The Tower (36 page)

Shepherd smiled. ‘Hello, Professor,’ he murmured under his breath. ‘Remember me?’

Dawn rose fast in the desert, rapidly warming the land and the buildings of the compound.

The soldiers were the first to appear, rising with the sun, their bodies conditioned to early starts by military life. They stretched and scratched as they emerged from the main building, their eyes screwed almost shut against the brightening sky then abruptly stopped as they saw the swathed figures hunkered down by the water and filling their canteens.

Williamson instinctively held his hand up to halt his men and a crackle of adrenalin passed through each of them as they saw what had prompted it. They were nomadic goat herders, their faces whitened by desert dust and still partly wrapped in keffiyeh. Williamson glanced over to the guard tower where their weapons were stashed and noticed the gate next to it, rolled all the way back, a team of goats drinking from one of the streams in the desert beyond it.

‘Who the hell are these guys?’ he muttered.

‘They arrived about an hour ago.’ Liv and Tariq appeared behind him, dragging a crate out of the transport hanger. ‘They are welcome here,’ Liv said, ‘just as you are.’

‘How do we know they can be trusted?’

‘I don’t, not fully, any more than I knew you could be trusted. What I do know is they are here because they felt the same pull as you, which means others will undoubtedly be coming here too. We can either choose to meet them with closed gates, suspicion and loaded guns, or welcome them, as we did you.’

Williamson continued to stare at the newcomers. ‘The way I remember it, the gate was closed when we arrived. Seems pretty sensible to me.’

Liv shot Tariq a look. ‘That was not my idea. But letting you in was.’

Williamson tipped his head. ‘Much obliged.’

Others had started to drift out of the compound buildings, roused by the heat and raised voices. Liv had intended to talk to everyone individually, quietly sowing the seeds of her plan rather than risking a public debate that she might well end up losing. Now she had no choice.

‘Tell me, what would you have done if we hadn’t let you in? What if we had kept the gate shut, turned the big guns in the guard tower on you and told you to leave, would you have just turned around and gone away, after travelling so far to find this place?’ Williamson said nothing. ‘Or would you have camped out in the desert, sticking close to one of the rivers so you had plenty of water, maybe far enough to be out of range of the cannons but still close enough to watch us and assess our strengths and weaknesses? Perhaps you would have decided eventually that you could take us. You might even have managed it, stormed this fortress in the middle of the night and taken control. Then what? What would you have done with us – killed us, kept us prisoner, banished us to the desert? And what about all the other people who are on their way here now, answering the same call you did, the same one they did?’ She pointed to the goat herders who had stopped drinking and were now listening too. ‘Would you try and keep them out, keep the gate locked and defend this scrap of desert with your last bullet, or until a stronger force arrived and took it from you so the whole thing could start all over again? Would you do that – for a bunch of buildings and a pool of water?’

Williamson continued to stare at her, though she sensed the challenge in his eyes had slipped a little. She shook her head. ‘This has been the pattern throughout human history: men possessing things, others seeking to take those things away by force. And what good has any of it done? Few things can truly be possessed.’ She pointed to one of the holding pits where the water had broken the banks and flowed freely through the links of the perimeter fence. ‘And some things cannot be contained. And whatever this place is, whatever it represents to the people drawn here, it is not something to be owned or fought over. It is simply something to be shared. A place where people can come together and not be divided or driven apart. A place of safety. A kind of home.’

She moved over to the crate and levered the lid off with her foot to reveal its contents. Williamson and his men gathered round. The nomads by the waterline moved closer too. It was full of tools: crowbars, wire-cutters, shovels still coated in dust from the graves they had recently dug. ‘We should take down the fences,’ Liv said. ‘They have no place here.’

Silence surged back in on the heels of her words but nobody moved. Liv surveyed the line of faces. They were looking at the tools, the fence, each other – but not at her. She was done talking and didn’t know what else she could say.

‘Dust cloud!’

The shout snagged everyone’s attention. All heads turned to the horizon. A new column of dust was rising up in the east, backlit by the sun now clawing its way up into the white sky. The timing could not have been worse. Liv felt sure that no one would want to start dismantling the perimeter fence with more strangers on the way. They would wait and see who it was first, and then the moment would be lost and she would have to try and persuade them all over again.

A movement to her right caught her eye. Williamson had stepped forward and reached down to pick up the lid of the crate. He fitted it back on top, sealing the tools inside in a wordless, symbolic full stop on the whole argument. Then he did a curious thing, he turned towards the nomads and waved them over. They hesitated at first then slowly responded, walking over to join the main group.

Corporal Williamson smiled a greeting then turned to his fellow soldiers. ‘Why don’t y’all go find what other tools they got in the transport bay, maybe see if they got a winch back there, or some kind of a towline we can hook up to the truck.’ He turned to the nomads, smiled again and ambled to one end of the crate. ‘Williamson.’ He patted his chest with the flat of his hand then pointed back at the man. ‘What’s your name? Asmuk?’

‘Yasin,’ the man replied.

Williamson squatted down and grabbed the side handle of the crate. ‘Wanna help me with this, Yasin?’

Tariq translated the request and the goat herder’s face exploded into a smile. He squatted down, grabbed the other handle and heaved the crate up so enthusiastically Williamson was nearly knocked over. ‘Whoah there, tiger,’ he said, lifting his end and steadying himself until they were carrying the burden equally. ‘Why don’t we start at the gate,’ he said, leading the way. ‘See if we can’t get that sucker down before the new guys arrive.’

The unaccustomed sound of plastic on plastic buzzed through the Abbot’s private chambers as the phone shivered and shimmied across the keyboard of the open laptop, drawing all eyes to it. Thomas walked across from the huge fireplace, picked it up and opened the message.

