Outlanders 37 Rim of the World, page 14
Decorated with yellow lightning stripes, the number 88 was emblazoned in scarlet on the side of the engine. All the brass parts from the drivers to the rods to the rivet heads shone with a bright polish. It seemed a very strange object d'art to find in an African witch-doctor's hut.
A young girl turned the crank of a rope-and-pulley assembly connected to a ceiling fan directly above Inkula. The big flat blades turned sluggishly, only stirring the air, not cooling it off. The range of temperature they had encountered so far varied from very warm to very hot to sickeningly hot, so Kane felt justified in mopping his sweat-drenched face with a scrap of cloth he picked up from a table.
Princess Pakari knelt beside the old man, putting a hand on his arm. Softly, she said, "Your holiness, can you tell our friends about Prester John?"
Inkula's milky, sightless eyes blinked. "They do not know of him?"
"We know the legends," Brigid said. "That Prester John founded a great Christian empire here in Africa in the twelfth century. He was a European who became a great military leader and established a nation that encompassed the frontiers of India and stretched to the headwaters of the White Nile. But in our land, Prester John is dismissed as only a myth."
Inkula waved his arms in an expansive gesture. "But not here. In Africa, the past has hardly stopped breathing. Sit, and we will speak."
The four people looked around and saw only cushions covered in zebra hide on the floor. Carefully they sank down onto them. Grant's knee joints popped and he uttered an embarrassed curse under his breath.
Inkula declared in a challenging tone, "Yes, you know part of the story, but like all Americans, knowing only a little has not stopped you from involving yourselves in the affairs of other cultures."
Kane scowled and a profanity leaped unbidden to the tip of his tongue. Before it could leave his mouth, Pakari leaned over and whispered urgently in the old man's ear.
With a sigh, Inkula said, "I have been informed that all of you have earned the respect of my princess and therefore the friendship of the Waziri nation. So I will tell you all that I know, a story handed down from priest to priest for nearly a thousand years.
"Prester John conquered the monarchs of Merdia, Persia and Samiardi, emerging victorious from a terrible battle that lasted three days, but ended with his conquest of Abyssinia. After that, he and his armies started for Jerusalem to rescue the Holy Land, but the swollen waters of the Tigris compelled him to return to Abyssinia. Or so our legends would have it."
Brigid said, "Most of the legends actually began in Europe. Around 1165, copies of a letter purporting to be written by Prester John to the Holy Roman Emperor Manuel began circulating through Italy, Spain and Portugal. This letter claimed that Prester John was the greatest monarch under heaven, as well as a devout Christian. That was a very odd combination for an African king."
Inkula nodded his bald head. "A European he was by birth, but Prester John belonged to the race of the three Magi who paid homage to the newborn Christ, their former kingdoms being subject to him. Prester John's enormous wealth was demonstrated by the fact that he carried a scepter of pure emeralds.
"His empire extended over the three Indias, including that of Fartherest India, where lay the body of Saint Thomas, and back again down to the ruins of Babylon and the tower of Babel. All the wild beasts and monstrous creatures commemorated in legend could be found in his dominions, as well as all the wild and eccentric races of men of whom strange stories were told, like the centaurs and Cyclops."
Kane only half listened, distracted by sweat stinging his eyes and the growing desire for an iced drink of some kind.
"Prester John's territories contained the monstrous ants that dug gold and the rivers that flowed into the Fountain of Youth," Inkula went on. "There were pebbles that gave light, restored sight and rendered the possessor invisible."
Kane and Grant repressed groans of impatience, not just with Inkula's long-windedness, but with the rapt expressions on the faces of Reba DeFore and Brigid Baptiste.
"There were no poor in his dominions," Inkula said proudly, "no thief or robber, no flatterer or miser, no dissensions, no lies and no vices. His palace was enormous, built after the plan of that which Saint Thomas erected for the Indian king Gondopharus. Before it was a marvelous mirror erected on a many-storied pedestal. It was called a speculumin and in it Prester John could discern everything that went on throughout his dominions and detect conspiracies.
