The Tides of Nemesis (The Windows of Heaven Book 4)

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  Q’Enukki broke himself free of that timeline again, before it could unfold any further. “I do not wish to see any more of that just now!” he shouted. “This world is too new! I want there to be happy endings!”

  He felt Samuille’s soft touch on his shoulder. “There will be joy. But there must also be much sorrow first. Your own prophecies foretold that the evil would rise a second time to wreak havoc upon the lands.”

  “So soon? How much more can we endure? Not now!”

  “Very well. We shall restrict what you see to the healing of the planet, though I fear not even that will be easy to watch.”

  Q’Enukki followed the landscape that repeatedly swept underneath him; the Mind-shadow blanked from his sight by a growing chaos screen, for which he was deeply grateful.

  Great patch-quilted salt-water inland seas lay trapped by soft highlands in some regions; unable to find egress to the oceans. In other less lofty places, these bitter lakes with no outlet sank to beneath sea level—usually inside the great rift zones, near inland tectonic plate fractures.

  Blocking the outflow of a series of such titanic puddles stretching across parts of future Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico sat a high-altitude mud flat that the Time’s-Enders would call the Kaibab Plateau Upwarp. East, in what would be New Mexico, volcanoes centered on a giant caldera in the forming Jemez Mountains vomited plumes of ash, shaking the saturated earth like a huge pan of batter. Springs, feeding what would someday become the Colorado River system, added water to the titanic lake complex, and increased the pressure against the soft Kaibab muds.

  Answering some deep subterranean call, the Yellowstone super-volcano farther north erupted again, burying newly arrived animal herds in ash as far away as future Nebraska, in another smaller mass-extinction. This ice age would be a long one.

  Q’Enukki could not be sure what triggered the following events. Clusters of meteoric fragments from Tiamatu swept close to Earth for centuries after the Deluge. A few impacted with each pass, interrupting the planet’s healing process with wild tsunamis that often buried nesting river dragons with their eggs and footprints so rapidly that both were preserved under the fine silt. By now, the great drakes were thinning out.

  Each impact cluster had fewer large meteors, as Earth’s orbit slowly cleared of Tiamatu’s debris. The present event only involved two large bodies. The first meteor hit not far to the southeast of the unstable Kaibab plateau system, adding its shock waves to the volcanic mayhem in the east. A hurricane of flash-dried dust expanded out from Meteor Crater. Or maybe one of the super-eruptions to the east shook the land too hard. Or it might have been that the Kaibab sediment pack simply reached saturation from the mounting lake waters, or all of the above. One way or another, the point of least resistance breached over what would someday be Northern Arizona.

  Q’Enukki saw it happen in accelerated time dilation, with each wide orbital pass. A torrent etched across the forest of saplings in the Kaibab mud. Within hours, Earth Time—minutes for Q’Enukki—churning waters cut a gorge deep into the landscape. In a few days’ time, it exposed layers of fossilized sediments—limestones, shales, and sandstones. For almost a week this gravel-blasting water-jet went on, until the lakes behind the broken dam of soft earth rushed through to the lower lands south, and emptied their muds in heaps, west of future Imperial Valley, toward the Gulf of California.

  Centuries later, tribes descended from Khumi and Tiva would enter the giant canyon to be the first human beings besides Q’Enukki to see it. Their distant descendants, the Havasupai and Walapai Indians, would speak of it in legends already ancient by the coming of white men to that place. They would tell of how the canyon formed during the out-rushing waters of a great world-destroying flood, from which their first father and mother found rescue inside “a giant stone canoe.”

  The second asteroid did not impact, but grazed the outer atmosphere over future Russia. The massive body’s gravitational field had a brief, catastrophic grabbing effect as it sped by. The heat of air friction radiated onto the glaciers, and melted flash floods that dumped northward, across the temperate coastal zones of future Siberia and Alaska.

