After another hour of pushing they had figured out where the mechanism that opened the chamber lay. Down into the dimness they went, Cindee cracking what Keith thought must be industrial strength glowsticks. The first thing they did was to find the interior mechanism that would let them back out. Once that was accomplished, they explored the chamber and quickly fetched up against objects in skin cases.
“We need to look at these,” Cindee murmured. “But before you say anything more about Talia, yes, later. Look, there’s another Pipali pictograph. You guys with the magic touch, start looking for another Open Sesame way down to the river, if there is a way. I want to sneak a look at these artifacts, since we kinda got interrupted at Gondrani.”
David and Keith moved around the chamber after failing to find anything near the Pipali drawing.
“This is just a storage room,” Cindee commented finally. “I’m guessing the Harappans kept things they needed for the original ceremonies down here.
“On the other hand, we’ve concluded that the objects related to the tablets are different from the ancient civilizations’ artifacts. They’re all later works, since the Guardian craftsmen were looking to preserve copies of the whole Scriptures, early in New Testament times. This does look like Harappan writing on some of these, though. Why would they use a language that was already lost? How could they even do that?”
“Maybe it got lost later,” Keith suggested. “Maybe they knew it all the way up to those times, but persecution kinda wiped out everyone who knew it after that.”
“Or, it could be like some of the Guardians are saying, that they were never languages, but some kind of code based on symbols, pointing to a need for a key,” Cindee added. “Now that we have artifacts like the Pipali statues, we might get keys from them. Maybe we’re ignoring something about the artifacts we already have, like Britomartis’s ax.”
“This is not helping us get down to the river,” David said. “I know this Golden Testament quest is important. Drew drilled it into my head before he agreed to hire me, that the mission was what mattered, but right now, all I can think about finding Evangel. There are no writings, no symbols, nothing on these walls besides that one petroglyph. If there was just some clue about how to get below this room …”
Chapter Sixty – Where Go the Boats?
Keith went back to staring at the Pipali etching. “Okay, the statues they had at Gondrani just had her standing, holding that light in her hands, or it was sitting at her feet. But the one up by the steps – it had the light as part of her headdress, right?”
“Yes,” Cindee agreed.
“And this one … It’s got the light behind her …” Keith squatted and stared some more. “Any chance the different positions of the lights could be clues to a direction? Say the one up there … the light is on her head because we had to go down, below the sunlight, to get in here. So if this one has the light behind her, maybe the passageway we’re looking for is in the floor. If I was lying on my face, the light would be behind me.”
Cindee and David joined Keith on the floor. Cindee handed out whisk brooms and glow sticks and they dusted and crept around. They moved the artifacts several times.
“Here!” Cindee crowed. All three of them dug and pulled at a ring set into the floor. It was attached to a smoothly-fitted square stone. David pushed them aside and pulled on the ring with all his strength. His veins stood out and sweat covered him, but the stone didn’t budge.
“Wait – stop!” Keith exclaimed. “I don’t think it’s a matter of strength.” He rubbed at the stone and found faint images carved into it. Pipali’s slender figure was repeated three times. She faced different directions and extended a hand outward.
“They’re damaged,” Cindee muttered. “I don’t see any kind of lamp.”
“Yeah, but think about it,” Keith said. “This was probably some kind of escape hatch. Anybody had to be able to get it open, or at least an ordinary person in a big hurry – not – you know, just somebody like him.” He jerked a shoulder in David’s direction. Cindee and David smiled.
“You’re right,” Cindee agreed. “There’s got to be another directional cue, or something else that makes it easier.”
Keith tried twisting the ring in different directions. The base did move by quarter-turns, clicking as it went. The clockwise direction seemed to offer much more resistance so he switched to counter-clockwise. After moving three clicks, he felt the base catch and the ring sank slightly. He tried clockwise, and this time it moved freely six clicks before the base dropped again. The ring was hard to grasp now. Keith’s fingers were too big to fit.
