Entangled

by Graham Hancock

  ‘Two similar yet fundamentally different species of fully conscious humans evolved in parallel,’ the Angel commented. ‘Cro-Magnon is a name given by scholars to one – the anatomically modern humans who are your own direct ancestors. Though there were mystics and visionaries amongst them, many fell deeply into the physical plane and in time they forgot they were also beings of spirit. For them matter became everything. Evil angels mingled with them, and drew them towards wickedness …’

  ‘Evil angels?’ Leoni asked.

  ‘Demons, if you prefer.’

  ‘Like Sulpa?’

  ‘Yes. Sulpa is a demon, and one of my own kind, a being of intelligent, conscious, non-physical energy. But his purpose – his only purpose – is to magnify evil and send his malevolent presence out into all times and across all universes. The more pure and innocent the good he destroys, the more horror and pain he inflicts in the process, the more his own power grows. That is why he hungers for the Neanderthals.’

  ‘The Neanderthals? I saw a story about them on Discovery Channel. Aren’t they supposed to have been stupid? And my kind of humans wiped them out?’

  ‘It’s true that the Neanderthals were less materially competent than the Cro-Magnons. In fact, they cared nothing for wealth and possessions. But they were highly evolved spiritual beings and they carried within them a quality of pure, innocent goodness that warmed the Totality. Their goodness was power, Leoni, raw cosmic power, but they used it only for healing, to communicate telepathically with one another, to live in harmony with the Earth, leaving almost no mark. Your species found them ugly, but beauty and truth shone forth from them like a beacon.’

  ‘I’m not surprised we wiped them out then,’ said Leoni. ‘We can’t stand too much beauty and truth.’

  ‘Well, now we approach the heart of the matter,’ said the Angel. ‘Because it is not at all certain you did wipe them out. Your scholars only know that the last population of Neanderthals survived in Spain until twenty-four thousand years ago and then became extinct. But they don’t know why this happened. They have no evidence. No observations. In such a case, where an event has not been observed, you may only speak of probabilities …’

  ‘OK, so it’s probable, not certain, we wiped them out.’

  ‘In which case it’s also probable but not certain that they became extinct in some other way …’

  Leoni shrugged: ‘I suppose so – but why is this important?’

  The Angel’s reply was baffling: ‘For the sake of every human alive today it is a matter of the utmost importance that the Neanderthals are not exterminated by Cro-Magnons twenty-four thousand years ago. In fact, the fate of the human race depends on it …’

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  They were being hunted by more Illimani swimmers, still a bowshot behind but closing fast. Ria squinted through the freezing spray. Just six of them. But they were all big men with flint daggers gripped between their teeth.

  Beside her she heard a growl of anger as Driff saw them.

  Bont had seen them, too. He was on his back, using the handle of his axe to hold Grondin and Brindle against him and keep their heads above water. Ligar, Jergat and Oplimar were struggling just to stay afloat.

  Driff shook his soaking mane of black hair out of his eyes. There was a crazy intensity there that Ria had seen in other Illimani braves, and she didn’t like it. But whatever Brindle had done to turn him against his own people, she hadn’t seen him waver for a heartbeat since he’d saved her life on the meeting ground.

  She looked back.

  The pursuing swimmers were fast and determined. They’d already halved the distance. But behind them on the bank, the treacherous swamps, overgrown thickets and dense stands of trees that lay across the great bend of the Snake had slowed the Illimani horde almost to a halt. Yelling with frustration, many more of them, perhaps a hundred, now gripped weapons between their teeth and dived into the water.

  Suddenly Ria saw Sulpa. His lean blood-drenched body and long red-gold hair were unmistakable. He sauntered to the bank, brought his hand up to shade his eyes, and seemed to be looking directly at her. Then his arm snaked lazily forward and he pointed his finger.

  Ria glimpsed some fast-flying object coming her way. It seemed no bigger than an insect but it threw up a burst of steam when it entered the water beside her and smacked into her thigh with the force of an arrow, causing her to scream out in shock. The pain was sharp and agonising, as though the projectile was tipped with fire, but when she put her hand down to explore she found no wound, only a lump under her flesh.

