The Tower (18 page)

Kasim’s face flushed and Liv instantly regretted losing her temper. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She felt like the sun was boiling the brains in her head. She was too tired for this, and she hadn’t asked these people to follow her into the desert – but that didn’t stop her feeling responsible for them.

‘I can wash everyone,’ Tariq said, stepping out of line. All eyes turned to him. ‘I was working away from the dam when the surge hit.’ He held out his arms to show his clothes. ‘I do not have so much of the red clay on me. I can clean myself with water from my canteen, then fetch more from the pool to clean the mud off everyone else.’

Kasim’s small black eyes darted between Liv and Tariq as if this might be some kind of trick. ‘Who goes first?’ he asked.

‘Does it matter?’ Liv said, in a voice more breath than substance. She was so exhausted she could barely stand let alone speak. ‘If it makes you feel any better then I will go last.’

‘I will start with the cleanest,’ Tariq suggested, ‘that way I will soon have someone to help me.’

Kasim looked down at himself and nodded his agreement as he realized there were plenty more filthy than he was. Liv looked down at herself painted red from head to foot by the silty water as she had clung to the dam. She looked up at Tariq. ‘Like I said –’ she managed a smile ‘– guess I’ll be going last.’

Liv observed the cleaning process from a distance, huddled in a thin blade of shadow created by one of the larger boulders that littered the land. After the confrontation with Kasim she didn’t want to risk causing any more tension. She watched Tariq gently pouring water over the heads and bodies of the group, like an Old Testament prophet baptizing the faithful in the desert and studied the Starmap with fresh eyes. She had hoped that, now the events predicted in the first line had been revealed, it would shed new light on the rest of the prophecy. But even though symbols like the skull were repeated elsewhere in the text, their meanings seemed to shift depending on the symbols around them. She knew now that it meant poison in the first line but when it appeared again in the last that meaning did not seem to fit. It was like each symbol was a mirror, identical in form but reflecting something entirely different depending on where they were placed.

When the last man was clean and had gone to join the others by the main pool she tucked the paper into her pocket and shuffled stiffly across the dust to the red muddy puddle they had left behind. By now her headache was monumental, hammered hard by dehydration, heat and stress and made worse by the torment of seeing everyone else now gathered at the edges of the water, drinking.

‘You might want to spread the word subtly that they should maybe go easy on the water,’ she said to Tariq as he held out a canteen of water for her. ‘I’m not sure how long it’s going to have to last us. I’d tell them myself but I don’t think I’m exactly Miss Popularity at the moment.’

Tariq looked over at the others. ‘I think they have more respect for you than you know.’

‘Even Kasim?’ Liv poured the water over her face, allowing the last few delicious drops to run into her mouth.

‘He followed you into the desert didn’t he? Don’t worry – I’ll tell them we should ration the water, at least until we know what we’re doing.’ He exchanged a full canteen for the empty one. ‘What
are
we going to do?’

Liv took another drink of water then let out a long weary breath. ‘Honestly?’ she said. ‘I have no idea.’

‘But you made the water come. You knew the river was going to run red.’

She shook her head. ‘The water came from the earth, not from me.’

‘But you knew it was going to happen. How?’

‘You really want to know?’ Liv pulled the folded sheet of paper from her back pocket, now stained red. ‘This is carved on the Starmap – the rock we laid on the Ghost’s grave.’ She pointed to the first line. ‘See here – a river, an eagle, a skull. These are what made me think the water was about to be poisoned. Except …’ She frowned as again she tried to express it. ‘It was more like I
felt
it.’

‘Like a premonition?’

‘Something like that, only one that has somehow been captured in these symbols and written down. Not exactly scientific, is it? And please don’t tell the others. The way things are at the moment they might lynch me if they realized I put them through all this because of some ancient warning scratched on a stone.’

Tariq smiled. ‘Our culture is different from yours; we place more importance on the past and are not so fixed on the future. The wisdom of the ancients is revered, and so are those who can interpret it. Many believe our ancestors saw our future more clearly than we see it ourselves. Did you know writing was invented here?’ Liv nodded, remembering her conversations with Gabriel when they had been seeking the Starmap. ‘Our belief is that the ancients invented the written word precisely so they might record these things, so they could speak to us and pass on the divine knowledge they carried. May I see it?’