“Let me,” Cindee said. She slid her pinkie into the ring and maneuvered it counter-clockwise. Two clicks, and the base popped upward, along with the stone, lifting the whole assembly. David grabbed it and set it aside. All of them could hear rushing water below. They looked down into blackness. Even Cindee’s glow sticks didn’t give them a view.
“Here.” David produced a long, high-powered flashlight from a belt clip and shined it down. “It’s the river, all right,” he reported. “But it’s twenty feet down. If there’s a boat dock, or any way down, I don’t see it.”
“Probably whatever they had was made of wood, and disintegrated a couple of centuries ago,” Cindee sighed. “It even flows in the general direction of Gondrani. So Talia can never get to us this way. We have to get to her somehow.”
“We just need to get a boat down there,” Keith insisted.
“How?” David asked. “That opening is less that two feet square.”
“These people who lived here used this somehow,” Keith said. “We can use it somehow.”
“They used it when the river was twenty feet higher up, or out in the open,” David retorted.
Keith lurched to his feet and stared around the small room again. They had searched it down to the dust in the corners, for clues of any kind, but they hadn’t searched for …
“Look,” he said. “Here are some of those frameworks that look like ivory, just like the ones from Gondrani. But they’re just stacked, not set up.” He grabbed one and pulled it into ‘camp-stool’ position.
“No room to set them up here.” Cindee shrugged. “So what about them?”
Keith set the statue on the stack and fiddled with the frame and skin holder. He twisted it different ways until it snapped out of the camp stool mode into an L shape. He grabbed a second one, flipped it into the L shape, and set them flush against each other.
“They’ve got extra pegs and holes, and they snap together in different shapes,” David marveled, grabbing more frames. Cindee scrambled to get the artifacts and stack them out of the way as the two men rapidly connected frames until they had something about the size and shape of a coffin laid out on the floor.
“The skin stuff sticks together really well. Maybe it’s watertight.” Keith smoothed and pinched edges together. “Okay, this will still fit through the hole, right? Do we have any rope?”
Cindee nodded and pulled a coil from one of the supply sacks. Keith tied one end of the rope to the ring in the stone and the other end to the edge of a frame at one end of the improvised boat. David and Keith wrestled their creation through the hole and carefully let it drop down to the water. The current immediately tugged it downstream until the rope ran out.
David aimed his flashlight downward and they watched anxiously. “I can’t see for sure how much water it took on when we dropped it in,” he reported, “but it’s staying buoyant. We need to make one with a prow. Keep watching it to see if it lists or starts sinking, Luna.”
He and Keith quickly assembled another craft, this time more deliberately boat-shaped.
“Outriggers, maybe?” Keith suggested.
“Yes, and we can make two hulls and fasten them together below,” David agreed. They quickly finished assembling the new structures to the point where they were ready to go down the hole.
“Won’t we need paddles or poles?” Cindee asked. They looked
around the room again.
“Nothing comes to mind,” Keith said. “We need to see, and we need to avoid obstacles somehow. That current looks kind of fast.”
David grabbed three or four more frames, took them completely apart, and then snapped just the ivory-like shafts together. He was able to make two poles about twice the length of his arms, covering the ends to the middle with layers of skins wrapped thicker at the ends, somewhat like kayak paddles. “These should be some use to push off the walls or other obstacles, or maybe paddle if we have to. Any other flashlights, Cindee?”
“No, sorry. Lots of glow-sticks.” She dumped them out of a bag.
“Thread them around the top of the framework,” Keith said. “It’s something. Oh, yeah. The skin material tears with the grain,” he recalled. “We’ll need lashing material to tie the parts together.”
“I guess this is a bad time to say I get seasick,” Cindee muttered as she tore strips of skin and the two men finished the boat parts.
