The mayan prophecy (Timeriders # 8) (33 page)

The holy man dipped the bristles of his brush into the clay pot full of dark brown paint and then daubed some more on to the cave wall. Carefully. He needed to get the symbols exactly right, to faithfully reproduce them.

They of course meant nothing to him. An incomprehensible series of markings, but clearly they meant
something
. A message from the heavens that perhaps wiser men, more deserving men than he, would be able to fathom out.

Again he picked his way forward through the cave to remind himself of how the markings on the very next symbol went. The light of the day was bright. The midday monsoon had been and gone and cleared the sky, leaving the sun sitting in clear blue, warming up the jungle below.

The old man emerged from the mouth of the cave on to the lip. To his right a merchant was leading a tethered line of heavily laden llamas up the trail, oblivious to, or perhaps used to, the drop to their side. The merchant hesitated, and turned and looked at the same thing as the old man. A spectacular sight. Then he returned to the task of ensuring his animals carried on into the cave and through the access way to the city at the rear of it.

The holy man stepped to one side to let him pass, and the cave behind him soon echoed with the snorting, scraping,
clopping of the beasts as the merchant guided inside and towards the rear.

His eyes returned to the jungle before him; below, moisture steamed up from the thick velvet carpet of tree tops, like the ghosts of the forefathers rising from Deep Mother Dirt to gaze curiously at the enormous object in the sky.

It hung there, over the jungle, like a solitary storm-cloud, casting its shadow over much of it. The Visitors came from it and returned to it each night from their labours in the village. They were hard at work on something beneath the ground.

Something godly, something wonderful. Something his people’s ancestors had discovered centuries ago and now protected, kept safe for the Visitors. Its purpose was mysterious and yet the Visitors were not secretive; they were happy for the villagers to watch them as they set about their work.

The holy man once again looked out at the vast structure hanging in the sky.
Vast
, and circular in shape, topped with ridges and spikes and convolutions that made no sense to him. It glistened in the sunlight, as smooth as a polished riverbed pebble.

Along the surface of this floating heavenly chariot, as large as a mountain top, were giant markings – symbols. The old man studied the next symbol carefully, making sure he had it in his mind correctly before finally turning and heading back into the cave to daub it on the wall beside the last one he’d painted. As he stepped back inside, he reminded himself again that perhaps, one day, wiser, far more deserving minds would determine their actual meaning.