Suinne shrieked, hurling his cube of detonation clay back into the collapsing ruins of S’Eduku-tal-ebab, which fell with the mound’s slopes into an engulfing pit.
The cube struck a crumbling building, and exploded on impact.
A wall of heated air swatted Suinne like a fly, hurtling him outside the wobbling gateposts, into a knot of his startled soldiers—the third part of his total force; the only ones not caught inside the Treasure Cave furnace—that looked on from the Kengiru camp. When he wobbled to his burning knees, the Mound of Arrata had become a gravelly plain. Usalaq had vanished like a ghost into the clouds of dust surrounding the rubble.
193
The last two survivors of the Boat of a Million Years, with a handful of their descendants, stood at the door of a stone chamber built into the side of a flat hill.
T’Qinna still trembled from the memory of Arrata Mound imploding in the distance like a fiery punctured blister in the earth. The legacy she had hoped to record for whatever generation to emerge from the Great Dark Age in the distant future was now no longer possible.
Iyapeti paused before going inside. “Yoqtani, how did you and Usalaq know to do all this?”
Palqui’s brother shrugged, after he dismounted. “After we all got separated at the sack of Surrupak, Arrafu and I made for Elam with Palqui’s friend, Shatru of Isin and his wife, but some of us were captured by the Kengiru at Kuara—that’s where we lost Ereshkigal. I married in Elam, raising sons and daughters, with each son becoming a war captain. Shatru and his wife had many children, too, and have a vineyard in the hills above Susiana. Arrafu became our priest—the last true Khaldi in the East. My tribes have ranged the mountains between here and Elam since.”
Palqui raised his hands to heaven. “Thankses to Eya! Tell it to Shatru from me, if you see him, that Loma and me be well.”
Haviri asked, “How did you meet up with your grandfather again, Son?”
Yoqtani said, “I found poor Father Usalaq alone among the ruins of S’Eduku-tal-ebab—I think he’s a little crazy from solitude; talks in unknown words of powers from the World-that-Was. When none of you returned for so long, he told me that if the people of the Shuimer and Akkad came to take the Treasure Cave, he would destroy it. He went on and on about how they would use his knowledge to ruin themselves further, with the whole world. He escaped capture when Ninurta took the last of the loyal Khaldini to exile. The few who remained either caught the Madness Plague later on, or left.”
The Pendulum catapulted T’Qinna into a pall of more guilt. On top of everything else, she had misjudged Usalaq, and thought him disloyal. He simply had an engineer’s mind, rather than that of a shepherd, priest, or a scribe. Her bland, socially dull great grandson had prepared all these decades to do what she doubted she would have had the strength to do in the end—what horrified her even now that it was an accomplished fact.
Yoqtani was not finished. “Here is the place Father Usalaq and I built to house what little we could salvage from the Treasure Cave, after Suinne’s earlier scouts came to Arrata last year. Ninurta had originally tried to corrupt Usalaq. Suinne, and I guess Ninurta, too, assumed that Usalaq was compliant, misreading his lack of emotional intensity for indifference. They never thought him a threat. All the while, he laid his plans against them. I only came along later, and supplied the manpower for his plans.”
Palqui laughed, poking his head inside the small cache’s doorway. “You, Brother, and Father Shelah had the same vision Eya gave to me! Praises and thankses be to the Name-that-Is-No-Longer-Named!”
Yoqtani came and stood before T’Qinna. “Mother Pyrrha, Father Usalaq preserved a talisman of ancient an’jineering that he said would be special to you. Go inside, and look.”
T’Qinna stepped in the door. One of Yoqtani’s men had lit a torch, and set it inside a wall sconce at the other end. On either side of the chamber, crumbling papyrex scrolls sat in their wooden racks. What captivated T’Qinna, however, lay on a platform in an alcove at the far end of the room. Cut stone blocks and mortar were stacked knee-high before a stone sarcophagus. On its lid, sat the Orb recorder-viewer that her old mentor from Aztlan, Mnemosynae, had given her, before the Deluge. Beside it, the box of record crystals lay open. The one inside the transcription slot was half-full, the last one. On it were a montage of images of people and places long gone.