"There was another, smaller palace, but still of wonderful character. In that, balanced on the rim of the world and guarded by an army of ferocious apes, Prester John pent up his treasures."
Kane asked, "What kind of treasures?"
Inkula smiled. "Instruments, devices. A devout Christian he was, but Prester John also had an interest in a new art known as science. He would not have been able to rule over his enormous dominions if he had not possessed certain instruments."
DeFore ventured, "Like the collar, the Great Snake?"
Inkula nodded. "And Prester John's Mirror. The collar and the mirror were important parts of the emperor's control of his country. When these were lost, his empire fell."
Grant frowned. "Lost? Or stolen?"
Inkula tugged at his beard. "Who can say, wageni? But many nations sprang up in the shadow of Prester John's empire. Six hundred years ago, the chief native power was in the hands of the Zulu tribe. Then the Mazimba and the Waziri came down from the Lake Nyassa quarter, and together all of them built a strong kingdom in Manicaland.
"The thing to remember is that all these little empires thought themselves the successors of Prester John. They all worshipped a great white king in the north, whom they called by twenty different names. They had forgotten about his Christianity, but they remembered that he was a conqueror. The Waziri and the Zulu revered the story of Prester John, but by this time it had ceased to be a historical memory, and had become a religious cult of zealots."
Kane swallowed a sigh, although he wasn't surprised to hear about a religion springing up around a legend. He hated dealing with people whose spirituality had turned down the path of fanaticism.
"They worshipped a great power," Inkula continued, "who had been their ancestor, and the favorite Zulu word for him was umkulunkulu. The belief was perverted into many different forms, but this was the central creed—that Umkulunkulu had been the father of the tribe, and was alive as a spirit to watch over them.
"But it was more than a creed with the Zulu and the Waziri. Somehow or another, a fetish had descended from Prester John by way of the Mazimba folk. Always it was in the hands of the tribe, which for the moment held the leadership, passing from the Zulu to the Waziri to Zambesi. The great tribal wars of the sixteenth century were not struggles for territory but for leadership, the possession of this fetish."
"I presume you mean the collar," DeFore said.
Inkula nodded. "When it fell into the hands of the Zulu, they called it Ndhlondhlo, which means the Great Snake, but of course it wasn't any kind of snake."
"Of course," murmured Brigid. "The snake was the Zulu tribal totem and so they would naturally name their most sacred possession after it."
"Have you have heard of Shaka?" Inkula asked. "Yes," Brigid answered. "He was a sort of native Napoleon early in the nineteenth century. He made the Zulu the paramount power in South Africa, slaughtering about two million people to accomplish it."
"He had the Collar of Prester John," Inkula stated. "And it was believed that he owed his conquests to it. The Zambesi and the Cetewayo tried to steal it lest Shaka destroy their tribes. But upon Shaka's assassination, it disappeared. The collar was gone out of existence, and with it the chance of a single African empire."
"Except," Grant said quietly, "the Waziri had it all along."
A thin smile stretched the old man's lips. "My people did not use it as Shaka had. We hid it from those who wished to repeat Shaka's atrocities. The Waziri were scattered and divided, but we have long memories. Even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the influence of the British, the Europeans and the Americans reached across Africa, we told the story of Prester John and his miraculous collar and his mysterious mirror."
Inkula stopped speaking and an expectant silence fell over the hut. After waiting a moment, Kane cleared his throat and asked, "Okay, I'll be the straight man. What's so miraculous about the collar and so mysterious about the mirror?"
"No one really knows," Inkula stated matter-of-factly. "We have only folk-tales. Myths."
"I thought that was what we've been listening to for the past five minutes," rumbled Grant, shifting position on the cushion.
Inkula turned his face toward him. His milky eyes chilled Grant's blood and he almost looked away. In a soft tone barely above a whisper, the priest said, "There are myths that are so ancient that they spawn hundreds of other myths, like a flower spreads seeds. The truth is a mixture of reality and legend, fear and veneration."
"What's the real stuff?" Kane demanded tersely. "Where did the collar and the mirror come from?"
