“The sages are often wrong, especially nowadays.”
“My father often leaned toward fire first, as did Seti in his original opinion on the interpretation of Atum-Ra’s prophecy. Atum said the word fire before he mentioned water.”
Nu replied, “But he also admitted that he wasn’t sure, and added that his statement was not necessarily meant to be taken chronologically.”
The Elder intoned in the formalistic half-chant that A’Nu-Ahki found so affected and irritating, “In any case, we shall have to seek further.”
“With respect, Pahpi, I think we can do that just as well on a lower slope. We’re hot and dehydrated up here, and just as apt to hallucinate as to see anything meaningful.”
Muhet’Usalaq shook. “How can you even suggest such a thing at a time like this? This is the culmination of my whole life! The final hour! Now you have gone and broken the moment! Do you not understand my father took us up here to…”
“Burn away the chaff of our fleshly appetites, I know,” Nu finished. “Mine are sufficiently toasted. Let’s go to a lower slope.”
The Old Man’s eyes fell, imploding stars unable to sustain their own emotional weight. The heat must have gotten to him, for tears started to run down his face and there seemed to be an unusual air of bewilderment about him that Nu had never seen before.
“Every decade you get more and more self-willed!” There was an almost drunken slur to his words. “And now you mock our very heritage! Yet, I cannot believe you would do that! What is the matter with you?”
“I’m tired of your manipulative little endurance test,” Nu answered softly but firmly. “This isn’t about us! It’s time you understood that I’m not another Q’Enukki. I don’t have his energy or vision, I hate the heat, and I find it impossible to focus on E’Yahavah or anything else up here. Sacrifices are one thing, but we can seek answers more effectively in a lower ravine where the elevation’s heat won’t warp our minds. This is too important! I’m sorry if it doesn’t live up to your ideal.”
The Ancient shook his head in cataclysmic sobs; eyes draining around his inner collapse to unearth emotional artifacts long buried in layers of willful sediment. “I am the one who has left you the wrong impression…” His speech rambled like that of a man half-asleep. “The last promise! The last bloody promise I made to him, and I have broken it with the most important person in the world! I could not even do that one simple thing right! I never could do the most important things right!”
Nu was terrified at the sound of his own self-doubt erupting from the man who had always been a mountain of confidence. “What do you mean?”
“Q’Enukki—my father! He made me promise! And I have broken it! The last promise! The most important one! ‘Do not put heavy burdens on the children,’ he said—yet that is all I have ever done to you! Truth is, my father was very different from me—insightful and spontaneous, while I am rigid and brittle! I can only imitate! Yet my imitations somehow always turn into mockeries! He taught me much, but could not give me the imagination to apply his wisdom to a swiftly changing world. His wisdom is sound, but my application, inept… It has confused you, has it not?”
Nu stood over the Old Man; dumbstruck by the devastating honesty his own frankness had unleashed.
Muhet’Usalaq crumbled to a drunken slouch on the hot stone. “The only picture you have of Q’Enukki has been painted by the fire of his writings, and by me! But I have given you a distorted image; I see that now.”
“No! You taught me well!” Nu tried frantically to put back the bricks of his ancestor’s crumbling wall of dignity—bricks that fell too fast for him to catch and replace, and would never again stand as the edifice he had always comfortably known. “I just can’t live up to that ideal!”
Muhet’Usalaq shook his head, as the torrid ego shredder of N’Zar’s blasted peak ripped away his tormented personal façade. “It is not a matter of living up to anything! Q’Enukki was a man, with weaknesses just like any other! He simply walked with E’Yahavah, and trusted the Sacrifice Ram to cover his shortcomings.”
“It’s not that simple! What about his power and goodness—I can’t even come close to that and I’m still supposed to be this ‘Comforter from the A’Nu’ my father prophesied of! How? What does it even mean, Comforter? It could mean almost anything!”
Muhet’Usalaq glanced up at him. “Not just anything. It is true, Q’Enukki’s walk brought a strength and goodness to him, but that was effect—not cause. You also have it placed in you to awaken a generation—or at least to preserve a remnant.”
