by Jon Jacks
Yet unlike Sis, the body encased in this casket was now far from motionless.
The layers of shroud were beginning to be carelessly cast aside.
A great many in the crowd gasped in a mingling of terror and awe as the shrouded body sat up in the casket.
On the orders of the guard’s commander, a small number of the soldiers stepped forward to help lift the shrouded figure from the casket, while another two of them quickly tore and cut away at the shrouded folds encasing the feet.
Even as the tightly swathed body was reverently placed upright on his feet upon the floor, a great deal of the shroud was already falling aside, the guards helping to remove the layers as they fell about the figure now being ever-so swiftly revealed.
It was a man who still bore the signs of a wound to his chest, even though it was now almost fully healed, like the injuries to his hands and feet that were now little more than purple blemishes.
He looked to Lil to be a very similar man to the one she had seen raised upon the cross, his slim, bony build being exactly the same: but naturally, there was now a vast difference to the man standing alive before them, for he was chiefly formed of the major parts of a lion.
*
Chapter 28
A heavenly music played, as if coming directly from the heavens themselves, for Lil could see no one around the room who could be singing it.
The crowd cheered or gasped in sheer wonderment, the latter formed purely from the humans attending, who had obviously witnessed nothing in any way similar to this before.
Lil was expecting the guard’s commander to invite any doubters to step forward and inspect the risen god – for that, of course, was how Frenda had seemed to describe the procedures – but instead the king himself reverently approached, kneeling before this lion-man who looked so much like himself.
The lion-god placed what passed for his two hands upon the king’s bowed head.
When he spoke, his voice was booming and powerful.
‘As through the right and the fixed laws of heaven, and the orders bright, I decree that you be exalted to such power as our princes, and hereby prevent all reply and opinion ranged against you; for you are answerable only to me.’
As he intoned the rite, he raised a hand to take down from his own head the strange crown that he had worn while carrying his cross, one of thorns rather than of gold, of berries rather than rubies.
He placed this now upon the head of the king, a sign for the newly-crowned ruler to rise to his feet and turn to his exuberantly rejoicing people.
The most nervous of the people the king stepped back amongst were those who hesitated as they prepared to slap him triumphantly upon his back, then thought better of it. No doubt, Lil reasoned, these were old friends of the new king who now recognised that everything had changed between them.
The commander of the guard had now invited any doubters to step forward towards the risen god, to check for themselves that this was indeed the same man they had seen flagellated, crucified and killed: but there were few doubters left amongst the crowd, with even the single man who stepped forward seemingly doing so only because he wished to draw closer to his god.
The loud crack, the sound of a tree split asunder in a storm, reverberated around what was, after all, a relatively small room.
There was a brief shocked silence, then cries of horror.
The lion god pitched forward, a large hole in the middle of his head streaming with fresh blood.
*
‘So much for your resurrected god!’ Sis scoffed, contemptuously tossing aside the strange stick that spat small arrows.
*
Chapter 29
‘Sis!’
Lil ecstatically ran towards her friend, finding it hard to believe – despite everything she knew about Sis! – that she was back, that she was alive.
Sis’s hair sprang out towards Lil, the strands instantly curling about her waist, hoisting her high as if about to dash her to the ground. The hair still smelt of, was still ingrained with, the soil that Sis had only recently been buried in.
Had this burial turned Sis against her?
The whole crowd, of course, was against Sis: like a wave in a great storm, it turned and surged forward towards her.
Sis remained where she was.
Her hair once again whipped out everywhere about her, spreading like a rapidly growing, alien ivy. It tore off heads, pulled whole bodies apart, sliced and severed, speared and skewered.
And, Lil realised with relief, she was being cradled safely above it all.
Magical sticks cracked, this time aimed directly at Sis. But her body absorbed then instantly rejected the crude missiles, spitting them out nonchalantly. Her armour was already slipping into place everywhere about her, transforming her into a glistening jewel of sapphire and emerald.
The soldiers in their strange armour hacked uselessly at the tendrils of hair with their heavy swords. The steel plates of armour rippled noisily as their wearers died.
Sis left alone those hysterically weeping over the death of their god, including the king.
*
‘You were dead; I saw you!’
To keep us with Sis’s faster pace, Lil had to break into a trot now that she had been safely lowered to the ground.
‘You saw and believed in the resurrection of their god: so why do you need an explanation from me?’
‘Because…you’re my friend: not my god.’
As they walked, the resistance to their passage was sporadic, lacking any coordination now that they were far outside the complex. Even so, as if it were an army of irresistible serpents, Sis’s hair continued to strike out at anything that might present any danger to them.
Now the writhing hair pulled apart whole structures, ripped asunder large machines, the sparking of electricity, the spilling of fuel, causing explosions and fires to add to this scene of complete mayhem.
No, not complete mayhem: for Memesis walked through it all as if out for a stroll.
‘Then as a friend, I ask you to wait a little longer for explanations; I have an urgent appointment to keep.’
