* * * *
Garance was what her compatriots called un petit bout de femme. Slim and quick and dark, her height only topped five feet when she lied about it. It was a relief, as well as a pleasure, to have Barry Cosgrave as a colleague on this third trip to Bhutan. Barry was six feet three and played rugby whenever he was back in England long enough. Garance was more than happy to let him do the height work.
She made her way to the central temple and craned her neck to admire the wall painting Barry was working on, a fabulously intricate sylvan scene, full of tiny mythical characters and forest animals. At the base of the scaffolding, a group of monks were working under Garance’s supervision, selecting and mixing pigments, learning the art of conservation, so that when the European team left at the end of this final three-month stint, they would be able to carry on the work unaided.
At first, the conservation team had found it hard to get on with the monks, who had lain down strict rules before allowing the foreigners access to the artifacts. In order to preserve their religious integrity, each object touched by the conservators had to be purified, a ritual that the team initially found exasperating. But soon their perspective shifted, and they began to see the paintings not just as works of art, but as part of a scheme of things. The prayers, chanting, the incense and the calm, ordered gestures of the monks were as vital as the paintings themselves. Now that the work of restoration was almost over, the conservators would have been horrified at the idea of removing the paintings from the temple to display them in an exhibition in some great western city. They had been created for this temple, in a citadel within a medieval fortress, on an isolated hilltop in a forgotten mountain kingdom. Only here were the paintings and colored statues, gemstone-brilliant, truly alive.
Garance smiled fondly at the bent, shaven heads as the monks worked in silent, intense concentration, as meticulous as any Western-trained professionals. She called up to her colleague, working ten feet above their heads.
“Hi, Barry! Feel like a break yet?”
Barry grinned down from his precarious perch on the rickety scaffolding.
“Teatime already?”
Garance had just opened her mouth to reply when the quake hit. The first tremor was short but violent. The scaffolding collapsed with a shriek of splintered wood and cracking stone as a fissure opened in the floor. Barry fell backward onto the stone flags without a sound, just a look of absolute disbelief on his face. Garance, her feet knocked from under her, hit the ground hard. When the earth stopped shaking and the last of the falling masonry had tumbled into a dusty heap, Garance crawled over to Barry’s inert body. From the strange, disarticulated look of his upper body, she could see that his neck was broken. With trembling fingers, she felt for a pulse. Nothing.
The uncontrollable shivering of shock was beginning to take hold. Two of the monks struggled to their feet then began to disengage the third from the mess of wood and plaster. One of them turned and looked from Barry’s crumpled form to Garance, his eyebrows raised in question. She bit her lip and shook her head. Holding a hand to her head, aware that it hurt but not much caring, she forced her stumbling feet outside. The courtyard was full of dust and broken stone. Monks in their dark red and yellow robes ran about calling to the dazed workers, organizing gangs to clear the rubble.
The outer walls of the Dzong were shaken but had resisted, except in one place where an ancient fissure had opened and brought down an avalanche of stone, furniture, beams and plaster from three stories. At the bottom of the heap, invisible beneath the tons of debris, was the lab.
Garance just stared at the mess of broken beams and joists, the steaming smoke of plaster dust, the delicately carved door and window frames, splintered and smashed. The sound of sobbing and moaning was all around her, along with the excited cries of the survivors, as suddenly everybody was holding a spade or a shovel. But no sound came from the ruins.
“Helen! Danny!” Garance screamed, pulling at debris to try to force a way through what had been a window. She felt a hand on her arm, but she took no notice. Then the hand pulled her around, forced her to stop injuring herself uselessly. The monk’s robes were torn and dusty, their dark red color soaking up the blood that dripped from a gash that ran the length of his left forearm. He stood tall and straight, his smooth face impassive at first glance, but the dark eyes above the high cheekbones were full of compassion.
“You need gloves,” Tenzin said softly, “and you need a shovel. We will start. You join us when you are ready.”
Garance looked around in confusion. Gloves? Shovels?
