The Fall of Tartarus

by Eric Brown

  They descended to the banks of the St Augustine, its broad green girth flowing sluggishly between the rotten lumber of dilapidated wharves and jetties. The river, usually choked with trading vessels from all along the coast, was empty now; not one boat plied its length.

  An urchin fell into step beside the Abbot and tugged at his robes. They came to a boathouse, and the Abbot shouldered open the door and stepped carefully aboard a long-boat. Cramer climbed in after him and seated himself on cushions beneath the black and scarlet awning. The Abbot sat forward, at the very prow of the launch, while the boy busied himself with the engine. Seconds later it spluttered into life, a blasphemy upon the former silence, and the boat surged from the open-ended boathouse and headed upriver, into the interior.

  Cramer pulled a flask of whisky from his bag and chugged down three mouthfuls, the quantity he judged would keep him afloat until the serious drinking began at sunset. The Abbot had thought to provision the launch with a container of food: biltongs, rounds of ripe cheese, cobs of black bread and yellow, wizened fruit like pears. A goblet suggested that they should take from the river for their refreshment: Cramer decided to stick to his whisky. He ate his fill, lay back and closed his eyes as the boat bounced upstream. He must have dozed; when he next opened his eyes he saw that they had left the city far behind. Flat fields spread out on either hand; tall crops, perhaps green once, were scorched now the colour of straw beneath the merciless midday sun.

  He thought of Francesca, considered the possibility of her resurrection, and somehow withheld his tears. To busy himself, to take his mind off what might lie ahead, he dipped the goblet into the river and carried it to where the Abbot was seated cross-legged at the prow like some proud and macabre figurehead.

  He raised the brimming goblet to the holy man’s lips. Graciously, the Abbot inclined his head and drank thirstily. When the cup was dry, he murmured his thanks.

  Cramer remained seated beside him. Already he was soaked with sweat and uncomfortable, and he wore the lightest of jungle wear. The Abbot was surely marinating within the thick hessian of his habit.

  Cramer nodded to where his sleeves were tucked inside their shoulder holes. ‘Yet more penance since we last met,’ he observed, his tone sarcastic.

  He wondered when the Abbot would have his tongue pulled out, his legs amputated, his testicles removed - if they had not been removed already.

  ‘After finding Francesca,’ the Abbot said, ‘I made my way back to Baudelaire. I informed the Church Council of the miracle in the jungle, and petitioned them for permission to undergopenance physicale. The following day the Surgeon Master removed my arms.’

  Cramer let the silence stretch. He felt dizzy with the heat. The glare of the sun seemed to drive needles into his eyes. The boat changed course slightly and passed a sandbank. Dead birds and other bloated animals floated by.

  ‘And Francesca?’ Cramer whispered.

  The Abbot turned his cowl to Cramer, suggesting inquiry.

  Cramer cleared his throat. ‘Why does she want me with her?’

  ‘She did not say.’ The Abbot paused. ‘Perhaps she loves you, still.’

  ‘But what exactly did she tell you?’

  ‘She said that I was to bring you back to Tartarus. In return, she would guide me to the temple.’

  Cramer shook his head. ‘How does she know its whereabouts? Months ago, like you, she had no idea.’

  ‘She was bequeathed its location in her sleep.’

  He cried aloud. ‘In her sleep?Sleep? She was dead. I buried her myself.’ He was sobbing now. ‘How can she possibly be alive?’

  The Abbot would say no more, no matter how much Cramer pleaded. He lowered his head, and his lips moved in soothing prayer.

  Cramer took sanctuary beneath the awning. He sucked down half a flask of whisky as night failed, as ever, to fall. The bloated sun dipped below the flat horizon, but such was the power of its radiation that the night sky was transformed into a flickering canopy of indigo, scarlet and argent streamers. The light-show illuminated the entirety of the eastern sky, and against it the Abbot was a stark and frightening silhouette.

  Cramer drank himself to sleep.

  He was awoken by a crack of thunder such as he had never heard before. He shot upright, convinced that the sun had blown and that Tartarus had split asunder. Sheet lightning flooded the river and the surrounding flatlands in blinding silver explosions, a cooling breeze blew and a warm rain lashed the boat. He slept.

  It was dawn when he next awoke. The sun was a massive, rising semi-circle on the horizon, throwing harsh white light across the land. They were slowly approaching a dense tangle of vegetation with leaves as broad as spinnakers, waxy and wilting in the increased temperature. The river narrowed, became a chocolate-coloured canal between the overgrown banks. While the sun was hidden partially by the treetops, and they were spared its direct heat, yet in the confines of the jungle the humidity increased so that every laboured inhalation was more a draught of fluid than a drawn breath.

  Cramer breakfasted on stale bread and putrescent cheese, thirst driving him to forego his earlier circumspection as to the potability of the water, and draw a goblet from the river. He gave the Abbot a mouthful of the brackish liquid and arranged bread and biltongs beside him so that the holy fool might not starve. The Abbot ate, using his toes to grip the food and lift it to his mouth in a fashion so dextrous as to suggest much practice before the amputation of his arms.

