Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk

by James Lovegrove

  I could tell we were getting close to it when the current picked up and the water became turbid. Soon there was an appreciable swirl on the surface, a slow-moving whirlpool some ten or fifteen yards in diameter. Gad set the Zodiac against the whirlpool’s rotation and throttled back on the outboard until we were effectively at a standstill.

  “You do the honours,” he said to me, and I bent and put my shoulder to the grim task of heaving Solveig, in her rug cocoon, overboard.

  She was a slight thing but heavier than she looked. I struggled to roll her up onto the Zodiac’s gunwale. I asked Gad for assistance, but he said he had to keep his hand on the tiller to hold the boat steady. So, beginning to sweat, I resumed grappling with the corpse and eventually managed to lay it across the rubber float. After that, it was easy enough to tip it off into the lake.

  The rug soaked up water but the body stayed afloat, drifting lazily round in the spiralling current and spinning in smaller circles of its own. Gad and I watched it keenly as it was drawn inexorably towards the centre of the whirlpool. I noted the whirlpool gathering speed but didn’t immediately apprehend the significance of this fact. All I wanted was for the corpse to be gone, to disappear from sight so that we could be done with this grisly business and leave.

  To my horror, and Gad’s as well, the rug began to unpeel itself. Solveig’s pallid, bored-looking face was revealed, and then one of her arms flopped free, almost as though she were alive and attempting to swim. The arm wafted in the water in a slow parody of volition, while Solveig’s hair fanned out around her head, rippling like the fronds of a sea anemone.

  It was awful, and yet I couldn’t tear my gaze away. Then, to my immense relief, the whirlpool abruptly pulled her under. She was there one moment, bobbing on her back, like a blonde version of Rossetti’s Ophelia; gone the next, sucked down into the sinkhole in a single gulp, leaving no trace, not even a few bubbles to mark her passing.

  Gad inhaled sharply, as though for the past minute or so he had neglected to breathe.

  “Well,” he said softly, “that’s that over with. She ain’t ever coming back. Loki? If you’re listening? Sorry, guy. Them’s the breaks. For what it’s worth, she was a good choice. Or he. This transgender stuff confuses me.”

  “She,” I said.

  He nodded. “She did you proud, Loki. Shame it had to end this way for her.”

  It wasn’t much as eulogies go, but it was all poor Solveig was ever going to get.

  EN ROUTE BACK to the ravine, I noticed something curious.

  “I can see the bottom,” I said, peering over the boat’s bows. “The bottom of the lake. I’m sure I couldn’t when we were coming the other way.”

  “Yeah, is that so?” said Gad nonchalantly.

  “Yes. The water’s getting shallower. Definitely.” Which would account for the quickening of the whirlpool. I thought of the water around a plughole, turning faster as the bath drains out.

  “Guess I’d better pour on the speed, then.”

  The boat did accelerate but not by much. Our speed climbed, but I wouldn’t say Gad exactly poured it on. Maybe this was as fast as the Zodiac could go.

  I studied the lake with increasing concern. Boulders were appearing above the surface, and other rocky outcrops, all of which I was sure hadn’t been there before. In places, the lake was only a couple of feet deep, whereas earlier it had seemed unfathomable. The landscape was emerging from beneath it, like some mythical continent arising, a desert Atlantis.

  I turned to Gad. “We really need to hurry. We’re not going to make it.”

  “Doing the best I can, Dion. Lake’s drying up faster’n I thought it would. Sun’s evaporating it, ground’s absorbing it. But we got time, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “Ain’t an exact science, but I reckon we’ll get back to –”

  There was a hideous scraping sound, the Zodiac’s soft hull rubbing across the top of some hidden stone reef. Gad grimaced but piloted us doggedly on. Shading my eyes, I searched for the entrance to the ravine, but couldn’t see it yet. I realised it would be touch-and-go whether we reached it. The flat-bottomed boat had minimal draught, but the waters were receding fast. Lake Sweetwater’s brief burst of renewed life was coming to an end. Its mayfly renaissance was over, and the dry times were returning.

