by Jack Castle
Mac pointed the binoculars where Brett indicated and saw the small bastion atop the wall. Just below it hung a rickety, jury-rigged wooden platform that looked as though it had been added to the wall as an afterthought. The ‘elevator’ was little more than a platform that dangled from a worn rope and pulley system.
“I see it,” she said, “but it doesn’t look very solid.”
“Well, I don’t see an opening down here for miles. It might be our only option.”
She returned the binoculars to him. “Yeah, but how the hell are we going to get up there?”
Brett swallowed hard before answering. “I guess one of us will just have to climb up there and lower the elevator down for the rest of us.”
Mac noticed that Brett blanched at the thought of climbing the wall. Clearly, he was not thrilled at the prospect. “Brett, are you afraid of heights?”
“Lady, I’m not afraid of anything,” he said. But his attempt to conceal his discomfort failed miserably.
“Yes, you are.” She grinned. She found it hard to believe that the big bad commando was afraid of anything. “You’re afraid of heights.”
“I’ll climb it,” said a voice behind them. It was Stein’s.
Both of them turned to face Stein, who was already dropping his gear and disrobing down to his tank top. Stein, with his lithe, muscular body, seemed to offer the only viable option. “I used to climb in the Alps with my father when I was a boy,” he said. “I’ll be up there in a few hours.”
Brett was Mac’s first choice for the mission. If anyone was going to make first contact with the aliens, she wanted it to be Brett, especially after the incident with the river creature. However, having watched Brett pale at the sight of the climb, Mac knew that Stein was the best possible candidate. Stein was certainly the most physically powerful, and with his background in rock climbing, he was the most qualified. Besides, Mac thought, a small part of me wouldn’t mind if the murderous bastard fell to his death. No, she cursed herself silently, Stein’s still a member of my crew, and I can’t have thoughts like that.
“Okay, Stein. You’ve got the OP,” she said.
Stein nodded and began emptying one of the packs and selecting items necessary for his ascent: a rope, bottled water, food, and so forth. Tae helped him with his gear, but Leo chose not to.
To his credit, Stein had been going out of his way to be helpful and avoid confrontation with Leo and the others since his little performance on the river. She tried to keep in mind that the commando had shot the water beast to protect Leo, just as he had shot the professor to protect her. Mac’s inner voice kept repeating that there was definitely a pattern there, but she tried to ignore it.
Sensing her thoughts, Brett said, “You know, if you really want me to, I’ll make the climb.”
“No,” Mac said. She watched Stein stretch and was surprised at how limber the heavily muscled man was. “You were right. If we’re to go forward, Stein’s the best man for the job.”
She didn’t mention her concerns about what might happen if Stein was to make first contact, and Brett didn’t bring it up. It was a risk and they both knew it.
After she wished him luck, Stein moved to the wall and began his ascent. The bricks had been laid in a jigsaw pattern, and they jutted out randomly, affording him plenty of handholds. Still, the climb, which would be at least sixty stories high, was a massive undertaking.
Stein climbed only two feet and slid back down. Had he been over thirty feet, the same fall would have been fatal. And Stein had to climb over six hundred feet. The fall hardly inspired Mac’s confidence.
“Don’t worry,” he told her, spying her concerned look. “I’m just testing the handholds. I’d rather do it down here then up there.”
“Be careful,” she said with genuine concern.
Hesitating for a moment, he replied in a gentle tone, “Since when do you care about my well-being, Commander?”
“Since the day you boarded my ship,” she said.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be back — how do you say? — in a jiffy.” With that, he climbed ten feet in less than a minute. Stein stopped climbing long enough to turn back toward Mac. “Just one more thing, Commander.”
“Yeah, what’s that?” she shouted up at him.
“We’re no longer on board your ship.”
Before she could reply, the commando resumed his speedy ascent.
Tae stepped next to her. “If he maintains his present rate of climb,” he said, doing some mental figuring, “he should reach the top in about an hour and six minutes.”
