by J M Hemmings
‘The Old Gods…’ Ao murmured to himself, his eyes widening with awe … and fear, as an epiphany hit him with abruptly brutal force. ‘They’re … they’re real! The legends are true! The stories are true, they’re real!’
He had never been this close to the ancient shrine; to get so near to it was strictly forbidden to anyone but medicine men and women, and while the elders of his band knew of the location of this place, on the rare occasions on which their migrations through the taiga took them this far north, they would usually skirt it by miles.
The glow of the prisoner’s eyes in the darkness grew even brighter, and in a moment of inexplicable yet near-dazzling clarity, Ao Maliya understood precisely why the elders forbade anyone to approach this sacred site. It was a feeling that he could not put into words, that he could not comprehend in any sort of linear, logical fashion, but the potency of its message gushed at once through every cell of his being.
Skipping the interlocutory link of the interpreter, he rushed over to Higgins and grabbed at the officer’s arm.
‘You cannot go there! I made a mistake, we shouldn’t have come here, we, we have to go, we have to turn around and, and leave!’ he babbled, flecks of spittle flying haphazardly from his flapping crimson lips, his eyes wild in the eerie gloom.
Higgins jerked his arm out of the Ewenki’s grasp.
‘Unhand me, blast you!’ he snapped in English, his usually unflappable composure rattled by Ao’s near-rabid outburst.
‘Turn around, turn around!’ Ao yelled hysterically, lunging again for Higgins’ greatcoat. ‘We have to leave, we have to, we have to go!’
This time, however, the officer was ready for him, and moving with agile speed, he swivelled his hips and twisted his torso, deftly dodging the young man’s clumsy flailing, and with a perfectly executed judo throw he hurled Ao to the ground. The impact drove all of the air out of the young man’s lungs, and he lay gasping futilely for breath, like a fish pulled from water, drowning in air. Higgins, meanwhile, kept him pinned down while the interpreter hurried over.
‘What’s gotten into this damned fool?!’ Higgins demanded. ‘What’s he blabbering on about?!’
‘He was saying,’ the interpreter answered, his own features contorted with unease, ‘that we have to leave. We have to turn around and go. We should not have come here.’
‘What?! After leading us here, all this way, to the very doorstep of this place … he now wants us to now abandon the mission and turn around?! The fool has gone insane, he’s lost his bloody mind, he has! Well, you can inform him that we’re proceeding as planned, and that we no longer require his services, not until we come out of the place at least.’ Higgins then looked up, his fury-filled eyes seeking out a particular soldier. ‘Boreyev!’ he barked as soon as his gaze settled on the big man. ‘Come over here and truss this madman up! Stuff a gag in his damned mouth as well, I’d say! Make sure he doesn’t go anywhere until we come back!’
‘Yes sir!’ Boreyev growled as he jogged over with a length of rope.
Boreyev tied Ao up and stuffed a rag into his mouth, and there the expedition left him, lying tied up on the ground.
‘Fix bayonets!’ Vasilevsky ordered.
The soldiers all complied, attaching their cutlass bayonets to their rifles, while the two officers loosened their sabres in their scabbards and drew their revolvers from their holsters. Vasilevsky glanced at the assembled soldiers, who were all now in formation, and he then looked at Higgins, who gave him a nod of affirmation.
‘The company will advance!’ Vasilevsky barked.
He and Higgins led the soldiers from the front, weapons at the ready, while the scientists followed a short distance behind, marvelling at the otherworldly readings they were observing on their equipment. Two people brought up the very rear of the group: the chained-up prisoner and a burly Japanese soldier, whose job it was to keep a close eye on her.
As they neared the top of the ridge, Higgins held up a hand to call a halt to the advance, not wanting to silhouette himself and his men against the sky. He beckoned to one of the lead troopers, a bow-legged, bald-headed Malay, and the man hurried over.
‘Scout around the perimeter, Razif,’ Higgins murmured, his eyes darting left and right, peering through the endless, shadow-drenched ocean of trees, trying to pick out any signs of movement among the tens of thousands of vertical bars, slashes and stripes that extended as far as the eye could see into a greenish-brown blur in every direction. ‘Make sure we really are alone here.’
