by P. W. Child
Nina was reluctant to answer, using her chewing as a stalling method.
“I just know one thing,” Sam shared, “and that is that Purdue was tortured by the Black Sun and left for dead…and that alone begs for all systems go for a bloodbath.”
After Nina swallowed down her candy she looked at the stars being born one by one over the unknown horizon they were heading into, wondering how many of those were potentially diabolical. “The nursery rhyme makes more sense now, you know? Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. How I wonder what you are.”
“Never thought about it that way, actually, but there is some mystery to it. You’re right. Also, wishing upon a falling star,” he added, looking at the beautiful Nina sucking at her fingertips to savor the chocolate. “It makes you think why a falling star would have the power to make your wishes come true, like a genie.”
“And you know how evil those fuckers really are, right? If you base your desires on the supernatural, you are bound to get your ass kicked, I reckon. You’re not supposed to use the fallen angels, or demons, whatever the hell people sum them up as, to feed your greed. That is why anyone using…” She went quiet. “Sam, is that the rule you and Purdue are applying to Prof. Imru or to Karsten?”
“What rule? There is no rule,” he defended blandly, his eyes fixed on the difficult road in the growing darkness.
“That Karsten’s greed would be his downfall, perhaps, using the Magician and King Solomon’s diamonds to rid the world of him?” she guessed, sounding awfully certain of herself. It was time for Sam to come clean. The feisty historian was no fool, and above that, she was part of their team, so she deserved to know what was going on between Purdue and Sam and let in on what they were hoping to achieve.
Nina napped for about three hours straight. Sam did not complain, even though he was totally knackered and fighting to stay awake on the monotonous road that looked like a crater with bad acne, at best. By eleven o’clock, the stars stood out in pristine glamour against the untainted skies, but Sam was too busy admiring the wetlands flanking the dirt road they were driving toward the lake.
“Nina?” he said, rousing her as gently as possible.
“We th—, we there yet?” she murmured in a daze.
“Almost,” he replied, “but I need you to see something.”
“Sam, I am in no mood for your juvenile sexual advances right now,” she frowned, still croaking like an animated mummy.
“No, I’m serious,” he persisted. “Look. Just have a look out your window and tell me if you see what I see.”
Laboriously she obliged. “I see darkness. It’s the middle of the night.”
“The moon is full, so it is not completely dark. Tell me what you notice about the landscape,” he pressed urgently. Sam sounded confused and upset at the same time, something quite uncharacteristic about him, so Nina knew it had to be important. She looked more keenly, trying to see what he was referring to. It was not until she remembered that Ethiopia was mainly an arid and desert landscape that she realized what he meant.
“We are driving through water?” she asked carefully. Then the full punch of the oddity hit her and she exclaimed, “Sam, why are we driving through water?”
The Jeep’s tires were wet, although the road was not flooded. On both sides of the gravel road, the moon illuminated the creeping shallows that rippled in the mild wind. Since the road was slightly elevated above the surrounding harsh ground, it had not yet been immersed as much as the rest of the vicinity.
“We’re not supposed to be,” Sam replied, shrugging. “As far as I know, this country is known for drought and the landscape is supposed to be bone dry.”
“Wait,” she said, flicking on the roof light to check the map Adjo gave them. “Let me see, where are we now?”
“Just passed Gondar about fifteen minutes ago,” he answered. “We should be close to Addis Zemen now, which is another fifteen minutes or so to Wereta, our destination before we boat on the lake.”
“Sam, this road is about seventeen kilometers away from the lake!” she gasped after measuring the distance between the road and the nearest water body. “There is no way that this could be the lake’s water. Could it?”
“Nope,” Sam agreed. “But what gets me is that, according to Adjo and Purdue’s preliminary research for this two-day scavenge, this region has not had any rain in over two months! So I would like to know, where the hell the lake got the extra water to floor this fucking road.”
