Rule of God (Book Three of the Dominium Dei Trilogy)

BOOK THREE OF THE DOMINIUM DEI TRILOGY

Wrath of Rome

The Chiron Confession

The 34
^th
Degree

The Promised War

The Atlantis Revelation

The Atlantis Prophecy

Raising Atlantis

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Thomas Greanias

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Soli Deo gloria

A
thanasius 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 the 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.