  They proceeded on a winding course along the river, ever farther into the dense and otherwise impenetrable jungle.

  Hours later they came to Chardon’s Landing. Cramer made the launch fast to the jetty and assisted the Abbot ashore. They paused briefly to take a meal, and then began the arduous slog to the plateau where Cramer had buried Francesca.

  * * * *

  The air was heavy, the light aqueous, filled with the muffled, distant calls of doomed animals and birds. The trek to the plateau was tougher than he recalled from his first time this way. After months of drunkenness Cramer was in far from peak condition, and without his arms the Abbot often stumbled.

  As the hours passed and they slogged through the cloying, hostile heat, Cramer considered what the holy man had said about Francesca’s resurrection. Clearly, he had not killed her in the clearing all those months ago, but merely stunned her - and she had discovered the whereabouts of the temple from the survey photographs made by the Pride of Valencia . . . Then again, there was always the possibility that the Abbot was lying, that Francesca had not risen at all, that he had lured Cramer here for his own sinister purposes. And the image apples, which seemed to show Francesca in possession of the laser which had killed her? Might she not have been carrying a laser similar to his own after the crash-landing and before he arrived, at which time the apples had recorded her image?

  They came at last to the clearing. The two tents were as he recalled them, situated thirty metres apart. Francesca’s grave, in the jungle, was out of sight.

  Cramer hurried across to Francesca’s tent and pulled back the flap. She was not inside. He checked the second tent, also empty, and then walked towards the edge of the escarpment. He looked out across the spread of the jungle far below, gathering his thoughts.

  He knew that he would find Francesca’s grave untouched.

  ‘If you claim she is risen,’ he called to the Abbot, ‘then where is she?’

  ‘If you do not believe me,’ the Abbot said, ‘then look upon the grave.’

  Cramer hesitated. He did not know what he feared most, that he should find the grave empty ... or the soil still piled above Francesca’s cold remains.

  He crossed the clearing to the margin of jungle in which he had excavated her resting place. The Abbot’s cowl turned, following his progress like some gothic tracking device. Cramer reached out and drew aside a spray of ferns. The light fell from behind him, illuminating a raw furrow of earth. He gave a pained cry. The mound he had so carefully constructed was scattered, and only
a shallow depression remained where he had laid out her body.

  He stumbled back into the clearing.

  ‘Well?’ the Abbot inquired.

  Before Cramer could grasp him, beat from him the truth, he saw something spread in the centre of the clearing. It was a detailed map of the area, based on aerial photographs, opened out and held flat by four stones.

  The Abbot sensed something. ‘What is wrong?’

  Cramer crossed the clearing and knelt before the map. Marked in red was the campsite, and from it a dotted trail leading down the precipitous fall of the escarpment. It wound through the jungle below, to a point Cramer judged to be ten kilometres distant. This area was marked with a circle, and beside it the words, ‘The Slarque Temple,’ in Francesca’s meticulous, childish print.

  ‘My God,’ Cramer whispered to himself.

  ‘What is it!’

  Cramer told the Abbot, and he raised his ravaged face to the heavens. ‘Thanks be!’ he cried. ‘The Age of Miracles is forever here!’

  Cramer snatched up the map, folded it to a manageable size, and strode to the edge of the escarpment. He turned to the Abbot. ‘Are you up to another hard slog?’

  ‘God gives strength to the pilgrim,’ the holy man almost shouted. ‘Lead the way, Mr Cramer!’

  For the next two hours they made a slow descent of the incline. So steep was the drop in places that the Abbot was unable to negotiate the descent through the undergrowth, and Cramer was forced to carry him on his back.

  He murmured holy mantras into Cramer’s ear.

  He found it impossible to assess his emotions at that time, still less his thoughts - disbelief, perhaps, maybe even fear of the unknown. He entertained the vague hope that Francesca, having completed her quest and found the temple, might return with him to Earth.

  They came to the foot of the incline and pressed ahead through dense vegetation. From time to time they came across what Cramer hoped was the track through the undergrowth that Francesca might have made, only to lose it again just as quickly. Their progress was slow, with frequent halts so that Cramer could consult the map and the position of the bloated sun. He wondered if it was a psychosomatic reaction to the events of the past few hours, or a meteorological change, that made the air almost impossible to breathe. It seemed sulphurous, infused with the miasma of Hell itself. Certainly, the Abbot was taking laboured breaths through his ruined nose-holes.

  At last they emerged from the jungle and found themselves on the edge of a second great escarpment, where the land stepped down to yet another sweep of sultry jungle. Cramer studied the map. According to Francesca, the temple was positioned somewhere along this ledge. They turned right and pushed through fragrant leaves and hanging fronds. Cramer could see nothing that might resemble an alien construction.

  Then, amid a tangle of undergrowth ten metres ahead, he made out a regular, right-angled shape he knew was not the work of nature. It was small, perhaps four metres high and two wide - a rectangular block of masonry overgrown with lichen and creepers. He detected signs that someone had passed this way, and recently: the undergrowth leading to the stone block was broken, trampled down.

