‘Oh, thank God,’ she said, hopping back on to solid ground with relief.
Chase patted her shoulder. ‘Told you it’d be fine. Okay, Soph?’
Nina looked round as Sophia began to cross the log. As well as the constant splash of the waterfall, she heard another sound, a rustling in the treetops. Birds, she realised, flitting through the foliage. She saw one circling near the ceiling, soaring through a hole into the sunlight before swooping back down into another. ‘Look at those birds,’ she said to Chase. ‘I wonder if they live here permanently, or found it while they were migrating?’
‘So long as they don’t crap on my head, I’m not that bothered,’ Chase replied. ‘How you doing, Soph?’
‘Fine,’ Sophia replied. ‘I don’t know why Nina was so scared.’ She put one hand on the stump of a broken branch for support - and it snapped with a wet crack.
She lurched sideways. Her leg slithered off the log in a shower of mouldering bark, other hand clawing for grip as she fell—
Her fingers caught a knot of creepers, the thinner vines stretching and snapping as she swung from the makeshift bridge.
Chase ran to the edge of the chasm, gripping one of the log’s exposed roots and stretching an arm towards her. She struggled to bring up her free hand, but couldn’t quite reach. ‘Eddie!’ she cried. ‘I’m slipping!’
‘Hang on!’ Chase climbed on to the log. He gripped her wrist and tried to pull her up, but in his kneeling position couldn’t get enough leverage. ‘Nina, help me!’
She hesitated, then ran to him. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Hold that root,’ he said. ‘Then grab my arm so I can pull her up!’
Nina did so. The root creaked unsettlingly when she pulled it. Rotten. ‘I don’t think it’ll hold!’
‘It’ll have to! Come on!’
She gripped it, reaching out with her other arm to Chase. Their hands closed tightly. Chase took Sophia’s weight, Nina his as he strained to lift her. More of the knotted vines snapped, Sophia’s handhold breaking away—
Nina pulled, groaning at the strain on her shoulder muscles. The root groaned too - but held. Chase got to his feet, hauling Sophia up with him. She found purchase with one boot and leapt to the safety of the cliff edge, Chase jumping after her. ‘Oh, God!’ she gasped, holding him tightly as she fought for breath. ‘Oh, thank you, thank you . . .’
‘Ahem,’ said Nina, deciding their clinch had gone on long enough. Chase got the hint and pushed Sophia away.
‘And thank you too. I suppose,’ Sophia said to Nina, the words sticking distastefully in her mouth.
‘You’re welcome,’ Nina replied, taking the ‘compliment’ in kind. ‘Come on, let’s get moving.’
She set off in the direction of the statue. Chase caught up. ‘Can’t believe I just saved her life,’ Nina muttered.
‘I can,’ said Chase. ‘Because you’re not her.’
‘Y’know, that might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.’
Chase let out a muted laugh, then picked up a stick and swatted aside plants as they moved deeper into the strange little jungle. After walking for some time, at one point splashing across a stream, they were directly beneath one of the largest openings in the ceiling. The varieties and colours of the vegetation multiplied in the daylight, various fruits and berries ripening on the trees. ‘It really is beautiful, isn’t it?’ Nina said, pausing to smell an unfamiliar purple flower. ‘I can see why it was passed down through memory as a paradise.’
‘Prefer something a bit more open, myself,’ said Chase. ‘You know, with actual sky rather than just little patches of it overhead . . .’ He tailed off.
Nina picked up on his suddenly cautious stance. ‘What is it?’
Chase used the stick to bend back the branches of a bush. ‘There’s something here.’
Beyond the bush were the remains of a building, a tumbledown ruin barely standing beneath layers of vines and lichen. ‘It’s brick,’ she said. ‘Like the other Veteres structures.’
‘It’s the wrong shape,’ said Sophia. ‘It’s not round, it’s square.’ Nina saw she was right; what was left of the walls displayed right-angled corners. ‘And the bricks have just been stacked on top of each other - they’re barely even straight.’
‘Cowboys,’ joked Chase.