“What remnant? Even most the Seer Clan thinks I’m a heretic now! What comfort have I been to them? What comfort have I been to anyone?”
The Old Man hung his head. “A lifetime of mistakes has tracked me down and beaten me into this dust. You comfort me from that! I never could inspire a generation the way my father and brothers had!”
Nu had trouble imagining Urugim inspiring anybody—except perhaps at the very end. He had only known his grandfather’s other brothers as distant childhood uncles. Most had died as martyrs in obscure parts of the world before he reached adulthood.
“What makes you think I can do what you could not?”
A swath of gray twine hair fell in front of the Ancient’s watering eyes. “You are more like my father than any man alive when you simply behave naturally. Yet you seek to emulate his legend by imitating me. All through your childhood I would try to change you and then belittle you when your efforts to change only produced my own kind of pretension!”
“What are you talking about?”
Muhet’Usalaq turned his head up at him with quivering eyes that stared right through him. “You were reflecting me, not my father! And I never liked what I saw in that mirror!” He seemed about to collapse into a child-like breakdown. “They never let me be a Dragon-slayer, you know—not a real one! I had to stay home with the women—Mooma and Auntie were too afraid to bring on the end of the world!” His dam broke to unleash the cries of a little boy trapped too long in the prison of a name and forced to live out his dreams through the dwindling accomplishments of his children.
“Let’s go to a lower slope,” Nu said, offering his grandfather a hand.
Muhet’Usalaq took it and replied dully, “I know of this little ravine with a waterfall and a pool. We cannot see the whole sky, though.”
“It’s okay. We’ve both seen enough for one night.”
And the LORD said, “My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh; yet his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.”
—Genesis 6:3 (NKJV)
17
Apocalypse
N
ightmares hunted Nu in his slumber, disrupting the peace and comfort of the waterfall crevasse’s cool spongy moss. He had gone to sleep dwelling on the conversations with his father before climbing N’Zar with Muhet’Usalaq.
A’Nu-Ahki found himself at the controls of a type of aerodrone he had often seen overflying the monastery—like three glass-domed cylinders connected by a double layer of gigantic wings with dual tail rudders. He rode in the bubble at the front of the center cylinder, which sat forward of the other two. His hands caressed strange instruments as if they were Emzara’s body, fingers reaching here and there across a patch-quilt of glowing knobs, levers, and dials—moving without his control—to keep the giant monstrosity aloft. The insect hum of the machine’s four wing-mounted engines made him feel like an intruder in a hive of horrendous wasps.
“Approaching target,” said the cold voice of somebody in the glass-metal cabin behind him.
Nu’s hand danced across the controls again, performing some unknown adjustment, while his other gripped a mechanical column that must have steered the drone. Outside the window, the land below seemed distant and hazy, unreal somehow.
“Target acquired. Commencing drop,” said the voice from behind, as if he were simply switching on a quickfire pearl.
Everything shook an
d rattled as racks full of bombs tumbled out through open slits in the drone’s three underbellies. Shrill whistles followed each projectile down and away into the hazy unreality below. Nu could see the detonations flash across the countryside, but by then he was so far away that he could not even hear the explosions.
A thrill like too much wine pulsed through his body. He heard himself shout to the others inside the machine, “Men we are no longer, but gods! We now wield the thunder of the gods and fly as only the divine ones fly—in chariots of crystal, iron, and flame!”
He closed his eyes.
When they opened again, he was not on the aerodrone but in the citadel of a great wood-burning ironclad. He gazed out across the ocean to a narrow ribbon of land on the horizon. Utterly strange and fantastic, this vessel bore no resemblance to the oar-banked biremes and triremes of little more than two centuries ago. The top-heavy armored leviathan carried huge cannons able to spit giant thunder-darts the distance of a day’s journey on mount. Nu watched as these pounded a coastal city and squared off against another wood-burning fortress-ship in the distance. The shoreline erupted in a wall of flames so far off that he could not even smell the smoke.