“Ask Prakash.”
She nodded, looking out for Prakash, finding him at the center of activity. The elderly monk was supervising rescue operations, not waiting for secondary tremors, just getting on with the job. Garance ran to him, and he pointed to a pile of implements that would serve. She grabbed a hoe then dashed back to the flattened building, her temporary home, that held her work, her friends—almost everything that meant anything to her. Almost. She remembered Carla.
* * * *
The present
In the four years that followed, Garance had thought about Carla every day—every day as the cold intensified and fear dug in deeper. It had been a month before Garance admitted to herself that there would be no help, that the satellite phone would never find a signal, that they were completely cut off. But from what? Modern civilization had always passed the Land of the Thunder Dragon by. Now the mountain kingdom was settling into oblivion.
Prakash had organized the collection of all the food reserves and stored them in the Dzong. They used one of the remaining outbuildings to store huge quantities of firewood and busied themselves repairing and rebuilding, whenever the driving glacial winds and ice storms permitted. The survivors camped in the Dzong. The ancient, solid stone building had resisted the quakes. It would resist the cold and the darkness. The valley was isolated and most of the population was concentrated around the Dzong. When the Abomination had begun, it had been full of administrative workers and peasants with produce brought in from the surrounding region to trade in the local markets. Rich forest sheltered the valley from the worst of the storms and cold, and the animals that found their way there—the small deer, wild pigs, birds, and even strays from the yak herds of the lower valleys—had provided food for a while.
They had eaten only modest quantities of meat to begin with, but as the stocks of rice and dried vegetables diminished, Prakash had shrugged his shoulders and grinned.
“If the Thunder Dragon stops us growing rice, we must make do with dragon food!”
To Garance’s dismay, even after four years, there still seemed to be an inexhaustible stock of chili peppers. At least she only had to suffer the dried version in every dish of cooked food, as there were no more fresh stocks to eat raw as a sort of side salad. After four years, she could still joke about things like chilies and yak cheese. After four years there were still enough reminders of the days before the Abomination to make joking possible. Laughter meant hope, even after four years.
At the beginning of the fifth year, Tenzin came back from a hunting expedition with a sack. He emptied the contents before Prakash in the communal room of the Dzong. A compact group of monkeys was huddled together, five adults and three babies, their arms around one another, the babies in the center. All were frozen to death. Another monk, Ahmet, produced a clutch of birds, their feathers stiff with frost.
Prakash shook his head.
“Too cold.” he muttered, looking at the frightened faces huddled about the hearth. “Too cold, too long.” He threw another log into the flames.
A week later, Tenzin and Ungyen went on their periodic trip to the end of the valley, to see if there was any change in the low, threatening cloud and the creeping darkness that grew closer each time they inspected it, engulfing the forest and the mountains beyond the valley. After two days, Tenzin returned, alone, his robes torn and singed and stained with blood, his eyes turned inward, full of
horrors. He went straight to Prakash and stayed alone with the old man for half a day. When Garance saw him again the deathly pallor had left his face, but he refused to speak about what he had seen, about what had happened to Ungyen.
Prakash called a meeting in the central temple, beneath the paintings that alone had kept their brilliant colors in the new world of darkness and obscurity.
“From now on,” the old man said, “no one will leave the sanctuary of the Dzong. The evil spirits that took our brother Ungyen are all about us. Tonight, we will say prayers in his memory to help his spirit find its way in the darkness and to keep our holy places free of the taint of evil.”
From the beginning of the fifth year, there was little joking, little hope. Just survival.
* * * *
The room was full of frightened people. They huddled together in silence, even the small children, waiting. The cold was deepening every minute, and Garance was certain that whatever had submerged the surrounding mountains—and the whole world for all she could tell—would soon be upon them. The Dzong was the most solid building in the area. Set on a hilltop and with massive stone walls and narrow windows, it was the most easily defensible. But what was pouring toward it through the forest would not be kept out by mere stone. Garance knew. She found herself looking at the demons in the wall paintings and seeing them in a new light. She shivered. What was coming was worse.