“Not much else we can do until he reaches the top. We might as well break out some food and have lunch.”
As the others began unpacking their gear and settling in, Mac continued to watch Stein. After twenty minutes, she was finally satisfied that he wasn’t going to fall to his death, and she took some freeze-dried apples from Leo and sat down in the shade of a tree. She removed the Europa journal from her pocket and held it in her hands.
As she contemplated the book, she wondered if her shuttle had landed on the same planet that Harry had described in his journal. Both planets had the same amount of moons, and they also had similar features, notably the floating landmasses. But if Captain Reed were here, Mac wondered, how long ago was it? Seventy years ago? A thousand? Professor Bort had told her that Captain Reed’s corpse was over seven hundred years old. Is time even relative when traversing through a wormhole? She made a note to ask Leo or Tae about that one in the near future. Just not right now. She wasn’t in the mood to hear a sixty-minute dissertation on wormholes. Instead, she opened the Europa journal and began reading.
Chapter 13
The SongBird Goddess
Day 11
I have been poisoned.
#
As the bile from his stomach rose in his throat, Captain Reed tore away from the evening campfire and ran into the surrounding thick underbrush. He should have known better than to accept a morsel of food from Hu-Nan, the big fat Awumpai. Hu-Nan never gave up food. Harry could still hear the Awumpai laughing.
Obviously, they weren’t trying to kill him, for they could easily do that with a flick of their wrists. No, stupid, stupid, stupid Hu-Nan was having some fun with him. The big red Awumpai was probably trying to get even after the gun incident.
Harry tripped over a root but caught himself before he hit the forest floor. Normally, a combination of one or more of the three moons lit one’s way at night, but only the smallest of the moons was visible this night. It didn’t help that Harry was beneath a canopy of leafy trees and had forgotten his flashlight.
In the past week, the caravan had journeyed out of the mountains, and the terrain had changed from valleys of tundra to thick forests. Although it still snowed on some of the cooler nights, it usually melted by midday.
At present, Harry searched for a creek that he had seen near camp during the daytime. He knew he just had to get through the thick undergrowth. Feeling the bile rise up again in his mouth and hearing the babbling brook, he quickened his pace. He was only one tree line away from the creek when he started hearing what sounded like singing.
Harry had read Homer’s Odyssey as a kid and had always wondered what the Sirens might have sounded like. He knew now, though, that the Sirens’ song couldn’t have sounded more beautiful than what he heard just then in the alien forest. He was drawn to the song, the nausea fading from his mind.
As he made his way through the woods, moving parallel with the river, he glimpsed a vaporous cloud of sparkling lights above the river. In his haste, he was far from stealthy. His footsteps cracked fallen tree limbs, and his shoulders snapped off dead branches. Suddenly, another voice joined the first, and both sang in harmony. It was beautiful. The light was just ahead near an opening like a small beach next to the water’s edge. He was almost there.
Harry burst th
rough the trees and didn’t see the short embankment that encircled the small beach landing. He fell over the embankment and landed face first in the sand. In the brief moment between bursting through the trees and planting his face so far in the dirt that he would have made an ostrich proud, Harry glimpsed the most wondrous thing he had ever seen in his life.
In those brief seconds, he saw Princess Asha floating about twenty feet above the center of the river. A shimmering aura surrounded her tiny form, and she spoke — no, sang — to an angelic head that appeared on a luminescent cloud. The angel had swirling multi-colored eyes, like Asha’s, and her face was surrounded by long golden curls that floated upward, almost as though her head were submerged in water.
Stunned, and slightly hurt from the fall, Harry lifted his face out of the dirt. As he hastily brushed sand out of his eyes with his one good hand, the singing abruptly stopped. Before he could raise his head, the light he saw reflected on the beach faded away.
