by Simon Toyne
‘I can wash everyone,’ Tariq said, stepping out of line. All eyes turned to him. ‘I was working away from the dam when the surge hit.’ He held out his arms to show his clothes. ‘I do not have so much of the red clay on me. I can clean myself with water from my canteen, then fetch more from the pool to clean the mud off everyone else.’
Kasim’s small black eyes darted between Liv and Tariq as if this might be some kind of trick. ‘Who goes first?’ he asked.
‘Does it matter?’ Liv said, in a voice more breath than substance. She was so exhausted she could barely stand let alone speak. ‘If it makes you feel any better then I will go last.’
‘I will start with the cleanest,’ Tariq suggested, ‘that way I will soon have someone to help me.’
Kasim looked down at himself and nodded his agreement as he realized there were plenty more filthy than he was. Liv looked down at herself painted red from head to foot by the silty water as she had clung to the dam. She looked up at Tariq. ‘Like I said –’ she managed a smile ‘– guess I’ll be going last.’
Liv observed the cleaning process from a distance, huddled in a thin blade of shadow created by one of the larger boulders that littered the land. After the confrontation with Kasim she didn’t want to risk causing any more tension. She watched Tariq gently pouring water over the heads and bodies of the group, like an Old Testament prophet baptizing the faithful in the desert and studied the Starmap with fresh eyes. She had hoped that, now the events predicted in the first line had been revealed, it would shed new light on the rest of the prophecy. But even though symbols like the skull were repeated elsewhere in the text, their meanings seemed to shift depending on the symbols around them. She knew now that it meant poison in the first line but when it appeared again in the last that meaning did not seem to fit. It was like each symbol was a mirror, identical in form but reflecting something entirely different depending on where they were placed.
When the last man was clean and had gone to join the others by the main pool she tucked the paper into her pocket and shuffled stiffly across the dust to the red muddy puddle they had left behind. By now her headache was monumental, hammered hard by dehydration, heat and stress and made worse by the torment of seeing everyone else now gathered at the edges of the water, drinking.
‘You might want to spread the word subtly that they should maybe go easy on the water,’ she said to Tariq as he held out a canteen of water for her. ‘I’m not sure how long it’s going to have to last us. I’d tell them myself but I don’t think I’m exactly Miss Popularity at the moment.’
Tariq looked over at the others. ‘I think they have more respect for you than you know.’
‘Even Kasim?’ Liv poured the water over her face, allowing the last few delicious drops to run into her mouth.
‘He followed you into the desert didn’t he? Don’t worry – I’ll tell them we should ration the water, at least until we know what we’re doing.’ He exchanged a full canteen for the empty one. ‘What are we going to do?’
Liv took another drink of water then let out a long weary breath. ‘Honestly?’ she said. ‘I have no idea.’
‘But you made the water come. You knew the river was going to run red.’
She shook her head. ‘The water came from the earth, not from me.’
‘But you knew it was going to happen. How?’
‘You really want to know?’ Liv pulled the folded sheet of paper from her back pocket, now stained red. ‘This is carved on the Starmap – the rock we laid on the Ghost’s grave.’ She pointed to the first line. ‘See here – a river, an eagle, a skull. These are what made me think the water was about to be poisoned. Except …’ She frowned as again she tried to express it. ‘It was more like I felt it.’
‘Like a premonition?’
‘Something like that, only one that has somehow been captured in these symbols and written down. Not exactly scientific, is it? And please don’t tell the others. The way things are at the moment they might lynch me if they realized I put them through all this because of some ancient warning scratched on a stone.’
Tariq smiled. ‘Our culture is different from yours; we place more importance on the past and are not so fixed on the future. The wisdom of the ancients is revered, and so are those who can interpret it. Many believe our ancestors saw our future more clearly than we see it ourselves. Did you know writing was invented here?’ Liv nodded, remembering her conversations with Gabriel when they had been seeking the Starmap. ‘Our belief is that the ancients invented the written word precisely so they might record these things, so they could speak to us and pass on the divine knowledge they carried. May I see it?’