David embraced her. “I do too,” he confessed. “And airsick, in a fighter jet, no less. One time my flight crew gave me a case of barf bags. They swore it wasn’t a gag gift, but, really it was, you know. Come on.”
Keith and David ended up releasing their first experimental rectangle of skin and frames because they couldn’t control its awkward shape. They grunted and strained to get the outrigger and double hull parts down without losing them to the current. Lashing the parts together was exhausting and unending torture. David’s face was green from more than the glow sticks. They hadn’t even let Cindee come down yet, trying to spare her the worst of the rocking and dipping and almost-tipping-over episodes.
“Okay, Luna,” David called out in a ridiculously cheerful voice, considering they were both battered, beat, and he had just heaved over the side three times in rapid succession. “You’re going to have to jump. Make sure your rope is secure under your arms.”
Cindee tossed down their supply packs first. The men caught and stowed them. After that, she didn’t even seem to hesitate. She jumped in, clear of the boats, and David fished her out and hauled her in beside them.
“Welcome aboard the Luna,” David laughed, untying Cindee’s rope. He pulled out a combat knife and held it against the second one anchoring their boat to the ring up inside the storage room. “Anchors aweigh, Captain?”
“Yeah,” Keith said nervously. “I guess it’s time to answer the question, ‘Where go the boats?’”
Chapter Sixty-one –Air Pockets and Floatsam
How long it was before Talia experienced something besides numb limbs and bone-shattering pain, she didn’t know. Between hitting the water so far below and the buffeting from the explosion, she had no power to do anything but float and try to find an air pocket. But she had to keep shoving her shoulder against her head, smacking against the satellite headset, beating out the rhythm in Morse Code, A-L-I-V-E. It was rated waterproof but she doubted it would last long through all this.
The rain of rocks and dirt kept defeating her quest for something to breathe. She would undulate and flip her body, dolphin-like, limbs useless, toward a weak shaft of light, find a spot to gulp a single mouthful of air, and then choke and reel against mud and grit, bang her head against some unseen object a few times, and wobble off in search of another gulp of air.
More flailing and twisting, another precious air bubble … gasp … gulp … choke, bang-bang-bang …
“Move on or die.” The voice repeating in her head almost sounded like the Israeli female drill instructor she had trained under a few years back. Had that phrase been part of the training? She didn’t remember it, but it made sense. Move on or die.
Just as the rain of rocks seemed to slow, something new started agitating the water and pulling at her body. The numbness was fading a little, but oxygen was necessary to get her limbs working and it was a bigger problem to get than before, now that it was clear she was being pulled downward, away from where air was most likely to be found. A whirlpool sucked her in circles. She remembered assuring Keith she had been trained to hold her breath a long time. How long? Long enough, with nothing stored up? Not likely.
She tried to fight the pull but it was useless. Down and to the side she went, spinning, spinning. Her lungs burned and strained and the numbness was starting to creep back. One final hard whack of her whole body against a rock wall and she sucked in, unable to resist. Water filled her with cold, gritty silt, and a sense of doom.
Something bumped against her, a floating thing, and she grabbed onto it to pull herself upward. Finally she found air. Now she just had to cough out all the water and garbage she’d inhaled and breathing would again be possible. Her head felt like another explosion had gone off before this process had progressed far enough that breathing did her any good. She lay half-in-half-out of the soup-thick, silt-saturated water on a rock ledge, still clutching whatever had allowed her to drag herself back to life.
“Oh, God.” Jiggly’s arm lay in her death-grip. He had somehow snagged on a spar of rock made jagged by the explosion, and they both lay on what was left of the beautiful pavilion at the opening of the tunnel. Talia made her hand release the limp arm and she scuttled back from Jiggly. Her joints protested and she collapsed again, content to just breathe for a few moments.