When Harry’s vision finally cleared, he thought he saw the princess’s dainty bare feet step off an invisible stairway that bridged the river and the beach. He looked for the angelic face in the cloud but didn’t see it, and Asha’s aura was gone as well.
“What’s wrong, Harry?” Asha asked. She had her hands clasped easily behind her back and an impish smile upon her face.
“What the hell was that?” he stammered.
“I don’t know. What did you see?” she asked coyly.
What had he seen? He had only caught a glimpse of the big cloud, and most of it was through the trees. Had he seen fireflies or some sort of gas cloud that had ignited?
“I … I don’t know what I saw,” Harry said. “A beautiful woman, almost angelic. She looked kind of like you, only older.”
The Dan-Sai gave him a pitying look and helped him to his feet. To Harry’s surprise, she explained what he had seen. “That was the SongBird Goddess, Harry, that’s who you saw. She asked me to say ‘hello’.”
Asha turned to go, but Harry roughly grabbed her by the arm. Realizing what he had done, he quickly released her in case there were any Awumpai nearby. “The SongBird Goddess,” he stammered, “who is that?”
Asha thought about the question for a moment before answering. “She is many things: mother of all creation, brother to Khaos, and the balance to the universe — or, at least, she was.”
Asha’s beautiful face focused on him for a moment and suddenly contorted, as though she were inflicted with great pain. Once it passed, she asked, “Would you like to see her?”
Before he could answer, Asha took a step toward to him and lightly tapped his temple with her middle finger. Harry suddenly found himself standing on pure white sand in a cavernous room, the walls built of massive sandstone blocks. Looking around, he saw a pool of water in a circular pit that was not more than twelve feet across. On the wall behind the pool, he noticed strange writing. The symbols reminded him of Egyptian hieroglyphics and Japanese characters.
Harry was about to examine the writing further when he glimpsed ripples on the water. Moving to the pit’s edge, he looked into the water and saw the SongBird Goddess of whom Asha had spoken. The beautiful woman floated just beneath the surface of the crystal-clear turquoise water. Her long hair flowed gently over her head, and a glowing white aura surrounded her. She peered up at Harry, and he saw a look of sadness upon her angelic face.
She reached out to him, her fingers making ripples on the water’s surface, and suddenly, as if he were in some kind of crazy dream, he found himself underwater staring up at her as if he had been transported to the bottom of the well to stand at her feet. The water was ice cold against his face and he instinctively held his breath. The Goddess towered over him, over ten feet tall, and he was surprised by the look of agony on her face. It appeared that she was nearly drowned, her arms limp to either side, her head tipped back as if in hopeless desire for the air above, and, as Harry watched further, he determined that this was the perpetual state of her existence: forever drowning in an aqueous tomb.
Harry felt an overwhelming urge to free the enigmatic, wondrous being. Looking down at her feet, he saw that one slender ankle was shackled to an enormous chain, which, in turn, was fastened to a semi-circular hook on the pit’s floor. The chain was only long enough to allow the ends of her hair to break the surface.
Worse yet, she wasn’t alone. Two dragon-headed eels slithered doggedly around her floating form. Each of them was six feet long and had a mouth lined with four-inch long, needle-like spikes. Harry saw one of the serpents lunge toward the goddess and take a bite out of her side. She grimaced.
The bite wound began to heal immediately, but even though the goddess’s skin regenerated, it was clear she had felt the pain of the injury. It was a torture endured beyond mortal comprehension. Harry had to do something.
He was running out of air. Nonetheless, he swam to the chain and reached for it. His single hand passed through the links as though it belonged to a ghost, but his movement drew the attention of one of the serpents. It reared its head back like a cobra, opened its jaws, and darted for his face. When Harry opened his mouth to scream with the last of his breath, the horrific scene vanished, and he found himself back on the beach.
He felt Asha’s tiny hands try and steady him, but his wobbling legs gave out, and his body dropped to the beach. He tried to process what he had seen and couldn’t be sure if he’d left the beach or whether the scene had played out only in his mind. Regardless, he knew that the goddess existed and that her suffering — such agony! — was real.
