The Lost Prophecies

by The Medieval Murderers

  Tonight he would send Parvati Karam his first e-mail. He had already done a genuine search on genealogical sites to find her, in case somehow she retraced his steps on her computer.

  There were demonstrators at Birmingham airport; the few airports left in the world had permanent pickets. Shiva, watching the banners beyond the fenced-off enclosure, could understand their anger. Most agreed that the explosion of air travel in the years before the Catastrophe had hastened the warming. Now it was strictly rationed, limited mostly to politicians and diplomats who needed to travel to the Tasman Islands or Patagonia, and the scientists monitoring Antarctica. One could not get to the southern hemisphere by boat, for like the land the tropical seas were too hot for human survival. Luggage was limited on the plane; there had been no question of bringing his statue.

  He entered the little airport building. It was hot and muggy outside and worse indoors. As he waited to be searched he looked through the far window. The plane was sitting on the tarmac. It seemed a small and fragile thing to take him so far. He looked around at the other passengers, mostly middle-aged and prosperous-looking.

  When they took off and Shiva looked through the window, he felt the clutch of fear in his stomach they had warned him about. The world was spinning away, the city transformed into a patchwork of miniature houses in a sea of green.

  ‘First time?’ the passenger next to him asked sympathetically. He was a spare man with a grey beard, dressed less formally than most of the other passengers, a jacket over a white kaftan. ‘It’s a bit disorientating. At first.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose it’s a privilege, an experience.’

  ‘I’ve done it nine times. It’ll get boring. The refuelling stop in Tibet will come as a relief.’ The man sounded weary. ‘I’m a hydrologist, going to have another look at the Antarctic icecap. I’ll be taking a second flight down from Dunedin.’ He smiled sadly. ‘It’s hard on my wife and children.’

  ‘Are they in England?’

  ‘Leeds. Name’s Bill Allen, by the way.’

  ‘Shiva Moorthy. I’m a diplomat. Joining the embassy at Dunedin. Cultural attaché.’

  ‘Long posting?’

  ‘Couple of years.’ He changed the subject. ‘I hear the Antarctic rivers are still rising.’

  Allen nodded. ‘Inevitable now the icecap’s melting faster – its area’s a fifth of what it was. It’ll be gone in a few decades, and then the sea will stabilize at last. But as the seas warm up down there, the heat’s releasing more methane from the seabed, like we had in the north last century.’ He looked at Shiva seriously. ‘We’re still not safe.’

  ‘Will we ever be?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The scientist paused. ‘I saw a methane eruption from the air once, miles of sea frothing and bubbling, even burning in places, throwing all that stuff up into the atmosphere.’

  They talked a little more, about Antarctica and Dr Allen’s family and Shiva’s fictional job. Shiva used the scientist as a practice run for the story he would tell Parvati Karam, and related his fictional background in the civil service. After a while Dr Allen said there were papers he must study and left Shiva to look out of the window. They passed high over the fields of Germany, through a brief interlude of scrub, then into the great brown desert. Endless stony plains and mountains, the dried-up Danube and its tributaries visible as dry veins and arteries. He saw the jumble of an abandoned city beside it – Budapest, perhaps. Already it was hard to believe there were once great cities here. In time, as they crumbled away, perhaps people would forget they ever existed. He turned away.

  Dr Allen had fallen asleep over his papers. Shiva reached into the bag he carried on his lap and brought out his copy of the Black Book. He had studied it carefully over the last few weeks, reading through the verses of prophecy. In the original book, which had been carbon dated to the seventh century, the verses had been in Latin. He was surprised that they still rhymed in English; surely the translator must have interfered with the verses’ meaning. Most of the prophecies related to events in medieval and Stuart England, and all of them, the believers said, had come true. The verses seemed to Shiva to be no more precise than the rambling incoherences of the Book of Revelation, which he had read as part of his preparation. He read once more the final verse of the Black Book, which the Shining Light people said applied to the present day:

  Five hundred thirty years, then God returns to save

  His chosen, once the sinful have been purged.