The whispered rumors were growing more audible. The talk about the Thunder Dragon was lighthearted and intended to lift morale. The Thunder Dragon could not be responsible for destroying his country. The rumors though were dark and disjointed. Nobody knew where they started, but they were spread by the last refugees to seek shelter in the Dzong, gray-faced men and women that none of the local villagers recognized. They told of waves of madmen, sightless and pestilential, of hordes of monstrous dogs with teeth like three tigers, and worst of all, of a creeping tide of blackness, a formless mass of pure evil that devoured all in its path. The gray-faced refugees spoke of someone called Eblis—a foreigner, a monster—who could stop the wave of evil if he was caught and sacrificed. They searched the terrified faces huddled in the Dzong, looking for a sign, looking for Eblis, and none of the villagers could hold the gaze of their red-rimmed eyes.
When Garance caught the gray-faced refugees staring at her with unsettling insistence and heard the muttered name, Eblis, she knew that evil was inside the fortress. As if he sensed her fear, Tenzin never left her side and carried his walking staff at all times, even though they never ventured beyond the imposing fortress doors.
It was about this time that Garance began to dream. It was always the same dream, and at first she regarded it as a sort of nightmare. But night after night, as she floated high in the sharp, almost starless air, she realized that the contractions in the pit of her stomach were not from fear but exhilaration.
Looking down, she saw the dark spine of the Himalayas and let her gaze follow its crooked way west. If she followed it far enough, then farther still, she would be almost in Europe. Carla!
Often she let the star path carry her steps where she yearned to go.
She raced across the snow-clad peaks, right to the end, to where they fell away into the plains of Persia. As far as the eye could see was darkness—thick, glue-like darkness that rose and fell like a great sea. Far away, in the midst of the sucking, slimy darkness, she caught a glimpse of a flat expanse, untouched by the slime, and she knew it to be the Caspian Sea. She soared onward. Asia Minor, the Black Sea—almost home! And she would have flown on, ever farther until she was caught by the morning rising at her back, had not an urgent voice called inside her head. Then she remembered the warmth of the Dzong, the warmth and the tenderness that lived there, and she felt it reach out to draw her back into warm comforting arms that all the slime in the world could not chill. And in her dreams, she felt her eyes filling with tears.
“Carla,” she shouted in the silence of the space between the stars, and one night, she was certain she heard the echo of a voice.
* * * *
The fire spluttered, and faces turned anxiously toward the hearth. The stink of rotten meat flooded into the room, and mad voices echoed from the chimney, howling and snarling over the crackling of the fire. A monk threw another oak log into the flames, but the darkness that poured down the chimney like black slime threatened to smother it. There was a sharp cry of fear and more hands grabbed at dry sticks and small logs, stoking the flames, driving back the darkness and sending stinking gouts of black steam hissing into the room. Mothers pulled their children closer, but still no one spoke.
The outer wall of the Dzong rose like a sheer cliff from the hilltop. The only windows were pierced in the red-painted band of the highest section that ran around the building like a lace frieze. They were unattainable from the hill slopes far below. At the center of the edifice, the temple-citadel was blind, windowless, impregnable. But Garance watched the temple doors, solid oak and barred with iron like the main gates, and she wondered how long they would hold. From outside came the sound of animal feet, monkeys that climbed the outer walls, their paws pattering on the flags as they flew past, chattering in terror. Then the howling began, and an ominous booming. Something was beating at the doors of the Dzong.
“Thunder Dragon!”
Voices murmured in consternation. Garance glanced at Tenzin watching, impassive, at her side. His lips moved, but he did not take his eyes from the heavily barricaded temple door.
“The Thunder Dragon is dead. This is the end of all things.”