She broke down and bawled, begging E’Yahavah in her heart for a chance to see Usalaq again. She pleaded that he might somehow have escaped the conflagration he had set off to keep even worse ones from happening later. Iyapeti found her draped over the softly glowing crystal globe. He touched her arm and pulled her into his. She wanted to continue weeping there, but she could not let it happen. She pulled away, but far more gently this time, and with a word of thanks to him.
“I have one last testament to make,” she said. “Then we must finish walling off the niche, with the orb recorder inside. We have to move it outside where there’s enough light for me to make the recording.”
Iyapeti hoisted the crystal orb by its base, and carried it outside, where he placed it on a flat rock, opposite the door of the chamber. The volcano rumbled in the background, strands of liquid fire running down its sides like glowing hair under a smoky shawl. The noise had eased off from what it was earlier. T’Qinna checked the power cell, and set the recorder timer for half a minute. Then she stood over by the door, and composed herself. She had rehearsed this message ever since the Bab’Elu Plague fell.
The jeweled light on the orb’s base told her it was recording.
“I am Pyra: mother of nations, speaker to beasts, singer, of the Eight who crossed the Waters of Primal Chaos from the vanished World-that-Was with the cask of Atum-Ra…”
She spoke no more than a quarter of an hour, at times seizing up with tears, at others rage, at yet others so focused that she hardly knew what she said. The Earth rumbled, but held its fury in the shadow of the smoking mountain with hair of liquid flame.
The chamber behind her meant isolation. Madness lay in its womb. So also did hope, but not for the Woman—not in this life.
Then the Divine Wind of E’Yahavah gently wrapped himself around her as she drew near her conclusion. A natural breeze ruffled her hair softly, as if to put flesh and bone to the moment.
T’Qinna wept as she spoke her final words into the ancient oracular imaging recorder, before its power cell wore out. “I have come to believe that the most terrifying of all Divine judgments is when E’Yahavah simply gives a foolish generation what it wants. That is what has happened here. They wanted to re-write history so they could control the future, and now history is for them erased, except for this tiny thread, dreamlike half-memories, and the few genealogies to escape the purges of Suinne.
“Now that we few can barely be understood, E’Yahavah will need to reveal himself again, entirely from nothing. Let him do so to some future generation fit to receive him, who have the humility to understand their need. This he is sure to do because he is gracious. As for we few who remember, he has shown us mercy, and will doubtless grant us a place of refuge to live out our remaining days in sorrow, yet also in a distant hope.”
“To those of you in that far-off day, who can figure out how to get this message, and that it is a message worth getting, I, who am your Mother, wish you all my love. May you rediscover your origins, so that you navigate rightly toward the future hope in Heaven’s Ram. This message ends.”
The mountain exploded again, shaking the ground. A skeleton-thin old man scrambled down the embankment, from the direction of what used to be the Sacred Cities of Arrata.
Usalaq stopped before Iyapeti, panting. “I think I am being followed, my Father. Suinne still has about a third of his force—the mounted third.”
Malaq signaled his riders with a whistle. “Mount up! Hostiles are coming!”
Iyapeti said to T’Qinna, “You stay here with the other women. Usalaq, Haviri, and Palqui will remain with you.”
T’Qinna
cried, “Wait! The orb—put it back inside!”
‘Peti had Haviri carry the device back into the chamber, and placed it inside the stone casket. Then they both lifted the heavy lid, sealing the device inside its resting place. T’Qinna followed ‘Peti outside again, where he mounted his horse, and led his riders off. Yoqtani did likewise, having left his footmen back where they had first met the caravan, too far off to engage the enemy that had tracked Usalaq from the fall of Arrata in time.
T’Qinna went inside to wait, with Usalaq and Palqui, while Haviri went back outside to watch the volcano with his wife and Lomina.
Palqui began to add another block to the wall that would seal the stone cask in its tomb.
Usalaq went over to him. “Not that way, Son, these stones are precision cut to lock together. The mortar is only to hide the wall once it is up. Like this...” He repositioned the block, and slid it so that the raised polygon on its end fit into a slot in the aperture, and dropped into another on the block beneath it. Grandfather and grandson finished the wall together—something T’Qinna watched with a profound sense of healing.