  Herds of bison, hairy rhinoceros, and mammoth froze when the asteroid’s gravity blasted layers of atmosphere away in its shockwave. Most asphyxiated in the sudden loss of oxygen, before their burial in the mucky flash floods that swept in minutes later. High precipitation in the lower atmosphere came into sudden contact with the cold of deep space. Clouds and rain quick-froze, burying the animals in whirlwinds of dust, snow, and ice. Arctic coastlines shifted, refreezing the flash flood sediments into vast plains of permafrost tundra. Millennia later, the sons of Iyapeti and Sutara discovered the still-frozen near fresh carcasses, and fed them to their sled dogs.

  The asteroid’s passage had other effects. The super-volcanoes of the Siberian Traps again stirred to life, which added to the melts across the narrow arctic temperate strip. Then the heavy cold came. Tsunamis rushed inland—this time to bury a few fledgling human civilizations. Yet none of these catastrophic floods destroyed all land everywhere. E’Yahavah kept his word.

  Samuille broke in on Q’Enukki’s traumatic observations. “It is time for us to move on. We have others to pick up. You have a mission to complete before you can experience your quickening.”

  “Who? What mission?”

  “We go again beyond the sun’s attraction-well, to a speed nearer light. I will explain all, once we have retrieved our other passengers.”

  A’Nu-Ahki heard the girl scream amid the grape leaves. Time and space displaced him in a moment of disorientation—back to the Canyons of Terror in wild Southern Aeden, where he heard the cries of another man’s wife impaled by some long-dead vultch-gryphon. The same helplessness froze his limbs as when he had watched the flaming rivers of ruptured Mount N’Zar consume his relatives in Akh’Uzan. Always the faces! Always their screams—they never go away—now even when I’m awake!

  Another cry told him that this was no flashback.

  Nu grabbed his cane, and shuffled through the vines, pulling his way along as quickly as he could, up Mount Lubar’s slope. It took several minutes to navigate the terraces, during which he called out to the mysterious crier.

  The mountain breeze carried a girl’s wail, muffled, as if she struggled against an assailant that clamped his hand over her mouth.

  Nu called out to her again, but could not localize her cries. He wove through latticed vines, his shady retreat transformed into a vast green maze of angry leaves and clinging tendrils.

  He shouted again.

  Much closer, an incoherent whimper came from beneath the grapes, followed by a violent rustle.

  Nu turned to see a shadow race through the vineyard. It crashed through a trellis on one of the lower steppes, hurled it aside, and cut away into the dense foliage.

  The sound of the weeping girl filled the upper terrace, a tormented wraith that guided A’Nu-Ahki through the vines.

  She lay in fetal position next to the shredded remains of her wrap. Her long dark hair hung over her face.

  A’Nu-Ahki choked back his rage, as the hollow helplessness he so dreaded took over. He removed his cloak, and laid it gently over her. Only then did he see that she was Ae’Vria, daughter of U’Sumi and T’Qinna.

  Nu whispered, “Who did this to you?”

  For a long time she would not answer, as if she debated within herself. Finally, her tears fell under control, and she gasped a response.

  It came in a single name: “Khana’Ani.”

  U’Sumi arrived at Khumi’s homestead, his body a quaking skin stretched over battling inner dragons. All the way, he had prayed for control to do what he must with the least amount of hurt to Khumi and Tiva.

  Khumi met him at the door of his stone house with dark questioning eyes; the mouth beneath his thin black beard frowned. Tiva hovered in the darkness, just inside.

  U’Sumi knew he was visibly shaking. “Where’s Khana’Ani?”
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br />   Khumi’s eyes narrowed. “Why? What’s he done now?”

  U’Sumi knew no other way than to just say it. “Ae’Vria was raped this afternoon. She claims Khana’Ani forced her. He needs to answer.”

  “What? I don’t believe it! It’s a mistake!”

  To U’Sumi, it all came out just a shade too fast to sound genuine.

  “No mistake, I’m afraid.”

  “I don’t understand… Are you sure she saw things right?”

  U’Sumi grinded his teeth, but kept his calm. “I know it’s hard, Umi, but ‘Vria was raped, she says by Khana’Ani. We need to find the truth.”

  “I didn’t raise no perverted dog!”

  Tiva stepped out of the shadows. “Let’s not make excuses for ourselves,” she said to her husband. Her eyes burned with a cold flame.

