CHAPTER 69
Milo swung the lantern back behind him, illuminating the stone steps. “Not much farther, Dr. Kate.”
They had descended the spiral stone staircase for what felt like an hour. Kate thought they must be at the center of the mountain or a mile below the monastery by now. Milo skipped down the stairs, carrying the lantern like a kid carrying a candy bag on Halloween night, never tiring, never stopping to rest. Kate’s legs burned. She hadn’t yet recovered from yesterday’s exertion. She dreaded the return trip up the stairs.
Up ahead, Milo had stopped again, waiting for her, but this time he stood on level ground — a large round opening at the base of the stairs. Finally. He stepped back and held the lantern out, illuminating a wooden tombstone-shaped door with a rounded top.
Kate waited for a moment, wondering if he was simply waiting on her again.
“Please go in, Dr. Kate. He’s waiting on you.”
Kate nodded and opened the door, revealing a cramped circular room. The walls were covered in maps and shelves that held glass bottles, figurines, and metal artifacts. The room was… medieval, like the ancient lab in the tower of a castle where someone with a name like Merlin or Archimedes might work. And there was a sorcerer in the room, or at least he looked like one. An old man sat at a shabby wooden desk, reading. He turned his neck slowly as if it pained him. He was Asian; his hair was long since gone, and his face was more wrinkled than any Kate had ever seen. He must have been more than 100 years old.
“Dr. Warner.” His voice was a whisper. He stood and ambled toward Kate, leaning heavily on his wooden cane.
“Mister…”
“There are no misters here, my dear girl.” He paused. Walking and talking were too taxing for him. He stared patiently at the stone floor while he gathered his breath. “Call me Qian. I have something for you. Something I’ve waited 75 years to give you. But first, I have something to show you. Could you help me with the door?” He motioned to a small wooden door Kate hadn’t seen before. It was no more than four feet tall. Kate opened the door and was relieved to see that the passage beyond was taller than the doorway. She waited at the door as Qian paced past her, stopping every few feet. How long had it taken him to get down here?
Kate looked into the corridor and was surprised to find that it was illuminated by modern LED lights. And it was short — no more than fifteen feet long. It seemed to dead end into a stone wall. It took Qian several minutes to reach the door, and when he did, he gestured toward a wooden button on the wall.
Kate pressed the button, and the stone wall began to rise up, like a false wall in an Indiana Jones movie. Kate felt air blowing past her feet, rushing into the room. It must have been sealed.
She followed Qian into the room, which was square, approximately forty feet by forty feet. It was empty except for a large rug laying in the center of the room, which must have been at least thirty feet by thirty feet. Kate glanced to the ceiling and saw a thin linen cloth that covered the entire area of the room. Above the cloth, she could see another identical cloth, and beyond that, another as far as she could see, like layers of mosquito net reaching to the top of the mountain. A method to wick away moisture? Possibly, but Kate saw something else — tiny pieces of dirt and rock, caught in the cloth.
Qian nodded toward the rug. “This is the treasure we protect here. Our heritage. We have paid a dear price for it.” He cleared his throat and continued speaking slowly. “When I was young, men came to my village. They wore military uniforms. I didn’t know it at the time, but they were Nazi uniforms. These men sought a group of monks who lived in the mountains beyond my village. No one would talk about these monks. I didn’t know any better. The men paid me and some other children to take them there. The monks were not afraid of these men, but they should have been. The men who had been kind in our village turned ruthless in the mountains. They searched the monastery, tortured the men, and finally set fire to the mountain.”
Qian paused again, gathering his breath. “My friends were dead, and they were searching the monastery for me. And then they found me. One of the soldiers took me in his arms and carried me through the monastery into a tunnel. Three monks were waiting there. The man told them that I was the only survivor. He handed me a journal and said that I had to keep it safe until the time was right. The three monks left that night with only the clothes on their backs and this tapestry.” Qian settled his gaze on the massive work of art — some sort of biblical story with gods, heroes, monsters, heavens, light, blood, fire, and water.
Kate stood silently. In the back of her mind, she wondered what this had to do with her. She suppressed the urge to say, “Looks great, now can I use your computer?”
“And now you are wondering what this has to do with you.”