  Their wicked cities flayed by burning sun and drowned in

  purging flood,

  And at the end a sun-bright fire of blood.

  When it was first discovered, the book had been no more than a curiosity, until the Shining Light Movement had declared that the earlier prophecies coincided with real events, and that this showed that the book had been inspired by God. And this year, 2135, was five hundred and thirty years since the Gunpowder Plot that was the subject of the previous prophecy.

  ‘And at the end a sun-bright fire of blood.’ It sounded like a nuclear holocaust. But as Commissioner Williams had said, there was no nuclear power in the Tasman Islands – old arsenals enough in the north, but none down there and no way of getting nuclear equipment. The only physical communication with the north was flights like this one, every passenger rigorously searched – but for explosives, not books, which was how Parvati Karam had got away with the original Black Book. The Shining Light Movement firmly believed that the world would end this year but claimed not to know exactly how. That would be for God to reveal. But then why recruit these scientists and engineers? What were they planning? Shiva looked down at the cover of the book.

  They were over blue water now, the plane casting a tiny shadow on the sea. There was an island in the distance – the Crimea, an isolated desert crag in the centre of the vastly extended Black Sea. Shiva returned his copy of the book to his bag. He thought about the religious dogma he had had to read about in these last weeks. In the years before the Catastrophe, fanaticism had been everywhere, in Islam and Christianity and Hinduism and in a secular faith too: the blind belief in pseudo-scientific free-market theories that had succeeded Communism. The globalizers had believed in endless growth, that in some mystic way technologies to defeat global warming would appear. Like Marx, they had talked of the inevitable destiny of mankind. Their dogmas, like their world, were dead now, and they were hated for the blindness their ideas had brought. Humanity was tired of faith; the world today was a practical place; it had to be if humanity was to survive. But now Shiva wondered whether perhaps that practicality was only skin deep, perhaps always had been, the urge for the simplicities of faith always ready to surface. Outside, the colours changed, from blue sea to the grey moonscape of the Caucasus.

  The face of the murdered old watchman came to Shiva’s mind. He had been a breadwinner, supporting two grandchildren in a crumbling Birmingham terrace. His life had been snuffed out like an ant’s. Shiva promised himself that whatever else transpired in the Tasmans he would see Parvati Karam arrested and tried for his murder.

  It was getting dark when they landed to refuel in Tibet, on the airstrip that had once served Lhasa. Here, at the southern end of the vast desert that stretched to the Chinese settlements in Siberia, a group of guards drawn from all over the world kept permanent watch over stores of aircraft fuel. Ten years ago a group of eco-warriors had got on to a scheduled flight and had managed to blow up the fuel dump. Nowadays the passengers were herded into a secure outbuilding while the plane refuelled.

  Walking from the aircraft to the building, Shiva was amazed by the clearness and coldness of the air. In the distance, between a dried-out riverbed and huge mountains, he saw the ghostly jumble of deserted Lhasa and, above it, the old Potala Palace, tier upon tier of empty windows. He felt a sense of wonder at the journey he was making and was conscious of the huge distance he was from England, from all that he knew. The sun set behind the mountains, and the long shadows merged into darkness.

  �
�Amazing sight, isn’t it?’ Dr Allen whispered beside him. ‘Makes me want to cry when I think what we’ve lost. Better hurry up,’ he continued gruffly. ‘Don’t want to catch a chill.’

  The concrete building where they waited was another relic, faded pictures of drowned Chinese landscapes lining the walls. They sat on wooden benches, and a group of guards distributed rugs and bowls of soup.

  ‘I didn’t know it could be so cold anywhere,’ Shiva remarked.

  ‘We’re very high. Over three and a half thousand metres. Makes some people ill. I don’t envy the guards. A ghost city and no one else within two thousand miles.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And we fly south over India next. The great jungles, all the new plants.’ Enthusiasm entered Dr Allen’s voice. ‘Tree ferns two hundred feet high, huge sprouting flowers we don’t even know the names of. The plants have adapted to the heat faster than anyone could have guessed. Pity it’s too hot down there to do any proper scientific surveys.’

  ‘What about animals?’