‘Yes sir!’ Razif answered, giving Higgins a stiff salute before speeding off, flitting like a woodland spright from shadow to shadow.
‘How long has our order searched for this place?’ Higgins said to Vasilevsky as they waited for their scout to return. ‘Centuries? Millennia, even? And here we finally are, at the centre of it all, at our El Dorado … but unlike the fabled city of gold, this, what lies ahead of us, just over the top of the next rise, is no myth. And our names – yours and mine, Vasilevsky – will be remembered for all of future history for what we are about to accomplish. Relish this moment, my friend … relish it.’
Vasilevky’s mask of sullenness remained unmoved at Higgins’ impromptu speech.
‘You want to be praised, talked about and remembered, Englishman, that much is obvious. Me? I just want to see every one of those disgusting things,’ he snarled, turning to jerk his thumb at the prisoner, ‘wiped forever from the face of the earth. I still think we should have just brought a few wagons loaded up with dynamite with us, and simply blown this place and the foul thing inside it to hell. It would have been a lot less risky than what we’re about to attempt.’
‘We have everything we need to make this mission a success,’ Higgins said coolly. ‘This site and the being inside—’
‘The hellspawn inside it,’ Vasilevsky growled.
‘Indeed, yes,’ Higgins muttered, one eyebrow subtly raised as he continued, ‘will provide us with answers to questions our forebears have been asking for centuries, for millennia. We cannot simply destroy such potential. And even with a few wagons of dynamite, I’m not sure if we even could. There are things we do not yet understand about the nature of this place, of the creature within … You heard what Dr Khan was saying earlier, my good sir. The readings on his instruments were unworldly. To attempt something as, as crudely forceful as blowing this place up may set in motion a disaster of cataclysmic proportions. Even if we had the requisite explosives at hand, I would not permit it.’
‘You have your opinion on the matter, I have mine,’ Vasilevsky grunted gruffly, unmoved by his compatriot’s words.
The officers allowed their conversation to trail off into a combative silence, the tension drawn ever tauter by the intensifying suspense of the wait for the scout’s return. He eventually did, and assured the officers that it was safe to proceed.
‘Well then,’ Higgins said as he stood up, ‘let’s see what lies in the valley beyond, shall we?’
Vasilevsky, as thorny as ever, scowled and barked an order to the troops, who all stood up in perfectly synchronised unison, and then began to advance. Every step Higgins took up the slope magnified his sense of excited anticipation, and it took no small effort of will to stop himself from running ahead, with the top of the slope so tantalisingly close.
He reached it soon enough though, and in the small valley beyond his gaze fell upon the object of his desire, the locus of his every ounce of toil and labour and research over the past few decades … and it was not quite what he expected. The valley itself was strange enough, looking like something that was almost man-made rather than a natural geological formation; from atop the rise on which the men were standing, the land fell sharply away in a near-vertical drop, flattening out after twenty-five or thirty metres into an enormous concave depression. The top of the ridge – the lip of this odd, bowl-shaped valley – extended in a sweeping curve to either side of the men, disappearing into the wall of trees.
‘Looks like
a giant bloody cannonball dropped from the heavens and landed right here,’ one of the soldiers muttered as the men surveyed the landscape before them.
In addition to the oddness of the terrain, the trees in the valley were also far from normal. They were of the same few species that populated the rest of the taiga, but the sheer size of the valley trees was beyond incredible; the freakishly enormous spruces, firs and pines in here positively dwarfed their brethren, making them look like mere saplings in comparison. Indeed, even the gargantuan redwoods and sequoias of California, which Higgins had seen with his own eyes, looked like adolescent specimens compared to these titans.
‘No wonder it’s seemed for the past few hours like night has fallen in the middle of the day,’ he whispered, half to himself, as he stared in wonder at the enormous trees that blotted out the sky.
‘I thought it might have been an eclipse,’ said Vasilevsky, who had overheard him. ‘And I was half right, eh Englishman? But it’s not the moon blocking the sun, we can now see…’
‘Indeed, indeed,’ Higgins murmured in response. ‘These trees must be what, one hundred and fifty metres tall? Taller, perchance? There may be some in this valley that exceed two hundred metres! By Jove, they’re positively, utterly enormous! And the girth of those trunks … they have to be at least ten metres in diameter, maybe more!’