  ‘What is it?’ the Abbot whispered.

  Cramer described what he could see.

  ‘The shrine,’ the holy man said. ‘It has to be . . .’

  They approached the Slarque temple. Cramer was overcome with a strange disappointment that it should turn out to be so small, so insignificant. Then, as they passed into its shadow, he realised that this was but a tiny part of a much greater, subterranean complex. He peered, and saw a series of steps disappearing into the gloom. Tendrils, like tripwires, had been broken on the upper steps.

  Cramer took the Abbot’s shoulder and assisted him down the steps. Just as he began to fear that their way would be in complete darkness, he made out a glimmer of light below. The steps came to an end. A corridor ran off to the right, along the face of the escarpment. Let into the stone of the cliff-face itself, at regular intervals, were tall apertures like windows. Great shafts of sunlight poured in and illuminated the way.

  He walked the Abbot along the wide corridor, its ceiling carved with a bas-relief fresco of cavorting animals. In the lichen carpet that had spread across the floor over the millennia, he made out more than one set of footprints: the lichen was scuffed and darkened, as if with the passage of many individuals.

  At last, after perhaps a kilometre, they approached the tall, arched entrance of a great chamber. At first he thought it a trick of his ears, or the play of the warm wind within the chamber, but as they drew near he heard the dolorous monotone of a sustained religious chant. The sound, in precincts so ancient, sent a shiver down his spine.

  They paused on the threshold. From a wide opening at the cliff-face end of the chamber, evening sunlight slanted in, its brightness blinding. When his eyes adapted Cramer saw, through a haze of tumbling dust motes, row upon row of grey-robed, kneeling figures, cowled heads bowed, chanting. The chamber was the size of a cathedral and the congregation filled the long stone pews on either side of a central aisle. The heat and the noise combined to make Cramer dizzy.

  He felt a hand grip his elbow, and thought at first that it was the Abbot. He turned - a monk stood to his left, holding his upper arm; the Abbot was on Cramer’s right, his broken face suffused with devotional rapture.

  He felt pressure on his elbow. Like an automaton, he stepped into the chamber. The monk escorted Cramer up the aisle. The continuous chanting, now that they were amidst it, was deafening. The sunlight was hot on his back. The front of the chamber was lost in shadow. He could just make out the hazy outline of a scorpion-analogue statue, and beside it the representation of a torso upon a cross.

  Halfway down the aisle, they paused.

  The monk’s grip tightened on his arm. The Abbot whispered to Cramer. His expression was beatific, his tone rapturous. ‘In the year of the supernova it is written that the Ultimate Sacrifice will rise from the dead, and so be marked out to appease the sun. Too, it is written that the sacrifice will be accompanied by a non-believer, and also the Abbot of the true Church.’

  Cramer could hardly comprehend his words.

  The monk pushed him forward. The chanting soared.

  He stared. What he had assumed to be the statue of a body on a cross was not a statue at all. His mind refused to accept the image that his vision was relaying. He almost passed out. The monk held him upright.

  Francesca hung before him, lashed to the vertical timber of the cross, the ultimate sacrifice in what must have been the most God-forsaken Calvary ever devised by man. Her head was raised at a proud angle, the expression on her full lips that of a grateful martyr. Her eyelids were closed, flattened like the Abbot’s, and stitched shut in a semicircle beneath each eye. The threads obtruded from her perfect skin, thick and clotted like obscene, cartoon lashes.

  Her evicted eyes, as green as Cramer remembered them, were tied about her neck.

  Her arms and legs had been removed, amputated at shoulder and hip; silver discs capped the stumps. They had even excised her small, high breasts, leaving perfect white, sickle-shaped scars across her olive skin.

  Cramer murmured his beloved’s name.

  She moved her head, and that tiny gesture, lending animation to something that by all rights should have been spared life, twisted a blade of anguish deep into his heart.

  ‘Hans!’ she said, her voice sweet and pure. ‘Hans, I told you that I loved you, would love you forever.’ She smiled, a smile of such beauty amid such devastation. ‘What greater love could I show you than to allow you to share in the salvation of the world? Through our sacrifice, Hans, we will be granted eternal life.’

  He wanted, then, to scream at her - to ask how she could allow herself to believe in such perversion? But the time for such questioning was long gone.

  And, besides, he knew . . . She had always sought something more than mere existence, and here, at last, she had found it.

  ‘Hans,�
�� she whispered now. ‘Hans, please tell me that you understand. Please hold me.’

  Cramer stepped forward.

  He felt the dart slam into the meat of his lower back. The plainsong crescendoed, becoming something beautiful and at the same time terrible, and he pitched forward and slipped into oblivion.

  * * * *

  He surfaced slowly through an ocean of analgesics. He found himself in darkness, something wet tied around his neck. With realisation came pain, and he cried aloud. Then, perhaps hours later, they laid him out again and put him under, and though he wanted to rage and scream at the injustice, the futility of what they were doing to him, all he could manage was a feeble moan of protest.