  Khumi turned on her, and looked for a moment as if he would strike her. “You’d just like to see him go down, wouldn’t you, you little shrew!”

  U’Sumi tensed his muscles.

  Tiva did not back down; her small, plump form planted firm. “Like I’m the one who attacked Ae’Vria? Get some sense! If Khani’s innocent, the truth will out, but if he’s guilty—if he’s guilty, let him pay!”

  Khumi turned to U’Sumi again. “Did any besides Ae’Vria see him?”

  “Pahp saw a young man run away, but could not identify him.”

  “Then it’s her word against my son’s!”

  U’Sumi clenched his fist, and spoke through equally clenched teeth, “Ae’Vria has never been known to lie, and her body bears the marks of assault. As for it being her word against Khana’Ani’s, we don’t know that, since Khana’Ani has not given us his word one way or another.”

  Having no way to answer this, Khumi simply growled, and pointed to the tent compound his sons lived in out in the field.

  “Let’s go get him and see if we can’t make sense of this! You!” he grimaced at Tiva, “you stay here and keep your flapping mouth shut!”

  The sun had set before the two men reached the camp. Khumi’s older sons, Mizori’Ra and Kush, had big tents at the center of the compound with small children about. The younger boys camped farther afield.

  “Ra!” Khumi shouted. “Where’s that little grease-maggot Khani?”

  “Don’t know. But when I get my hands him he’s gonna pay! Left me with his share of the milking, and never mended that pen like you told him.”

  “That’s the least of our troubles. Find that good-for-nothing, grab him, and drag him before me! Got it, lads?”

  Ra and Kush both smiled nastily. “Consider it done.”

  Khumi said to U’Sumi, “Let’s check his tent.”

  Khana’Ani’s hovel lay well outside the compound. Khumi thrust the goatskin flaps aside. U’Sumi was not surprised to find it empty.

  Khumi scratched his head. “His hunting gear’s gone, and his roll.”

  “I’ll do an aerial search in the morning,” U’Sumi said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  “I’m going to stop by ‘Peti’s. I’ll send word as soon as I have any.”

  “I appreciate that,” Khumi said. “Sorry I got a bit hot.”

  “It’s a rude shock for us both.”

  A’Nu-Ahki and ‘Miha enjoyed pitching a tent amid the vines when they were in bloom, and would often leave their house during the summer to enjoy the evening aroma together. Now the vineyard felt violated.

  Nu heard shouts from the valley as he fanned the dawn fire. A young straw-colored head bobbed in the greenery, racing uphill to reach him. Soon, Ghimuraya son of Iyapeti entered the vineyard, panting.

  “What is it, lad?” A’Nu-Ahki asked the runner.

  “My sister Zhahara is missing! My Mahm saw her walking with Khana’Ani the other day. She thinks they ran off together, and so do I!”

  Na’Amiha’s dour weather-tanned face turned to her husband.

  Nu asked the boy, “Has your uncle left in the Phoenix yet?”

  “He’s almost ready. Uncle Khumi’s going too.”

  The whine of the aerodrone’s engine turned their attention to the fields. Nu saw the patched-up old flying machine sweep up into the air.

  ‘Miha asked, “What do you know of your sister and Khana’Ani?”

  Ghimuraya turned his blue eyes to the trees. “Only a little.”

  “And what’s that?”

  The young ‘tween fidgeted, but the continued frowns of the Ancient and Mamu applied the right pressure to squeeze his lips into motion.

  “I heard the girls talk—I don’t know if it’s true. It’s… you know…”

  “Enlighten me,” Nu commanded.

  Ghimuraya looked down. “Th-they spoke about ‘laying’ with boys,” he blurted, when he apparently could think of no more elegant way to say it.

  A’Nu-Ahki asked, “Which girls and which boys?” His vision for a new kind of world crumbled as his grandson spoke. The incident with Arrafu and Rhea had happened under extreme conditions, and they had committed to each other afterward in marriage. This was considerably different.

  “Zhahara told Nef and Bi’Qa that she’d laid with Khana’Ani, and that he promised to have his father betroth them when they came of age.”