  Dr Allen shrugged. ‘People say there are big creatures down there. They see the trees move from the air. God knows what they are. Some people say there are even people on the Himalayan slopes.’

  ‘Survivors?’ Shiva asked eagerly. ‘From India?’

  The scientist looked embarrassed, no doubt making the connection to Shiva’s ancestry. ‘It’s just that some pilots flying over thought they saw smoke rising from the jungle, like campfires. On the upper slopes it’s not too hot for people to live. But condensation often rises from forests when they warm up in the mornings. It could be people, though, it could be. One day when things are more settled we’ll go down there and find out.’ He smiled uneasily. ‘We’re lucky in a way: we have a whole new world to explore.’

  ‘Yes.’ Shiva thought of people who looked like him, perhaps living a Stone Age life down there, cut off. If the Black Book was right, before the year’s end God would kill the lot of them.

  ‘What are the Tasman Islands like?’ Shiva asked.

  Dr Allen laughed. ‘Prosperous. Busy. Old-fashioned. Very like the old world in a lot of ways. Dunedin’s pretty, nice view out across the bay.’

  ‘I hear they’ve got a big fundamentalist movement,’ Shiva said neutrally. ‘Gets a lot of votes in the elections.’

  ‘Less than they did, thank goodness. Maniacs.’

  They talked a little about the scientist’s work, then he went to sleep again in his chair. Shiva looked out at the huge old palace, grey in the moonlight, high jagged mountains rising behind. He thought of the most recent message he had received from Parvati Karam: ‘Look forward to meeting you on Thursday. Mackenzie’s Café, George Street, Dunedin. 2.30.’

  He thought of Alice, who had given him the radiation ring. It was two years since they had parted. She had loved him but he hadn’t loved her back, or not enough. He often disappeared for weeks at a time because of his work, but she was always waiting for him on his return. There was something smothering in her devotion and in the old-fashioned way in which she wanted him, as the man, to decide and initiate things, even their lovemaking. Shiva hadn’t wanted that sort of power himself. Strange, though, that it was always leaders – people who wanted or wielded power – to whom he had been drawn since school, mixed in somehow with a desire to bring them down, show their feet were made of clay. Like Marwood. He saw the fraudster’s face again, heard him cry out that he was innocent. The case had affected him more than any other. There had been something in the way the man actually believed his own lies that had made Shiva ashamed to deceive him. Marwood had been generous, had desired affection. Yet that did not make him any less wicked than any of the fraudsters he had brought to justice over the last ten years. Marwood had deceived farmers who were trying to scratch a living from thin mountain soils, surviving on the edge.

  He felt a similar unease about Parvati Karam, about using their own shared heritage to deceive her. He shook his head. These qualms didn’t make sense in moral terms. He was just tired. Tired to the bone, he realized. He had spent sixteen years in the police, twelve in the fraud department. It was time to leave, he thought; he needed to change his life. But where would he go? An inspector he knew had retired early and gone to work in the refugee camps; a number of people did. But he didn’t want to do that. He wasn’t built for it, apart from anything else. He looked at his hands, thin and bony. His parents had called them Brahmin’s hands, though they weren’t Brahmins. A boy at school had once called them girl’s hands. He could kill a man with them if he had to; he had been trained to do so long ago. That ability, though, was about knowledge of anatomy and lines of force, not strength. He leaned back in his chair and slept, a deep and dreamless sleep until a guard shook him awake. The guard was tall and stocky, with high cheekbones and slanting Asiatic eyes. ‘Time to get back on board, sir.’

  It was still dark when they flew over India, so Shiva saw nothing. There was turbulence that the pilot said was tropical storms below. He slept again and awoke, eyes sore, to find they had crossed the Indian Ocean and were above a red desert stretching endlessly to the horizon. Australia, once partly inhabited but now the hottest desert in the world. A few hours now and they would be there.