Kate blushed and tossed her head to the side. “No, I mean, it’s beautiful…” And it was. The colors were bold, as vivid as any fresco in a Catholic church, and the threads added depth to the depictions. “But, the man I came here with — he and I are in danger.”
“You and Andrew are not the only ones.”
Before Kate could speak, Qian continued with an unexpected strength in his voice. “Your enemy is the same group that burned that monastery 75 years ago and the same that will unleash an unthinkable evil very soon. That is what the tapestry depicts. Understanding it and the journal are the keys to stopping them. I have clung to life for 75 years, waiting, hoping the day would come when I would fulfill my destiny; and yesterday, when I learned what had happened in China, I knew it had come.” Qian reached inside his robe, and with a frail hand, offered Kate a small leather-bound book.
He motioned toward the tapestry. “What do you see, my child?”
Kate studied the richly colored images. Angels, gods, fire, water, blood, light, sun. “Some sort of religious depiction?”
“Religion is our desperate attempt to understand our world. And our past. We live in darkness, surrounded by mysteries. Where did we come from? What is our purpose? What will happen to us after we die? Religion also gives us something more: a code of conduct, a blueprint of right and wrong, a guide to human decency. Just like any other tool, it can be misused. But this document was created long before man found solace in his religions.”
“How?”
“We believe it was created from oral traditions.”
“A legend?”
“Perhaps. But we believe it is a document of both history and prophecy. A depiction of events before man’s awakening and tragedies yet to come. We call it the epic of the four floods.” Qian pointed to the upper right-hand corner of the tapestry.
Kate followed his finger and studied the image — naked beasts, no humans, in a sparse forest or an African savanna. The people are running, fleeing a darkness descending from the sky — a blanket of ashes that suffocates them and kills the plant life. Just below that, they are alone in a barren, dead wilderness. Then a light emerges, leads them out, and a protector is talking to the savages, giving them a cup with blood in it.
Qian clears his throat. “The savior knows that he cannot always be there to save them. He shares a cup with his own blood to protect them. The first scene is the Flood of Fire. A flood that almost destroyed the world, almost buried man in ashes and tore all the food from the world.”
“A creation myth.” Kate whispered. All major religions had some form of creation myth, a history of how God created man in his image.
“This is no myth. This is a historical document.” Qian’s tone was gentle, like a teacher or a parent. “Notice that man already existed before the flood of fire, living as beasts in the forest. The flood would have killed them, but the savior merely protected them. But he cannot always be there to save them. And so he gives them the greatest gift of all: his blood; a gift that will keep them safe.”
In the back of Kate’s mind, she thought: The Toba Catastrophe and The Great Leap Forward. Blood. A genetic mutation — a change in brain wiring — that gave humanity a survival advantage, helping them brave the sea of ashes falling from the Toba Super Volcano 70,000 years ago. The Flood of Fire. Could it be?
Kate skipped down the tapestry. The scene was strange. The men from the forest seemed to have transformed into ninjas, or spirits. They wore clothes, and they had begun slaughtering beasts. The scene grew bloody, the horrors growing with every inch of tapestry. Slavery, murder, war.
“This gift made man smart, and strong, and safe from extinction, but he paid a great price. For the first time, he saw the world as it truly was, and he saw dangers all around him — in the beasts of the forest and in his fellow man. As a beast, he had lived in a world of bliss, acting on his instincts, thinking only when he had to, never seeing himself for what he was, never worrying about his mortality, never trying to cheat death. But now his thoughts and fears ruled him. He knew evil for the first time. Your Sigmund Freud came very close to describing these concepts with his id and ego. Man transformed into a Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. He struggled with his beast-mind, his animal instincts. Passion, rage — no matter how much we evolve, man can’t escape these instincts — our heritage as beasts. We can only hope to control the beast inside us. Man also longed to understand his waking mind, with its fears, dreams, and questions of where he came from and what his destiny was. And most of all, he dreamed of cheating death. He built communities on the coast and committed untold atrocities to ensure his own safety and seek immortality, in his deeds or through some magic or alchemy. The coast is the natural place for man; it’s how we survived the flood of fire; sea life was our food source when the land was scorched. But his reign was short-lived.”
Kate surveyed the next part of the tapestry — a great wall of water, just behind a chariot on the sea, which carries the cup-bearing savior from the flood of fire.
“The savior returns and tells his tribes that a great flood is coming, that they must prepare.”