  Now little low islands were visible, raised patches of glistening mud. Gad circumnavigated them, and although he continued to radiate an air of imperturbability, I caught what I fancied was a flicker of concern in his eyes. He didn’t relish the prospect of becoming stranded out here any more than I did. He, like me, was keen to make it back to the pickup and, ultimately, back to the Friendly Inn, where we could tie up any dangling threads and go our separate ways, never to meet again. At that moment I wasn’t even thinking about the contest. I was experiencing the low-level nausea of the crook who simply wants to be able to get away with his crime scot-free, even as fate does its very best to thwart him.

  Seeing life from the other side of the fence now, eh, Dion?

  Snide comments from Anansi did not help.

  The Zodiac juddered across something rugged, and Gad swore some Native American curse and veered sharply sideways. For several seconds the boat skimmed freely through the water. Then it hit some other obstruction. Gad and I were jolted out of our seats. We landed back more or less upright, and Gad gunned the motor and the Zodiac charged forward, but not for long. All at once it was ploughing a furrow through mud, and the propeller became clogged, and we lost momentum, and just like that the motor cut out and we were at a halt, beached, going nowhere.

  “Well, shit,” Gad sighed. “If that don’t suck a fat one... Could’ve sworn the lake’d stick around longer than that.”

  The boat lay at a slight angle, amid a sea of mud.

  “What do we do now?” I said, trying to keep an edge of anxiety out of my voice.

  “We could stay put.”

  “But the way you said that, you don’t think it’s wise.”

  “It ain’t got much to recommend it. Mojave’s not what you’d call a hospitable spot, ’specially to two fellas without a drop of drinking water on ’em. Our best bet’s abandoning the boat and going on on foot. Won’t be easy, but it’s preferable to just sitting here and letting the sun slowly bake our brainpans.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?” I surveyed our surroundings, the lakebed that was almost entirely land again. “Let’s get cracking.”

  “After you,” said Gad.

  WE STEPPED OUT of the Zodiac, onto the mud. Straight away I sank in up to my ankles; Gad likewise.

  “Trick is to keep moving,” he said. “Stop, and you’ll just carry on sinking.”

  So we hurried, or tried to. We trudged. We slopped. We slurped. We forged through the mud. It accumulated around our calves in clumps, layer upon thickening layer. The further we travelled, the more of it stuck to us, and the more that stuck, the harder we had to struggle just to walk. In some places the mud was so shallow we could virtually skate over it. In others, it swallowed our legs up to the knees and we were wading along, arms swinging, like astronauts in cumbersome spacesuits.

  There was the mud, and the heat of the morning, and I could feel them both taking their toll, but I dug deep and carried on. Gad, at least twenty years my senior, was finding the going tough too, but he had a lean, wiry build and I sensed his stamina was well above the average for someone his age He might even be as fit as me. We could do this, I thought. We could make it through to the ravine and the pickup.

  But soon my strength was ebbing. The mud was relentless and treacherous. More than once I lost my footing and went floundering into it face first. I managed to pick myself up and lumber on, but each time it was more difficult to recover than before. I lost my shoes, and my socks, and had no recollection of them being wrenched off my feet and vanishing, and didn’t care. I began to despair. The ordeal seemed endless. The mud went on forever.

  I didn’t realised I had stopped
in my tracks until Gad said, “Don’t just stand there, Dion. Up and at ’em.”

  I forced my legs to move, hauling them one after the other out of the mud and back into more mud, on and on. Increasingly I found myself bent over, scrabbling along on all fours. I was covered in muck. Dank gluey brownness was all over me, inside my clothes, smeared on my face.

  At some point Gad fell behind. When I looked round, he was perhaps a hundred feet back. I’d been aware that he was flagging, but not that he had completely run out of steam. I yelled at him to keep up. All I got in return was a bleak, weary shake of the head and a beckoning gesture.

  “Need you,” he gasped. “Think I’m in trouble here.”

  Ignore him. Go on.

  But I couldn’t. I couldn’t just leave him. So I ignored Anansi instead and turned myself round and toiled back through the path I had churned in the mud until I was by Gad’s side.