‘Well?’ Athanasius appeared too, crowding over the phone to try and see what message it had brought. Gabriel lay on the bed, still strapped down. Thomas angled the phone so they could both see the screen as a photograph of the dark stone appeared on it. Another downloaded, this time showing the reverse side.

‘The Starmap,’ Athanasius whispered, a smile curling the edges of his mouth. The smile faltered. ‘It’s too small,’ he said, moving his head back and forth to try and focus on it.

‘Give me a second,’ Thomas said, ‘I thought this might be a problem.’

He opened an application on the laptop then selected a different stripped wire from the doctored USB cable and touched it to a contact point at the base of the phone. After a few seconds the mouse arrow on the laptop screen turned into a spinning wheel and a command box opened asking if he wanted to IMPORT ALL IMAGES?

‘Could you hit
Enter
please,’ Thomas said, looking up at Athanasius. ‘My hands are somewhat occupied.’

Athanasius did as he was asked and a progress bar tracked the slow transfer of data from the phone to the laptop. No one breathed or moved, least of all Thomas who was literally holding it all together. The progress bar vanished and two new icons appeared on the desktop. Thomas let go of the phone, clicked them open and two images of the Starmap appeared on the screen. He enlarged them and arranged them so both were visible next to each other.

‘That’s Malan,’ Athanasius said, pointing at the image with the block of text forming the inverted shape of the Tau. He translated as he read:

‘That’s the second prophecy, the one that led us out into the desert – where the prophecy was fulfilled. Only the last line doesn’t make sense in the light of what actually happened.’

‘What did happen?’ Athanasius asked, leaning forward and studying the screen.

A jumble of images flashed through Gabriel’s mind. Liv falling to the ground, the flame pouring from the drill tower and turning to steam as the oil turned to water. ‘We did return the Sacrament within the full phase of the moon. And the fire was quenched. So I can’t understand why the blight still prospers. We need to know what else it says on the stone.’

Athanasius studied the second image, tracing the constellations of Draco, Taurus, and the Plough.

‘There’s more than one language here,’ he said, ‘and they’re not Malan. This little block of text next to Taurus is some kind of proto-cuneiform. Perhaps it relates directly to this extra star drawn in the constellation of Taurus, just there, between the bull’s horns. It says something like “The Sacrament reaches home, a new star is created and a new king or ruler reigns or rules over the end of days”.’

He scanned the rest of the symbols and ran his hand over his head. ‘There are pictograms or possibly ideograms here that could be from different sources. They represent concepts and ideas rather than individual words and must be interpreted rather than read. But to understand them properly one would need to know the context and time in which they were written. There is a bird here for example that could be an eagle. In Egyptian hieroglyphs the eagle represents the letter “A”, but in Aztec it means the sun. So you see how easy it would be to misinterpret this message.’

‘We can safely assume the tablet originated in ancient Mesopotamia,’ Gabriel suggested. ‘That’s where we found Eden and that’s where all the other references to the Sacrament point.’

‘Indeed, but without knowing exactly what era and in what region it was written I would only be guessing at its meaning. However there is one person in the Citadel who has spent his life studying pictograms like these. I feel sure he would not only be able to tell us exactly where and when this was made just by looking at it, he would also be able to translate it.’ He glanced at Father Thomas and they exchanged a troubled look. ‘Unfortunately he is not a man who is likely to want to help us. He’s the chief Librarian – Father Malachi.’

Dragging the branches away from the track proved much harder than Shepherd had anticipated. The drop in temperature had frozen them to the ground and he had to tug hard to get them free before he could haul them away. On top of this his shoes were made for city streets, not trudging through thick snow and they gave him little grip or insulation as he slipped and stumbled through the snow, until he was sweating despite the cold.

It took him nearly twenty minutes to create a gap in the tangle of branches wide enough for the Durango to pass through, stopping only once when he heard a knocking sound coming from somewhere above, like someone hammering nails into wood. After a pause it came again, three distant bangs that echoed in the woods before the silence flooded back. By the time he had finished, night had bled into the forest and it had mercifully stopped snowing. The moon had risen too, shining bright behind thinning clouds and casting a silver light over the forest. Shepherd could no longer feel his feet or the ends of his fingers and could almost hear the tinkle of ice forming in the air he breathed out then falling to the ground.

He made it back to the car and whacked the heater on full, stamping his feet and holding his hands in front of the vent, not caring about the pain as his veins opened up and the blood flowed through his flesh again. The read-out on the dash said the temperature was now minus eight and he could well believe it. He had intended to defrost himself a little then hike up to the cabin but the job of clearing the branches had proved how ill-equipped he was to spend much time out in the cold. He also remembered that Douglas’s cabin had been a fair trek up the track, much too far to attempt in his city shoes. He could leave it until tomorrow, maybe get some better boots from somewhere in Cherokee, but who knew what the weather was going to do in the night and whether he’d even be able to get here again. It would also mean going out and dragging the branches back into position so no one would know he had been there. There was a third option but the ghost of Franklin rose up in his head to repeat the last words he’d said to him:

Just check it out
– he’d said –
don’t make a move on your own.

But he was here now and had seen the footprints in the snow. What was the harm in a student looking up his old professor?

He waited until he had some feeling back in his feet then slipped the car back in gear and slowly reversed back up the road. The tyres crunched through a crust of ice as he eased the car off the road and onto the track. Dry branches reached out and raked the side of the vehicle like witches’ fingers as he squeezed through the gap that wasn’t quite as wide as he’d hoped.

Whoever was up in the cabin would be able to hear his engine rumbling its way up the track but there was little he could do about it. To compromise, he cut the lights, plunging himself into a bluish darkness that was still bright enough to drive by and would preserve his night vision, just in case he needed it when he got there.