  Sulpa pointed at her again. But before he could shoot her with another little dart she and her companions were swept round the curve of the Snake and shielded from him by a rank of tall willows growing close to the water’s edge.

  Ria heard Grondin’s thought-voice. ‘We are saved.’ And an instant later she understood why.

  The current was carrying them towards a barren little island in the middle of the river. There, out of sight of the Illimani, the other Ugly braves had beached their jaalas and stood with arms outstretched, some holding spear shafts, others coils of rope, waiting to rescue them from the water.

  Ria was allowing herself to hope she might make it when one of the Illimani swimmers gripped her ankle. She just had time to take a gulp of air before her whole body was dragged beneath the surface.

  She didn’t panic. After their parents had drowned, Hond and Rill had taught her everything there was to know about swimming. She’d learned to hold her breath and swim underwater in ice-cold rock pools in the mountains. She prided herself on being able to stay down for the count of two hundred. So she kept her eyes open in the cold blur. Her attacker had a dagger in a sheath at his waist but didn’t reach for it. He was still holding her ankle, jerking her under, and his free hand snaked out, scrabbling for her throat, leaving his flank vulnerable. Ria stabbed him hard and fast, driving the blade deep between his ribs. She heard his scream, muffled by the water, a cloud of bubbles burst from his mouth, and she was free.

  Even before she could reach the surface and fill her lungs another Illimani swimmer was all over her, pale legs thrashing, hairy armpit in her face. He had a knife clamped between his teeth but, like the first man, he didn’t use it and tried to grapple with her instead. Ria slashed her blade across his belly, releasing a huge wash of blood, and broke loose, surging upwards, desperate for breath, shaking her hair out of her eyes as she surfaced.

  The four surviving Illimani were ignoring everyone else, converging on her, and Ria guessed why they weren’t using their weapons. Sulpa wanted them to capture her and bring her back alive.

  With her last reserves of strength she thrashed across the current towards the island. Brindle, Grondin and Bont had already been pulled ashore by the Uglies, and Ria saw Ligar, Oplimar and Jergat being helped from the water. She’d become separated from Driff in the struggle but he caught up with her now, just as the four Illimani reached her. One wrapped his arm around her head, another grabbed her thigh, another her hair, as Driff flailed into them, biting and pummelling. Then the river tumbled them all in a heap against the island where the Uglies were waiting. Ria and Driff were hauled to safety and the Illimani were hacked to death in the shallows.

  There was a swirl of activity as the crews rearranged themselves amongst the remaining jaalas, and Ria was quickly back on one of the little vessels with her companions beside her. But the next wave of Illimani swimmers was almost upon them, and more than twenty splashed close enough to swarm the jaalas as they were launched. Ria reached over the side and stabbed one of the attackers in the eye as he tried to climb aboard. Another brave swam up and she slashed at him, screaming defiance, forcing him back. She saw Bont and Grondin laying about with their axes, cutting a way through, saw Uglies on the other jaalas doing the same, until at last the little fleet broke clear and surged into the mainstream, scudding over the surface.

  Ria didn’t look back; the men in the water couldn’t match th
e speed of the jaalas.

  She crawled across the floor of the raft to where Brindle lay, still unconscious, and rested the palm of her hand on his chest. His eyes were closed, his breathing was steady, and he did not seem to be in discomfort or pain. She confirmed again that the axe wound to his head, though bloody, had not penetrated his skull.

  ‘He going to be OK,’ Grondin pulsed. ‘He sleep deep now. We heal at Secret Place.’

  Since she too was very tired, and there was nothing more to be done on the bucking craft as it shot along with the river, Ria stretched herself out on the deck next to Brindle. Almost at once Sulpa’s image came into her mind, his lean body drenched in blood, pointing at her.

  She reached down inside her leggings and touched her right thigh where his little dart had struck.