  He was in up to his crotch.

  “Real soft patch,” he said. “Stuff’s like quicksand here. I can’t lift either of my legs.”

  “Try.”

  “Can’t. You gotta pull me.”

  I could feel the mud dragging on my legs, urging me down. It was a sickening sensation.

  “Come on.” I held out an arm to him. “Grab on. I’ll do what I can.”

  He grabbed. We strained and heaved as one, but it was no use.

  “Only one thing for it,” I said. “I’ll go on. Get to the truck. Fetch help.”

  Gad nodded.

  I tried to turn round again.

  I couldn’t.

  The mud held me fast.

  I writhed. I squirmed. I fought to free myself.

  I couldn’t.

  It was above my knees, clawing my thighs. It gripped like a vice. And I was utterly worn out.

  I allowed myself to rest for a moment. I would gather my strength, get ready and then exert myself again.

  Next thing I knew, Gad was telling me to wake up. “This ain’t the time for napping, Dion. We gotta figure out a way out of this.”

  I opened my eyes and started battling with the mud once more. Somehow, though, I ended up embedded even further in it.

  “This is stupid,” I said. “Absurd. It can’t be happening.”

  But it undoubtedly was.

  Gad and I had managed to trap ourselves in the middle of a mud plain. No one knew we were there. Our chances of getting rescued were negligible, possibly even nil.

  THE SUN CONTINUED its inexorable, blazing ascent to its zenith, and as the air grew hotter, so the mud hardened and set. Talk about adding insult to injury. Gad and I weren’t just stuck, we were being cemented in place. Soon the ground around us had become concrete-solid, and it was then that Gad began to laugh.

  “Shut up,” I told him. “How the hell can you laugh at a time like this?”

  “’Cause it’s funny.”

  “We are going to die out here!” I exclaimed. “In what conceivable way is that amusing to you?”

  “’Cause it’s my fault.”

  “No argument about that. We wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t stabbed Solveig.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not what I meant. Don’t you see? Look at us. Anything about our situation at all familiar to you?”

  “No.”

  Yes, said Anansi.

  “Anything about it strike a chord?”

  “No.”

  Yes. Oh, you cunning bastard, Coyote. And how dare you. That’s my story. Mine!

  “The tar baby,” said Gad.

  The sticky gum doll, said Anansi. The one I caught Mmoatia the Dwarf with.

  “The tar baby that a farmer set up to catch a rabbit with. The more the rabbit struggled to get free of the tar baby, the more stuck he became.”

  My story! I carved a mannequin out of wood and covered it with tree sap...

  “Then Coyote came along, and the rabbit, who was a sly one, explained that the farmer was punishing him for refusing to eat his melons, but he’d promised him a nice fresh chicken if he just stayed there a while.”

  And I put a yam in a bowl in front of it...

  “So Coyote offered to swap places with the rabbit, and he pulled the rabbit free and stuck himself to the tar baby instead.”

  And Mmoatia saw the yam and ate it, and thanked the doll, who didn’t reply, so Mmoatia got cross and hit it...

  “And when the farmer came back, he didn’t have a chicken, of course, but he did have a big stick.”

  Her fists became stuck in the gum...

  “He beat Coyote within an inch of his life.”

  And I’d caught her and was able to take her to Nyame, the last of the four gifts which bought me ownership of all the world’s stories.

  “Tricksters get tricked,” said Gad. “Happens all the time. Goes with the territory.”

  “This,” I said, incredulous, “this was all designed to trap me?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Everything? Solveig included?”

  “Hell of a plan, right? Suckered you right in from the start.” Gad wasn’t gloating. If anything he was rueful, which, given our shared predicament, was understandable. “Gained your confidence, strung you along... It just went wrong here, at the very end. The coup de grâce – me playing the ‘tar baby’ – it was always gonna be the hard bit to pull off. Guess I shoulda known it might backfire. Didn’t exactly work out so well for Coyote, did it?”

  “And letting me think I’d won the contest?”

  Gad gave a half-hearted shrug. “A lie.”

  “But I have won!” I declared.