Liv handed him the facsimile of the Starmap.

Tariq studied the document, his brow furrowed in thought, while Liv poured water over her hands, watching it run red on the ground.

‘This crescent symbol with an arrow next to it,’ he said, pointing to the end of the second line. ‘It is still used by the Bedouin.’

Liv studied the symbol and noticed it was repeated again in the third and fourth lines.

‘It refers to the phase of moon,’ Tariq explained. ‘In the desert we use the moon to measure the passing of time. Each phase is twenty-eight and a half days. That arrow next to it is the Bedu number nine, so together it means “nine moons”.’

Liv did a calculation in her head. ‘Two hundred and fifty-six nights – eight months.’

Tariq pointed to the very last symbol, another crescent enclosed by a circle. ‘That also refers to time. It is the moon inside the sun, representing a day and a night together. It is more generic. It means “days”.’

Liv looked at it in the light of this new information and something clicked in her head.

‘“Days,”’ she repeated, her eyes drawn back to the skull. ‘That makes more sense. Whenever I look at this second skull I get a sense that something is ending, like a death. Death of days – sounds pretty apocalyptic.’

Tariq nodded solemnly. ‘Every culture has its own account of the coming apocalypse. In mine we are taught the Sumerian myth of the god Marduk, who will return one day and destroy the earth. The Sumerians were incredibly advanced in their knowledge and understanding of science and cosmology in particular. Modern scholars believe that Marduk may actually be a planet whose orbit will one day make it crash into the Earth. There are many accounts in the past of near misses. The flood myth for example, present in every culture on earth, is believed by some to have been the result of a heavenly body passing close enough for its gravity to upset the flow of the oceans. Even the Christian nativity, with its bright travelling star has been attributed to Marduk. Sometimes it is represented as a bull with a sun between his horns, just like this is.’ He pointed at the large star on the map, directly between the horns of Taurus.

‘Eight months,’ Liv mused, ‘then Marduk returns to destroy the world. And the first line of this prophecy has already come to pass, so I guess we’re already on the clock.’

Tariq handed the document back to her. ‘I better go tell the others to go easy on the water,’ he said. ‘Otherwise we won’t even make it to eight months: and I would hate to miss the end of the world.’

He bowed slightly then turned and headed away. There was something very comforting about the old-fashioned courtliness of this man. He was like someone from another time. He reminded her of Gabriel a little.

Liv looked back down at the symbols, focusing on one in particular.

Though many of them danced before her eyes, this one remained steady and clear. The sword above the crude horse figure was Gabriel – the warrior, the rider, sword of justice and liberator of the Sacrament. It was the one symbol that gave her hope because the sword also appeared towards the end of the prophecy next to another.

It meant two things to her: first, Gabriel was still alive, he had to be if he was to figure in events that would come to pass eight months from now; and second, before those eight months had run their course he would be reunited with the one who was represented by the T: the Sacrament, the Key – her.

Gabriel woke to haunted moans echoing off stone walls. He opened his eyes and saw a vaulted ceiling high above him, a host of frozen angels bound to the stone, faces fixed in sorrow, as if in lament for what they saw below.

He twisted his head to the side and saw rows of beds stretching away to the nave of a church. They were filled with the writhing figures of men and women, straining against thick canvas bands that bound them, their skin a riot of boils that burst under the stress of their contortions. Doctors in contamination suits moved between the beds, tending to the worst cases by giving them shots that instantly calmed them. On the far wall he saw images of demons pulling tongues from the damned and devils boiling others in vats of oil and realized where he was. It was the Public Church in the Old Town of Ruin, close to the base of the Citadel. He had made it, but too late. The church was now a howling sick bay full of the infected.

The disease was spreading.

Gabriel gritted his teeth as a wave of fever rolled over him followed by an excruciating urge to scratch violently at his skin, but he was bound to his bed like the others so he could not. He heard footsteps approaching across the stone floor and closed his eyes, quelling the urge to writhe against his bindings and feel the ecstasy of relief from the growing itch. He felt hot, was getting hotter, and sweat tickled down his burning skin making it worse.

The footsteps stopped by his bed and he battled hard just to remain still. He didn’t want to be knocked out with a dose of strong sedative. He needed to think and for that he needed to be conscious, no matter how agonizing it might be.