Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  ‘You’re … you’re like him?’ Margaret gasped.

  ‘No, not like him at all, not yet. I am not great and wise and strong like he is. I only have a tiny fraction of his powers … I am just a lowly servant compared to him. But biologically I am like him, yes.’

  ‘Just a “fraction of his powers” huh?’ she asked, unable to mask her scepticism, which verged on contempt. ‘And what exactly does that mean?’

  ‘Like the General can change into an elephant, I can transform my body into that of a lion. And even now, in this human form I’m in, I can see, hear and smell far better than any human. If I get injured, I heal far faster than any mortal being. I cannot get sick from viruses or bacteria like mortal humans or animals can. And once my body reaches its state of prime maturity, I will stop ageing. Well, almost … the ageing process will be slowed massively.’

  Margaret’s face crumpled into a disbelieving frown.

  ‘What the heck do you mean “stop ageing”?’

  ‘I mean just that, Dr Green. When my body reaches its physical peak it will stay that way, and I will only age very, very slowly. I will live for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years – like the General.’

  Margaret almost tripped over her feet, and she spluttered with disbelief.

  ‘What?! What on earth are you talking about?! Thousands of years? I’m sorry kid, but your General is flat out lying to you. He’s talking out of his ass, plain and simple! The oldest recorded lifespan of a human being is one hundred and twenty-two years. Trust me on this, all right, I’m a doctor. I’ve studied biology and physiology in far more depth than your General, and no matter what he tells you—’

  ‘Please Dr Green, you must not imply that the General is a liar,’ the youth interjected gravely, shooting her a wounded glance. ‘It is a very terrible thing to say.’

  ‘But it’s preposterous, what he’s telling you!’ Margaret insisted. ‘No human being, no mammal, reptile or bird can live for thousands of years. None! Even reaching one hundred years is beyond the physical capabilities of ninety-nine percent of animal life on this planet. It’s, it’s, it’s insane, is what such statements are! Making such claims, he’s trying to—’

  Margaret stopped herself here, realising that she may well be digging a grave for herself. She breathed deeply to calm herself down – which was extremely difficult, for she found ignorance and wild claims based on superstition to be terribly irksome – and restrained herself from making any more comments. The young soldier, meanwhile, flashed her a smile that was as uncanny as it was fleeting.

  ‘I’m sorry Dr Green,’ he said coolly, ‘I know you are very clever, and I don’t mean to insult you, but … you don’t know about the General. He is a lot older than you think.’

  ‘If you say so,’ she acquiesced, deliberately assuming an attitude of meek compliance.

  The boy turned on his heels, maintaining a rigidity of form and motion, still utterly immersed in his role as soldier.

  ‘I must take you to the dining hall now. We shouldn’t keep the General waiting.’

  ‘That’s fine. I’m ready, please lead the way.’

  Margaret paused here and flashed the soldier a guiltily apologetic glance before continuing. ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I’ve been very rude. I didn’t even ask you your name.’

  ‘I’m Sergeant Tesla.’

  ‘Sergeant … Tesla?’

  The boy allowed himself a semblance of a smile before pulling the mask of cool neutrality back over his face.

  ‘It is not the name I was given by my parents. No, I left that name behind when I became part of the Antidote. The General encourages us to take our new names from people who inspire us, historical figures we look up to, for example. He says that there is great power in the choosing of a name, and I believe this to be true myself. In my former life, when I was a young child, I enjoyed making things with scrap materials and dreaming up inventions, and I have always had an interest in discovery and innovation. In the classes I attend here, I learned about Nikola Tesla, and I have done a lot of reading on him. So, when the time came to give myself a name in the service of the Antidote, I chose Tesla.’

  Margaret nodded, impressed both by the youth’s source of inspiration and the degree of knowledge he seemed to possess, which was of a far greater range than the limited worldviews of most of the uneducated rural villagers she had come across here in the Congo.

  ‘That’s a fine choice, Sergeant Tesla,’ she commented, making sure to meet the young man’s eyes with her own so that she could convey the sincerity of her comment.