  “You honestly think so? Take a look at us. At yourself. This look like winning to you?”

  My own trick, used against me, Anansi fumed. The stories are similar, but even so. I did it first. Coyote stole it from me.

  “Enough!” I yelled at him, clutching my head. “Enough! Get out of my thoughts. Get out of me. Go. I’ve had enough of you.”

  “Spider giving you grief?”

  “Look at what you’ve done to me, you bastard. Look how I’ve ended up. All in the name of your stupid, pointless contest. Go!”

  “You tell him, Dion. Go for it.”

  “Leave me the hell alone!”

  I didn’t even know who I was shouting at any more. Anansi? Gad? Myself? What I did know was that my voice sounded hopelessly small and faint in that heat-ridden wilderness, a whisper lost in an ocean of sky.

  “Anansi?”

  There was silence, inside me and outside.

  Not a sound except the faint scuttling of tiny legs, dancing off into the distance.

  LATER, SOME TIME later, I have no idea how much time later, Gad said, “You ever wonder, Dion, if there’s actually been a trickster god inside you at all?”

  “Huh?”

  “Coyote’s voice. I don’t hear it no more. And now he’s not talking to me, I’m asking myself, did he ever?”

  EVEN LATER, WHEN our lips were parched and blistered and the sun was searing and we were still planted in the ground like half-buried statues...

  “Maybe,” Gad said, “we’re men who thought they were gods. We wouldn’t be the first.”

  “Stop talking. Please stop talking.”

  “Or men who know too many stories. You think that’s possible? To know too many stories?”

  “I can’t listen. My head hurts.”

  “Maybe the tricksters’ biggest trick of all is that there is no contest. Right now they’re laughing their asses off, all of them, over the huge hoax they’ve pulled. It’ll be a heck of a tale to tell all the other gods, how they fooled a bunch of humans into hurting, even killing one another, for nothing, no good reason whatsoever.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Gad...”

  “Never trust a trickster. Never trust a motherfucking trickster. That’s the moral of the story.”

  WE WILL BE here forever. They will find our bones, bleached, picked clean by vultures and, yes, by coyotes.

  We will be rescued. Someone will miss us and
send out a search party. A helicopter full of paramedics will descend from the blue like a roaring angel and bring us salvation.

  We will die.

  We will live.

  OH, NANABAA OBOSHIE, you taught me how to begin a story and also how to end one. Let me end this one with the words that end all tales.

  “That was my story which I have related. If it be sweet, or if it be not sweet, take some elsewhere, and let some come back to me.”

  This is my Anansesem, my Anansi story.

  I am Dion Yeboah, and I wish with all my heart that it did not end this way.

  1968

  THE SCRUM COLLAPSED. Guy, in the front row, went down with what seemed like the full weight of a dozen boys on his back. He couldn’t rise, couldn’t move. He was trapped.

  Then a rugby boot stamped on his outstretched hand. Steel cleats ground his knuckles.

  Guy screamed. He tried to pull his hand out from under the boot, but the boot’s wearer only bore down harder, crushing the hand deeper into the grass. He felt the sweaty, suffocating press of bodies on top of him. Guy’s nose was squashed into the turf, and the pain from his hand was excruciating. It felt as though small bones were fracturing.

  Mr Stevenson the games master gave up frantically and uselessly blowing his whistle and prised apart the tangled human knot with brute strength. Guy was one of the last on either team to see daylight. He rose to his feet holding his hand out limply in front of him, like something which no longer belonged. It was reddened, raw, beginning to puff up. Mr Stevenson despatched him to the sanatorium to have it looked at.

  As Guy stumbled off the pitch, a boy on the opposing team hissed, “That hurt, Lucas? It was meant to. Fucking choccie poof.”

  TWO DAYS LATER, in the dining hall, Guy was carrying his lunch on a tray, searching for somewhere to sit. His hand was thickly bandaged. Matron had given him a chit absolving him from rugby for a week. Instead, he had to go on a five-mile run with Mr Jacks’s upper-sixth cross country squad every afternoon. The running was exhausting and made his hand ache, but at least there was little chance of it getting injured afresh.