Nina moved past the crumbled walls, seeing more ruins amongst the plants. ‘There’s a curved wall, though - or what’s left of one.’ The reason struck her. ‘Of course! It’s like the site we found in Indonesia - the original Veteres structures were scavenged for materials by later settlers. They didn’t have the skills to build something as complex as a dome, so they used the bricks to make something simpler. That means someone was here after the Veteres left. But who?’
‘Who was in the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve?’ asked Chase.
‘Nobody,’ Nina told him. ‘They were banished - and God made sure they wouldn’t come back by setting cherubim armed with flaming swords to guard it.’
Chase raised an eyebrow. ‘Flaming swords? Sounds familiar.’
‘Mm-hmm.’
‘Flaming swords?’ Sophia asked. ‘Am I missing something?’
‘Excalibur glowed under certain conditions because of earth energy,’ Nina explained. ‘An early culture could easily have interpreted it as a kind of fire.’ She gazed at the ruins. ‘This must have been part of the Veteres settlement - where they lived. Where their civilisation started.’
‘So why did they leave?’ asked Chase. ‘They didn’t just expand across the world - they upped sticks and completely left this place behind.’
‘They were driven out,’ Nina remembered. ‘By “beasts”.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t get it. They must have been pretty advanced to have built all the stuff we’ve seen - so why couldn’t they master pointy stick technology and just kill these beasts? I mean, lions and tigers and bears—’
‘Oh, my.’
‘—are nasty predators, but they didn’t have a chance in the long run ’cause of the whole “opposable thumbs, motherfuckers!” thing.’ He raised his hands, thumbs aloft.
‘Charmingly put, as ever,’ said Sophia. ‘But you have a point - tools and weapons are great equalisers. Unless the beasts also had opposable thumbs, of course.’
‘The inscriptions did say that the Veteres tried to train the beasts, though,’ said Nina. ‘To give them the gift of knowledge. Maybe not a great idea to teach a gorilla how to use a spear.’
‘Gorillas didn’t build this,’ Sophia said, pointing at the wall. ‘And they didn’t build that giant statue, either.’
‘You’re right.’ Nina looked to the eastern wall. ‘If the answers are anywhere, that’s where they’ll be.’
The three Humvees, their black flanks pock-marked by bullet impacts, stopped near the base of the mesa.
Callum, riding in the lead vehicle with Vogler, checked the truck’s GPS. ‘We’re at the position where the missiles hit.’
‘You didn’t need the GPS to know that,’ said Vogler. Ahead, a crater had been gouged out of the ground, mangled metal scattered round it. A short distance away, more debris surrounded another hole - one that went much deeper into the towering mass of stone than anything a missile could have caused. ‘This is it. We’ve found Eden.’
‘In there?’ Callum said sceptically.
Vogler didn’t reply, instead climbing out and regarding the surroundings. The only sound was the wind, the plain desolate and lifeless. It didn’t seem possible that the end of their quest could be here. But then, he had never imagined that his missions for the Covenant would take him to a city frozen beneath the Antarctic ice either.
The doors of the other Humvees opened. Zamal emerged first, mood as black as ever. ‘No bodies? So much for the wonders of UCAVs.’ He made a disapproving sound, regarding Callum caustically. ‘War by remote control, using robots to do your killing? A cowardly way to fight. A true warrior of Allah looks his enemies in the eye.’ Issuing orders to h
is men, he started for the cave entrance.
‘Where are you going?’ Vogler called.
Zamal paused as the men went to the hole. ‘To look my enemies in the eye.’
‘We should wait for Ribbsley - he’ll be here in less than an hour.’
‘You should know by now, Killian,’ Zamal said with a thin smile, ‘I am not a patient man.’
One of his men reported that there was a wider tunnel behind the opening. ‘Wide enough to fit the Humvees?’ Vogler asked. The trooper nodded. ‘We should clear it. We don’t know what’s in there - they might be useful.’
‘I do know what’s in there,’ Zamal countered. ‘Wilde, Chase and Blackwood. It is time for them to die.’
‘We had an arrangement with Dr Wilde.’