  The youth smiled with a brief flicker of shy pride, which was quickly extinguished as his countenance reverted to its former stony blankness.

  ‘Please follow me,’ he instructed as he turned away from her and marched off at a brisk pace.

  She hurried after the teen as he moved with rapid and easy familiarity through the maze of corridors. Margaret was very curious about the architecture that surrounded her, and it was all that she could do to keep her eyes on the young man ahead of her rather than to stare in awe at the massive, continually curving stone walls. There were no right angles here, it seemed, and no straight lines. Everything was circular, curved, concave, convex. Indeed, the only geometric and perfectly flat surface seemed to be that of the floor beneath her. Constructed of river rocks, it was polished smooth and glossy, and it shone beneath the gently pulsating, multicoloured light that emanated from the bioluminescent fungi grafted onto the walls.

  They started up a spiral staircase, and the pace at which the soldier ascended it in front of Margaret left her quite out of breath when they eventually reached the top. But as she turned the bend that opened into the dining hall, any opportunity to regain the oxygen which had deserted her lungs vanished; the sight of the spectacular, cavernous space before her caused her to stop dead in her tracks.

  ‘This … this is amazing,’ she gasped.

  ‘I see you are impressed by our dining hall.’

  The General’s rich baritone voice snapped Margaret out of her state of awe and back into the surreal present.

  ‘I … yes, yes, it’s incredible!’ There was no use in trying to conceal her childlike awe – this sight was too overwhelming in its magnificence for her to feign any sort of nonchalance. Margaret continued to stare all around her in amazement as she spoke. ‘How old did you say this city was?’

  ‘This castle is around two-thousand-five-hundred years old. It has taken us decades to restore it to the full glory of how it was in ancient times, but it was so well-constructed that most of what you see is still the original material. This is the Moon Chamber, and you are fortunate, because tonight is a full moon.’

  The dining chamber consisted of a vast, circular stone floor, crowned by what appeared to be a gigantic crystal dome. The crystal of which the dome was constructed was of a transparent blue hue and seemed almost jagged in texture. It had the rather spectacular effect of simultaneously diffusing, amplifying and refracting the light of the full moon above, thereby illuminating the entire space with a gentle bluish-white glow that was light enough to read by.

  In the centre of the Moon Chamber was a round table, constructed of deeply polished hardwood, cut from the trunk of a tree whose girth rivalled that of thousand-year-old sequoias in North America. Around this table sat three people, their features illuminated in tones of red, orange, burgundy and ochre by a multitude of candles. The General was seated on the chair closest to the entrance to the hall, while to his right and left sat two strangers. One was a rake-thin middle-aged Nordic woman, whose hair hung about her bony, marble-pale shoulders in a thick mess of platinum dreadlocks. The other was an elderly Brazilian fellow, short and rotund, upon whose bulbous nose was perched a pair of thick soda-bottle spectacles, the curves of which mirrored the roundness of his features. Unlike everyone else Margaret had seen in T’Kalanjathu, these people were dressed in civilian clothes. The General, meanwhile, was magnificently attired in his formal dress u
niform.

  All of them paused their conversation as Margaret entered the room, and the General stood up from his ornately carved, high-backed chair.

  ‘Welcome, Dr Green,’ he said with a warm smile. ‘Please, take a seat.’

  Margaret nodded, feeling a slight nervousness tightening in her throat. She swallowed her anxiety and tried to appear confident as she strode over to the table, a little too cockily perhaps, where a place opposite the General had been prepared for her. Brushing an errant wisp of mousy hair out of her eyes, she tried to take a seat, struggling to move the heavy chair. Noticing her difficulty, the General immediately stood up to assist her.

  ‘My apologies,’ he said. ‘These chairs are hewn of a type of ironwood native to these forests. It is exceptionally dense and durable, but as you can see, it makes for rather cumbersome furniture.’

  Margaret grunted and yanked the chair out herself, perhaps a little too enthusiastically. She did not want any assistance whatsoever from that man – no, that thing, that monster, whatever the General was. A flush of panic immolated her with a terrible and all-consuming heat as she realised she had forgotten about his mind-reading powers.

