Elisha's Bones - Don Hoesel [66]
She’s enjoying this and, once again, her amusement comes at my expense. I’ll be the first to admit that my knowledge of saintly lore is thin. I shrug my shoulders in surrender.
“There’s even a church named after him,” she says. When she takes my hand to lead me out of the tunnel, I’m beyond exasperated. The glint I see in her eye tells me that she’s well aware of this, even as it tells me there’s not a thing I can do about it.
If it had been any more obvious, the flame from the dragon’s mouth would have singed my hair. Espy and I are standing in the nave of Bete Giyorgis, the Church of St. George. It’s the newest of the churches, and the most finely executed. Looking down on it from above, one can see the church was fashioned in the shape of a Greek cross. Its interior is less ornate than those of its older cousins, but the structure itself possesses a stateliness absent from the others.
Espy has filled me in on the particulars, and what she has told me does not jog anything in my memory. I’m reasonably certain that my knowledge of the lives and times of Christian saints is so sparse that I have never heard the story of how St. George killed the dragon. Espy, on the other hand, knows all the details, down to the name of the lance—Ascalon—that George used to slay the beast. She learned her catechism as a child and it has come back to serve us well.
There are more people around than were here when we began, but Espy and I still have a measure of privacy. Few visitors linger for more than a minute or two; there are so many churches to see before the flies become unbearable. The church stands as a testament to the saint, for his image is pervasive in the minimalist decoration.
We are still faced with the question of where to start but, buoyed by Espy’s revelation, we have our investigative second wind. What adds to my enjoyment is that Brown, Sarah, and Miles are on the wrong side of the compound. What I try to avoid considering is the possibility that Esperanza is wrong and that the other team is working with hard evidence rather than conjecture. My thoughts go, again, to Miles Lincoln. How does his specialty fit here?
St. George’s has its share of artwork—which is the province of Miles—including a lovely relief over the doorway, and some carvings. What I’m most drawn to, however, are the murals that bring color and character to the walls. There are several, of varying sizes and subject matters, though most of them feature St. George in one fashion or another. There is one, in a prominent spot on the wall, that stands out from the others; I noticed it when I walked in, and I stare at it for a full minute, trying to convince myself that it can’t be as obvious as this. It’s a representation of the saint slaying the dragon, jabbing his lance into the neck of a beast that does not seem as formidable as the dragons I remember from childhood stories. This animal is no larger than the horse on which George sits.
“Esperanza.”
She follows my line of sight and gives a perfunctory nod once her eyes play over the mural. Both of us move closer to the painting, neither of us sure what we’re looking for.
It’s two minutes, perhaps three, before I come to realize that we’re out of our depth. I could attempt an interpretation of the symbolism, but I don’t have the background to make that worthwhile. There are things in the mural that could be representative of ideas or events. The man in the white robes in the bottom left corner, right next to the skull, could be a reference to the resurrection story in Second Kings. An image in one of the left panels appears to show someone secreting something. It’s subjective, unless you know what you’re looking at, and how the symbols were understood when painted. Processual symbolic analysis is not among my areas of expertise.
“I guess this is why Brown needs Miles,” I say.
No response from Espy. When I look at her, it is to see that she’s focused on the mural. Her eyes are not moving.
“What’s that?” she asks after a time.
Without