For hours they waited, banking up the fire and listening to the frenzied howling and the mad beating on the doors. They heard the scratching and scrabbling as long dog-claws tried frantically to reach barricaded windows far out of their reach. From the courtyard beyond came the piercing screams of canine terror and the savage sounds of barbaric feasting. The group of gray-faced refugees huddled closer together. Their ears too were straining, their eyes staring at the door, but in their faces was no sign of fear. It was expectation that glittered in their eyes, and their mouths hung open in silent jubilation. Garance felt for Tenzin’s hand and wrapped herself in his warmth to drive out the chill that had crept into her bones.
At last, the night was still, except for the thunder of another ice storm, and the watchers fell into an exhausted sleep. Garance watched Tenzin closely, gazed at his features as she would an antique work of art, as she had never looked at it before. She studied the monk’s smooth, calm features as if memorizing them, as if she knew she may never wake again to find his watchful face looking at her. Tenzin smiled.
“Sleep now. Who knows? Perhaps there will be a tomorrow after all.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Waiting
“And you’re sure you can’t hear Tancred?” Yvain’s voice was troubled.
“No, I can’t bloody hear him!” Jack roared. “The eejit mutters like an altar boy answering the Pope at the best of times. But I can hear Earth dying, and it makes me… It makes me want to cry and smash somebody’s face in. Just leave me alone, will you?”
“Yvain?” Jim’s expression was anxious. “Since there’s been no reply—or at least not one any of us has been able to pick out in all the howling and screaming that’s coming over the airwaves—how can we be sure that Tancred got the message? I mean, will he know to meet us tomorrow on Mount Ardar at the World Tree?”
Yvain raised his hands in an eloquent shrug. “Nothing is certain anymore. We just have to hope.”
Jack had taken out his temper on a pile of wooden crates. He kicked the debris into a corner then dusted his hands off on his trousers.
“So, what do we do until then?” he asked, with the beginnings of a grin. “Tide’s out. Anybody fancy going shrimping?”
* * * *
The morning was well advanced, and the clouds were heavy and shot with rain, but the wind had died a little. From where Kat waited with Carla and Tully, she could see where Tancred sat alone in th
e middle of a clearing, perched on a rock. With one hand he stroked its rough, lichen-dappled surface, with the other he rubbed his forehead, as if his head hurt. Around him, poplars trembled in the breeze, their foliage sparse but still green. The grass grew tall around the rock, and there were no signs of the dying sickness in the vegetation. Not yet.
Kat watched him tenderly, knowing how much the burden of responsibility on his shoulders was weighing him down, and she longed to share it with him. She knew that he’d chosen the place in the clearing in the hope that the green heart of the world would help him push back the suffocating blanket dropped by the black slime. He’d told her this was their only chance of getting out a message to Yvain.
Carla and Tully still slept. They had not woken from their dreamcatching of the previous night. Carla tossed and threshed about, muttering half-articulated words, while Tully lay pale-faced and still. Kat waited for them to wake, occasionally taking a hand and replacing it beneath the heavy quilt or touching Tully’s neck, checking that she could still find a pulse. She looked to Jeff for the answer to a question.
He shook his head. “I can’t see anything. I can’t follow where they’ve gone.”
There was another question. Kat bit her lip, not wanting to ask it, but she was too afraid not to. She peered through the trees to the clearing. She could see Tancred’s bowed head, how his shoulders sank lower and lower. He alone was responsible now. She expected no help from Yvain.
“Jeff, do you think you could…? I know you oughtn’t. It isn’t something I’d ever ask normally, but can you look ahead, into the future? Not far! Just enough to see that Carla and Tully get back from wherever they’ve gone. Could you?”
Jeff nodded gravely. He would try. Dusty snuggled closer, giving him a bit of canine comfort. Jeff placed a hand on her head and the hound settled her long nose in his lap. Kat watched nervously as Jeff screwed up his eyes. She almost reached out a hand to tell him to stop when the first beads of sweat began to stand out on his brow, despite the cold. Too late. His eyes opened wide, and he turned to her, not seeing. But Kat saw what was in their depths and crushed both hands over her mouth to prevent the scream from escaping.
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