  ‘I’m fine, er, it’s fine,’ she stammered, not daring to look him in the eye.

  ‘Are you sure, Doctor?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m okay. Let’s have some dinner now, huh?’

  Margaret plopped herself down with hasty clumsiness, and then tried awkwardly to lean back in her chair, which was rather uncomfortable despite – or perhaps because of – its ornate design. The General ignored her evident discomfort and swept a melodramatic arm out before him.

  ‘Dr Green, let me introduce you to these members of my team.’

  ‘The Antidote, right?’ she replied, hoping that her tone didn’t come off as too snarky.

  ‘Yes, the Antidote.’

  The General beamed a strange smile at Margaret, and at once a chill rushed down her spine and an eerie disquietude prickled the surface of her skin. She understood immediately that she was on very thin ice here, despite the General’s smiles and pretensions of polite hospitality.

  Keep your big ol’ mouth shut, Margaret. It’s the only way you’ll be walking out of here alive.

  ‘To your left is Dr Elin Ogilvy of Norway. She is one of the top microbiological engineers on the planet. You may have read some of her papers, if you follow journals of microbiology, that is.’

  The Nordic woman gave Margaret a curt nod and a cool smile with her thin, tightly drawn lips.

  ‘Hi Dr Ogilvy,’ Margaret murmured.

  ‘And the wonderful fellow on your right is Dr Ricardo Teixeira, a prominent and highly esteemed virologist from Brazil. He has been at the leading edge of the study of various medicines engineered from plants unique to the Amazon rainforest. His research has been ground-breaking in his field, second to none.’

  ‘Hello Dr Green,’ rasped the portly little Brazilian, squinting at Margaret through his soda-bottle lenses. His husky voice was draped with a dense accent. ‘It is nice to have met you.’

  ‘Uh yeah, it’s nice to meet you too, Dr Teixeira,’ she replied, smiling somewhat uneasily.

  ‘Now, let us not waste any more time with small talk, for time is most surely the most precious commodity we possess,’ the General said.

  ‘Agreed, General,’ Dr Ogilvy added. ‘Shall we eat before we get on with matters at hand?’

  ‘Yes, let us give our bodies nourishment, so that our minds may operate at their most optimum capacity. Ghandi, could you and Sankara please bring out our meals?’

  Two of the teen soldiers who were stationed at the doors saluted and hurried off.

  ‘They will be back in five minutes,’ the General said, smiling. ‘In the meantime, perhaps you would like to ask a few questions about us? I’m sure that despite your persistent feelings of fear, anxiety and confusion, you must nonetheless be a little curious about the Antidote, no?’

  ‘I would, um, like to ask a few things, er, if you, uh, don’t mind,’ Margaret replied, acutely aware of how badly she was stuttering and stammering.

  ‘Ask away, Doctor. Remember, whatever happens, you will have your freedom in thirty days. This I promised you, and my word is my bond. But, as I have also said, I feel that you may well decide to stay on once the time comes to make your decision.’

  Margaret wanted to jump up and scream at him. Her fiery temper flared up, as if a gallon of petrol had just been tossed onto the orange-glowing embers that burned in the pit of her belly.

  I’ll never choose to stay with you, you goddamn terrorist! You kidnapper of children, you rapist, you liar, you misogynist, you warmonger! Never, not in a million years!

  That was what she desperately wished to roar at this man, this pompous, lying violence-spreader with his fake smile and put-on Oxford accent and somehow flawless English.

  You pretend you’re so sophisticated, so ‘enlightened’, out here in the jungle in your ancient city, with your child soldiers and these moron scientists who you’ve somehow duped into joining your warped, fucked-up little cult … well, not me! Hell no! I’ll never willingly join this disgusting club, whatever the heck it is! You dare talk to me about ‘enlightenment’, out here, out here in the most unenlightened, lawless and barbaric place on the planet! You presumptuous, arrogant asshole! I don’t care if you’re reading these thoughts! Go on and read ‘em! Kill me, rape me, get it over with! I’m getting sick and tired of this goddamn game!