Feeling overwhelming sadness for the beautiful being, Harry asked, “Hasn’t anyone ever tried rescuing her?”
“Many have tried, and all have failed.” A sad look washed across Asha’s face. “Only the scepter of power can break the bindings that hold her.”
Harry recalled the thick chain that bound the SongBird Goddess’s ankle. He doubted that a welding torch could even dent the heavy links. “Who would do such a thing?” he asked.
“Her brother, Atum-Khaos,” Asha said without trying to hide the contempt in her voice. “It was he who imprisoned her for all eternity.”
“Why would he do that to his own sister?”
Asha took a deep breath before answering, but once she began, her response poured from her delicate lips like a heavy downpour of Florida rain. “Long ago, when the universe was still a gaping shapeless void — even before time was set in motion — there was a great battle among the gods. Atum-Khaos, first born to Anu, the Father of all Gods in heaven and all creation, was Anu’s greatest general. After defeating Anu’s enemies, Atum-Khaos was declared second only to Anu himself.”
“Let me guess,” Harry said, interrupting her. “That wasn’t good enough.”
Surprised, Asha tilted her head to the side. “You have heard this story?”
Harry rubbed his calloused hand over his stubbly chin before answering. “Let’s just say we have similar stories back where I come from. But I’m sorry. Please continue.”
Asha considered this information for a moment and then continued. “Yes, well… Atum-Khaos gathered all those loyal to him and rose up against the Father of the Gods, but Anu was much too powerful and cast Khaos from the heavens.”
“But what does any of this have to do with the SongBird Goddess?” Harry asked.
“I am getting to that, Harry. Be patient.” Asha gently stroked his arm. “The SongBird Goddess’s only crime was that she did not wish to see her brother perish in the fall, so she stood with him. But, she herself never lashed out at the Order of the Universe.”
“So it was Anu who did this to her?” Harry asked.
“No, it was her brother, Khaos. After she suffered the same fate as her brother and was cast down from the heavens, she and the other fallen ones did many wonders with the few powers they still possessed. They bore many offspring by joining themselves with the lo
cal inhabitants of worlds that they helped nurture and create.”
“But again, Khaos was not satisfied with sharing all of the power,” Harry guessed.
“Yes, that’s correct. It did not please Atum-Khaos that some of his own followers began to worship his gentle and more benevolent sister. So, in a fit of rage, he wiped her offspring from many worlds throughout existence.”
“Didn’t she and her followers try and stop him?”
“Yes, and it was a battle that lasted nine millennia. Just as Khaos was about to be defeated, his followers held three races of her offspring hostage: my people, the Awumpai, and the Adamah.
“Declaring a truce, the SongBird Goddess agreed to banishment as long as her brother swore not to harm her people. Unfortunately, she didn’t know the terms of the banishment when she agreed. Since the SongBird Goddess is still an immortal and cannot be killed, Khaos banished her to a secret temple. He knew that she would still be able to reach out to her followers in dreams and whispers upon the winds, so he devised a punishment that would keep her in agony and distract her from communicating with her followers. As you saw, she drowns in a pit of sorrow, torment, and damnation while twin serpent guardians feast continually on her regenerating flesh.”
Harry asked, “Is there anything we can do?”
“No,” Asha answered. “At least, I do not think so. Her suffering is eternal.”
Then, as if that explained everything, Asha picked her way through the nearby brush and dashed off into the forest, presumably heading back toward camp. Harry sensed that Fu-Mar was close behind.
Even more confused than before, Harry was about to follow, but he was suddenly — and violently — reminded why he had ventured into the dark forest in the first place. He started heaving from whatever it was that Hu-Nan had slipped him. It was as if Asha’s presence had been keeping it at bay and now, with her absence, his body was free to revolt as it willed.