“This is,” she shook her head, unable to figure it out, “un…natural.”
“You do know what this means, right?” Sam sighed. “We’ll have to get to the monastery entirely by water.”
Nina did not seem too unhappy about the new developments “I think it’s a good thing. Moving entirely in the water has its perks – it will be less conspicuous than doing the tourist thing.”
“How do you mean?”
“I propose we procure a canoe in Wereta and make a whole trip of it from there,” she suggested. “No changing of transport. No meeting with locals to do so either, see? We get a canoe, slap on some robes and bring the Word to our diamond-hoarding brothers.”
Sam smiled in the pale roof light.
“What?” she asked, equally amused.
“Oh, nothing. I just like your new found criminal integrity, Dr. Gould. We must be wary not to lose you to the Dark Side completely.” He chuckled.
“Oh, fuck off,” she said, smiling. “I’m here to get the job done. Besides, you know how I detest religion. Anyway, what the fuck are these monks harboring diamonds for anyway?”
“Good point,” Sam conceded. “Can’t wait to raid a bunch of humble, gentle people of the last wealth their world has.” As he feared, Nina did not care for his sarcasm and she answered with an even toned, “Aye.”
“By the way, who is going to give us a canoe at one in the morning, Dr. Gould?” Sam asked.
“Nobody, I suppose. We’ll just have to borrow one. It will be a good five hours before they rise to notice that it’s gone. By that time we will be picking off the monks, right?” she ventured.
“Godless,” he smiled, bringing the Jeep down a gear to navigate the tricky potholes obscured by the strange tide of water. “Absolutely godless, you are.”
28
Grave Robbing 101
By the time they reached Wereta, the Jeep was threatening to sink under three feet of water. The road had disappeared a few miles back, but they soldiered on towards the edge of the lake. Cover of night was imperative to their success of sneaking onto Tana Qirkos before too many people frequented their path.
“We’ll have to stop, Nina,” Sam sighed hopelessly. “What worries me is how we’ll get back to the rendezvous point if the Jeep drowns.”
“Worries for another time,” she replied, resting her hand against Sam’s cheek. “For now we must get the job done. Just take it one feat at a time, otherwise we will, excuse the pun, drown in concern and fuck up the mission.”
Sam couldn’t argue with that. She was right, and her suggestion not to get overwhelmed before a solution could present itself made perfect sense. He halted the vehicle at the entrance of the town in the early morning hours. From there they’d need to find a boat of sorts to reach the island as soon as possible. It was a long way to go to even reach the lake banks, let alone paddling to the island.
In town there was chaos. Houses were disappearing under rising water, and most cried ‘witchcraft’ because there’d been no rain to cause the flooding. Sam asked one of the locals sitting on the steps of the town hall where to get a canoe. The man refused to speak to the tourists until Sam whipped out a roll of Ethiopian birr to pay with.
“Power outages struck in the days leading up to the floods, he told me,” Sam told Nina. “To exacerbate things, all the power lines collapsed an hour ago. These people started evacuating in earnest a few hours before, so they knew this was going to get bad.”
“Poor buggers. Sam, we have to stop this. Whethe
r it really is an alchemist with special skills doing all this is still a bit far-fetched, but we should do our best to stop the fucker before the whole world is destroyed,” Nina said. “Just in case he somehow has the ability to employ transmutation to enable natural disasters.”
With compact satchels on their backs, they followed the willing loner a few blocks away to the College of Agriculture, all three wading through the knee-high water. Around them residents were still trudging along, shouting warnings and suggestions to one another as some tried to save their homes while others wished to escape to a higher escarpment. The young man who led Sam and Nina finally stopped short of a large warehouse on the campus grounds and pointed to a workshop.
“There, that is the metal workshop where we do classes for construction and building farming equipment. Maybe you can find one of the tankwa kept by the biologists in the shed, mister. They use it to take samples at the lake.”
“Tan—?” Sam tried to repeat.