She hoped it wasn’t just the Pendulum swinging back to her warm, but needy, side. Usalaq had never bonded easily as a child, and his wife had always wept on T’Qinna’s shoulder over his lack of affection. She had committed suicide after her oldest son, Haviri, left on his Sun Ship. Usalaq had kept his grief to himself then, too. Haviri, while far more affectionate than his father, had not shown any surprise on his return, when T’Qinna had told him of his mother’s death. That had disturbed her deeply back then. It took a lot more to disturb her now—at least until the next Pendulum arc.
Haviri remained outside, keeping watch on both the volcano, and for enemy soldiers. The chamber sat in a small gully between two low ridgelines, so T’Qinna doubted he could see much without climbing one of the slopes.
She leaned against a wall and watched Palqui and Usalaq mix and spread the mortar over the block wall. They used a jar each of water and natron, from a small wood trough in the corner. The color of the mixture looked as if it would dry to the dun color of the other walls, without paint.
The noise at the door startled her.
T’Qinna turned, expecting to see Haviri or one of the women come inside to rifle through a pack for some way bread. She did not expect what she saw instead.
The volcano thundered to a towering new crescendo, as the sky outside blackened. Warriors blocked the door. Behind them, outside, several of their compatriots held Haviri fast, one of them covering his mouth with a forearm, from behind. The women were not in view.
Suinne shuffled into the chamber, panting. He leaned on a silver plated staff, tipped with a razor sharp crescent moon over its handgrip. His pale, almost translucent face seemed to have a sickly glow in the increasing dimness. “I see some treasures are too costly to pack in detonating clay, Usalaq. And what have we here?—the Revered Mother and her faithful brood—how charming! As you can see, I got past your horsemen. Iyapeti and his riders are all dead. I had bowmen covering all the approaches.”
T’Qinna’s rage unleashed itself in a fluid motion. The dagger strapped to her thigh came out through the discreet slit in the folds of her skirt, and flew from her hand with the speed and force of a leopard’s claw.
Suinne still had his triumphant smile for several seconds before he noticed that the arterial blood spray arcing across the wall came from his own neck. The razor-honed dagger had slit half his throat without sticking.
The “moon god’s” warriors had no time to react before a clamor outside forced them into the small chamber, trampling over the draining corpse of their master. Palqui attacked, driving his trowel as a knife into the diaphragm of the nearest Kengiru soldier, mixing blood with mortar. Usalaq hurled a handful of natron-infused grit into the eyes of a second fighter. T’Qinna stood ready to claw the eyes of any that dared approach her.
Only then did the thunder of Haviri’s hand-cannon sound.
Kengiru bodies began to fall at the chamber door, one after the other, each with gaping holes in them. The clattering of swords outside settled and fell silent.
T’Qinna ran for the opening, stumbling over the bodies. Palqui dropped his trowel, and followed, with Usalaq behind him.
Streams of flame enveloped the sky directly overhead, as hot smoking stones fell all around. She put up her hood, and looked about. Iyapeti wiped his sword, which he had used on the man that held Lomina.
Malaq called from somewhere above. “Rivers of fire approach!”
T’Qinna stepped out, closer to Iyapeti, turned, and looked up on the low hill that covered the orb chamber. Malaq stood on its flattened summit.
Iyapeti ran to her. “Hurry; we must find higher ground!”
She pulled away from him. “We must seal the chamber first!”
“There’s no time!”
Usalaq was suddenly in their midst, muttering something that could not be heard over the mountain’s roar.
Palqui dragged the bodies of the Kengiru warriors that blocked the doorway to the orb chamber inside, and re-emerged.
T’Qinna cried, “I can’t hear you!”
Usalaq raised his voice for the first time in T’Qinna’s memory; “I will seal the door!”
She grabbed at his ragged mantle. “You’ll be killed!”
