Everson’s eyes flicked around, “Atkins, with me. Perkins, you’d better come too. The rest of you, stay alert. Keep them covered.”
Ranaman led the Tommies to the huge split boulder that dominated the sacred space. Crepuscular fingers of light shone down upon it from the slits up in the tower above. With its blood-coloured rust stains, Atkins could well believe it was the heart of some giant.
“Behold, the Heart of Croatoan. Long has it been in the care of the Ruanach. His heart was broken when he fell and will only be healed when Croatoan is released from his prison in the underworld. And now, with your presence, as foretold by our ancestors, that time is near.”
“This temple marks the centre of the crater,” said Everson.
“The very spot where Croatoan fell,” declared Ranaman catechistically.
Everson stood close to Atkins and Perkins and, leaning in, spoke in a low voice. “This thing is composed of iron. Probably the remains of a meteor that hit the planet hundreds of years ago. It would seem that chatt and urman myth has some basis in fact.” He looked up into the minaret above. The domed temple, with its thin, tapering minaret, might be a representation of the ancient event, the dome being the impact of the meteor, the minaret its fiery tail.
“Iron?” said Atkins, touching the boulder.
“The reason I suspect Perkins was spared,” said Everson. “They mistook the crash of the Ivanhoe for another sacred rock falling from the sky.” He raised a sardonic eyebrow. “You’re the Man in the Moon, Perkins.”
“Come,” said Ranaman, leading them through the narrow cleft between the two halves of rock, towards the back of the temple. They could have walked round, but there seemed to be some implied ritual in passing between them, a significance of which they were unaware. There, from a niche in the wall, Ranaman retrieved the wooden casket.
“This great magic was left in our keeping also. Through it, our ancestors who sought out Croatoan communicate with us from the Village of the Dead. It has been a long time since our ancestors spoke to us. Then came the sky-being, Jeffries. He said he came from the place of our forefathers in search of Croatoan. He spoke to our ancestors and then passed beyond, following them into the underworld.”
As he spoke, Ranaman opened the casket, revealing the leather-bound book. Everson lifted it out of its resting place and set it on a shallow facet of the rock so that it was illuminated by a pool of light from the minaret above. It was definitely older than the Bleeker journal, with heavy binding and thick wrinkled vellum pages.
His anticipation grew as he traced a finger over the Croatoan Sigil, cast in iron embedded on the front. He licked an index finger and proceeded to turn the pages. The book was another journal of sorts. Many early portions were in a script he couldn’t read, but one that he recognised.
“It looks like the code in Jeffries’ occult journal,” said Atkins.
“Hmm,” said Everson thoughtfully. Here and there, he recognised the Croatoan symbol again. He felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.
Near the beginning, there was a manifest. Those sections he could read spoke of a new Virginia colony and of Croatoan. It seemed that whatever befell the missing colony, stranger and more deadly things had befallen them here.
“So they did come from Earth,” said Perkins.
“It appears so,” said Everson uncomfortably. “They’d gone looking for a new world. It seemed the one that they found wasn’t quite what most of them expected.”
Other pages spoke volumes, more so because they weren’t there. Someone had torn them out. Jeffries again, no doubt. All of which served to convince Everson that he was on the right track. He speculated on what information they might contain. There was no doubt that this book contained a factual account of the colony’s day-to-day survival, among other, more esoteric, matters. He would have liked to study it more closely, but Ranaman took the book from him and clutched it to his chest.
As the urman led them back through the cloven rock, Everson wondered wistfully if the battalion’s own War Diary would become such a relic in the future. He had a vision of some other snatched and stranded band of people, some decades or a century hence, arriving on the strange world in strange machines, coming across the Pennine Fusiliers’ official account. He imagined them finding the remains of the trenches, reclaimed by the veldt, long overgrown and forgotten. Skeletons occupied the firesteps, standing to for eternity, their khaki uniforms rotting and their bleached bones intimately entwined with wireweed. In his mind’s eye, he saw his dugout, half-collapsed and empty, a memorial, like Scott’s Antarctic hut, and envisaged the strangers coming across the mildewed and foxed Battalion War Diary and looking at it in wonder and fear. He shook his head and dismissed the maudlin fancy. He didn’t want that to become their reality.
TULLIVER CAUGHT GLIMPSES of the tower through the trees before him. The only sound breaking the silence around him was the crack and slap of the undergrowth and Hepton’s inveterate cursing as he lumbered along, carrying his bags, boxes and tripod.
He squinted through the thinning canopy overhead. His petrol-fruit-enhanced eyes caught an area of the sky that seemed to shine a little brighter than the rest, as if it had been polished and worn through wear. Another bright flash arced its way into the sky. Interesting. It seemed his heightened senses could pick up a building discharge.
It was followed a few seconds later by a rolling boom, and in the distance, he could hear whoops and howls of alarm. However, around them, but for the persistent creep and creak of the parasitic creepers that pervaded the jungle, they were cocooned in an area of silence.
As they pushed on, Tulliver, curious, exercised his newfound skill, spotting other shiny patches of sky and finding that each built to a lightning bolt. So intent was he on honing this new skill that he stepped out of the undergrowth and almost onto the end of a bayonet, as Mercy and Pot Shot spun round to meet his unexpected arrival with cold steel.
“Halt! Identify yourself. Friend or – fucking hell, sorry, Mr Tulliver, sir!”
Something came crashing through the undergrowth, huffing and snorting. The two Tommies swung their rifles towards the sound.
“Christ, no!” said Tulliver, his hand pushing Mercy’s rifle barrel down. “That’s Mr Hepton.” Then he sniffed and waved his revolver in the general direction of the noise. “Then again, kill him if you want. I shan’t bloody blame you.”
Hepton stumbled into the clearing and, upon seeing the Fusiliers, proceeded to divest himself of his baggage and equipment, dumping it on the ground at his feet.
“Where the bloody hell is Jenkins? He can carry this stuff now,” he said, straightening up, arching his spine and pushing his hands into the small of his back as he recovered his composure.
Mercy and Pot Shot looked at each other.
Hepton stood there, waiting. “Well?”
“Jenkins is dead, sir.”
Hepton threw his hands to the heavens and rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Bloody typical!”
“Where’s Everson? I’ve something he needs to see,” Tulliver asked, patting the wrapped package under his arm.
“This way, sir,” said Mercy, leading him into the temple.
“Are you going to help me?” snapped Hepton at Pot Shot.
“Can’t sir,” said Pot Shot, straight-faced. “I’m on guard.”
Muttering and huffing, Hepton glared darkly after the pilot before shouldering his load, unaware of the gossamer-fine white threads spreading silently through the damp soil and leaf mulch at his feet.
INSIDE THE TEMPLE, Tulliver saw Everson, standing at the centre along with Atkins, a tanker and an urman, lit by shafts of sunlight converging from slits in the tower above. They served to illuminate two halves of a huge boulder. Around them, a host of urmen sat or knelt, watching them with rapt attention as if trying to burn the moment into their memories.