“You can stand now,” the custodian told him.
They were in a large square stone chamber. The walls were roughhewn and totally without ornament. The room was empty except for three long, narrow coffers of unpolished white marble side by side at the far end.
“Steady yourself, old friend,” Mericalis said. “And then come and see who we have here.”
They crossed the room. The coffers were covered with a thick sheet of some transparent yellowish material that looked much like glass, but in fact was some other substance that the Warder could not identify.
An icy shiver ran through the Warder as he peered through the coverings.
There was a skeleton in each coffer, lying face upward: the glistening fleshless bones of some strange long-shanked creature, manlike in size and general outline, but different in every detail. Their heads bore curving bony crests; their shoulders were crested also; their knees were double ones; they had spikelike protrusions at their ankles. Ribs, pelvises, fingers, toes—everything strange, everything unfamiliar. These were the bodies of alien beings.
Mericalis said, “My guess is that the very tall one in the center is Vonubius. That’s probably Aulimiath on the right and the other one has to be Oberith, then.”
The Warder looked up at him sharply. “What are you saying?”
“This is obviously a sepulcher. Those are sarcophagi. These are three skeletons of aliens that we’re looking at here. They’ve been very carefully preserved and buried in a large and obviously significant chamber on the deepest and therefore oldest level of the Temple of the Visitants, in a room that once was reached by a grand processional passageway. Who else do you think they would be?”
“The Visitants went up into the heavens when their work on Earth was done,” said the Warder hollowly. “They ascended on a ship of fire and returned to their star.”
“You believe that?” Mericalis asked, chuckling.
“It says so in the Scriptures.”
“I know that it does. Do you believe it, though?”
“What does it matter what I believe?” The Warder stared again at the three elongated alien skeletons. “The historical outlines aren’t questioned by anybody. The world was in a crisis—in collapse. There was war everywhere. In the midst of it all, three ambassadors from another solar system arrived and saw what was going on, and they used their superior abilities to put things to rights. Once a stable new world order had emerged, they took off for the stars again. The story turns up in approximately the same form in every society’s myths and folk-tales, all over the Earth. There’s got to be some truth to it.”
“I don’t doubt that there is,” said Mericalis. “And there they are, the three wise men from afar. The Scriptures have the story a little garbled, apparently. Instead of going back to their native star, promising to return and redeem us at some new time of trouble, they died while still on Earth and were buried underneath the temple of the cult that sprang up around them. So there isn’t going to be any Second Advent, I’d tend to think. And if there ever is, it may not be a friendly one. They didn’t die natural deaths, you’ll notice. If you’ll take a careful look you’ll see that the heads of all three were severed violently from their trunks.”
“What?”
“Look closely,” Mericalis said.
“There’s a break in the vertebrae, yes. But that could have been—”
“It’s the same sort of break in all three. I’ve seen the skeletons of executed men before, Diriente. We’ve dug up dozens of them around the old gibbet down the hill. These three were decapitated. Believe me.”
“No.”
“They were martyrs. They were put to death by their loving admirers and devoted worshipers, the citizens of Earth.”
“No. No. No. No.”
“Why are you so stunned, Diriente? Does it shock you, that such a dreadful thing could have happened on our lovely green planet? Have you been squirreled up in your nest on this hillside so long that you’ve forgotten everything you once knew about human nature? Or is it the unfortunate evidence that the Scriptural story is wrong that bothers you? You don’t believe in the Second Advent anyway, do you?”
“How do you know I don’t?”
“Please, Diriente.”
The Warder was silent. His mind was aswirl with confusions.
After a time he said, “These could be any three aliens at all.”
“Yes. I suppose they could. But we know of only three beings from space that ever came to this planet: the ones who we call the Visitants. This is the temple of the faith that sprang up around them. Somebody went to great trouble to bury these three underneath it. I have difficulty believing that these would be three different alien beings.”
Stubbornly the Warder said, “How do you know that these things are genuine skeletons? They might be idols of some sort.”
“Idols in the form of skeletons? Decapitated skeletons, at that?” Mericalis laughed. “I suppose we could test them chemically to see if they’re real, if you like. But they look real enough to me.”
“The Visitants were like gods. They were gods, compared with us. Certainly they were regarded as divine—or at least as the ministers and ambassadors of the Divine Being—when they were here. Why would they have been killed? Who would have dared to lay a hand on them?”
“Who can say? Maybe they didn’t seem as divine as all that in the days when they walked among us,” Mericalis suggested.
“But the Scriptures say—”
“The Scriptures, yes. Written how long after the fact? The Visitants may not have been so readily recognized as holy beings originally. They might simply have seemed threatening, maybe—dangerous—tyrannical. A menace to free will, to man’s innate right to make trouble for himself. It was a time of anarchy, remember. Maybe there were those who didn’t want order restored. I don’t know. Even if they were seen as godly, Diriente: remember that there’s an ancient tradition on this planet of killing one’s gods. It goes back a long, long way. Study your prehistoric cults. You dig down deep enough, you find a murdered god somewhere at the bottom of almost all of them.”
The Warder fell into silence again. He was unable to take his eyes from those bony-crested skulls, those strange-angled empty eye sockets.
“Well,” Mericalis said, “there you have them, at any rate: three skeletons of what appear to be beings from another world that somebody just happened to bury underneath your temple a very long time ago. I thought you ought to know about them.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“You have to decide what to do about them, now.”
“Yes,” the Warder said. “I know that.”
“We could always seal the passageway up again, I suppose, and not say a word about this to anyone. Which would avoid all sorts of uncomfortable complications, wouldn’t it? It strikes me as a real crime against knowledge, doing something like that, but if you thought that we should—”
“Who knows about this so far?”
“You. Me. No one else.”
“What about the priest and priestess who found the excavation pit?”
“They came right to me and told me about it. They hadn’t gone very far inside, no more than five or six paces. Why should they have gone any farther?”
“They might have,” the Warder said.
“They didn’t. They had no torch and they had their minds on other things. All they did was look a little way in, just far enough to see that something unusual was going on. They hadn’t even gone far enough to find the thieves. But they didn’t say a thing about dead bodies in the tunnel. They’d certainly have told me about them, if they had come upon them. And they’d have looked a whole lot shakier, too.”