Liv handed him the facsimile of the Starmap.
Tariq studied the document, his brow furrowed in thought, while Liv poured water over her hands, watching it run red on the ground.
‘This crescent symbol with an arrow next to it,’ he said, pointing to the end of the second line. ‘It is still used by the Bedouin.’
Liv studied the symbol and noticed it was repeated again in the third and fourth lines.
‘It refers to the phase of moon,’ Tariq explained. ‘In the desert we use the moon to measure the passing of time. Each phase is twenty-eight and a half days. That arrow next to it is the Bedu number nine, so together it means “nine moons”.’
Liv did a calculation in her head. ‘Two hundred and fifty-six nights – eight months.’
Tariq pointed to the very last symbol, another crescent enclosed by a circle. ‘That also refers to time. It is the moon inside the sun, representing a day and a night together. It is more generic. It means “days”.’
Liv looked at it in the light of this new information and something clicked in her head.
‘“Days,”’ she repeated, her eyes drawn back to the skull. ‘That makes more sense. Whenever I look at this second skull I get a sense that something is ending, like a death. Death of days – sounds pretty apocalyptic.’
Tariq nodded solemnly. ‘Every culture has its own account of the coming apocalypse. In mine we are taught the Sumerian myth of the god Marduk, who will return one day and destroy the earth. The Sumerians were incredibly advanced in their knowledge and understanding of science and cosmology in particular. Modern scholars believe that Marduk may actually be a planet whose orbit will one day make it crash into the Earth. There are many accounts in the past of near misses. The flood myth for example, present in every culture on earth, is believed by some to have been the result of a heavenly body passing close enough for its gravity to upset the flow of the oceans. Even the Christian nativity, with its bright travelling star has been attributed to Marduk. Sometimes it is represented as a bull with a sun between his horns, just like this is.’ He pointed at the large star on the map, directly between the horns of Taurus.
‘Eight months,’ Liv mused, ‘then Marduk returns to destroy the world. And the first line of this prophecy has already come to pass, so I guess we’re already on the clock.’
Tariq handed the document back to her. ‘I better go tell the others to go easy on the water,’ he said. ‘Otherwise we won’t even make it to eight months: and I would hate to miss the end of the world.’
He bowed slightly then turned and headed away. There was something very comforting about the old-fashioned courtliness of this man. He was like someone from another time. He reminded her of Gabriel a little.
Liv looked back down at the symbols, focusing on one in particular.
Though many of them danced before her eyes, this one remained steady and clear. The sword above the crude horse figure was Gabriel – the warrior, the rider, sword of justice and liberator of the Sacrament. It was the one symbol that gave her hope because the sword also appeared towards the end of the prophecy next to another.
It meant two things to her: first, Gabriel was still alive, he had to be if he was to figure in events that would come to pass eight months from now; and second, before those eight months had run their course he would be r
eunited with the one who was represented by the T: the Sacrament, the Key – her.
34
Gabriel woke to haunted moans echoing off stone walls. He opened his eyes and saw a vaulted ceiling high above him, a host of frozen angels bound to the stone, faces fixed in sorrow, as if in lament for what they saw below.
He twisted his head to the side and saw rows of beds stretching away to the nave of a church. They were filled with the writhing figures of men and women, straining against thick canvas bands that bound them, their skin a riot of boils that burst under the stress of their contortions. Doctors in contamination suits moved between the beds, tending to the worst cases by giving them shots that instantly calmed them. On the far wall he saw images of demons pulling tongues from the damned and devils boiling others in vats of oil and realized where he was. It was the Public Church in the Old Town of Ruin, close to the base of the Citadel. He had made it, but too late. The church was now a howling sick bay full of the infected.
The disease was spreading.
Gabriel gritted his teeth as a wave of fever rolled over him followed by an excruciating urge to scratch violently at his skin, but he was bound to his bed like the others so he could not. He heard footsteps approaching across the stone floor and closed his eyes, quelling the urge to writhe against his bindings and feel the ecstasy of relief from the growing itch. He felt hot, was getting hotter, and sweat tickled down his burning skin making it worse.