‘We’ll be filthy rich from the lumber when we cut them all down,’ Vasilevsky murmured. ‘Even if it takes years to drag them to a river deep enough to float them away.’
‘Quite, my good sir, quite!’ Higgins responded with gleeful enthusiasm. ‘But before we begin laying out business plans and calculating costs and expenses, we do have the matter of the being that is somewhere in the middle of all of this to take care of.’
The muscles of Vasilevsky’s jutting jaw tightened, and a guttural growl of hatred and loathing – tempered with fierce determination – rumbled in his throat.
‘Let us waste no more time then,’ he gnarled. ‘Into the valley, men! We begin our assault!’
The men picked a path down the near-vertical descent, clambering down via a series of rocks that were jutting out of the moss-covered walls. The soldiers, all strong and agile, got down easily enough, but they had to assist the two scientists, who were not quite as nimble as the younger men. The interpreter, whose services were not needed for the time being, was told to wait at the top. Finally, when everyone else had climbed down, the last soldier forced the robed prisoner to descend. Despite the heavy chains on her wrists and ankles, she managed to hop with catlike grace from rock to rock, getting to the bottom far faster than the soldier who came down after her. When the prisoner had completed her descent, Higgins strolled over to her. Beneath his thick moustache he wore a smile, but he had about him the look of a coiled viper, poised to strike.
‘It’s almost time for you play your part in this mission,’ he said to her in Arabic, a language in which he was fluent. ‘Remember what will happen to you if you don’t cooperate … and what my masters will do to your imprisoned friends when word reaches my superiors of your betrayal.’ He pointed at the two homing pigeons, which, unlike the rest of the baggage, had been brought down into the valley. ‘Your actions will determine which of those birds we release, and which message subsequently reaches my superiors.’
For the first time in many weeks the woman spoke. Her face remained hidden behind the cloths wrapped around it, but her eyes shone like twin jewels against the inky darkness of her hood.
‘Don’t worry Higgins,’ she said, her tone of voice calm and neutral, her accent coloured with a distinctly foreign lilt of North African origin. ‘I’ll do what you want me to.’
‘You’d better,’ he muttered, before turning and striding stiffly to the front of the company as they got back into formation.
‘The whore is going to cooperate, yes?’ Vasilevsky asked Higgins as he took his place in the vanguard of the small force, while looking askance at the woman in black.
‘She is,’ Higgins answered. ‘You don’t need to worry about that. She knows full well what’s at stake; if she even shows a hint that she’ll fail to follow our orders, I’ll release the black pigeon. But she won’t be that stupid, mark my words. She’ll do what we need her to.’
‘And as soon as it’s played its part,’ Vasilevsky hissed, his cold eyes taking on even more of a flinty hardness, ‘I’ll shove my sabre through its throat.’
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, my good sir,’ Higgins said calmly. ‘We’ll deal with her when the time comes. Are you ready to advance?’
‘Ready.’
‘Then I’ll allow you to give the order.’
Vasilevsky nodded curtly to Higgins and then barked out the command to advance. The troops moved at a steady pace into the strange artificial night created by the titanic trees, looking like mere toy soldiers, abandoned in a forest and come uncannily to life.
For all his bravado and bluster, Higgins could not help but feel somewhat nervous as he and his fellow officer led the company into the gloom. This place had an utterly unearthly feel to it, and the sensation of static electricity pricking its million unseen needles through his skin, penetrating the very marrow of his bones, intensified with every step he took. Indeed, it seemed almost as if a deeply sonorous, humming resonance, increasing steadily in potency, was vibrating through the air, the soil, the trees … through every molecule, in fact, of this place.
‘What’s that sound?’ he heard one of the troops mutter behind him. ‘Is it just me, or can anybody else hear that?’
‘There will be silence as we advance!’ Higgins snapped.
‘These trees must be thousands of years old,’ Vasilevsky murmured, awed, as they skirted around the vast trunk of one of the titans. ‘How on earth could it be possible that any tree could grow this massive? I feel like … like a blasted insect next to this thing!’