“Tankwa,” the young man smiled. “A boat we make of um, pa-p…papyrus? It grows in the lake and we have been making boats from it since our forefathers,” he explained.
“And you? Where are you going through all of this?” Nina asked him.
“I am waiting for my sister and her husband, ma’am,” he replied. “We are all going east on foot to a family farm, hoping to get away from the water.”
“Well, be safe, okay?” Nina said.
“You as well,” the young man said as he started back hastily to the stairs of the town hall where they had found him. “Good luck!”
After an uncomfortable few minutes of gaining entry into the little warehouse, they finally came upon something worth the trouble. Sam pulled Nina long through the water, lighting the way with his flashlight.
“You know, it’s a godsend that it isn’t raining as well,” she whispered.
“I was thinking the same thing. Could you imagine making this trip through water with the dangers of lightning and pouring rain impairing our vision?” he concurred. “There! Up there. It looks like a canoe.”
“Aye, but it is awfully tiny,” she bemoaned the sight. The handcrafted vessel was hardly big enough for Sam alone, let alone the both of them. Finding nothing else remotely useful, the two had to face the inevitable solution.
“You will have to go alone, Nina. We just don’t have the time to fuck about. Daylight will hit in less than four hours and you are light and small. You’ll travel much faster on your own,” Sam explained, dreading sending her off alone to an unknown place.
Outside a few women screamed as a house roof collapsed, spurring Nina on to get the diamonds and put an end to the suffering of innocent people. “I really don’t want to,” she admitted. “The thought terrifies me, but I’ll go. I mean, what could a bunch of peace-loving, celibate monks possibly want with a pale heretic like me?”
“Except burning you at the stake?” Sam said without thinking, in an effort to jest.
A slap to the arm conveyed Nina’s dismay at his thoughtless conjecture before she gestured for him to bring down the canoe. For the next forty-five minutes, they drew it behind them on the water until they found an open area without any buildings or fences to deter her way.
“The moon will light your way, and the fires on the walls of the monastery will mark your target, love. Be careful, alright?” He shoved his Beretta, with a fresh clip, into her hand. “Mind the crocodiles,” Sam said as he gathered her up in his arms, holding her tightly in his embrace. In truth, he was worried sick about her lone effort, but he dared not aggravate her apprehension with the truth.
As Nina covered her petite body in a cloak made of burlap, Sam felt a lump in his throat for the dangers she had to face alone. “I’ll be right here, waiting at the town hall for you.”
She did not look back as she started paddling, nor did she utter a single word. Sam took it as a sign that she was focused upon her task, when in fact she was crying. He could never know how terrified she was of traveling alone to the ancient monastery, having no idea what awaited her there while he was too far away to save her if something happened. Not only did the unknown destination frighten Nina. The thought of what lurked in the elevated waters of the lake – the lake from which the Blue Nile sprang – scared her senseless. Fortunately for her, though, many of the townspeople had the same idea as she did, and she was not alone on the vast stretch of water that had now obscured the true lake. She had no idea where the actual Lake Tana started, but, as Sam had directed, she was only to look for the blaze of fire pots along the walls of the monastery on Tana Qirkos.
It was eerie to be afloat among so many canoe-like boats, hearing people speak around her in tongues she didn’t understand. “I guess this is what it feels like to cross the river Styx,” she told herself in amusement as she paddled with a strong pace to make her way to her destination. “All the voices; all the whispers of many. Males and females and different dialects, all floating in darkness upon black waters at the mercy of the gods.”
The historian looked up at the clear, starry sky. Across her brow her dark hair fluttered in the cordial wind on the water, peeking from under the cowl. “Twinkle, twinkle, Little Star,” she whispered, clutching at the butt of the firearm as the tears rolled gently over her cheek. “Fucking evil is what you are.”
