by Simon Toyne
Arkadian fumbled with the phone, his hands shaking as he went through his old messages, looking for the picture file from over a month ago. Gabriel was alive, and so was Arkadian’s hope. Because if one person could survive then others could. It meant the infection could be beaten and he might just see his Madalina again.
69
Shepherd felt the rise in the road out of Cherokee, heading north towards the Tennessee border. He was riding high on his discovery that Melisa was alive and buzzing on the coffee he had ordered from the Tribal Grounds Coffee Shop in grateful thanks for the wi-fi that had brought him the news. Before leaving he had refined the search, inputting some of the new data and set it searching for recent passport information, visa applications, anything that might point him in the direction of where she was now. He had set it running and driven away, the mission to find Professor Douglas almost an afterthought something to get out of the way so he could carry on with the real business of following the red threads of his lost love.
The weather had eased slightly, though powdery snow continued to fall from the low cloud that clung to the mountains rising ahead of him. There was maybe an hour of daylight left, possibly less. He knew he should have started this search earlier, but he didn’t regret the time he had taken to check the MPD results. Everything was different now, the rock he had been pushing up hill for the last eight years had finally tipped over the summit and started to roll down the other side. He was ready for anything and his eyes in the rear-view mirror glowed and glittered back at him as though he’d just woken from a long, long sleep.
The road was deserted and the thin dusting of snow on the blacktop had few tyre marks in it. Shepherd kept his foot steady on the gas pedal, his eyes scanning the way ahead, trying to match what he was seeing with the faded memory of twenty years ago. Franklin had been right: the snow did make everything look different, but he still had a few solid things to go on.
First, there was only one main road that headed north out of Cherokee towards the Tennessee border – Tsali Boulevard, named after a Cherokee prophet. Second, he remembered the road had run alongside a river for several miles before meandering up into the hills, and he could see the white frozen ribbon of the Oconaluftee River out of his passenger window. Finally, he knew Douglas’s cabin had been high up on the side of a ridge, with elevated views all around that had enabled them to see over all the other ridges and peaks, giving them the whole sky to look at. He had studied the topographical maps and located a section of the highway, close to the Tennessee border, that rose to nearly five thousand feet. It was right in the mountains, miles from the nearest town, and he also remembered how dark it had been at the cabin, well away from any sources of light pollution, making it perfect for stargazing. He felt sure, or as sure as he could be, that Douglas’s cabin was somewhere here in this part of the mountains. All he had to do now was find it.
He’d been driving for about ten miles when the road began to rise more steeply. His eyes flicked to the sat nav display in the central stack of the dashboard. He’d found an option in the menu that displayed the car’s height above sea level and he watched it creep steadily up, ten feet at a time, past three thousand feet and still rising. After another mile the river thinned out to little more than a mountain stream, fringed with ice, a steady babble of black water running through the middle on its way down to the main river. There was a break in the trees up ahead and he slowed as he approached it.
A forest track snaked up and away from the main road, the mud rutted and frozen and clogged with snow. A similar track had led up to Professor Douglas’s cabin. It had been rough, like this one, but this was not it. A quick glance at the Sat-Nav confirmed that they were not high enough.
He carried on climbing, one eye on the altimeter as it continued its steady rise, checking each break in the trees and every track that wound its way up the side of the valley. He was edging close to the four thousand feet mark now and he noticed the temperature gauge on the dashboard was dropping. It was a few points below zero outside and the ground was starting to fall away sharply to his right. He eased his foot off the gas and tried to keep the car in the thin tracks of the few other vehicles that had come this way before him.
He rounded a corner and saw something tucked into a rest stop ahead – a car, the first one he’d seen since branching away from the main river and starting his climb. It was a big old station wagon and he slowed almost to a stop as he drew close to it, but there was no sign of the driver. There was a dusting of snow on it, including the hood, suggesting the engine was cold and it had been there a while. He noticed a baby seat in the back, probably just someone with car trouble who must have called a friend to come pick them up. He put his foot on the gas as gently as he could but the wheels still spun a little before they got a grip on the frozen surface.
The road continued to curve upwards and the car disappeared behind him, swallowed by the treeline. After a couple of hundred metres the altimeter stopped climbing, hovering steady around the 4,600 feet mark as the road started to level off. He had to be close. He glanced up at the strip of sky visible between the trees. It was darkening fast as the day drew to a close. The temperature was now minus five and still falling. If he didn’t find the track soon he might be forced to head back and try again at first light, provided the weather didn’t worsen in the night and shut down the mountain roads all together.
The curve of the road became sharper as it hairpinned back on itself, following the contours of the valley. Trees loomed overhead, laden with heavy snow and throwing deep shadows onto the road, making it hard to see very far ahead. Shepherd flicked the headlamps on full beam, which picked out the falling snow and the shallow shadow of another break in the treeline ahead. He drew closer, touching the brakes and feeling the slippery road through the steering wheel. His heart pounded and his hands gripped tight as he willed it to be the turning he was looking for. He drew level and slumped in his seat as he saw that it was barely a track at all. It ended just a few feet back from the road in a wall of tangled branches.