  She looked up at the General, beaming as sarcastic and scathing a smile as she could manage.

  ‘Well, where exactly do I begin? How about this: why don’t you start, sir, by telling me exactly what the Antidote is? I mean, are you a religious group? Or some sort of rebel militia who hope to take over the government? What’s your agenda?’

  ‘We are—’ the General began.

  ‘Wait, General.’

  A calm and measured voice interrupted him: Dr Ogilvy.

  ‘General, may I?’

  The General nodded coolly. From his expression it was plain to see that he did not appreciate this interruption, but in his subdued anger there was also respect for this woman. Dr Ogilvy, meanwhile, smiled coolly and looked Margaret squarely in her eyes.

  ‘Allow me to explain. We are no mere “rebel group”. We are not a militia, we are most certainly not a cult or religious order, and we are not affiliated to any particular government, political party or any outside organisation. No, none of these can describe anything of what we are, because we are our own movement. Yes, a movement. Pardon me for my rudeness in being so presumptuous when I say this, but you look to be of an age to have both witnessed and perhaps participated in some of the greatest social justice movements America has known in its recent history. I think as a small child you must have seen footage of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, yes? Civil rights protests, maybe? Surely you yourself would have marched in the protests against your country’s unlawful invasion of Iraq and their unjust war in Afghanistan in recent times?’

  ‘Yes,’ Margaret replied, her voice tinged with uncertainty. She was quite unsure of what to make of this woman, with calm confidence and disarming demeanour. ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Well, then you are already part of the Antidote. You just haven’t realised it yet,’ Dr Ogilvy responded.

  ‘Your movement must be rather loosely defined if it includes anyone who has ever participated in an anti-war protest.’ Margaret once again felt the dangerous stirrings of defiance crackling within her, but this time she did not hesitate to vocalise her thoughts. Any notion of censoring her opinions was burned to ashes as the fires of wrath began to rage within her. ‘And furthermore, this seems to be some sort of army! Yeah, an army! I’m sorry, but in my books no army can ever claim itself to be any sort of movement, or whatever, that has any pretensions to anything even remotely connected to the causes of peace and justice. Not until y’all lay down those rifles can I believe that. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is. That’s the t
ruth.’

  She looked down at her hands and saw they were trembling. What had she done? Perhaps it had not been a wise move to have allowed this avalanche of opinions to spill out from between her lips.

  Dr Ogilvy seemed unmoved, though. She replied to Margaret in a calm and even tone of voice.

  ‘I must make it clear that all of us in the Antidote are on exactly the same page that you are. None of us here love war. We all hate violence, death, suffering and all of the other concomitants associated with war. It is the ultimate aim of the Antidote to end all violence, to end all suffering on this planet, and to usher into this broken world a universal peace, the likes of which has never before been known in the history of humankind. But there are things that will have to be done to achieve this, many of them perhaps … unpleasant. For example, tell me this: what would have happened had the Allies not stood up to Hitler and the Axis powers? How many more innocents would have perished in Germany’s quest to dominate the entire European continent? How many more millions would have been slaughtered in the Reich’s death camps and gas chambers? Sometimes we must make war to end war.’

  Margaret sat listening to this with a tight-lipped smile, biting her tongue and tapping her fingers on the glass-smooth surface of the table, and doing her best to restrain herself from unleashing another tirade.

  ‘I see,’ she murmured through clenched teeth after a few seconds of pregnant silence. ‘So you are an army then? An army of peace and justice? That’s what you call yourselves?’

  ‘We are a movement,’ Dr Ogilvy insisted gently, still smiling and completely concealing whatever feelings may have been simmering behind the façade of measured calm stretched tight across her angular face. ‘War is only a minor part of it, and a part that is, as any reasonable person would know, an absolute last resort.’

  ‘Tell me then, tell me, how exactly does your “movement” intend to bring about, well, ha! Nothing less than world peace itself! How?’