  In his mind he reviewed his correspondence with Parvati. He had started with a tentative e-mail saying he had found they were distantly related. Her reply, his first words from her, had been equally tentative, but he fostered the correspondence, feeding her information about his family, a mixture of truth and invention. When he had said he was coming to work in Dunedin, where she lived, she had said that was a coincidence. Shiva had wondered whether there might be any underlying suspicion there but decided it was imagination. He sensed an underlying keenness to meet him. When he gave her the date of his flight, her next reply had been enthusiastic, asking about his life in England. She said her own was dull: ‘I work long hours, boring computer stuff for the government, but I have a nice house overlooking Victoria Bay and the islands. Work for my church takes up my leisure time.’ She suggested they meet in a café near the EU embassy once Shiva had settled in.

  His first meeting with Alice had been in a café, set up through a dating site. He recalled sitting in the little café, batting off mosquitoes, sweating because it was just before the monsoon, annoyed that the pretty white girl opposite him looked quite cool. He wondered where she was now.

  The engine note changed, the front of the plane tipping slightly forward. Dr Allen leaned across Shiva to look out of the window. ‘That’s Dunedin,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Nearly there.’

  Below, Shiva saw a coastline. The plane circled lower, and for the first time since passing over Germany he saw a green, cultivated landscape, little fields marching up hillsides, mountains in the distance. Then, once more, houses again, perched above a bay with islands beyond. Humanity, clinging determinedly to its last fragments of the earth.

  III

  The old city of Dunedin lay beneath the waves, and a new town had been built on the hills behind. Most of New Zealand’s mountainous South Island had survived, though the Canterbury Plains were gone. As the bus from the airport drove into town, Shiva saw rows of colourful earthhouses with elaborately carved wooden frontages. It was the gardens that amazed him, full of roses and flame trees and carefully cultivated palms. In Europe there were few gardens, only endless vegetable plots. But the Tasman Islands were the richest nation in the world, with plentiful hydroelectric power, large areas of mountain land that was potentially fertile but had never been cultivated, and a homogeneous, highly educated population. As he watched the healthy-looking people, many wearing shirts rather than kaftans, their long hair often braided into elaborate designs, Shiva wondered how such a people could have turned to an organization like the Shining Light Movement in substantial numbers.

  The bus dropped him in the town centre, near the embassy. Dunedin was built around a large eight-sided roundabout called the Octagon, a reconstruction of the one that had existed in the old
city, and Shiva took a road named George Street. The new town had re-created the design of the old, just as the original Scottish colonists three centuries before had named the streets after those of Edinburgh. It was midday, but the heat was bearable. A cool breeze wafted up from the sea, whipping up dust. In England at this time of day, people would be hot and sticky, searching out vestiges of shade, but here they walked about in the sun, relaxed-looking. Shiva carried his luggage to the embassy, which stood in a street of four-storey wooden official buildings, rising high above the one- and two-storey earthhouses in the surrounding streets. The doorpost was elaborately carved with what Shiva guessed were Maori carvings, intricate designs surrounding grimacing faces.

  He was taken to a room on the third floor, a large room with a wall of windows overlooking a sea dotted with little islands. The embassy intelligence officer was a dapper man in his forties, immaculately dressed in a dark suit and high-collared white shirt. He wore black-leather shoes, polished so they shone. Shiva knew his name was Rodriguez. He rose from behind a large desk, where papers stood in neat piles, and shook Shiva’s hand, his grip dry and strong. On the wall behind him was a map of the Tasman Islands; Tasmania and the South Island of New Zealand relatively little changed from their old coastline except that the North Island was now split into two. Above Tasmania, a corner of Australia showed at the edge of the map, the endless desert coloured orange in contrast to the green shading of the Tasman Islands.

  Rodriguez poured Shiva a glass of fruit juice and invited him to sit down. ‘You look tired,’ he said in a strong Spanish accent. His own eyes looked deceptively sleepy.

  ‘Yes, sir. My body thinks it’s the middle of the night.’

  ‘Flying is not a natural way to travel. Once was enough for me.’ He smiled, showing white teeth. ‘We have a small house for you a few streets away. You can get some rest soon.’

  Shiva noticed that though Rodriguez’ tones were formal, he did not use the clipped speech of the official classes at home. Was that only an English affectation? He had never been abroad, so he didn’t know.