‘There must be something in the soil,’ Higgins answered, ‘or, rather, beneath the soil. It may not only be the timber from these giants that makes us rich beyond our wildest dreams, Vasilevsky … there could be some sort of incredible energy source buried in this valley, something that could displace both coal and oil as fuels to power the future growth and expansion of human civilisation.’
A rare smiled brightened Vasilevsky’s stone-hewn features.
‘Two birds with one stone, eh Higgins? We strike a crippling blow against the foul beastwalkers, and we discover resources that will make us wealthier than fucking emperors.’
They continued to move through the eerie half-light, striding with focused purpose between the tower-like trees. Although they were advancing blindly, without a map or a guide to lead them on, they pressed on with unwavering intent, pulled ever on towards some invisible centre, like insects drawn to a single flame in the blackness of night, unable to resist its deathly light.
‘Oh my, look at these!’ Dr Khan exclaimed with delight, breaking abruptly away from the group and scurrying behind one of the lighthouse-like trees.
‘Blast the fool!’ Vasilevsky snarled, before he shouted out an order to halt the advance. ‘Go see what he’s doing,’ he muttered to Higgins, ‘and get him back in line.’
‘Dr Khan went that way, sir,’ one of the troops said as Higgins passed him. The soldier pointed to a narrow gap between two of the trees.
Higgins strode briskly through the shadows, and he found the elderly scientist squatting in front of a huge clump of luminescent fungi and mushrooms. They were coloured in hues of red, blue, violet, yellow, green and pink, and were glowing softly in the dark, emitting a gentle effulgence.
‘Quite fascinating, Dr Khan,’ Higgins remarked dryly as he stared at the enchanting display of bioluminescence, ‘but we cannot stop now.’
‘I, I must take samples!’ the awestruck scientist spluttered. ‘This is, why, it’s an entirely new species! They may even contain, or, um, yes, perhaps they are reacting to some sort of, of, radioactive isotope in the soil, or, um, maybe, or—�
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‘Come Dr,’ Higgins said, taking the elderly man’s arm with gentle fingers but a firm grip, and leading him away from the glowing fungi. ‘I assure you that you will be given all the time you need to examine the many wonders of this valley – after we have completed our primary mission objective.’
He led the scientist back to the group, and they continued to advance, drawn inexorably toward the heart of this otherworldly valley, where the greatest prize was ripe for the taking … or so they thought.
They pressed on through the dreamlike forest, and the closer they got to whatever it was that was tugging them towards it, the stronger the seemingly magnetic force appeared to become. The ground beneath their feet was more broken and uneven here, shifting from a relatively flat topography to earth that seemed to have been torn up by some freak seismic event, with huge ruts, ridges, ravines and pits scarring the land. In some places massive rocks jutted at strange angles out of the ground, like the crumbling tombstones of a long-lost race of giants. This made for difficult progress, but the men did not slow their advance, and they simply tackled whatever obstacles Nature threw their way in grim, determined silence.
Finally, they came to the edge of what appeared to be a deep rift in the earth; the ground dropped abruptly and unexpectedly away here, with sheer rocky cliffs plunging at least a mile, possibly even a mile and a half down to the distant valley floor below, which was dense with huge trees and lush vegetation. Owing to the sudden lack of a tightly woven forest canopy above them, sunlight illuminated this space and brought an abrupt end to the false night through which they had just trekked, and once again the open, cloudless sky was visible in a rich hue of azure. At the far end of the ravine, opposite the men, perhaps two miles distant in a straight line, a tall waterfall churned its narrow but voluminous stream of white water over a sharp cliff face, and its dull roar echoed like rumbling thunder. Other, smaller waterfalls also poured their issue into the valley from all sides, while flocks of birds swooped and soared in asymmetrical flight patterns through the air of this surreal place, some of them seeming as proportionately gigantic as the trees. An eagle of some sort – by far the largest bird of prey any of these men had ever seen – let out a piercing cry as it circled in a majestic gyre high above the tops of the trees but below the soldiers, who stared in wonder at the unusual spectacle of beholding from above an eagle in flight. One soldier raised his rifle to his shoulder, lining the bird up in his sights, his finger eager on the trigger, but Higgins quickly stepped over and pushed the firearm down.