Only the shouts echoing over the water reminded her that she was not bitterly alone, and in the distance she beheld the faint glow of the fires Sam spoke of. A church bell was ringing far away, and it appeared at first to alarm the people in the boats. But then they began to sing. In the beginning it was a myriad of differing melodies and keys, but gradually the people of the Amhara region started singing in unison.
“Is that their national anthem?” Nina wondered out loud, but she dared not ask for fear of betraying her identity. “No, wait. It’s…a hymn.”
Far away, the clang of the somber bell reverberated across the water as more waves were born from seemingly nowhere. She could hear some of the people break their song to exclaim in terror while others sang louder. Nina pinched her eyes shut as the water fluctuated violently, leaving her no doubt that it could be a crocodile or a hippopotamus.
“Oh Jesus!” she yelped as her tankwa careened. Grasping the oar with all her might, Nina rowed faster, hoping that whatever monster was under there would choose another canoe and let her live a few more days. Her heart went wild as she heard people scream somewhere behind her along with the vociferous commotion of splashing waters that ended in wailing sorrow.
Some creature had claimed a boatful of people and Nina was horrified at the notion that in a lake this size, every living thing had siblings. There was bound to be many more onslaughts under the indifferent moon, where the fresh meat ventured out tonight. “And I thought you were joking about the crocodiles, Sam,” she panted in fear. Unknowingly, she imagined the beast to blame to be exactly what it was. “Water demons, all of them,” she wheezed as her chest and arms burned under the effort of rowing through the treacherous water of Lake Tana.
By four o’clock in the morning Nina’s tankwa had carried her to the shores of the island, Tana Qirkos, where the remaining of King Solomon’s diamonds were hidden in the cemetery. She knew the location, but still, Nina had no exact idea where the stones would be kept. In a case? In a bag? In, God forbid, a coffin? As she approached the fortress built in ancient times, the historian was relieved about one bad thing: it appeared that the rising water levels brought her right up to the wall of the monastery and she would have no need to make her way across perilous ground teeming with unknown guards or animals.
By her compass navigation Nina ascertained the location of the wall she was to breach and used her climbing rope to secure her canoe to a protruding buttress. The monks were frantically busy taking in people at the main entrance, as well as relocating their food stores to the higher towers. All the chaos benefitted Nina’s mission. Not only were the monks too busy to pay attention to intruders, but the din of the church bell made
certain that her presence would never be detected by sound. In essence, she did not have to sneak about or be quiet while she made her way to the cemetery.
Rounding the secondary wall, she was delighted to find the graveyard just as Purdue had described it. Unlike the rough map she’d been given containing the section she was supposed to find, the cemetery itself was considerably smaller in scale. In fact, she found it easily on first glance.
This is too easy, she thought, feeling a bit uneasy. Maybe you’re just so used to having to burrow through shit that you can’t appreciate that thing called a lucky break.’
Perhaps her luck would hold long enough, just until the Abbot who saw her breach captured her.
29
The Karma of Bruichladdich
With her latest obsession with fitness and strength training, Nina could not argue with the benefits now that she had to utilize her conditioning to keep her from getting caught. Most of the physical effort was quite comfortably executed as she scaled an interior wall barrier to find her way into the lower section adjacent to the hall. Stealthily, Nina gained access to the narrow trench-like row of graves. It reminded her of a row of macabre train cars in sequence, lying lower then the rest of the graveyard.
What was peculiar was that the third grave from her, the one demarcated on the map, had a remarkably new slab of marble over it, particularly when compared to the obviously worn and dirty covers of all the others in the line. She suspected that it was an indication of access. When she came to it, Nina noticed that the head stone read Ephippas Abizithibod.
“Eureka!” she said to herself, gratified that the find was right where it was supposed to be. Nina was one of the best historians in the world. Although she was mainly an expert on World War II, she also had an affinity for ancient history, apocrypha, and mythology. The two words chiseled in the antiquated granite did not represent the name of some monk or canonized do-gooder.