The Fall of Tartarus (43 page)

Cramer
drank himself to sleep.

He
was awoken by a crack of thunder such as he had never heard before. He shot
upright, convinced that the sun had blown and that Tartarus had split asunder.
Sheet lightning flooded the river and the surrounding flatlands in blinding
silver explosions, a cooling breeze blew and a warm rain lashed the boat. He
slept.

It
was dawn when he next awoke. The sun was a massive, rising semi-circle on the
horizon, throwing harsh white light across the land. They were slowly
approaching a dense tangle of vegetation with leaves as broad as spinnakers,
waxy and wilting in the increased temperature. The river narrowed, became a
chocolate-coloured canal between the overgrown banks. While the sun was hidden
partially by the treetops, and they were spared its direct heat, yet in the
confines of the jungle the humidity increased so that every laboured inhalation
was more a draught of fluid than a drawn breath.

Cramer
breakfasted on stale bread and putrescent cheese, thirst driving him to forego
his earlier circumspection as to the potability of the water, and draw a goblet
from the river. He gave the Abbot a mouthful of the brackish liquid and
arranged bread and biltongs beside him so that the holy fool might not starve.
The Abbot ate, using his toes to grip the food and lift it to his mouth in a
fashion so dextrous as to suggest much practice before the amputation of his
arms.

They
proceeded on a winding course along the river, ever farther into the dense and
otherwise impenetrable jungle.

Hours
later they came to Chardon’s Landing. Cramer made the launch fast to the jetty
and assisted the Abbot ashore. They paused briefly to take a meal, and then
began the arduous slog to the plateau where Cramer had buried Francesca.

The
air was heavy, the light aqueous, filled with the muffled, distant calls of
doomed animals and birds. The trek to the plateau was tougher than he recalled
from his first time this way. After months of drunkenness Cramer was in far
from peak condition, and without his arms the Abbot often stumbled.

As
the hours passed and they slogged through the cloying, hostile heat, Cramer
considered what the holy man had said about Francesca’s resurrection. Clearly,
he had not killed her in the clearing all those months ago, but merely stunned
her - and she had discovered the whereabouts of the temple from the survey
photographs made by the
Pride of Valencia
. . . Then again, there was
always the possibility that the Abbot was lying, that Francesca had not risen
at all, that he had lured Cramer here for his own sinister purposes. And the
image apples, which seemed to show Francesca in possession of the laser which
had killed her? Might she not have been carrying a laser similar to his own
after the crash-landing and before he arrived, at which time the apples had
recorded her image?

They
came at last to the clearing. The two tents were as he recalled them, situated
thirty metres apart. Francesca’s grave, in the jungle, was out of sight.

Cramer
hurried across to Francesca’s tent and pulled back the flap. She was not
inside. He checked the second tent, also empty, and then walked towards the
edge of the escarpment. He looked out across the spread of the jungle far
below, gathering his thoughts.

He
knew that he would find Francesca’s grave untouched.

‘If
you claim she is risen,’ he called to the Abbot, ‘then where is she?’

‘If
you do not believe me,’ the Abbot said, ‘then look upon the grave.’

Cramer
hesitated. He did not know what he feared most, that he should find the grave
empty ... or the soil still piled above Francesca’s cold remains.

He
crossed the clearing to the margin of jungle in which he had excavated her
resting place. The Abbot’s cowl turned, following his progress like some gothic
tracking device. Cramer reached out and drew aside a spray of ferns. The light
fell from behind him, illuminating a raw furrow of earth. He gave a pained cry.
The mound he had so carefully constructed was scattered, and only a shallow
depression remained where he had laid out her body.

He
stumbled back into the clearing.

‘Well?’
the Abbot inquired.

Before
Cramer could grasp him, beat from him the truth, he saw something spread in the
centre of the clearing. It was a detailed map of the area, based on aerial
photographs, opened out and held flat by four stones.

The
Abbot sensed something. ‘What is wrong?’

Cramer
crossed the clearing and knelt before the map. Marked in red was the campsite,
and from it a dotted trail leading down the precipitous fall of the escarpment.
It wound through the jungle below, to a point Cramer judged to be ten
kilometres distant. This area was marked with a circle, and beside it the
words, ‘The Slarque Temple,’ in Francesca’s meticulous, childish print.

‘My
God,’ Cramer whispered to himself.

‘What
is it!’

Cramer
told the Abbot, and he raised his ravaged face to the heavens. ‘Thanks be!’ he
cried. ‘The Age of Miracles is forever here!’

Cramer
snatched up the map, folded it to a manageable size, and strode to the edge of
the escarpment. He turned to the Abbot. ‘Are you up to another hard slog?’

‘God
gives strength to the pilgrim,’ the holy man almost shouted. ‘Lead the way, Mr
Cramer!’

For
the next two hours they made a slow descent of the incline. So steep was the
drop in places that the Abbot was unable to negotiate the descent through the
undergrowth, and Cramer was forced to carry him on his back.

He
murmured holy mantras into Cramer’s ear.

He
found it impossible to assess his emotions at that time, still less his
thoughts - disbelief, perhaps, maybe even fear of the unknown. He entertained
the vague hope that Francesca, having completed her quest and found the temple,
might return with him to Earth.

They
came to the foot of the incline and pressed ahead through dense vegetation.
From time to time they came across what Cramer hoped was the track through the
undergrowth that Francesca might have made, only to lose it again just as
quickly. Their progress was slow, with frequent halts so that Cramer could
consult the map and the position of the bloated sun. He wondered if it was a
psychosomatic reaction to the events of the past few hours, or a meteorological
change, that made the air almost impossible to breathe. It seemed sulphurous,
infused with the miasma of Hell itself. Certainly, the Abbot was taking
laboured breaths through his ruined nose-holes.