The footsteps stopped by his bed and he battled hard just to remain still. He didn’t want to be knocked out with a dose of strong sedative. He needed to think and for that he needed to be conscious, no matter how agonizing it might be.
‘You’ve looked better.’ The voice took him by surprise. He recognized it. ‘Don’t worry,’ the voice came again. ‘I haven’t told anyone who you are. You still have a number of serious outstanding warrants on your head and to be perfectly frank I just can’t face the paperwork.’
‘Arkadian!’ Gabriel opened his eyes to a figure in a complete HazMat suit, one arm in a sling and a familiar face smiling behind a plastic visor.
‘I heard some lunatic had ridden in here on a horse,’ Arkadian’s voice was muffled behind layers of material that kept him isolated from the infected air. ‘How you feeling, better than you look, I hope?’
‘I feel like I’m dying. I probably am dying.’
‘Nonsense. You’re the picture of health compared to some of these people.’ He glanced up and across the huge empty space of the church. ‘Most of them have been driven insane by this thing. They have to be heavily sedated just to stop them howling and weeping and tearing at their own flesh.’
Gabriel shuddered and clenched every muscle as a new prickling blossomed and spread inside him. He could see how easy it would be to give in and be driven mad by this unbearable sensation. ‘How many cases?’ he managed, between gritted teeth.
‘Twenty-eight confirmed so far, eighty-four more being held in quarantine. They’re all here in the Old Town too. So far it’s only adults, children seem to have some kind of immunity and everyone’s hoping to God it stays that way.’
‘How many dead?’
Arkadian hesitated. He watched Gabriel snatching shallow breaths and guessed he was mindful of attracting the attention of the doctors. ‘How many?’ Gabriel repeated once the spasms had eased.
‘Nine.’
‘When was the first?’
‘Two days ago, a waiter working at his aunt’s café on the embankment. She was the next to die.’
Gabriel closed his eyes. He thought back to the two figures with breathing masks he had seen as he approached the Old Town wall; the paper suits and HazMat signs. If they had reacted fast enough to put a quarantine in place and isolate the infected then perhaps it had been contained. Maybe he wasn’t too late.
‘Have all the people infected worked close to the Citadel?’
‘Yes – all except you. You have been the cause of much excitement, and also concern. Concern because you’re the only one with the Lamentation who hasn’t originated inside these walls, excitement because it seems to have affected you differently. Most people are driven incoherent by it and die within forty-eight hours of the main symptoms appearing. But you can still talk. How long have you had it now?’
‘I don’t know. Days.’
‘More than two?’
‘Five, I think.’
Arkadian’s eyes misted a little behind the visor as he imagined five days of this kind of suffering. ‘Why did you come back?’
Gabriel shivered, freezing again despite his burning skin. ‘To protect Liv. I wanted to bring it back where it came from. I wanted to return it to the Citadel.’
‘Well – you have done.’
Gabriel shook his head. ‘Not quite.’
Arkadian looked on until Gabriel had ridden out another spasm. ‘Listen,’ he said, leaning closer. ‘I’m going to have to let the doctors know you’re awake. They need to ask you some questions and run more tests. Right now you’re the best chance they have of finding an antidote to this thing.’
‘OK. Just don’t tell them who I am.’
Arkadian managed a smile. ‘You take me for a fool? You’ll be no good to anyone if I have to throw you in jail.’
‘But I want you to do something for me first. Send a message to the Citadel. Try and persuade them to open their doors and allow the sick inside.’
Arkadian stared down at him as though he had genuinely lost his mind. ‘They’re not going to do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s the Citadel, they don’t let anyone inside.’
‘Things change. This infection started in there, it must be decimating the population of the mountain. They probably need medical help more than anyone. Tell them doctors will come too, along with all the medical equipment they need to study this thing and try and find a cure. It’s airborne. That’s how I got it. I breathed it in when I was there. And all these people here worked on the embankment closest to the mountain, that’s why they got it. So we need to return it to where it started and keep it contained. Just imagine if this thing spread.’