"I distinctly heard Utu take credit for making the collar," DeFore interposed.
Inkula's lips twisted as if he tasted something sour. "Perhaps he fashioned it, but he did not supply the materials."
"Which were what?" asked Brigid.
"Stones," Inkula answered. "Jewels. Flawless rubies to be exact, fifty-five of them. But I don't think they are really rubies."
"Why not?" Pakari asked, her golden eyes troubled. "You think the collar is a fake?"
"No, my child. But nor is it what it appears to be, either. Legend and even reality agree that several thousand years ago a meteor or perhaps even a comet exploded above central Africa. Pieces of it were found all over the land and it became known by many names—the Kala, the Shining Trapezohedron, the Chintamani Stone even the Messiah or Godstone."
Brigid, Grant, Kane and DeFore all stiffened as Inkula spoke, swiftly exchanging startled glances with one another. Pakari noticed their reaction but didn't interrupt the old man.
"The Christian Bible even makes reference to it," he continued. "The prophet Zachariah refers to a holy stone that will transform man into messiah. The ancient rabbis claimed a fragment of this stone occupied a place in the Ark of the Covenant. Even King Solomon was said to have had a piece of the stone set into a ring."
"What was so special about these pieces of meteorite?" asked Brigid.
Inkula sighed. "The stones are reputed to endow their bearer with extraordinary powers of influence over the minds of people. With them, perhaps in tandem with Prester John's mirror, which is also alleged to have been made from the meteor, a person develops the power to bend the will of others."
Brigid said non-committally, "There have been other
such objects throughout history with powers like those attributed to the stones. The rings of Solomon and Genghis Khan come to mind."
"Perhaps so," Inkula said. "But Pakari and Laputara's father and my good friend Emperor N' gatawana investigated the myths, the fables. He came to believe that a cult of Waziri wise men collected all the largest pieces of the meteor that had fallen in Africa. They hid them in a valley that became known as Ophir.
"At least three thousand years ago, the pieces were stolen and made into a collar, a necklace of sorts. Many men wore it, conquerors, god-kings, mighty men of old from Gilgamesh to Alexander to even a white barbarian named Arturus. Each one tried to exert control over the entire ancient world and each one, after achieving some success, met an ignoble end."
Inkula's lips stretched in a patronizing smile. "But I don't expect wageni, Americans at that, to believe in the power of an object no one but a handful of superstitious witch doctors have seen in many hundreds of years. If you cannot see, feel, touch or taste an object, then you reject any other attributes of that object. You have been conditioned to be materialists."
Pakari squeezed the old man's wrist, saying reprovingly, "Hush! They are our honored guests."
"They are guests, perhaps," Inkula said coldly. "It remains to be proved if they should be honored."
Shaking her head in exasperation, Princess Pakari turned toward the Cerberus people and said, "I apologize for Inkula. He is a great man, but he tends to draw premature conclusions. He thinks you are just humoring an old man in his fantasies."
Brigid chuckled, not sounding the least bit offended. Casting a sideways glance toward Kane, she replied, "Inkula is not the only man here who suffers from that malady. But it might surprise him how much we do believe in the power of an object nobody has seen in hundreds of years."
Inkula's sparse gray eyebrows rose. "How so?"
Brigid jerked a thumb toward Kane. "Because Kane here not only handled some pieces of the so-called Messiah stone—"
"I chucked them over a cliff," Kane broke in loudly, proudly.
Inkula's mouth gaped open in astonishment. "Over a cliff?"
Kane grinned at the astounded expression on the priest's face. "And I'd do it again, you sour old bastard."
Inkula stared in his direction, and although his seamed, chocolate-brown face showed no emotion, he was obviously struggling to accept Kane's pronouncement as truth. At length, he said calmly, "Then we have much to discuss...honored guests."
Chapter 17
The atmosphere in the little but became less formal as the antagonistic energy between Inkula and the four outlanders abated. A couple of years ago, the Cerberus warriors had become embroiled in a plot to use an ancient Archon artefact to alter the very fabric of reality. The artefact had been known by many names, by many peoples in civilizations both primitive and advanced—Lucifer's Stone, the Kala, the Kaa'ba, the Chintamani Stone, the Shining Trapezohedron.