  The hard lump under her skin throbbed and radiated heat.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  ‘But that’s ridiculous,’ Leoni protested. Her mind was reeling. ‘How can we make any difference to something so long ago in the past? Whatever happened happened and there’s nothing we can do about it …’

  The Angel smiled: ‘That’s not quite how time works.’ She made some adjustments to the controls of her laptop device. ‘But once again you’re just going to have to take my word for it.’

  ‘Take your word for what?’ Leoni asked.

  ‘That we may influence events at any point in Earth’s history or prehistory providing the results we want to achieve aren’t ruled out by existing evidence and observations.’

  The Angel had spoken formally, almost as though she were quoting from a legal document, but now she reverted to her normal tone: ‘In the case of the Neanderthals, history only has evidence they became extinct twenty-four thousand years ago, and this happened in Spain. But history does not tell us how or why they died out. We’re therefore free to attempt to influence not the extinction itself – which is an observed historical event – but how and why it happened …’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Leoni. ‘If we have a time machine.’

  ‘But we do.’ The screen of the Angel’s laptop had sprung into life again, displaying its vortex of menacing colours. ‘Surely you guessed when I sent you to see Sulpa I was sending you back in time?’

  ‘Not at first, no. It didn’t even occur to me. Matt suggested it later when I drew pictures of the weapons Sulpa’s people were carrying. But it doesn’t make any sense to me.’

  ‘How do you think time works?’ the Angel asked. She pointed to the screen: ‘Draw it for me with your finger.’

  Leoni reached out and traced a glowing green horizontal line from left to right across the middle of the screen. She scrawled PAST above the extreme left side of the line, PRESENT at the centre, and FUTURE at the extreme right.

  ‘Ah,’ said the Angel. ‘Time’s arrow. For one event to cause another it must precede it.’

  ‘Well, obviously – duuh …’

  ‘Or perhaps not so obvious. Perhaps, for example, time is more like this.’

  The Angel waved her hand, erasing Leoni’s line, and touched the screen with her own index finger. Though continuous, the line she drew was not straight but looped and twisted and sprawled across all parts of the screen, making multiple meandering curves and turns, often winding back and recrossing its own path, here forming a spiral, there a cat’s cradle, and there coiled into a tangled knot.

  ‘Different things happen at different points along the line,’ the Angel explained, ‘and there are multiple causal interconnections running in all directions, so it’s not, strictly speaking, inevitable that one thing must occur before another in order to influence it. That’s how it seems to humans – almost all of you agree on it – because you’re so deeply immersed in matter. But leave the body, step outside the flow of earthly time, and you see that everything is continuously unfolding at every point along the line …’

  ‘And once you’ve stepped out you can step in again at any point you choose?’

  ‘Or you can be sent in, as I sent you in,’ said the Angel, and she touched a tangled point on the line with the tip of her finger.

  ‘But out of body, right? Like I was in the middle of all that Sulpa madness? It’s not like the land where everything is known, or Don Apolinar’s dungeon?’

  ‘You have no physical avatar when I send you into the past this way’ – the Angel touched the laptop again. ‘You are pure, non-physical consciousness. You are spirit.’

  Leoni felt her eyes drawn back to the meandering line on the screen – a brilliant luminous green trail, standing out against the background of deeper, darker, swirling colours. ‘Wherever time recurves, and passes close to its own course, such as here’ – the Angel pointed to a place where two sections of the line ran in parallel for a short distance and appeared to touch. ‘Or where time crosses over itself, such as here’ – she pointed to one of the many loops she had drawn. ‘And particularly where it becomes intricately ravelled and intertwined such as here’ – she indicated one of the most densely knotted areas of the line – ‘then special possibilities emerge both for good and for evil.’ The Angel turned her intense gaze on Leoni: ‘Connections form between the different epochs thus superimposed, and the lives and fates of certain individuals can become entangled …’

  Leoni was staring into the screen again. The swirling colours had vanished. It was now as though she was looking down at the Earth through a trapdoor in the sky. What she saw was a group of little rafts, launching from an island in the midst of a wide fast-flowing river, surrounded by a crowd of swimmers.

