Rule of God dd-3 Read online

  Rule of God

  ( Dominium Dei - 3 )

  Thomas Greanias

  The thrilling conclusion to the Dominium Dei Trilogy by New York Times bestselling author Thomas Greanias. Athanasius has survived the arena in The Chiron Confession and the assassins of Rome in Wrath of Rome, finding refuge with the Christians in the underground cities of Cappadocia in Asia Minor. Here he uncovers the secret origins of the Dominium Dei conspiracy only to be found out. As all hell breaks loose, Athanasius wrests control of Dominium Dei and brings the fight to Caesar’s doorstep in Rome in this shock-after-shock, kill-or-be-killed finale to the groundbreaking Dominium Dei Trilogy. With the sure hand of a master storyteller, Thomas Greanias casts his consummately-researched world of Rome in a brilliant new light, brings to life eternal characters of passion, and delivers a timeless message of redemption that will shape our vision of reality.

  Thomas Greanias

  Rule of God

  Soli Deo gloria

  I

  Athanasius stumbled down the dark and seemingly endless cave after the young woman, his hands feeling the walls as they narrowed, tripping over jagged rocks as he tried to keep up with her.

  “Where are you?” he muttered and then slipped, tumbling over a ledge and into space until he landed flat on his back, the wind knocked out of him.

  “Samuel!” the woman cried out from afar.

  Samuel? My name is Athanasius.

  His head was lost a haze of confusion. He was Athanasius of Athens, famed playwright in Rome until everything was taken away from him by the imperial conspiracy Dominium Dei. Now he was on the run, hunted across the sea by the assassins of Rome, taking refuge the darkest corner of the empire in Asia Minor, here in the underground cities of Cappadocia.

  Yes, he thought as he began to inhale and exhale again. Samuel Ben-Deker was only a name he was using here. It wasn’t his real name. And yet Gabrielle was the real name of this woman he had just met in the flesh, a woman he once dreamed about back in Rome long before his present tribulations.

  Nothing makes sense anymore. I’ve literally fallen into my nightmares.

  He saw Gabrielle high up on a ledge above him with a torch. There were hundreds of torches now, flickering throughout a great cavern of rocky pillars and bridges, and levels and levels of ledges and caves. This was where the Christians hid themselves and lived like animals. Now he was one of them.

  He gasped, trying to get his breath back as he took in this incredible world beneath the mountains. There were hundreds of workers marching home from the field outside — thousands — carrying their torches, singing hymns and exiting the cavern into still more caves, tunnels and other parts unknown. He had never seen or imagined such a sight in his life.

  “Samuel Ben-Deker,” said the voice of Gabrielle, and he looked up to see her angelic, blood-streaked face looking down at him as she shook her head. “You won’t be long for this world if you don’t watch your step.”

  He followed her wordlessly, trying to make sense of it all. He had followed the trail of Dominium Dei to the Dovilin Vineyards, which among many other things supplied Caesar’s favorite wine. His plan was to poison the wine at the source and thus assassinate Domitian, with hopes of return to Rome to reclaim his life and love Helena. But the bishop of the local church here hated him, which was his first complication upon arrival. Then Dovilin’s daughter-in-law Cota had clearly taken a shine to him — another complication. He thought it couldn’t get worse with the hate-filled eyes of her husband Vibius toward him, but it had — with the appearance of Gabrielle.

  “You’ll want to stick to the marked paths, Samuel,” Gabrielle calmly told him as they crossed a bridge over what appeared to be a bottomless pit to hell on either side of them.

  One wrong step, indeed, he thought, trying not to look down.

  “There are several cities down here that have been used over the centuries to hide people from the wars above,” she told him. “Now we Christians hide from the Romans.”