Feeling his way with his staff, the priest and the little servant girl fetched tea and sesame sweetbreads for their guests. While they were so occupied, Kane and Grant rose from the floor to stretch their legs and look around the interior of the hut. During the course of the adventure, Brigid learned that many different cultures separated by time and distance venerated certain kinds of stones, particularly if they were of celestial origin. Apocryphal religious texts told of Lucifer falling from the sky bearing a black stone that was split into fragments and scattered among humanity.
"I think it's pretty obvious what Utu's connection is to the Collar and Mirror of Prester John," Brigid said. Ancient Amazonian legends related that the god Tivra built an altar on an island in Lake Titicaca to hold three holy stones called the Kala. In Hungary, a black monolith was worshipped by the backward villagers, and stones with supernatural properties were written about in ancient manuscripts from the Arabic Kitab al-Azif to the Ponape Scriptures of the South Seas.
"Same old routine, sounds like," stated Grant. "Giving humans some technological toys to go out and do the Annunaki's bidding so they don't have to get their own hands dirty—or bloody." Buddhist and Taoists legends spoke of the Chintamani Stone, alleged to have fallen from the star system of Sirius. The texts claimed that "when the Son of the Sun descended upon Earth to teach mankind, there fell from heaven a shield that bore the power of the world."
"Technological?" Pakari inquired. "I thought we were talking about rocks or jewels." Only a short time before they had come across the tai-me, which seemed to be the Native American equivalent of a fragment of the Chintamani Stone.
"If the rubies in the collar are fragments of the Shining Trapezohedron," Brigid replied, "then they're not exactly rocks, either." Always the stone had been associated with the concept of a key that unlocked either the door to enlightenment or madness. It had served as the spiritual centerpiece of the race they had known as the Archons, even after it had been fragmented and the facets scattered from one end of the Earth to the other.
According to Balam, the last of his ancient people, the trapezohedron allowed glimpses of all possible futures to which their activities might lead.
But the stone was far more than a calculating device that extrapolated outcomes from actions. Balam had said, "It brings into existence those outcomes."
He had referred to the stone as a channel to "sidereal space," where many tangential points of reality lay adjacent to each other, the parallel casements of the universe, a multitude of realities co-existing with their own.
The tests performed on the pieces of the stone in the possession of Cerberus yielded inconclusive results. Lakesh had suggested that the artifact was a probability-wave packet, a mathematical equation in physical form that formed an interface between their universe and others.
Kane smiled crookedly. "We never did figure out what the trapezohedron actually was."
Brigid matched his smile with a rueful one of her own. "No, we didn't. And more is the pity."
Pakari took a tray from the servant and offered slices of fruit to Grant. "You lead very interesting lives in America," she said.
Picking up a chunk of melon and eyeing it critically, he grunted dourly, "Yeah, that's one way of putting it. I don't think 'interesting' would be the word I'd choose."
Kane repressed a smile at Grant's tone. Unlike him, Grant had not freely chosen the life of an exile, an insurrectionist. He had sacrificed everything that gave
his life a degree of purpose to help Kane and Brigid escape from Cobaltville. Even after all the time that had elapsed since that day, Kane still felt responsible for what the man had given up and what he had suffered since then in the war against the hybrid barons.
But old habits died very hard. Kane and Grant had been partners for nearly fifteen years, and it was part and parcel of Magistrate Division conditioning to always back a partner's play.
When Kane, Brigid, Grant and the Cerberus exiles declared war on the dark forces devoted to maintaining the yoke of slavery around the collective necks of humankind, it was a struggle not just for the physical survival of humanity, but for the human spirit, the soul of an entire race.
Over the past few years, they had scored many victories, defeated many enemies and solved mysteries of the past that molded the present and affected the future. More importantly, they began to rekindle of the spark of hope within the breasts of the disenfranchised fighting to survive in the Outlands.