It was easy; pull a lever and wipe out thousands. The operators of these machines never saw their enemy—never heard the screams of the multitudes of men, women, and children they slaughtered. Nu could sit there, push the meaningless buttons, turn the mysterious knobs all day, and never feel anything. It was even fun in a perverse kind of way.
He closed his eyes again.
This time when they opened, A’Nu-Ahki found himself surrounded by a city in flames. Whistling missiles fell all around him, sending great plumes of wreckage and dirt into the sky like fiery mushrooms. Seared air slammed into his chest with the force of a smith’s hammer, and knocked him to his knees. Buildings toppled while men screamed and ran through the shattered streets, bodies on fire. Women huddled in terrified balls of futile protection around their children; all of them crushed to death by the falling buildings or scythed down by flying bits of rock and metal.
The flaming World-end staccato pounded the city and Nu’s body like multiplied flame hammers from every direction until only cratered ruins, smoking mounds, and fly-covered corpses remained in the midst of a sudden eerie stillness. The madness worked through A’Nu-Ahki, throttled his insides, while he jerked and twitched. He turned and ran from the holocaust. But the faces of the dead and wounded, burned and shattered, red, black, and gray, followed him through the halls of sleep—the endless damned, condemned to a black-hot prison by humanity’s lust to each become an autonomous god. They fell into heaps of bodies, mountains of rotting fertilizer in endless fields.
Nu’s pace through the rotting piles slowed as the fires began to fade and go out. Presently, brick masons came along to survey the grisly hills in the holocaust’s aftermath. They gathered the skulls, and placed them into a pile with a sign next to it that bore the ideogram for War painted in bold red.
Beyond the heap of skulls, they made a second, larger bone pile that seemed like a natural hill from where Nu stood. Time—maybe decades or centuries—somehow passed. A commotion broke out on the second skull heap’s far side; raucous laughter of men and women squealing in pleasure, cut off periodically by screams of terror and torment.
Nu circled the skull pile with the sign of War on it, and approached the second mound. It was also made largely of skulls, except that most of these bones were far older, grayer in hue, as if they had been accumulating much longer than the War pile. The people on the opposite side did not hear his approach, even as he stumbled over crunching stray bones and rounded the heap to see what they were doing.
The spectacle stopped him dead.
Streams of humanity—mostly young women and children—came from over the horizon, led along in chains either by titans or wealthy, prominent men. Many of the prisoners seemed unaware of their captivity, as if under a spell. As they drew nearer to Nu, flocks of tiny multi-colored birds became visible like sparkling jewels over the forced march, singing sweetly to the prisoners as they flitted overhead.
As Nu listened, the bird-song transformed into an evil squawk of foul words and repetitious lies; “This is living. There is no love or life outside of the queue, only death in the void…”
The stumbling women and children laughed and drank with their captors along the way, although the titans and men of power paused frequently to rape and brutalize them. Only when the prisoners neared the mountainous bone pile did their true condition seem to come home to them. There, the colorful birds with their repetitive songs turned black and circled away to sing for others farther back in the line. Their purpose seemed to be to keep the marchers from seeing the bone pile or hearing the screams.
Once free of the birdsong, some prisoners tried to dash away from the skull mountain, until their chains snapped them back. When they reached the ancient mound, their captors would draw swords and hack the heads from the prisoners, and toss them onto the skull pile. They rolled the bodies into a pit of refuse using the forced labor of the next set of abductees.
And the birds sang madly on.
A’Nu-Ahki turned to face the business side of the great heap. He saw that it too bore an ideogram sign that read, Crime Without Punishment. The Crime pile had more than twice the skulls of the War mound.
The surveyors and masons in charge of stacking the skulls from both heaps began to distribute them across the gigantic single landmass called Earth. In all the great cities, people began to use the skulls as bricks to build.
The dream carried Nu through Sa-utar and Bab’Tubila, then to lands beyond—all undergoing vast post-war reconstruction using skull bricks. Assuri had finally fallen before the multi-tribal alliance purchased by Tubaal-qayin Dumuzi’s industrial supremacy.