  She zoomed in. The people on the rafts were fighting the swimmers, hacking their way through them with axes. With a final mighty effort they broke free and the rafts were carried off by the current.

  Leoni zoomed in again and found herself on one of the rafts. Most of the people on board were cut and bleeding. Some, with no necks, big chunky bodies and crude ungainly features, resembled the figure of the Neanderthal the Angel had shown her earlier. Others were humans like Leoni and, with a jolt of excitement, she recognised the mysterious girl she had warned about the tree-birds – the girl with nut-brown skin and chestnut hair who’d come to her in a dream and taken her hand and told her that together they could find their way out of a terrifying forest. She lay on the floor of the raft beside a club-footed Neanderthal with a head injury. She was injured, too. Her lean hard body was soaked from the river, and blood seeped from multiple flesh wounds. Her face was a mass of bruises but her eyes shone with the same bright intelligence Leoni remembered. There was no mistaking her.

  ‘Her name is Ria,’ said the Angel. ‘She lives in the Stone Age, in what is now the northern part of Spain, by the banks of a glacial river that dried up millennia before you were born. She’s a member of a tribe of Cro-Magnons who call themselves the Clan.’

  ‘And the other people with her?’

  ‘Some are survivors of the Clan like herself. The rest are Neanderthals. Usually you would not see them join forces, but in Sulpa they face a common enemy.’

  Abruptly the river vanished from the screen and the meandering green line was back. The Angel pointed to a densely coiled and knotted section. ‘Though separated by twenty-four thousand years of linear time, your epoch intersects with Ria’s epoch here’ – her finger touched one of the points where the line crossed over itself and there was a flash of green. ‘Your life is in the twenty-first century, Ria’s is in the Stone Age. But because there really is no present and no past everything in these two intersecting timelines actually unfolds simultaneously.’

  ‘So what you just showed me, the rafts and the river, this Ria girl – it was all happening twenty-four thousand years ago but also, in a weird way, right now?’

  ‘In a weird way, yes.’

  The screen display changed again. The green line was gone and Leoni found herself looking down on the brutish naked ranks of Sulpa’s pale-skinned bloodstained army.

  ‘They belong to a Cro-Magnon tribe of eastern Europe who call th
emselves the Illimani,’ said the Angel. ‘Sulpa has possessed the body of one of their young warriors, killed their former king, shaped them into this instrument of evil, and led them on a mass migration across Europe, ending up in northern Spain. He has come there to torture and kill the last Neanderthals on Earth. But all the Cro-Magnon tribes who cross his path are also being annihilated, including Ria’s people.’

  ‘She looked like she’d been in a fight …’

  ‘She had been. A fight for her life. Barely an hour ago in her timeline the Clan were attacked. The adults were massacred – only a few dozen escaped, Ria amongst them. Hundreds of children were sacrificed to feed Sulpa’s thirst for innocent blood.’

  ‘Why? What’s the matter with this guy?’

  ‘It is as I told you – the more pure the innocence he destroys, the more horror and pain he can inflict in the process, the more his own power grows.’

  ‘That’s why he sacrifices children?’

  ‘He drinks not only their blood but also their souls … He snuffs out their consciousness for ever so they may never again take shape in new forms. He takes everything they were and are and could be and feeds it to the evil within him. It is the same hunger for pure souls, magnified a thousandfold, that draws him to the Neanderthals. Never before, across the whole of reality, has such goodness and innocence as theirs come into existence.’

  A flicker caught Leoni’s eye and she glanced down at the screen.

  The green timeline was back.

  The Angel once again pointed to the place where the twenty-first century intersected with the Stone Age. ‘You will note,’ she said, ‘that the knot here is very dense and this intersection is also surrounded by other superimposed epochs …’

  Leoni looked. She could see many points that would have been widely separated if the Angel had simply drawn a straight line across the screen, but that lay close together and frequently overlapped in this intertwined and knotted line.