It was as though we entered a state of innocence. Even Madame Vysotskaya’s wild gaze softened, and her harshness gave way to a smiling radiance I warrant she had not shown since she had been a girl. And Fyodorov opined all the while, a great rambling sermon, ex tempore, filled with the inspiration of that most miraculous of moments.
He spoke of many things; of harnessing the power of the Garden for the resurrection of the dead; of the control of the elements, the weather, even the power of the sun. Then his thoughts took flight, and he told us of flying machines which would soar through the skies, and even to other lifeless worlds which we would transform into gardens like this. His face shone like a prophet, and I knew then what Nikolai Pavlovich had meant when he had called him a remarkable man, a holy man, an idiot; there was an honesty, a simplicity, a blind trust in him that could not help but fire my blood with hope and anticipation. Surely this vision was true; surely Fyodorov’s common task would unite all men under Holy Russia’s banner, the Third Rome!
We slept like children, but that night I awoke. I thought at first I had been dreaming, but then I saw it. Large and silent, a pool of darkness deeper than the night.
A figure stood at the edge of the clearing, touched by the dancing firelight. Tall, regal, commanding. Naked. It regarded us in silence, then seemed to become aware of my wakefulness, and turned, and walked away into the darkness. I thought I had dreamed it, until Krepkin mentioned the same thing the next morning.
“It was a man, I am sure. Not the cadaverous husk of the mummy in the cave. Not the almas, either, nor ape nor bear. The Kirghiz legend of Iskander, the Giant –”
I stopped. Vysotskaya regarded me with alarm, her mouth gaping open, her eyes wide. Next to her, Krepkin rose to his feet, his hand reaching for his revolver.
I turned, and my breath stuck in my throat.
It was the figure from my dream. But what a figure! An Adonis – tall, olive-skinned, rippling with muscle like a Donatello. Close-cropped curly hair, piercing sapphire eyes, aquiline nose. And cherubic lips, perpetually curled with heedless confidence, as though he knew his beauty.
“My dear fellow...” Fyodorov approached, holding his fur coat to cover the stranger’s nakedness. The figure beheld him with infinite disdain, then turned his back for Fyodorov to dress him, which he did with alacrity. With no acknowledgement of the favour, the tall man faced us, and spoke.
“Was that Greek?” I said.
Fyodorov nodded excitedly. “I believe so! Older than the Greek I’m familiar with. Let me try something...”
He pronounced some lisping syllables with careful patience, which I struggled to follow.
“We are travellers, from far away,” he said. “My name is Fyodorov. Who are you?”
The figure smiled strangely, as though pitying the Professor. “Your words are barbarous.”
“Oh, Lord!” cried Fyodorov. “It is the Greek of the classics! Dmitry Mikhailovich – you must know this tongue better than I.”
Fyodorov and I had discussed the Greeks many times on our journey. Not surprisingly, Fyodorov’s familiarity was with the later Hellenistic Greek of the Church Fathers; mine was with the classical stanzas of the heroic age. The stranger’s words were unbelievable.
“Are there more of you?” The Adonis’s eyes ranged over us.
“Oh, yes, yes!” smiled Fyodorov. “So many! Oh! This is the discovery of the age! How have you...? You were asleep, of course – in the sarcophagus.”
A shadow passed over the Adonis’s brow.
“Geroyev? What is he saying?” asked Krepkin, who had no Greek.
I told him, and as I did so I became uncomfortably aware that the mysterious stranger with whom Fyodorov conversed so volubly might well be the very same as the one which had murdered Myslev, and left Arkady bereft. Yet this was no mummified corpse...
“... the Czar himself will want to see you,” Fyodorov continued, his words falling over themselves in his excitement. “I must take samples – something about this place. It is the Garden! I am sure of it!”
The stranger regarded him steadily. “There is a poison here. It is not safe to remain.”
Fyodorov’s protest needed no translation. “A poison? That cannot be! A great gift, surely? You, yourself – to have survived, so many centuries...”
“Think you I came here alone? Look around: there is no one. They are all dead. If you remain here, you will die. Command your slaves – you must depart this place. You will lead me back. I would see Bactra the beautiful once more...”