A sudden noise made Arkadian look up. A woman was fitting and bucking so hard against her bed it started to shift and move across the floor. Three suited medics converged, obscuring her from view. One of them struggled to push the bed back into place while the others fought with the woman who was now howling like a banshee. They were trying to sedate her but she was thrashing so hard they couldn’t get the needle in her arm. The disturbance started to spread and others, tied and bound in the surrounding beds, began to rouse from their chemical slumbers. Then, as quickly as it had started, the thrashing stopped. The woman gave one last howl that sounded like the life was being physically torn from her, then was still.
The three medics stood for a moment, staring down at the body. Then one drifted away to calm another patient, and so did another, leaving only one remaining at her bedside, loosening and unwrapping the tight canvas bindings that were no longer needed.
‘Ten,’ Gabriel said.
Arkadian looked down at him and nodded. ‘Who shall I contact in the Citadel?’
Gabriel closed his eyes, exhausted from the sheer effort of keeping it all together. ‘A monk called Brother Athanasius. He helped me get inside the last time. He is the one who will help us again.’ He opened his bloodshot eyes and stared up at Arkadian. ‘Always assuming he’s still alive.’
35
For the second time that day the propellers of the C-130 clawed their way into the cold air and slung the plane up into the low, buffeting clouds.
Inside, strapped in the same painful jump seat as before, Shepherd’s battered body felt every judder and lurch. He consoled himself with the knowledge that the flight to Charleston would be marginally shorter than the inbound journey had been.
He and Franklin were studying the background files on the Reverend Fulton R. Cooper, fruits of Shepherd’s first real test-drive of the la
ptop and its ability to probe deeply and effortlessly into the databases of the FBI. He hadn’t had long but even so the speed and range of information it had managed to spit out had been impressive. Of course it didn’t hurt that Fulton Cooper was a public figure.
Shepherd read through the documents chronologically, starting with Cooper’s humble beginnings in the seventies selling bibles on the road alongside his father after his mother ran out on them. It was his father who had encouraged his son to preach at fairs and small town chapels, realizing that his son had a rare gift to engage a crowd and that business was always brisker whenever he spoke. At fifteen, Cooper had already started preaching on TV, first as a guest of other televangelists then on his own show where his lively blend of infomercial techniques, personal appeals and assertion that modern Christianity was exemplified in the American dream caught on so fast he was nationwide in less than three years and pulling in half a million dollars worth of pledges per show. Then it all came tumbling down.
His wife suddenly left him and appeared on a Primetime Live exposé accusing him of being a habitual drunk and wife beater. The file contained copies of photographs and medical records going back years showing the black eyes and broken fingers Cooper had inflicted on her, as well as screen grabs taken from a security camera, which showed him kicking her repeatedly in the driveway of their house after returning home from a fundraiser. She filed criminal charges, his TV shows were immediately cancelled, and he ended up going to jail for criminal assault.
Cooper staged a press conference the day he was released re-pledging his life to Jesus and begging forgiveness for all the sins he had committed while Satan had taken possession of him. He had spent his time in the wilderness, he claimed, and had put the temptations of the devil behind him now the Lord had revealed a new path for him as a modern crusader. The last few pages of the file showed exactly how this had manifested itself. There were extracts from his sermons against other religions, details of his various media campaigns outlining his opposition to the construction of non-Christian places of worship anywhere in America and his call to pass a law making Christianity the only religion that could be legally taught in American schools. But by far the most powerful component of his new mission was a charitable initiative called ‘Operation Saviour’ which, according to the literature, gave ‘spiritual help and healing for warriors on the frontline of the holy wars’. It raised money to send medical help and psychiatric counsellors to servicemen and women fighting in religiously sensitive war zones such as Afghanistan and the Middle East and helped them get jobs when they returned home again. It had won Cooper some very high-powered admirers. There were pictures of Cooper smiling and waving on stage at various political rallies, standing shoulder to shoulder with senators, congressmen and members of the cabinet from several administrations.