations of the sword to me, which were always done in private, Shep never once let me hold it. He would keep his grip firmly on the hilt and only let me touch it a bit, or perhaps wrap my hand around his. Each presentation of the sword was always concluded the same way, with his wiping it down with the oiled cloth and repeating the Latin phrase I called the sword spell.

I asked to hold the sword on my twelfth birthday and Shep agreed. With much anticipation I sat in his study while he removed it from his desk, unwrapped the purple cord, unfolded the cloth and handed it to me with the point facing the sky. In my zeal, I spastically thrust my hand into the foot-long blade and cut myself deeply. The sting was terrible and bloody, but the astonishing thing was that rather than cry out in pain, I uttered the long heard but never understood sword spell.

Nam virtus in infirmitate perficitur? said I, surprised by what had come from my mouth.

Shep smiled wide and said, My power is made perfect in weakness. Well done, Tripp. Well done.

Then in an oddly ritualistic way he solemnly dabbed his thumb in my blood and swabbed a red cross on my forehead as if he were a priest marking me with oil at baptism. I thought this was awesomely weird, and I left the mark on my head all weekend. My dad didn't even ask me what it was.

From that day forward I became a sword-obsessed lad, taking up war games, fantasy fiction, and collegiate fencing, all because of the sword. I forced my mom to take me to Renaissance fairs, and over the years collected a large heap of knives and bladed weapons which I kept in my arsenal of secret weird-boy treasures.

My 21st birthday was on Palm Sunday in 1990. After church Shep took me to lunch at Lenoir Hall, the wretched cafeteria in the heart of campus close to his office and the library, where he handed me a black archival box. Then, with a bit of dramatic throat clearing, he said, The sword that killed my father was his own, and he’d only had it for a day.

In a fluid motion, he took the sword from his bag beneath the table and laid it before me, on top of the black box. It was the first time I'd seen it in many years.

He said, They are not yours, but they are you.

The magic of these words didn’t sink in at first. Astonishment was all there was. I couldn’t believe it. I untied the purple string and gently unwrapped the linen cloth to see the sword. It smelled of clove oil. I put my hand around the hilt for the first time in my life and, seeing my old scar, I ran a careful finger down its wicked edge. I delighted in how small and wieldy the short sword was, more claw than cleaver.

Taking a bite of sweet corn into his mouth, Shep then tapped his discharged spoon on the lid of the box indicating I pay it some mind as well.

Open the box, he said.

Remembering the solemnity with which Shep had always done so, I wrapped the sword back in its cloth, said the phrase, and opened the box, surprised to see a jawbone covered in gold and an ancient book.

I said, Damn.

Shep pursed his lips.

Though a liberal academic, as the son of missionaries Shep didn’t care for profanity or stupidity.

I said, Excuse me. Um, Darn.

The book was incredibly heavy for its size. The stiff parchment pages were hand-written in an exotic foreign script. The jawbone looked like a real lower mandible that had been meticulously covered with beaten gold leaf.

It still had some teeth.

These two items in conjunction with the sword had an immediate and narcotic effect on me, as if I’d been drinking espresso and morphine. I felt like I was falling as the words Shep said began to sink in. When your grandfather hands you a golden jawbone, a mystic text, and the sword that killed his father and says They are not yours, but they are you, trust me, you’ll start feeling strange too.

What are these things? I asked.

He said, Treasures, Tripp. Treasures given to me by a penitent man many years ago. And he told me the story.

Shep was reading in the Bodleian Library at Oxford one afternoon in 1933, when a shadow cast upon the page. A Near Eastern man had appeared, waited a moment, then asked his name. When Shep answered the foreign man raised his hands toward God and said, Al hamdulillah.

Somewhat startled, Shep slid his chair back and stood up. He responded in Arabic, Ma ismikai?

The man said, Umut, which is Turkish for Hope.

Realizing he was not an Arab, Shep asked him where he was from in Turkish, saying Nerelisiniz?

Umut said, Istanbul.

The Turk’s eyes grew teary and Shep grew anxious. Shep, an athlete, began to shift his weight, to prepare for what he feared might happen. As he did, the Turk named Umut raised a worn briefcase and handed it to Shep. Then he fell down on his knees and wept.

Disarmed but shocked, Shep asked the Turk to have a seat. Umut started to ramble on and on. He said he knew the Rev. W.B. Shepard when he was a boy in Aintab. Though a Muslim, Umut had attended school at the missionary compound where my great-grandfather worked.

One day Umut saw an Armenian priest enter W.B.’s office carrying the briefcase. Through a crack in the door, Umut and two of his Armenian playmates watched the Armenian give W.B. the items and tell him his story. The Armenian fled the massacres in 1915. He was a monk whose religious brothers were all slaughtered at their monastery on Lake Van. He’d survived only because he was on solitary retreat at the ancient prayer cell on Arter Island three miles across the lake. The Armenian rescued three sacred objects from the repository under the altar on Arter Island: the sword, book and bone. He’d lived in hiding with them but felt called to entrust them to the American missionaries for safekeeping. W.B. accepted the honor of stewarding the treasures. He then invited the Armenian priest to join him on his relief mission to the hungry on the following morning.

Umut told a friend about what he’d heard the Armenian tell W.B. That boy told his brother, a cutthroat in the employ of the local mutessarif, or governor. The Nationalist Turks gave the mutessarifs wide latitude in those days, tolerating numerous acts of violence and brigandage against Westerners and Armenians.

The next morning the bandit compelled Umut to join him in an ambush of W.B.’s relief caravan. They sought to rob and kill everyone -- the drivers, porters, water boys, and even the clergy. Especially the clergy, they needed to be silenced of course. Umut begged not to go, he loved W. B. Shepard after all, and two of his friends were in the caravan as well. But the bandit promised to murder Umut’s entire family if he did not go.

Early that next morning, as the caravan made its way from Aintab, the bandits opened fire. When the vehicles stopped in the hail of bullets, the attackers drew their long back-curved blades and approached the trucks slowly on horseback. Umut looked for his two playmates, the Armenian boys, but they were nowhere to be seen.

Umut was ordered to look in every truck for the Armenian priest and American missionaries, who had grown broad bushy mustaches and worn local dress. When Umut came upon the truck carrying W. B. Shepard and James Perry, he began to tremble. He looked inside and saw Perry dead, and W.B. Shepard groaning from bullet wounds to his abdomen and legs. Umut told Shep that my great-grandfather smiled at him as he fumbled in his pocket with a bloody hand.

Umut said, "I could tell your father knew I betrayed him. His eyes told me so. My skin burned with the heat of my shame. Your father held a picture of his family that he had in his pocket and he began to weep. I reached for the briefcase and I pulled out the sword. Your father was crying and praying to God, and my shame turned to hatred, anger and fear. I screamed at him to stop. I plunged the blade into his side. I ran away.

When my mother saw the bloody sword and briefcase she just knew. She slapped me and put me out. She said she would not accept me as her son until I fulfilled penance for my crime.

I am Umut. I murdered your father. I beg your forgiveness.

The Turk bowed, blew his nose and walked away. Shep was stunned of course, and yet, he told me, he felt nothing but fury rise up within him. Shep said, My father’s death destroyed mother, ended my childhood, and shattered my faith in God. How could I forgive him? Just because he was sorry?

Shep was an angry young man, he told me, and when Umut stood there weeping before him and groveling for mercy, Shep exploded. He began to go after the Turk through the Bodleian library and out the door into the courtyard below.

But then, Shep said, He was gone forever.

Shep didn’t tell me exactly what that meant.

It was an amazing story and as his blood was my blood his