‘Which was cancelled the moment she betrayed us. You can wait for Ribbsley,’ he said, turning away. ‘I am going to carry out the Covenant’s purpose - to kill anyone who threatens our faith.’ He unslung his rifle and gave Vogler an even colder smile as he prepared to climb through the opening. ‘God is great.’
Nina, Chase and Sophia emerged from the jungle on to the lake’s muddy shore. ‘There’s the statue,’ said Chase, seeing it towering over them to the east.
Nina looked up at it. ‘It’s bigger than I thought. Must be at least a hundred feet tall.’ It was higher than the small plateau behind it, the head rising above the edge of the steep cliff. The rockface itself, she now saw, was covered with a network of similar copper ‘branches’ to those they had seen atop the temple in Antarctica. And from this angle, she could see a feature behind the statue, seemingly cut out of the rock. ‘Eddie, give me the gun.’ She took a closer look through the rifle’s sights.
‘What is it?’ Chase asked.
‘It’s a path to the summit. Stairs, carved out of the stone.’
‘Like that spiral one in Antarctica?’
‘This is open on one side - it’s more of a zig-zag. A long zig-zag. There’s a hell of a lot of steps.’
Chase sighed. ‘Great. More climbing.’
‘At least it’s not covered in ice this time.’ She glanced across the lake. ‘Hello, what’s that?’
‘Another tunnel,’ said Sophia as Nina peered at it through the scope. ‘It looks flooded, though.’
‘It is,’ Nina confirmed. ‘Almost to the roof. And the water inside doesn’t look to be flowing - it must be blocked at the other end.’
‘Like the one we came in through,’ said Chase.
‘Yeah . . .’ She slowly turned clockwise, pointing across the lake at the near-submerged tunnel entrance. ‘One.’ Then to the waterfall falling into the chasm, and the opening beyond it. ‘Two.’ Further round, another stream running roughly northwest into the jungle - the one they had crossed earlier. ‘Three.’ And finally, turning back to face along the lakeside, a wider waterway between them and the statue. ‘And four. Four rivers, all fed from the same source - and I bet that at one time they flowed into the desert.’
‘Four rivers,’ echoed Sophia. ‘Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, Euphrates . . .’
‘The four rivers that according to Genesis flowed from the Garden of Eden. But they don’t any more - because the Veteres blocked them off.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Chase. ‘The Tigris and the Euphrates are in bloody Iraq! That’s not even on the same continent.’
‘Names get re-used. Paris, Texas isn’t the same as Paris, France. It could be another case of a memory being passed down through generations.’ She looked back up at the plateau. ‘We need to get up there. If this place is anything like the temple in Antarctica, then whatever’s at the top of those stairs will be the place that we couldn’t get into because of the ice - the Source of Life.’
‘Or the Tree of Life, if you use the alternative meaning,’ Sophia said. ‘Another reference to Genesis.’
‘And if there’s another library, then we’ve got our Tree of Knowledge.’
‘If there’s an apple tree in there,’ Chase said, staring up at the statue’s impassive face, ‘I might have to apologise to Nan for skiving out of Sunday school.’
They headed along the lake. Crossing the fourth stream, they splashed over to the far bank close to the wall surrounding the statue. The high stone barricade at first appeared to have no entrances, but then they saw that a huge lump of rock had fallen from the ceiling, demolishing a section of it.
‘Good job that happened,’ said Chase as they approached. ‘We’d have had a job getting over that wall.’
‘It’s not just a temple,’ said Nina, realising its purpose. ‘It’s a fort. The Veteres built it to protect something, just like they blocked off the tunnels into the cavern. Another line of defence.’
‘So did they block everything off from the outside . . . or the inside?’ Chase said. He pointed at the plateau behind the statue. ‘Are they still up there?’
‘Let’s go see.’ Nina led the way up the pile of broken stone to the damaged wall. She peered over it at what lay below. ‘Oh . . .’
It was another library, rank after rank of clay tablets and cylinders containing the knowledge of the Veteres. But unlike the carefully arranged archive in the Antarctic, this was chaotic, thrown together. Some of the tablets, those nearest the base of the statue, were carefully stacked, but the majority were simply piled up, increasingly randomly the closer they were to the outer wall. Some had fallen - or been knocked - over, smashed pieces littering the narrow pathways through the crammed collection. The whole place was covered with dirt, damp with dripping water, creeping plants laying claim to every surface.