  Their fear, he thought, was completely unjustified. The Romans wouldn’t send good men down these hellholes simply to go after Christians. For one thing, he could clearly see a vast defense network of traps throughout the many levels as they walked. There were large round stones ready to drop and block doors, and at the entrance of every new tunnel he noticed holes in the ceiling through which defenders on the level above could drop spears. But the biggest deterrent he could see was the first he had succumbed to: the narrow corridors in the tunnel systems and the even narrower bridges and ledges along the walls of the great caverns. Roman fighting strategy was to move in groups, which wasn’t possible here, making them easy to pick off.

  “All you’ve managed to do is carve out elaborate tombs for yourselves,” he told her. “Why do you even go outside to work the fields for food if this is all you have to live for?”

  She stopped before the entrance to a rather mysterious, glowing cavern. “If this life is all we have to live for, then we are indeed to be pitied among men. But the life that we lead, we live for the Lord. Come, I will show you.”

  The glowing cavern was a church sanctuary used for worship. Inside stood several hundred Christians holding flickering candles and singing hymns to Jesus. Bishop Paul conducted the worship from the front, and as Athanasius followed Gabrielle to the back of the deep cavern, he had to concede that perhaps the good bishop did perform some actual work around here. He later found out that it took about a week for the bishop to complete a single communion service for the entire church, rotating nightly among smaller church clusters like this one, grouped by families and local communities.

  The singular thing he noticed about all the faces illuminated by candlelight was how impossibly young all these Christians were. Besides Bishop Paul, Athanasius had to be the oldest person present. One apparently had to be young to be a Christian, because one had to stand on one’s feet for the entire service after a long day’s work.

  Athanasius stood next to a watchful Gabrielle while Bishop Paul read from an epistle of the Apostle Paul’s that Athanasius could not recall from the scrolls in the Chiron trunk aboard the Pegasus.

  “Like a thief in the night the Lord will come when you least expect him, and there shall be a tribulation such as the world has never known nor ever shall. Those in fields must flee to the mountains from whence comes their help, and in darkness wait for the angels to separate the wheat from the chaff. So prepare your oil lamps and stock your grain, for you do not know how long before the earth is scorched and the ground made holy before the bride of Christ, which is the Church, can walk like Lazarus into the light of a new heaven and earth.”

  Some elements of what the bishop said sounded familiar, but it felt like a mish-mash of other epistles from Paul, Peter and John and did not have what Athanasius learned early on in his playwriting days was the “ring of truth” to it. That is, regardless of whether one believed the fiction, one grasped that its internal logic was sound, that it had integrity. This reading did not have integrity for some reason, and it took awhile before he figured out why.

  He leaned over to Gabrielle, who seemed rapt in attention at every word from the bishop like the rest, and whispered in her ear. “Didn’t the Apostle Paul say something to the effect that Christians should reject any supposed letter from him saying that Jesus has come back or when he would come back?”

  Without blinking her eyes and barely moving her lips she nodded. “Bishop Paul is a liar and an apostate, and this scripture he is reading is not of God but the devil.”

  “Well,” he whispered, staring at her as she continued her same pose of rapt attention.

  Once again he was completely flummoxed by this girl. On the one hand, she was the loyal vineyard manager of th
e great Dovilin Vineyards, which he still had trouble comprehending. On the other hand, unlike the Dovilins, she seemed to be cut from the same cloth as the other true believers he had encountered in Tribune Marcus, the Last Apostle John and young Bishop Polycarp. Like oil and water, the two didn’t mix, and yet here she was, an angel in his way, thus far preventing him from reaching his goal in the wine cave and poisoning the amphorae bound for Domitian.

  Now Bishop Paul with great excitement introduced a special missionary from the Lord’s Vineyard.

  “As we all know, God gave the Dovilin family a vision to plant the Lord’s Vineyard in both grape and truth. At the same time, the Lord spoke the same message to many other leaders of the Church in Asia Minor. This message was that if we are to prepare the world for the Lord’s return, we must influence the Seven Hills of Rome. These seven hills are trade, government, the military, architecture, literature, the arts, and the Games. This is our spiritual battlefield, and the Lord’s Vineyard is here to raise up those who would put on their spiritual armor and go out to scale these mountains for Christ. One such warrior from among you has seen the work of the Lord with his own eyes and come to share his testimonial with you.”