Something made her take another look at Jiggly. She could see a little red running from his shoulder wound. Do dead people bleed? She couldn’t remember. Her legs and arms still alternated between rubbery paralysis and spastic jerking. She had heard nothing for the longest time, and prayed the deafness was temporary, from the shock of the explosion. So when she finally got back up next to Jiggly, all she could do was lay her head on his chest to see if he breathed. No vibrations. No rise and fall. But his eyes are shut. Aren’t dead people’s eyes always open, except in movies?
Another movie scenario popped into her head. Somebody comically waking up from near death and worrying or complaining about being kissed. Kissed. Mouth-to-mouth. Jiggly. Can I? Is there any chance he’s …?
“God, I need help, if I’m going to give Jiggly mouth-to-mouth. I need … I need You to make me do it, and I need it to work.”
Talia was saying the words out loud, but couldn’t hear them, and wondered if she was whispering or shouting. Then she wondered why it would matter. Help me. She flexed more numbness out of herself and got into a crouch. Her fingers wouldn’t cup or pinch or do anything right at first. It’s been too long. He’s dead. He was dead when he fell off the cliff. Look at the bruises … the broken places … Why are you even trying?
“I haven’t got enough faith to believe God can bring you back from the dead, Jiggly,” she said to the unresponsive form after she finally managed to get the first set of breaths into him. “But I think you saved my life, so I need to try to save yours.”
No more doing chest compressions, the EMTs say. They said it does more harm than good. Thank God. I have no strength for that. None. She pushed more breaths in, watching Jiggly’s skinny chest inflate. And that was when the volley of muddy water shot out of his mouth and almost went down her throat.
“Ooohh!” She pushed his head over to the side and he convulsed and curled up into a ball, making horrible faces. One of his arms didn’t seem to work at all, the one with the shoulder wound, and he jerked when he landed on that side. Talia pulled him over in the other direction but it wasn’t as if there was any comfortable spot on the broken-up pavilion. A thought occurred to her and she staggered drunkenly up on her feet and into the tunnel.
The room from which they had taken the tablets stood almost undisturbed. They had only taken a couple of the frames along as examples, and the rest, plus a small pile of extra amphibian skins, lay on shelves. Talia grabbed an armload, no small task with her slowly-recovering ability to actually make her body obey her. She made her best possible speed back to Jiggly and tried to pad the rocks beneath him. She could tell he was in severe pain, even without being able to hear him.
She search
ed her sodden backpack, a scaled-down version of the Doomsday Duffel bag. She found her first aid supplies, double-bagged in plastic. The outer bag had shredded but most of the things inside were still dry. She shoved pain medicine into Jiggly’s mouth along with a swallow from the only bottle of water that hadn’t burst. He choked again but she tipped and massaged and got him to swallow. She poured as much disinfectant into the bullet hole as she dared and padded the shoulder wound with all the gauze she had.
He curled up again and she sagged back. She wanted to shove all the rest of the pills down her own throat, just to stop the muscle cramps and jolts of pain. She didn’t even try to examine herself for broken bones, assuming since she could walk and use her hands the feelings were mostly shock and maybe some torn ligaments. She knew she had to stay alert to help Jiggly until help came for them both. If it was coming. The satellite headset was gone, apparently sucked away by the whirlpool. So was her cell phone.
After a while she stumbled to the edge of the shattered pavilion and looked up. Stunned, she stared at the crazed boulders and sheets of rock leaning against each other, almost covering the mouth of the well. No helicopter could come down that way. Not even a climber. It could collapse at any time.
“I have to move Jiggly back, farther inside. I have to do it now.” Tremors shook her, and it took her a full minutes to realize it wasn’t more muscle weakness. Earthquake. She crouched and dragged at the skins under Jiggly’s body. Finally he started moving, spasms indicating how much she must be hurting him. But she had no choice. The collapsing rocks fascinated her as they fell downward, making no sound. But dragging Jiggly took too much concentration. At long last she rounded the corner into the tablet room and stopped dragging Jiggly. Consciousness fled.
The Great Thirst Boxed Set Page 36