‘God, what happened to it?’ Chase asked.
Nina felt a pang of sadness, recognising the growing desperation of the people who had made it. ‘It was their last stand,’ she said. ‘They wanted to preserve all of this, just like they did in Antarctica . . . but they were running out of time. They must have been building the wall around it even as they brought everything in.’ She indicated the stacks closest to the statue. ‘When they started, they tried to keep everything organised, but at the end, all they had time to do was just dump the tablets and hope not too many of them broke. Once they had as much as they could, they finished the wall. The knowledge of an entire civilisation, sealed in here . . . for ever.’
‘Presumably they took the most important records with them,’ said Sophia. ‘Like the audio cylinders, the voices of their prophets. As long as they had those, they knew they could eventually make copies.’
‘But they must still have lost so much.’ Nina contemplated the remains of the library for a long, quiet moment. Then she climbed through the wall.
Through binoculars, Zamal watched the three figures drop out of sight into the temple. After entering the vast cavern and overcoming his initial awe, the first thing he had done was get a sense of the topography of his new battle zone - and while surveying the landscape from a rise near the tunnel mouth, he had spotted the fugitives moving along a lake, heading for the enormous blasphemy that was the statue at its far end.
He and his men gave chase, running along the edge of the ravine splitting the chamber until they found a log bridge. Quickly traversing it, they moved as swiftly as they could through the jungle to the lakeshore - now only minutes behind Wilde and the others.
‘We have them,’ he said with a malicious smile.
Like its smaller counterpart in the Antarctic, the statue had a low passageway at its base, requiring anyone going through to prostrate themselves at the feet of their god. Unlike the ice-encrusted opening, however, this was teeming with life, insects scuttling out of the way as Nina crawled through the layer of filth that had built up over thousands of centuries. ‘It’s a pity you didn’t bring that machete,’ she said to Chase, behind her, as she ripped vines aside to reveal a taller, wider passageway beyond. Holes in the arched ceiling let in an indirect twilight cast, creepers hanging through them. ‘There’s a corridor, and what looks like a bigger room at the end of it. It must lead to the stairs up the cliff.’
She stood and brushed off the muck as Chase and Sophia emerged, then shone the flashlight down the passage. The sheen of copper and gold reflected back at her. ‘That’s new. There wasn’t anything like that at the other site.’
She moved down the corridor, directing the beam round the walls of what was revealed as a large circular chamber. ‘There was something like those, though. Exactly like those.’ The light fell on four metal bowls of different sizes arranged in a line directly across from the entrance - beside the spindle and copper horn of one of the primitive gramophones.
‘Is that a door next to it?’ Chase asked, walking past her, about to enter the chamber - before freezing in astonishment at what came into view. ‘What the hell are they?’
Nina and Sophia were equally amazed. The objects greeting their gaze were three statues - but unlike the other Veteres sculptures they had seen these were metal, not stone. They stood close to fifteen feet tall, elongated figures with their arms held out from their bodies, reminding Nina of the pose of the giant statue behind them . . . but where that had its hand open in generosity, these held a long, dangerous blade in each.
It was not the weapons that made the statues so startling, though. It was their faces - plural. Each figure’s head had four faces around it, looking in different directions. The one facing forward was similar to the long, stylised features of the Veteres’ god figure, though with its almond-shaped eyes narrowed threateningly. To its right was what seemed to be the face of a lion, teeth bared in a snarl; opposite this was the horned head of a bull. One of the statues was angled away from the entrance, revealing that the remaining face was an eagle, beak open, ready to attack.
Sprouting from each figure’s back were what looked like wings, formed from copper plate and gold filigree, stretching straight up to touch the metal-plated ceiling. Another set, similar in design but smaller, extended downwards from the statues’ chests to the floor between their four feet, which resembled the hooves of a cow. The legs themselves were wrapped in narrow bands of copper.
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