‘Appointment?’
Lil was so shocked she briefly halted before having to push herself into yet another quick trot.
‘With the Devil?’ she asked incredulously, recalling Sis’s original intention to search for and defeat the person she held responsible for man’s cruelty. ‘Sis, this isn’t Naseby! We have to rescue the children who–’
‘I know that he’s here: I can feel that he’s here,’ Sis insisted.
‘It’s not Naseby!’ a frustrated Lil persisted ‘It’s a place called MassBay: short for Massachusetts Bay!’
Sis ignored her, striding on across the tumbled landscape of overgrown ruins.
‘My mother says it’s here: the place where it all ends!’
*
Chapter 30
‘You’re mother?’
Lil was more taken aback than ever.
‘You never mentioned your mother: I never knew you had a mother!’
‘Just because we’re friends doesn’t mean you know everything about me.’
‘I don’t know anything about you!’
‘Then there you are; don’t presume I don’t have a mother.’
‘Okay, okay; but, then you never said that you still knew your mother!’
‘That’s what all this is about,’ Sis replied bluntly, indicating the heavily scarred landscape surrounding them. ‘She’s hurting badly; she’s been hurting badly for too long – and all this is the reason, I see that now.’
She glanced over her shoulder, briefly taking in the wrecked and burning complex.
‘The power being used here, it’s not all recovered materials,’ Sis continued, purposely striding out across the rolling earth once more. ‘That’s why Mother’s still hurting, why the drills are still probing so, so deeply into her!’
‘The earth?’ Lil asked uncertainly, trying to work out what Sis might
mean by her apparently increasingly crazed declarations. ‘You’re saying the earth is your mother?’
Even as she asked the question, Lil remained unsure if even she herself was speaking metaphorically or not.
‘I’d lost my connection with her, my close connection, don’t you see?’ Sis stated assuredly. ‘Mother knows now that it all comes back only to here, all those power lines, so deep underground: that’s why she’s been leading me here along.’
She halted abruptly.
She pointed, out towards a lone, dark figure languidly making his way towards them across the barren land.
‘See, he’s here!’ she hissed. ‘The Devil!’
*
Chapter 31
Lil stared at the approaching figure, assuming that there could only be some mistake; this couldn’t be the Devil!
He was dressed all in black. He wore a strange, equally back hat, one that sat tightly across the top of his head and added to what appeared to be an already impressive height.
He carried a stick, one he used to tap the ground and rocks before him, as if blind.
Sis cried out to him.
‘Tell me: are you the Devil?’
The oncoming man chuckled gruffly.
‘Indeed, I have referred to myself as such!’
*
As the dark figure drew closer, he looked less like a devil and more like a strangely garbed if incredibly slender man.
He even smiled a little as he tipped his strange, tall hat in greeting.
Despite the presence of his stick, he did not appear to be blind after all.
He frowned as he observed the looks of displeasure on the two girls.
‘Oh dear – I would hope I don’t really have the appearance of the Devil, my dears! I was speaking only in terms of my work.’
‘Then why did you say you were the Devil?’ demanded Lil.
‘The overthrowing of a king necessitates placing yourself in a dilemma of your own making: how is that you yourself are not so easily overthrown unless you take on for yourself all the god-granted majesty he had unjustly claimed for himself?’
‘The king who was supported by the Devil?’ Sis asked, curiously observing this unexpectedly polite man. ‘You overthrew him?’
‘Helped only: but yes, I thoroughly supported his usurpation. But then found that one devil is merely replaced by another, for that seems to be the nature of kingship.’
‘Milton?’ Lil eyed him doubtfully. ‘You’re John Milton?’
‘Of course,’ he replied with a grin, once again gallantly tipping the hat he had replaced back on his head.
‘But…you’re dead!’ Sis blurted out in uncharacteristic bewilderment.
‘And so were you, my dear,’ Milton replied jovially. ‘So were you!’
*
Chapter 32
‘In the book…it said you were blind.’
Lil glanced at the stick the man had originally seemed to need as he had first approached.
‘Ah, yes: the book!’ Milton said brightly. Glancing at the stick he held, almost as if suddenly made aware of it, he added every bit as light heartedly, ‘And yes – the stick too. Not that I need it anymore of course; just force of habit, tapping it away so noisily in front of me like that!’
‘Then you were blind; but now you’re not,’ Sis stated in a way that proclaimed she was expecting a more detailed answer than the one already given.
‘It’s hardly a condition I would wish to be resurrected with, is it my dear?’
‘Resurrected? So you’ve also…been reborn?’
Milton glanced happily about him, lifting his head as he luxuriated in breathing in the air.
‘Yes, yes: marvellous, isn’t it? Of course, I always believed it must be possible – but it is so gratifying to see that it is, indeed, possible! – if only, unfortunately for just a chosen few of us: and probably briefly at that, I now suspect.’
