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Nelson DeMille

The Quest

To My Three Creative Geniuses — Lauren, Alex, & James

Author’s Note

An earlier version of this book was published almost forty years ago, and when I wrote The Quest, the historical events that take place in this book — the Ethiopian revolution and civil war — were recent history. The old emperor, Haile Selassie, known as the Lion of Judah, had been deposed and died in captivity, and Ethiopia was plunged in chaos.

As a history and political science major in college, and as a news junkie all my life, Ethiopia interested me as an ancient isolated, almost biblical civilization that was being dragged bloodily into the twentieth century. Also, according to family history, some of my Italian forebearers had fought with the Italian Army when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1895, and again when Mussolini invaded in 1936. Thus, my interest in this country was piqued by that family history, and I thought a novel set against this background of a three-thousand-year-old royal dynasty coming to an end at the hands of Marxist revolutionaries would make for a great epic story in the vein of Doctor Zhivago, which I had recently read. Now, forty years later, I see that this story of war, love, and loss is timeless.

There is always some literary license taken when writing a novel, but the historical events in this story happened — or at least happened according to the news media of the day whose reporting was my main source of information as I was writing The Quest. I did take some license with the terrain and geography for the sake of drama, but the country I described in 1975 was still very much uncharted and dangerous — a perfect setting for an adventure into the heart of darkness.

PART I:

Ethiopia, September 1974

“What is it?

The phantom of a Cup which comes and goes?”

“Nay, monk! What phantom?” answered Perceval.

“The Cup, the Cup itself, from which our Lord

Drank at the last sad supper with his own.

This, from the blessed land of Aromat…

Arimathaean Joseph, journeying brought

To Glastonbury…

And there awhile it bode; and if a man

Could touch or see it, he was heal’d at once,

By faith, of all his ills. But then the times

Grew to such evil that the Holy Cup

Was caught away to Heaven and disappear’d. ”

— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Holy Grail”

Chapter 1

The elderly Italian priest crouched in the corner of his cell and covered himself with his straw pallet. Outside, screaming artillery shells exploded into the soft African earth, and shrapnel splattered off the stone walls of his prison. Now and then, a shell air-burst overhead and hot metal shards pierced the corrugated metal roof.

The old priest curled into a tighter ball and drew the pitifully thin pallet closer. The shelling stopped abruptly. The old man relaxed. He called out to his jailers, in Italian, “Why are they bombing us? Who is doing this thing?”

But he received no answer. The older Ethiopians, the ones who spoke Italian, had gradually disappeared over the years, and he heard less and less of his native tongue through the stone walls.

In fact, he realized he hadn’t heard a word of it in almost five years. He shouted in snatches of Amharic, then Tigregna. “What is it? What is happening?” But there was no answer. They never answered him. To them, he was more dead than the ripening bodies that lay in the courtyard. When you ask questions for forty years and no one answers, it can only mean that you are dead. But he knew they dared not answer. One had answered, once, when he first entered his cell. Was it forty years now? Perhaps it was less. The years were hard to follow. He could not even remember the man who had answered, except for the skull. His jailers had given him the skull of the one who had answered him. The skull was his cup. He remembered the man and his kindness each time he drank. And the jailers remembered when they filled his cup; they remembered not to speak to him. But he asked anyway. He called out again. “Why is there war? Will you release me?”