He checked the altimeter again – still steady at 4,600 – then turned his attention to the road again. With the curve it was impossible to see too far ahead. He couldn’t see any more breaks in the trees, but he could see the road starting to fall away. The altimeter dropped by ten feet, confirming he was beginning to descend. Then something struck him.
He took his foot off the pedal and glanced in the rear-view mirror at the track he had just passed. The road here was too narrow and treacherous to try to turn the car round so he braked as carefully as he could to slow the car to a stop. He put on the handbrake and the hazard warning lights then opened the door and stepped out into the cold, leaving the engine running.
The road was more slippery than he had thought, and he skated across it, holding his arms out for balance, heading back to the break in the trees. The wall of branches seemed bigger up close with dense twigs and dry, dead leaves bulking it out, making it seem impenetrable. But whereas the ground and the trees surrounding it were weighed down with snow, the branches had hardly any on them at all and there were drag marks in the snow either side showing where they had been pulled across the track. There were footprints too, softened a little by the recent snowfall, but footprints nonetheless – just one person by the looks of things, though he couldn’t be sure. They clumped together in groups around the branches then split off and headed up the track, ending at a spot where deep tyre marks chewed up the snow and ice and drew two lines straight up towards the summit of the mountain. And there was something else. Something that carried on the breeze sifting down through the rapidly darkening woods triggering a memory of the last time he had been here. It was wood smoke, coming no doubt from the potbellied stove that warmed the cabin and brewed the coffee.
Shepherd smiled. ‘Hello, Professor,’ he murmured under his breath. ‘Remember me?’
70
Dawn rose fast in the desert, rapidly warming the land and the buildings of th
e compound.
The soldiers were the first to appear, rising with the sun, their bodies conditioned to early starts by military life. They stretched and scratched as they emerged from the main building, their eyes screwed almost shut against the brightening sky then abruptly stopped as they saw the swathed figures hunkered down by the water and filling their canteens.
Williamson instinctively held his hand up to halt his men and a crackle of adrenalin passed through each of them as they saw what had prompted it. They were nomadic goat herders, their faces whitened by desert dust and still partly wrapped in keffiyeh. Williamson glanced over to the guard tower where their weapons were stashed and noticed the gate next to it, rolled all the way back, a team of goats drinking from one of the streams in the desert beyond it.
‘Who the hell are these guys?’ he muttered.
‘They arrived about an hour ago.’ Liv and Tariq appeared behind him, dragging a crate out of the transport hanger. ‘They are welcome here,’ Liv said, ‘just as you are.’
‘How do we know they can be trusted?’
‘I don’t, not fully, any more than I knew you could be trusted. What I do know is they are here because they felt the same pull as you, which means others will undoubtedly be coming here too. We can either choose to meet them with closed gates, suspicion and loaded guns, or welcome them, as we did you.’
Williamson continued to stare at the newcomers. ‘The way I remember it, the gate was closed when we arrived. Seems pretty sensible to me.’
Liv shot Tariq a look. ‘That was not my idea. But letting you in was.’
Williamson tipped his head. ‘Much obliged.’
Others had started to drift out of the compound buildings, roused by the heat and raised voices. Liv had intended to talk to everyone individually, quietly sowing the seeds of her plan rather than risking a public debate that she might well end up losing. Now she had no choice.
‘Tell me, what would you have done if we hadn’t let you in? What if we had kept the gate shut, turned the big guns in the guard tower on you and told you to leave, would you have just turned around and gone away, after travelling so far to find this place?’ Williamson said nothing. ‘Or would you have camped out in the desert, sticking close to one of the rivers so you had plenty of water, maybe far enough to be out of range of the cannons but still close enough to watch us and assess our strengths and weaknesses? Perhaps you would have decided eventually that you could take us. You might even have managed it, stormed this fortress in the middle of the night and taken control. Then what? What would you have done with us – killed us, kept us prisoner, banished us to the desert? And what about all the other people who are on their way here now, answering the same call you did, the same one they did?’ She pointed to the goat herders who had stopped drinking and were now listening too. ‘Would you try and keep them out, keep the gate locked and defend this scrap of desert with your last bullet, or until a stronger force arrived and took it from you so the whole thing could start all over again? Would you do that – for a bunch of buildings and a pool of water?’
Williamson continued to stare at her, though she sensed the challenge in his eyes had slipped a little. She shook her head. ‘This has been the pattern throughout human history: men possessing things, others seeking to take those things away by force. And what good has any of it done? Few things can truly be possessed.’ She pointed to one of the holding pits where the water had broken the banks and flowed freely through the links of the perimeter fence. ‘And some things cannot be contained. And whatever this place is, whatever it represents to the people drawn here, it is not something to be owned or fought over. It is simply something to be shared. A place where people can come together and not be divided or driven apart. A place of safety. A kind of home.’
She moved over to the crate and levered the lid off with her foot to reveal its contents. Williamson and his men gathered round. The nomads by the waterline moved closer too. It was full of tools: crowbars, wire-cutters, shovels still coated in dust from the graves they had recently dug. ‘We should take down the fences,’ Liv said. ‘They have no place here.’