Nu saw cheering, riot, and pageantry, as a new prosperity dawned. Temple brothels at Erdu and Ayar Adi’In gorged themselves to vomiting excess. The Temples fed the poor and diverted them with entertainment, while the rich divided the spoils in secret as always.
A’Nu-Ahki was unsure exactly when the heavenly Watcher joined him, only that it happened before the onset of the real terror.
The Watcher seemed to be a man of luminous animated glass, clear as crystal waters made alive by El-N’Lil, the Divine Breath. His eyes held the fires of judgment cupped in ampules of mercy. When he saw that Nu had noticed his presence, he said, “I am sent to show you what is.”
Nu took his hand as a small child would. It felt strangely cool and comforting—like the mists of the waterfall grotto where he somehow knew he still slept. The Watcher led him across a wide plain to a magnificent tower build of kapar stone and fine wood, but also partially of the skulls from the two piles. The castle had an odd hexagonal base, which divided into six turrets, each reaching into the clouds.
Nu said, “What is this place?”
“The house of Atum-Ra,” answered the glass-fluid man.
They walked inside though the main gate. Children danced and played in a fountained garden courtyard. All seemed peaceful in the keep—a wedding in one corner, a market place in another. Atop the north tower flared an altar with a sacrifice. Artisans plied crafts. Singers sang songs. Soldiers paraded in peacetime drill. It seemed an idyllic place.
The Watcher held his hands over Nu’s eyes, and then removed them. “Look again,” he said.
Nu panned around the same courtyard, now translucent and full of pallid light and creeping shadows. Skeletons filled the cornerstones and walls, screaming silent screams. Most were dead children and infants, sealed alive into the stones or behind the bricks, bone-bags twisted in the terror of final suffocation. He looked down to avert his eyes, but found the pavement equally translucent, revealing labyrinthine tunnels of pale light and even deeper living shadows near the tower’s foundation and metal staples. When he saw the Monster, a wave of nausea gurgled up from the pit—as if his stomach and the lower catacombs were one.
The gigantic hyd
ra writhed, an obscene iridescent-pus-yellow trunk supporting multiple bore-worm heads that burrowed upward through the walls, into the main tower, and from there dividing through to the six turrets. The wormholes undermined the entire fortress, while the Monster’s many heads poked out into the open in numerous places. Each ended as a thick umbilical cord worming into the bodies of several people, all wearing masks.
A’Nu-Ahki panted to keep from retching. “What is this creature?”
The Watcher did not answer, but said, “Follow me.”
He led Nu up a squared-off spiral stairwell inside the central tower. While they climbed, Nu could see inside the walls, where not two cubits away snaked one of the bore-worm’s oily necks. A rank odor seeped from cracks between the stones.
At the top chamber, they entered a hall surrounded by multicolored windows that bent the light outside into millions of geometric forms that danced in kaleidoscopic profusion across the interior. The airy loft had the hot cinnamon odor of dry-dust mummified corpses.
Inside the chamber, the worm-head curled up from the floor to bury itself inside a man who appeared to be a teaching sage of some sort. He wore a mask with the ideogram letter for Knowledge carved into its forehead. Children filled his room, all eagerly listening to what he had to say. He spoke of beauty, peace, prosperity, and enlightenment. Nu even heard him mention the Divine Name once or twice in passing.
After awhile however, it seemed that the Sage only repeated the same words in different ways, demeaning their significance, and distorting their definitions. The longer Nu listened the more apparent it became to him that the masked teacher merely told the children what to think, instead of imparting to them the skills of how to reason.
Again, the Watcher took Nu’s hand, pulling him across a causeway that connected to the ring of outer towers, specifically the one with the altar on it. One of the Hydra’s worm-necks snaked through the walls of this outer spire also, to emerge and penetrate a priest that stood before the flaming sacrifice.
Dawn Apocalypse Rising (The Windows of Heaven Book 1) Page 27