  Nu asked, “Are you sure you understood correctly?”

  “Yes, my Father.”

  “It seems things are more complex than we’d realized,” ‘Miha said.

  A’Nu-Ahki felt she had made the understatement of the new eon. Khana’Ani had to be just the sprout on the surface. Nu saw the root system all too well, and knew where cause and effect would inevitably lead.

  The sun-drenched landscape scrolled by underneath the sputtering triple-winged flying machine.

  “There they are!” Khumi shouted from the spotter’s seat.

  U’Sumi banked Sun Phoenix in the direction his brother had indicated, and saw a young man and a girl running across an open field.

  “I’ll set us down alongside them. You jump out, and take him down. I’ll pull around on the ground to cut off their escape!”

  Khumi nodded, and motioned his brother to land.

  Sun Phoenix swept from the sky like a bird of prey. Khana’Ani and Zhahara were too far from some rocks on one side, and the River T’Qinna’s rapids on the other, to do anything but try to outrun the drone. Khumi unstrapped himself, and leaped from his seat just paces ahead of them.

  The couple doubled back when Khumi stood up right in their path. U’Sumi swung the Phoenix in the opposite direction, and paralleled Khana’Ani and Zhahara’s retreat. He raced past them, and turned the aerodrone to cut them off. It was over in seconds.

  Khana’Ani crumpled to the dirt, while the girl stood by him with teary eyes. Khumi and U’Sumi reached the couple at the same time.

  “You’ve got questions to answer!” Khana’Ani’s father had eyes that reminded U’Sumi of Anchor Mount just before the big eruption.

  And Noah began to be a farmer, and he planted a vineyard. Then he drank of the wine and was drunk, and became uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and went backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father's nakedness. So Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done to him. Then he said: “Cursed be Canaan; A servant of servants he shall be to his brethren.” And he said: “Blessed be the LORD, The God of Shem, And may Canaan be his servant. May God enlarge Japheth, And may he dwell in the tents of Shem; And may Canaan be his servant.”

  —Genesis 9:20-27 (NKJV)

  17

  Prophecy

  They held tribunal by the village’s central fire at noon, with all members of all families required to attend, from oldest to youngest. A’Nu-Ahki sat in the Tacticon’s chair, to the right of the fire pit. Those called to testify stood off to the left, where they could face both the Pat
riarch and the clans. The Accused stood bound before the judge.

  The victim, Ae’Vria, stood with her family, the hands of her father and mother resting on her shoulders.

  A leaden overcast hung over the proceedings. Distant lightning and thunder flickered and rumbled bleak omens of dark resurrections. No one spoke—not even the small children, who doubtless had little idea of why everyone gathered, or why it scared them all in a vague sort of way.

  A’Nu-Ahki rose from his seat, and leaned on his staff. “This is the most serious crisis we have faced as a family community since the end of the waters,” he said. “We must first determine the guilt or innocence of one of our brothers. If innocent, then we must find the true perpetrator of this crime. If guilty, then we must decide, by seeking the will of E’Yahavah, whether or not the full penalty of the Divine M’Ae should fall upon the malefactor.”

  A surprised murmur tinged with a little outrage erupted from the gathering. Nu had intended his announcement to have just such an effect. He knew that some would think it extreme to use the full force of the death penalty against a crime that, while extremely serious, did not actually result in the loss of a human life. Yet, in A’Nu-Ahki’s mind, it was no stretch of the M’Ae, as a governing instrument, to use it against one extreme offender to stave off the sort of bloodshed known to result from revenge killings. Inter-tribal wars had raged over far less.

  Wind moaned through young trees on up Lubar’s slope, and smothered the village air under an oppressive inversion. Spirits of the rock-bound damned seemed to cavort around them, gleefully awaiting an outcome that, either way, would show the community of survivors that they could not escape from what they were.

  Not even the Tides of Nemesis could erase that stain, though it scoured the earth to its bedrock, and beyond.

  “Khana’Ani, of Clan Khumi stands accused this day by Ae’Vria, daughter of Clan U’Sumi of forcibly raping her amid the vines along the upper terrace of my estate. What answer does the Accused give to this?”