“Sounds familiar,” Kate said.
“Yes. There is a flood myth in every religion, old and young, around the world. And the flood is a fact. Around 12,000 years ago, the last ice age ended. Glaciers melted. The planet’s axis shifted. And sea levels rose almost 400 feet over the entire time period, sometimes rising gradually, sometimes in destructive waves and tsunamis.”
Kate studied the depiction — of cities falling to the wave of water, of throngs of people drowning, of rulers and the rich standing and smiling at the water, and at the very end, a small band of people, dressed in humble clothes, venturing inland, to the mountains. They carried a chest of some kind.
Qian let her consider the tapestry for a long moment, then continued. “The people ignored the warning of the flood. Man had mastered the world, or so they thought. They were arrogant and decadent. They thumbed their noses at the coming disaster and continued with their wicked ways. Some say God is punishing man for killing his brothers and sisters. One tribe heeds the warning, builds an ark, and retreats from the sea, into the mountains. The flood comes and destroys the cities along the sea, leaving only the primitive villages inland and the scattered nomadic tribes. A rumor spreads that God is dead, that man is now the God of Earth. That the Earth belongs to them for them to do with as they please. But one tribe maintained the faith. They held to one belief alone: that man is flawed, man is not God, that humility is to be truly human.”
“You were the tribe.”
“Yes. We heeded the savior’s warning and did as he commanded, we carried the Ark to the highlands.”
“And this tapestry was in the Ark?” Kate asked.
“No. Not even I know what was in the Ark. But it must have been real; stories of it survive to this day. And the story is very powerful. It has an incredibly powerful draw for anyone who hears it. It is one of many stories that rise out of the human psyche. We see it as truth, just as we recognize the various versions of the creation myth. These stories have always existed, and always will, inside our own minds.”
“What happened to the tribe?”
“They dedicated themselves to finding the truth of the tapestry, to understanding the antediluvian — the pre-flood — world, to discovering what happened. One group thought the answers lie in the human mind, in understanding our existence through reflection and self-examination. They became the mountain monks, the Immaru, the Light. I am the last of the Immaru. But some of the monks grew restless. They sought their answers in the world. Like us, they were a group of faith, at least at first. As time passed and they journeyed on, they slowly lost their religion, literally. They turned to a new hope for answers: science. They were tired of myths and allegories. They wanted proof. And they began to find it, but they paid a high price for it. Science lacks something very important that religion provides: a moral code. Survival of the fittest is a scientific fact, but it is a cruel ethic; the way of beasts, not a civilized society. Laws can only take us so far, and they must be based upon something — a shared moral code that rises from something. As that moral foundation recedes, so will society’s values.”
“I don’t think a person has to be religious to be moral. I’m a scientist, and I’m not… terribly religious… but I’m, or I think I’m a pretty moral person.”
“You’re also much smarter and more empathetic than the vast majority of people. But they will catch up to you someday, and the world will live in peace, without the need for allegories or moral lessons. I fear that day is further away than anyone believes. I speak of the state of things today, of the masses, not the minority. But I shouldn’t be speaking of any of it. I’m preaching about subjects of interest to me, as old men often do, especially lonely ones. You’ve no doubt guessed the identity of the monks who left so long ago.”
“The Immari.”
Qian nodded. “We believe that around the time of the Greeks, the monks changed their name to The Immari, perhaps to sound more Greek, so they might be accepted by the Greek scholars who were making so many breakthroughs in this emerging field of science. The true tragedy, and the truth of how that faction changed forever, is chronicled in the journal. And that’s why you must read.”
“What about the rest of the tapestry? The other two floods?”
“Those are events yet to come.”
Kate studied the other half of the tapestry. The Flood of Blood showed a group of supermen slaughtering lesser beings. The tapestry was covered in the crimson blood. Below it, a hero battles a powerful monster, killing it and rising into heaven, where he unleashes a Flood of Light, bathing the world and liberating it, including the oppressed. Taken in whole, the tapestry moved from black and grays of the Flood of Fire to the blues and greens of the Flood of Water to the red and crimson of the Flood of Blood to the white and yellow of the Flood of Light. It was truly beautiful, captivating.
Qian interrupted her concentration. “And now I must rest. And you must do your homework, Dr. Warner.”