“B-Bactra...?” Fyodorov stammered in Russian. “Lord, I have so many questions.” He turned to us, blinking in confusion. “He says we must leave. A contagion...” He looked around at the valley, bursting with life, as though his hope was crushed. “To find the secret, and then...”
I noted how Fyodorov had not translated the Adonis’s use of the word “slaves”. Krepkin’s eyes flashed as he listened, and his hand rested on his holster. “This is the man who killed Myslev?”
Fyodorov seemed at a loss. “I – I do not know. Perhaps, in the confusion of his waking...?”
Vysotskaya looked around her as if danger might spring from any place unseen. “If there is a disease, perhaps the caves? The storm may have abated...”
I remember my own lips curling as though I had a foul taste in my mouth. All I knew was that I was surrounded by ignorance and lies, and that somewhere amidst these seeming miracles and prodigies a mortal danger threatened us all. How could I then have suspected what its source might be?
The stranger’s name was Alexandros. By his bearing Krepkin and I knew him for a military man, or a great leader, yet neither of us could bring ourselves to believe this might be Alexander of Macedon himself. For over two thousand years the tribes of the lowlands had preserved the legend of Iskander the Giant, that bone-crunching monster whose reign in Central Asia, as in so many other lands, had changed the world. My mind was awash with questions, yet I regarded the stranger warily, ever mindful of Myslev’s corpse and the blood on the ice.
Krepkin had busied himself with dismantling the camp. As we bent now to assist him, I saw him stumble as though pushed, and the canvas and guy ropes fell from his hands over the springy flower-strewn turf. The stranger stood close by, his arms folded across his chest, wearing Fyodorov’s furs like the robes of a king.
“Major!” cried Sofia Filippovna, hurrying to hold him from falling. “You must sit down. You look unwell.”
Krepkin’s complexion was grey, his eyes sunken and feverish. His lips had the same cold look we knew only too well.
“Hard... to think...” he drawled. “Like I’m drunk...”
I shot a glance at the impassive Iskander. “You say we face a deadly contagion in this garden – is this how it begins?” The stranger made no reply. “We must get him to the quarantine tent with Arkady. Damnation! Is there nothing we can do?”
Iskander watched our every move, immobile and unfathomable amidst the remains of our camp. As we settled Krepkin on a second pallet, Fyodorov stood by Arkady’s cot, his face gaunt.
The boy’s breathing was shallow, his eyes unfocussed, and he no longer raved in words we could understand. Instead he grunted, in a bestial growl as monotonous as it was disturbing.
“I can detect no intelligence in him,” said Fyodorov. “He seems an imbecile. It is as though the contagion...”
“Nikolai Fyodorovich – it is not the contagion. That – creature out there did this. That mummified revenant – whatever it is!”
Fyodorov bowed his head over Arkady’s prostrate body as though he was praying. “Don’t you think I know that, my friend?” he pleaded. “What would you have me do? We are surrounded by the unknown. There is a force, here, which may change mankind forever – a life force. That man, Iskander – he was a mummified corpse not one day ago. Now he lives and walks like you and I. Is that not a miracle? A thing worthy of Eden itself? If there is something in the land, here, some particle of dust, which I can iso
late –”
“What would it tell you? That the mummy we found drains the life of the living to replenish itself? That the peril we face now seeks a greater herd of livestock on which to prey?”
Fyodorov looked at me, horrified. “But there is no way we can carry both of them back to the cave. One, perhaps, if we had Krepkin to help us. How will we climb the cliff? What are we to do?” Beneath his clenched palms, the unconscious form of Arkady twitched as if in dream, and growled like an animal.
I had no answer for him, but to fasten Krepkin’s revolver to my belt; the wretch had little use for it now. I felt Vysotskaya’s eyes on me as I returned to the camp. With Krepkin down, our expedition felt rudderless, and I realised Fyodorov had been no leader at all.
“Stay back!” I shouted, facing Iskander. “What did you do to them?”
A strange light burned in Iskander’s eyes, something feral in his stance I had not seen before. His knees were slightly bent, his shoulders hunched, his head angled forwards to regard me from beneath beetling brows. He smiled, but it was no longer the imperious sneer of a king, but a baring of teeth, the drooling leer of a predator before it springs. He lunged, and grabbed my arm, before I could reach the revolver.