The bone-thin engineer shook his head slightly, and waved his index finger back and forth, as if correcting the erroneous theorem of some wayward student. Then he pulled himself away, and walked over to the door, where Palqui had just finished dragging in the last body. Usalaq shooed his grandson away from the portal with a couple sweeps of his hand. Once Palqui stood clear of the entrance, Usalaq pressed a section of the heavy stone lintel that T’Qinna had not noticed before.
The square of stone went into the body of the larger single block of the lintel, and an enormous slab of granite fell into place, sealing the room.
Malaq’s voice bellowed overhead, “Get out of there! Go south!”
T’Qinna started to run. Then she felt herself hoisted up under her arms by two huge hands, tossed lightly into the air, caught, and then lowered gently onto the saddle of an already galloping horse.
She twisted her head, and saw the enormous face of Iyapeti smiling at her. The others were mounted, and riding behind her, while Malaq and his Khana’Anhu horsemen raced along the crest of the hill on their left.
Behind them, gobbling up the gully, a pasty river of consuming molten rock snaked after them like the enraged serpent of buried Aeden.
194
Iyapeti stood near the edge of a cliff top, looking out across a vast sea of molten lava. It stretched from the foothills he and his people had only just barely reached in time, to the still-belching pits on Anchor Mountain. A few rocky islands jutted above the nightmarish lake of fire, with headlands stretching out into it from the northwest and east. Vast plumes of steam roiled in the west, where the lake of fire met the Great Salt Lake of the West somewhere behind the northwest headland. The Great Salt Lake of the East was too far away to know if fire-rivers reached it too, but it seemed likely.
T’Qinna was inconsolable in her tent, farther up the slope, and just behind the first line of hills. When Iyapeti had tried to speak with her, she had asked him to leave her alone.
The lava had engulfed not only the door of Usalaq’s chamber, but had risen at least several cubits over the low rocky hill that housed it.
Iyapeti felt no resentment toward his brother’s widow—not with her multiple inner wounds. Losing her husband of five hundred and fifty years was bad enough. To do so along with his very legacy and hers, all inside of a year, was a lot to dump on any woman. That omitted all the layers of sorrows-on-top-of-disappointments the last two centuries had piled on her. He knew that he, too, would implode under it, once the shock lifted.
The others had trudged back up over the hill to camp, leaving Iyapeti alone to his thoughts by the glowing hot sea.
What now?
&
nbsp; Civilization—even its memory—gone; an aging few survivors, all of the women of whom (except maybe Lomina) were past childbearing years, with no one able to communicate what they knew to a people capable of receiving it, or willing to—where could they go? The splintered clans spoke no tongue with a large or complex enough vocabulary to grasp ideas commonplace to the Old Language. What was the point?
Iyapeti sat on a rock, and threw up his hands to the turbid black skies. “What do you want of us, E’Yahavah? You’ve struck my building tools from one hand, and my weapons of war from the other! Forget the world—though I’m willing to do what you tell me, there—how am I to relate to T’Qinna? I’ve been alone for so long, and I’m more than happy to give her plenty of time, but I can’t stay where I’m not really wanted.”
The Voice spoke conversationally from somewhere to his right. “Just be a good friend to her.”
Iyapeti fell from his rock, onto his face.
Seated above him, on another small boulder, a man he had not seen in over five hundred years gazed down on him with warm, sorrowful eyes. The last time this man had spoken to him, he had said something to the effect of, “Be fruitful and multiply across the face of the Earth.”
Iyapeti had done his share of that, and then later been forced to kill many of his own sons for all the blood Magog and his brothers had helped Kush and Nimurta shed. His only comfort was that Sutara had not lived to see it. Yet this comfort was also a fountain of heartbreak darker and hotter than that fire-spewing mountain on the horizon, which had once sheltered them from killer tides.
“Sit with me, Iyapeti,” said the Divine Wordspeaker of E’Yahavah; gesturing to the rock that ‘Peti had just tumbled from.
Iyapeti scrambled to his knees, but felt like crouching behind the rock, rather than sitting on it. Unfortunately, it was too small, so he reseated himself, but kept his eyes respectfully down.
Gate of the Gods: Book 5 of The Windows of Heaven Page 58