  A strapping, self-professed young thespian stepped forward. His name was Narcissus, and he began to talk about all sorts of signs and wonders.

  “Rome is on fire for the Lord!” he told the gathering, apparently unaware of the irony that the last time Rome was truly on fire, Nero blamed the Christians and used them as human torches to light his gardens at night. “You have heard the news of wars and rumors of wars, but you have not heard what is quietly taking place behind the scenes. Senators, generals, even those among Caesar’s household are coming to the Lord! They are asking for our prayers of protection for them as they seek to influence the empire for Christ.”

  There were murmurs and praises.

  Athanasius was all ears now, waiting for names. Surely Narcissus would talk about Flavius Clemens and his widow Domitilla and their boys Vespasian and Domitian. Perhaps he would even mention Athanasius of Athens as a great and secret martyr for Christ.

  “I myself was counted worthy to share my own faith with the greatest thespian of our generation!” Narcissus said. “In a private audience with none other than the comic Latinus I personally shared the Good News, and he accepted!”

  Latinus! Athanasius burst into a loud laugh that drew stares as he quickly coughed and cleared his throat and said, “Amen!”

  Others chimed in as well, but Gabrielle held her stare at him.

  Latinus was certainly on fire as a homosexual, and his hedonism back in Rome had made even Athanasius’s pale by comparison. Athanasius could only imagine which bathhouse this “private audience” took place in. This Narcissus stooge was a fool, and the Lord’s Vineyard a complete sham.

  “The fields are white for harvest!” Narcissus concluded. “And it is my prayer that after this harvest, more will join me as I mount my hill, and those others on other hills. Together we can change the world for Christ!”

  I know a faster way, Athanasius thought to himself, and it’s through the Angel’s Vault.

  The reading of scripture and testimonial over, the service would now end with Communion. Bishop Paul stationed himself at the exit of the cavern with a large goblet of wine. “The blood of Christ,” he said each time a supplicant came forward and took a sip. To his right stood good, strapping Narcissus with a loaf of bread, breaking off pieces and adding, “The body of Christ” with dramatic flair. The supplicants consumed the bread on their way out.

  For many of these poor souls, Athanasius realized, this might be their only meal of the day. Including, it seemed, himself. He was actually impatient for the line to move forward. When he reached Bishop Paul with his large goblet of wine, the bishop looked at him with disdain and almost pulled the cup away from Athanasius’s lips. Athanasius could barely hide his own disdain for the tasteless lora wine. Fortunately, the bread turned out to be substantial enough to satisfy the pang in his stomach as he chewed it slowly on his way out of the church cavern and into the caves.

  “Gabrielle,” he called to her down a long cave where groups of people talked to each other, but not to her. Indeed, as he passed by he heard whispers of “whore,” “Jezebel” and “Babylon” directed at her as she walked away alone into a tunnel.

  “Gabrielle, wait. Where are you going?”

  She stopped and looked at him. “To say my prayers and retire for the night. We have much work in the fields tomorrow.”

  By “we” he felt she actually meant to include him.

  “As Dovilin knows, I’m not a field laborer,” he told her. “But I can help you with the storage and transport of wine if you let me see what you’re doing with the amphorae in the Angel’s Vault.”

  She ignored his remark and asked, “So what did you think of our Communion?”

  Athanasius realized she was looking at his Tear of Joy necklace, which once again had fallen out of his tunic, mostly likely when he bent over to sip from the Communion cup. She wasn’t interested in talking business. The interminable subject of God and doctrine seemed to be his only way to her heart.

  “I didn’t expect the bishop to take the words of Jesus literally about the bread being his body and his blood wine,” he told her. “I would have thought it obvious to the disciples at the Last Supper that Jesus was not the bread he broke for them nor the wine he poured for them. But it’s certainly a great doctrine for the Dovilin brand of Communion wine among the churches of Asia.”