“Dmitry Mikhailovich! His skin – look at his skin!”
Iskander’s hand as it gripped my arm was grey, with a cadaverous sheen, and I fancied I could see beneath his features the mummy we had uncovered in the caves. His fingers tightened on my arm, burning with an icy fire.
A scream rent the air. A bestial, mindless cry, from the direction of the quarantine tent, followed by the sounds of struggle.
“Krepkin!” shouted Fyodorov.
Mustering all my strength, I wrenched my arm from Iskander’s grasp, feeling my muscles tear agonisingly. I ran after Fyodorov. Under the canvas, a biting, clawing figure I realised with a shock was Arkady wrestled on top of the writhing Krepkin, ripping at his flesh, smearing blood. Krepkin seemed mindless with terror, the soldier in him utterly gone, and it was all we could do to pull Arkady away. He kicked and screamed, flailing with gore-covered fingers, gnashing his foam-flecked jaws.
“Tie him down!” I cried, as we wrestled the lad to his pallet.
When it was over, Fyodorov and I stared at the boy, as Krepkin whimpered like a baby. Arkady struggled in vain, swaddled tight in his blankets.
I looked at Fyodorov in alarm, then ran from the tent.
Back in the camp, Vysotskaya and Iskander were gone.
We found Sofia Filippovna’s body in a thicket by the lake. The look of terror frozen on her features took my breath away, and I raised the back of my hand to my mouth, unable to meet Fyodorov’s eyes.
“The same greyish pallor,” he said. “Like Myslev and the others. Except this time there is no blood. She does not seem injured at all.”
He lowered himself to his knees, hunching over Vysotskaya’s corpse, examining the spider web of thin black veins that had erupted everywhere beneath her alabaster skin.
“Nikolai Fyodorovich, we have to leave. That thing is preying on us. It will kill us all.”
“Leave the others?” Fyodorov’s expression was like a child’s, asking permission to do something forbidden.
“What choice do we have? We cannot carry them. Besides... I no longer know what any of them are any more. What is this contagion? Will Krepkin and Arkady rise like Iskander? Will Sofia Filippovna?”
Fyodorov gazed round at the paradisiacal verdure which stretched to the white peaks, the lazy sunshine in the sighing trees, the insects going about their eternal business between the flowers. “There is so much here,” he said. “Imagine what the world could become if we could unlock this land’s secret! We – we could entreat Iskander...” Fyodorov clasped his hands tightly before him.
I no longer saw a visionary. I saw nothing but a tired old man, deluded and afraid of death. “Listen to me, Nikolai Fyodorovich – Iskander the Giant ate people’s bones. Don’t you see? Whatever Iskander has become, he is feeding on us. Perhaps the more he can feed, the further he can venture from the garden. Perhaps the force you’re seeking is not in the garden, but in Iskander – in whatever his touch infects. Think if he makes it to Ashkabad! Kazan! Even Moscow! It would be a plague like nothing mankind has ever seen – with Iskander at its head. We must leave this monster to its prison!”
In Tiflis I had considered my life stale and unprofitable, myself a person born out of his time, doomed to a pointless and superficial existence and a meaningless death. But I had not appreciated by what a thin thread all that I considered solid and wholesome truly hung – and how easily it could be dashed away. Now I had something to fight for – a world in which I had the luxury of mooning around like a spleen-stricken Russian hero, rather than this nightmarish existence as a hunted beast, fearing death at every turn.
I held my hand out to Fyodorov, feeling his old gnarled fingers locking into mine, and hauled him to his feet.
My arm was still painful from where I had wrenched it from Iskander’s icy grasp, yet I shouldered a pack of what weapons I could, and gave one to Fyodorov with enough provisions to carry us from the glacier. I had intended to leave everything else, but at the last moment I opened the small case of dynamite Krepkin had carried with him, and withdrew two sticks. Perhaps some presentiment of what was to come steered my hand, I do not know.
Fyodorov needed furs, having given his to Iskander, and there was now only one source. In the quarantine tent, as Fyodorov robed himself, we stared in horror at our two erstwhile comrades.
“Poor devils,” said Fyodorov, making the sign of the cross.