Silence surged back in on the heels of her words but nobody moved. Liv surveyed the line of faces. They were looking at the tools, the fence, each other – but not at her. She was done talking and didn’t know what else she could say.
‘Dust cloud!’
The shout snagged everyone’s attention. All heads turned to the horizon. A new column of dust was rising up in the east, backlit by the sun now clawing its way up into the white sky. The timing could not have been worse. Liv felt sure that no one would want to start dismantling the perimeter fence with more strangers on the way. They would wait and see who it was first, and then the moment would be lost and she would have to try and persuade them all over again.
A movement to her right caught her eye. Williamson had stepped forward and reached down to pick up the lid of the crate. He fitted it back on top, sealing the tools inside in a wordless, symbolic full stop on the whole argument. Then he did a curious thing, he turned towards the nomads and waved them over. They hesitated at first then slowly responded, walking over to join the main group.
Corporal Williamson smiled a greeting then turned to his fellow soldiers. ‘Why don’t y’all go find what other tools they got in the transport bay, maybe see if they got a winch back there, or some kind of a towline we can hook up to the truck.’ He turned to the nomads, smiled again and ambled to one end of the crate. ‘Williamson.’ He patted his chest with the flat of his hand then pointed back at the man. ‘What’s your name? Asmuk?’
‘Yasin,’ the man replied.
Williamson squatted down and grabbed the side handle of the crate. ‘Wanna help me with this, Yasin?’
Tariq translated the request and the goat herder’s face exploded into a smile. He squatted down, grabbed the other handle and heaved the crate up so enthusiastically Williamson was nearly knocked over. ‘Whoah there, tiger,’ he said, lifting his end and steadying himself until they were carrying the burden equally. ‘Why don’t we start at the gate,’ he said, leading the way. ‘See if we can’t get that sucker down before the new guys arrive.’
71
The unaccustomed sound of plastic on plastic buzzed through the Abbot’s private chambers as the phone shivered and shimmied across the keyboard of the open laptop, drawing all eyes to it. Thomas walked across from the huge fireplace, picked it up and opened the message.
‘Well?’ Athanasius appeared too, crowding over the phone to try and see what message it had brought. Gabriel lay on the bed, still strapped down. Thomas angled the phone so they could both see the screen as a photograph of the dark stone appeared on it. Another downloaded, this time showing the reverse side.
‘The Starmap,’ Athanasius whispered, a smile curling the edges of his mouth. The smile faltered. ‘It’s too small,’ he said, moving his head back and forth to try and focus on it.
‘Give me a second,’ Thomas said, ‘I thought this might be a problem.’
He opened an application on the laptop then selected a different stripped wire from the doctored USB cable and touched it to a contact point at the base of the phone. After a few seconds the mouse arrow on the laptop screen turned into a spinning wheel and a command box opened asking if he wanted to IMPORT ALL IMAGES?
‘Could you hit Enter please,’ Thomas said, looking up at Athanasius. ‘My hands are somewhat occupied.’
Athanasius did as he was asked and a progress bar tracked the slow transfer of data from the phone to the laptop. No one breathed or moved, least of all Thomas who was literally holding it all together. The progress bar vanished and two new icons appeared on the desktop. Thomas let go of the phone, clicked them open and two images of the Starmap appeared on the screen. He enlarged them and arranged them so both were visible next to each other.
‘That’s Malan,’ Athanasius said, pointing at the image with the block of text forming the inverted shape of the Tau. He translate
d as he read:
The Key unlocks the Sacrament
The Sacrament becomes the Key
And all the Earth shalt tremble
The Key must follow the Starmap Home
There to quench the fire of the dragon within the full phase of a moon
Lest the Earth shalt splinter and a blight shalt prosper
marking the end of all days
‘That’s the second prophecy, the one that led us out into the desert – where the prophecy was fulfilled. Only the last line doesn’t make sense in the light of what actually happened.’
‘What did happen?’ Athanasius asked, leaning forward and studying the screen.
A jumble of images flashed through Gabriel’s mind. Liv falling to the ground, the flame pouring from the drill tower and turning to steam as the oil turned to water. ‘We did return the Sacrament within the full phase of the moon. And the fire was quenched. So I can’t understand why the blight still prospers. We need to know what else it says on the stone.’
Athanasius studied the second image, tracing the constellations of Draco, Taurus, and the Plough.
‘There’s more than one language here,’ he said, ‘and they’re not Malan. This little block of text next to Taurus is some kind of proto-cuneiform. Perhaps it relates directly to this extra star drawn in the constellation of Taurus, just there, between the bull’s horns. It says something like “The Sacrament reaches home, a new star is created and a new king or ruler reigns or rules over the end of days”.’
He scanned the rest of the symbols and ran his hand over his head. ‘There are pictograms or possibly ideograms here that could be from different sources. They represent concepts and ideas rather than individual words and must be interpreted rather than read. But to understand them properly one would need to know the context and time in which they were written. There is a bird here for example that could be an eagle. In Egyptian hieroglyphs the eagle represents the letter “A”, but in Aztec it means the sun. So you see how easy it would be to misinterpret this message.’