  She looked him in the eye and said, “So near and yet so far you are, Samuel Ben-Deker. Like the Dovilins you would use Jesus to change the world according to your will, not the will of God.”

  “Only because God hasn’t changed a thing,” he told her, and put his hand on her wounded cheek. “How good can God be if he allows such evil to happen to you and to me?”

  She let his hand linger on her face for a moment before lifting it off with her own small but strong hand. “I can see you haven’t forgiven whomever you feel has wronged you, Samuel. But you must. Just as God has forgiven us through Jesus.”

  He caught her glancing again at his Tear of Joy necklace and wondered for a moment if this man Cerberus he was supposed to meet in this literally underground “eighth church” of John’s revelation was in fact a woman. He decided to push the conversation.

  “To forgive is divine, Gabrielle, but I am not. I cannot live here in a hole like you, working for hypocrites like the Dovilins to enrich them while they fleece Jesus’s sheep instead of feeding them and then sleep in soft beds at night without a care in the world. There is no peace in that.”

  “And what do you propose doing, Samuel?”

  “Jesus drove out the moneychangers from the temple. I would follow his example.”

  “Jesus didn’t hurt or kill anybody.”

  Athanasius paused. “Who said anything about killing anybody?”

  She looked at him again with her big, dark eyes, smoldering in both passion and pain. “You look like a man who could kill, that’s all.”

  Her words stopped him cold. Nobody had ever said that about him before, and he wondered if he had indeed changed so much in the weeks that had passed that as much was true and visible to others if not to himself. “I only mean to infer that it will take more than whips to drive the Dovilins from this land.”

  “And for this you need access to the Angel’s Vault?” She looked at him suspiciously.

  “Yes,” he told her flatly. “I cannot comprehend why you defend the Dovilins.”

  “Exposing your hatred is not defending the Dovilins, Samuel. There are plenty of open alcoves in the bunk caves for the seasonal vineyard workers. You look tired, and tomorrow I will start you in the fields. We must soften the soil of our hearts as much as the soil of the vineyard.”

  This I cannot do, he thought as she walked off and was swallowed up yet again into the darkness. Soften his heart when Rome had none? He could see t
he faces of Domitian and Ludlumus and now Dovilin before him. What frightened him was how hard it was to see the face of his beloved Helena in his mind’s eye, only her statue in Corinth, and even that was fading away like the image of his mother and family.

  Soften his heart? If he didn’t hold onto his hatred, he feared he would no longer be able to recall even that.

  Athanasius couldn’t sleep all night, so there were no dreams or even a nightmare to pass the time. Instead he had to lie awake inside a cavern with dozens of strangers, many of whom smelled worse than he did, waiting for the first stirrings of the caves before dawn. He then followed a few officious cave men who seemed to know where they were going toward the surface. Like the angels who rolled away the stone at the tomb of Jesus, they opened what appeared to be the underground city’s major gate, and he hurried outside into the vineyards, taking in the fresh and dewy air in great gulps like a man who barely survived suffocation.

  At last the master Vibius arrived on a fine stallion and dismounted while a slave took the horse to the small winery stable. Then other slaves, including big Brutus from the villa, began to open up shop. Another servant put a spread of fish, cheese and eggs on the table under the olive tree, and Athanasius understood this was meant for the workers to come and help themselves as they reported for work and went out into the fields.

  “You, Ben-Deker,” Vibius said, pointing at him.

  Athanasius froze.

  “You may give the blessing.”

  Athanasius began to breathe quickly. His mind raced to remember the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples. Something about blessing God’s name and daily bread. But it was too long. So he simply bowed his head like the others were doing, trying to come up with something. He slyly glanced up to see Vibius staring angrily at him.

  “Heavenly Father, bless this bread we are about to receive, and your servants the Dovilins for sharing their blessings with us who deserve no good thing. Amen.”