“I do not think it is them any more,” I replied, seeing the feral glimmer in Arkady’s eyes, bound to the cot next to the now unconscious Krepkin. “The contagion has robbed them of their humanity, yet will not let them die. Even you would have difficulty persuading the world the path to resurrection and eternal life lay on that path, Nikolai Fyodorovich.”
Fyodorov said nothing, shrinking into his voluminous furs. His face had lost its child-like luminosity, and now looked old, as though its hope too had died.
As we climbed the vertiginous cliff to the ice cave, I beheld an unmistakable figure stride out from the woodland below us and begin its ascent.
“In God’s name... he is following us.” Fyodorov stared down the drop, his face hollow with fear.
I knew then what instinct had made me pause by Krepkin’s armoury in the camp. It had not been an accident.
“Come, Nikolai Fyodorovich,” I said. “We haven’t much time.”
“The storm seems to be abating!” I shouted, from the far side of the ice caves an hour or more later. “I think we can make it down!” The snow had eased, though the eternal wind blew as chill as ever, and a roseate haze brushed the lower reaches of the glacier with a promise of shelter.
Fyodorov had remained behind in the cave, in a flurry of wind-driven snowflakes, shapeless and small in his furs. I realised then he was watching me, making up his mind.
“Don’t be a fool, Nikolai Fyodorovich,” I called from the mouth of the cave. “The dynamite will blow any minute – this whole place could collapse. Iskander is behind us!”
Still he vacillated. “What if we’re wrong, Dmitry Mikhailovich? I can’t leave him! I can’t turn my back on all this! What keeps him alive? This is too precious to run from...” He threw the backpack of food to me across the cavern floor.
“Fyodorov!” I shouted. “He will kill you – or worse!”
Fyodorov shook his head. “Think of all the people who have ever lived, Dmitry Mikhailovich! Buried, underground. What if they are still alive, in some unspeakable way, like Iskander was in the sarcophagus? Lying in dark empty silence, waiting for some sacrifice...”
A huge shadow loomed out of the blizzard behind him. But Fyodorov did not see it, instead looking horrified in my direction. “Dmitry Mikhailovich – your arm!” he cried – then the shadow engulfed him.
There was a scream, broken off
by a thunderous explosion.
I was found, half-mad and covered in blood, wandering on the windswept pamir below the glaciers. I do not know how many days had passed. A Kirghiz shepherd took pity on me, and delivered me to the Badakhshani tribes who inhabit the villages on the Panj, the native name for the headwaters of the Oxus, here at the roof of the world.
It was many days again before I could think of what had happened.
How I wish now I had not given in to my eternal curiosity! How I wish we had left unsleeping that which should never awaken.
My mind wanders. There are periods of time where I have no memory – yet I have moved, eaten, acted, as though controlled by a baser brain. The wound on my arm which Fyodorov saw has healed, yet there is a greyness about the scar, a necrotic nigrescence which leaves me in little doubt.
I wonder if endless days of animal mindlessness await me? Perhaps I too will flee to the heights, to be the savage almas, the snowman of legend? Krepkin’s revolver lies on the table before me, but I do not know if I shall have the courage – or if some power will prevent me. I put this down as a warning; even if they entomb me alive in their forbidding fanes on the windswept glaciers – do not follow!
We have left the Garden, and are not meant to return.
***
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Nikolai Fyodorov, the modest founder of the Cosmist school and now widely regarded as the father of transhumanism, frequently visited his friend and colleague Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson during his tenure as district judge in Ashkabad. He enthusiastically proposed an expedition to the distant Pamir Mountains to seek “ancestral dust” in what he believed was the lost Garden of Eden, although he never made the journey himself. He died in 1903.
Henry
Glen Mehn
The crinkle around her eyes that cracks your heart each time you see it, when she smiles and the lines that appear around her mouth turn up, but you can’t tell her about them because, not that she’s vain, but she wouldn’t want to be reminded. Your wedding, the long lost friends there, the toast to your dead father that had you in tears. The Birthright trip to Israel. The politics that you couldn’t agree with, hiding the suffering and the wall. The sight of the scuffle at the border, four armed guards taking down one man, protesting an Arabic you could not speak, but his body language and tone of voice clear, begging “What have I done?”
The Book of the Dead Page 20