At
last they emerged from the jungle and found themselves on the edge of a second
great escarpment, where the land stepped down to yet another sweep of sultry
jungle. Cramer studied the map. According to Francesca, the temple was
positioned somewhere along this ledge. They turned right and pushed through
fragrant leaves and hanging fronds. Cramer could see nothing that might
resemble an alien construction.

Then,
amid a tangle of undergrowth ten metres ahead, he made out a regular,
right-angled shape he knew was not the work of nature. It was small, perhaps
four metres high and two wide - a rectangular block of masonry overgrown with
lichen and creepers. He detected signs that someone had passed this way, and
recently: the undergrowth leading to the stone block was broken, trampled down.

‘What
is it?’ the Abbot whispered.

Cramer
described what he could see.

‘The
shrine,’ the holy man said. ‘It has to be . . .’

They
approached the Slarque temple. Cramer was overcome with a strange
disappointment that it should turn out to be so small, so insignificant. Then,
as they passed into its shadow, he realised that this was but a tiny part of a
much greater, subterranean complex. He peered, and saw a series of steps
disappearing into the gloom. Tendrils, like tripwires, had been broken on the
upper steps.

Cramer
took the Abbot’s shoulder and assisted him down the steps. Just as he began to
fear that their way would be in complete darkness, he made out a glimmer of
light below. The steps came to an end. A corridor ran off to the right, along
the face of the escarpment. Let into the stone of the cliff-face itself, at
regular intervals, were tall apertures like windows. Great shafts of sunlight
poured in and illuminated the way.

He
walked the Abbot along the wide corridor, its ceiling carved with a bas-relief
fresco of cavorting animals. In the lichen carpet that had spread across the
floor over the millennia, he made out more than one set of footprints: the
lichen was scuffed and darkened, as if with the passage of many individuals.

At
last, after perhaps a kilometre, they approached the tall, arched entrance of a
great chamber. At first he thought it a trick of his ears, or the play of the
warm wind within the chamber, but as they drew near he heard the dolorous
monotone of a sustained religious chant. The sound, in precincts so ancient, sent
a shiver down his spine.

They
paused on the threshold. From a wide opening at the cliff-face end of the
chamber, evening sunlight slanted in, its brightness blinding. When his eyes
adapted Cramer saw, through a haze of tumbling dust motes, row upon row of
grey-robed, kneeling figures, cowled heads bowed, chanting. The chamber was the
size of a cathedral and the congregation filled the long stone pews on either
side of a central aisle. The heat and the noise combined to make Cramer dizzy.

He
felt a hand grip his elbow, and thought at first that it was the Abbot. He
turned - a monk stood to his left, holding his upper arm; the Abbot was on
Cramer’s right, his broken face suffused with devotional rapture.

He
felt pressure on his elbow. Like an automaton, he stepped into the chamber. The
monk escorted Cramer up the aisle. The continuous chanting, now that they were
amidst it, was deafening. The sunlight was hot on his back. The front of the
chamber was lost in shadow. He could just make out the hazy outline of a
scorpion-analogue statue, and beside it the representation of a torso upon a
cross.

Halfway
down the aisle, they paused.

The
monk’s grip tightened on his arm. The Abbot whispered to Cramer. His expression
was beatific, his tone rapturous. ‘In the year of the supernova it is written
that the Ultimate Sacrifice will rise from the dead, and so be marked out to
appease the sun. Too, it is written that the sacrifice will be accompanied by a
non-believer, and also the Abbot of the true Church.’

Cramer
could hardly comprehend his words.

The
monk pushed him forward. The chanting soared.

He
stared. What he had assumed to be the statue of a body on a cross was not a
statue at all. His mind refused to accept the image that his vision was
relaying. He almost passed out. The monk held him upright.

Francesca
hung before him, lashed to the vertical timber of the cross, the ultimate
sacrifice in what must have been the most God-forsaken Calvary ever devised by
man. Her head was raised at a proud angle, the expression on her full lips that
of a grateful martyr. Her eyelids were closed, flattened like the Abbot’s, and
stitched shut in a semicircle beneath each eye. The threads obtruded from her
perfect skin, thick and clotted like obscene, cartoon lashes.

Her
evicted eyes, as green as Cramer remembered them, were tied about her neck.

Her
arms and legs had been removed, amputated at shoulder and hip; silver discs
capped the stumps. They had even excised her small, high breasts, leaving
perfect white, sickle-shaped scars across her olive skin.

Cramer
murmured his beloved’s name.

She
moved her head, and that tiny gesture, lending animation to something that by
all rights should have been spared life, twisted a blade of anguish deep into
his heart.

‘Hans!’
she said, her voice sweet and pure. ‘Hans, I told you that I loved you, would
love you forever.’ She smiled, a smile of such beauty amid such devastation.
‘What greater love could I show you than to allow you to share in the salvation
of the world? Through our sacrifice, Hans, we will be granted eternal life.’

He
wanted, then, to scream at her - to ask how she could allow herself to believe
in such perversion? But the time for such questioning was long gone.

And,
besides, he knew . . . She had always sought something more than mere
existence, and here, at last, she had found it.

‘Hans,’
she whispered now. ‘Hans, please tell me that you understand. Please hold me.’

Cramer
stepped forward.

He
felt the dart slam into the meat of his lower back. The plainsong crescendoed,
becoming something beautiful and at the same time terrible, and he pitched
forward and slipped into oblivion.

He
surfaced slowly through an ocean of analgesics. He found himself in darkness,
something wet tied around his neck. With realisation came pain, and he cried
aloud. Then, perhaps hours later, they laid him out again and put him under,
and though he wanted to rage and scream at the injustice, the futility of what
they were doing to him, all he could manage was a feeble moan of protest.