‘Do you have to talk in endless riddles?’ Sis demanded, more exhausted by Milton’s avoidance of direct answers than any fight she might have been expecting.
‘Surely you can’t expect everything to be explained in nothing but a few, sparse sentences? Let’s start – let’s go back to – my book: the one you mentioned. For that, of course, is the reason for my rebirth. And so I must naturally thank you for bringing it back to everyone’s attention!’
‘They didn’t realise you were a real person,’ said Lil, recalling the king’s explanation for their interest in the book. ‘They thought this project had been simply named after a place.’
Milton nodded.
‘It seems the creators of this endeavour knew they were playing god; perhaps even usurping his divined order – granting ourselves the right to pull down even heaven itself!’
‘But the gods: what would be their response to this rebellion against nature?’ Sis asked expressionlessly.
Milton observed her with a wry grin.
‘Well, as we know; that is where you come in, isn’t it my dear?’
*
‘Me?’
Sis appeared to be genuinely surprised by Milton’s mildly delivered accusation.
‘I didn’t know anything bout this “project”!’ she insisted vehemently.
‘Ah, but your mother, now,’ Milton said, ‘she began to see the connections to this great scheme of man’s, didn’t she?’
‘Not at first: then there were so many uncountable lines of power that man had buried beneath my mother’s skin. She knew only that she was dying. Yet worst of all was the deepest drilling, aiming for her heart – and yet that drilling continued even when man had been brought so low he no longer had any need for such power.’
‘And so you were brought to life by your mother, correct? To be a more precise instrument of destruction?’
Sis gave a nod in response to Milton’s declaration.
‘Man has his antibodies to fight disease: Mother needed hers.’
‘And so your mother took a seed from an apple that had fallen from one of her dying trees: and from that seed there sprouted a daughter of the elements who would take up her scourge and avenge her.’
Lil stared disbelievingly at Sis.
Was Milton seriously claiming that she wasn’t flesh and blood? That she was something other, maybe even plant-like?
If that was the case, no wonder Sis had been reborn once she had been buried in the earth, her mother.
There was a sudden snorting, a disturbance of rocks and rubble, over to their right.
Lil stared in horror. A gigantic serpent was rapidly making its way towards them, one that glittered entirely black as it snaked its way between and across the surrounding hillocks
‘Ah, the serpent is here, ‘Milton said calmly.
*
Chapter 33
The monster slowed then stopped right by them, giving a final snort of smoke, of roaring flames.
Its eyes glowed, the illumination of a bright light deep inside them
And within that eye, Lil saw a man.
This time, it wasn’t a bear-man, as she had seen within the eye of the dragon. It was a man free of any animal metamorphosis.
It was, in fact, a man she recognised.
For it was the man she had witnessed being tortured, raised upon his cross, and speared.
A man she had already seen killed twice.
*
Just below the eye, a part of the serpent’s scaly side shivered, then slid aside.
It was a door, revealing the metallic interior. A man stepped out, the same man: tall, handsome, bearded and with long, flowing hair.
And yet this same man was still standing by the eye-like window.
They could have been twins; only then a third and even a fourth man stepped out of the serpent’s insides, all of them differing in no way that Lil could see.
Sis apparently saw no need to fear them, for her armour had vanished once more, replaced now by a silken gown of butterfly-wings.
‘You can all
come with us,’ one of the men stated kindly. ‘And everything will be explained.’
*
The ‘serpent’ slithered unusually quickly over the difficult terrain. The many wheels of each linked carriage were tracked with metal plates that effortlessly crushed any object seeking to cause an obstacle to its progress.
It took them – Sis, Lil and Milton – towards yet another remarkably intact building excavated from the many layers of soil that had subsumed the Golden Age.
‘Clones,’ Milton explained, noting the confusion on Lil’s face as she took in that everybody aboard this train looked exactly the same. ‘Taking a small part of a man or animal, you can replicate him many times, perhaps even blending them together if you’re skilled enough; or even, as in my case, bring someone long dead back to life.’
‘But why?’ Lil asked. ‘Why would anyone need to replicate the same man over and over? How is that an improvement?’
‘And why this particular man?’ Sis added.
‘The improvement was sought through collecting the biological plans – the DNA – of famous people and their descendants: for it was discovered that this DNA was not only a memory of the physical person, but also stored their every thought, their every idea! Think how wonderful it would be to access the thoughts of people long dead! Unfortunately, my own memories lay languishing in this great library until your book set in motion a search.’
‘But why this man,’ Lil asked, repeating Sis’s question once again as she nodded towards the clones efficiently going about their business within the train’s interior. ‘Why repeat him?’
‘We are all connected, in our way, linking back to our own mother, who is naturally attuned to the vibrations of our DNA: yet even she finds it easier to establish that contact through a mind whose workings she has become used and attuned to.’
‘Your mother?’
Sis sounded incredulous.
‘Yes, yes, of course; who else do you think you are about to meet? We all have a mother, my dear!’