‘Because this is what we have been told: by the ever-resurrected god himself!’
*
‘But how – why? Why would all these natural disasters be so carefully aimed at man alone?’
‘Because we deserved it, of course!’
As he answered Lil’s query, the king raised his head slightly, as if catching signs that it was time for a change in the celebration’s procedures. Placing an arm of sorts about Lil’s shoulders, he began to lead her through a crowd that, naturally, smoothly parted for them as they approached.
‘How could we deserve to suffer so much?’
‘Because we refused to believe; and so we received our just punishment, to correct our ways!’
He grinned down at Lil as he joyfully continued with his explanation.
‘It was all for our ultimate benefit, of course! If we learn to believe, then we have finally been completely cleansed of ours sins, our foolishness! We will be reborn, not as something standing against nature, but as a part of it!’
His chest puffed out proudly, an action Lil read as his way of presenting himself as an example of this new, superior breed of man.
Before Lil could ask for any form of clarification, there was shrill burst of horns, a beating of drums; and almost immediately, the crowd’s chatter ceased as people turned to face in the very direction the king was headed. There was now only excited murmurs, the shuffling of feet, and even these were all being quickly stilled.
The sound of the drum was increasing, drawer nearer. A small procession of warriors were marching to its beat, warriors dressed in a style Lil didn’t recognise, their cloaks a rich and expensive red, their armour highly polished, their helmets decorated with plumes.
They were humans, not bestial men.
In their midst was another man, one also wearing a cloak; yet he was bent torturously under the weight of a massive wooden cross.
*
Chapter 24
If the man carrying the cross faltered in any way, one of the soldiers was standing close by to viciously whip his back until he struggled to his feet once more.
Lil wondered why everyone in the watching crowd was not only taking the infliction of such harsh punishment so lightly, but also seemed positively elated by it all. She hesitated, wondering if she should protest, or if, perhaps, she was confusing a theatrical event with reality.
She remained silent.
The king, observing her changing expressions, grinned in amusement.
‘He has brought this upon himself: he has chosen his role,’ he explained almost joyfully. ‘He is making a sacrifice of himself, to show us that which is true and undeniable!’
Once again, Lil grimaced in puzzlement.
‘What’s true?’
‘Why,’ the king replied with a hint of surprise that Lil hadn’t already guessed, ‘that I am the King of Kings, of course!’
*
The tortured man’s punishments only increased with each new development.
Reaching the pinnacle of a small hill, the cross was at last lifted from his back; only for him to be nailed spread-eagled across its beams, then raised up upon it as if it were some obscene tree.
The soldier who had been scourging the man now held in his hands a spear as he addressed the rapt audience.
‘For all those who doubt!’ he proclaimed accusingly: then forcibly rammed home the spear’s elongated point into the crucified man’s side, in such a manner that he must surely be penetrating deeply into the poor man’s heart.
With a groan of agony, the tortured man was at last relieved of his suffering, dying in front of everyone, going limp upon the cross he was so securely pinioned to.
As his lifeless form was taken down, there was an invitation to any doubters within the crowd to step forward, to take this opportunity to slide their hands deep inside the man’s wound – so that they would ‘bare witness to the fact that he is surely dead’.
The procession moved off once again, this time carrying the dead man limply amongst them, in the same way that he had been forced to bear his own cross. This time, too, the crowd followed on behind the languidly moving procession as it wound its way towards yet another door, this one leading into yet another part of the extensive complex of buildings.
Here the poor man’s dead body was reverently wrapped within a ghostly white shroud before being carefully laid to rest within a glass-topped casket.
And here he would lie ‘for but a thrice’, the commander of the warriors announced, guarded by us; yet anyone who still doubts, he added without any tone of admonishment, ‘is free to stay and observe the miracle of the resurrection for themselves.’
*
The king wasn’t a doubter.
He had more that he whished to show Lil. Besides, he reassured her, he would be notified when it was time to return.
They headed off for the moving room once more, taking it down to even lower levels.
No one seemed to find it peculiar that the king was spending his time showing a human around the complex rather than attending to any affairs of state, his odd conversations with what appeared to be some form of courtiers being brief and rare; perhaps this was a perfectly normal occurrence at the time of the celebrations, Lil presumed.
Another doubter, who must have the truth revealed to her.
‘You said you were King of Kings,’ Lil said as they descended in the moving room. ‘Who are the other kings?’
‘All dead, of course,’ he answered, glancing at her with a hint of surprise that she hadn’t already worked this out for herself. ‘With no chance of resurrection,’ he added with a satisfied smirk.
‘You saw one of the kings, saw me kill him,’ he reminded Lil. ‘Each group elects a king, and it is from those that the king of all must be chosen, by placing his life in the hands of the orders and decrees of our god.’
These lower areas of the building were more spartan than ever, yet it was a deliberately achieved simplicity for the sake of cleanliness, as everything sparkled as if freshly polished. Many of the rooms here were fronted by huge plates of glass, allowing a clear view of the interiors, where either beds were laid out in neat rows, or children were playing or taking part in what could be training exercises, ones of learning, of gymnastics.
Is this where the ‘chosen’ children ended up? Lil wondered. If so, perhaps the supposed religious ceremonies weren’t such a terrible idea after all.
The king ignored these rooms. Instead, he directed Lil into one that bore similarities to the cleanly sharp mingling of steel and glass that had surrounded the casket in which the dead ‘god’ had been placed.
Here, however, there were a number of glass caskets, so many that instead of them gracing the very centre of the room – as the single casket had in the god’s ‘tomb’ – they were here set along the walls, almost in a perfect replication of the dorms Lil had just viewed through the glass panes.
With a mischievous grin, the king led Lil over to the nearest casket.
As they drew nearer, Lil peered intently into the glass dome, recognising that a body already lay within the casket, trying to work out why the king thought she might be interested in seeing it.
She gasped in horror.
It was Sis.
The dead body of Sis had been serenely laid out within the glass casket.
*
Chapter 25
A spark of hope abruptly surged through Lil.
‘You can resurrect her?’ she asked, whirling excitedly on the king. ‘Like your god: you can bring her back to life?’
The king chuckled wickedly.
‘I could have you flayed for blasphemy, you know that?’ he said, observing her with a wry narrowing of his eyes.
He glanced about him, as if checking that no one else was around who might overhear him.
‘I wish I could,’ he said, quieter now, as well as being far more forlorn. ‘But these chambers,’ he continued, indicating the rows of caskets with a rising of his head, a sad casting
of his eyes, ‘they simply give a wounded body a better chance of recovery; keeping temperatures low and, it seems, preventing the worst of infection.’
He stepped back a little, letting his voice rise as he intoned phrases that he didn’t mind anyone overhearing.
‘The god, our dead god; he does truly arise from death. He’s placed in the glass casket merely so that he’s clearly on view to any who insist on doubting, everything made plain to them; with no opportunity for fraud or changing of the dead for someone living.’
‘Then…why place her here?’
Lil sensed the hope draining from her once more.
‘Because I realised she was special; and by retrieving her body, I had hoped – no matter how vain that hope was – to find out more about her.’ He turned to Lil, smiled. ‘Of course, I didn’t realise then that we already had you amongst us; a friend who could tell us what, unfortunately, her corpse is unable to tell us.’
As he spoke, the lid’s glass casket opened with a breathy hiss.
Sis remained perfectly motionless; she was undoubtedly dead, Lil realised with sharp pangs of regret, of deepest loss.
Lil leant forward, giving Sis a first and last kiss on her cold cheek.
Four beasts filed into the room, wheeling before them some form of metallic stretcher.
Lil was lost for words, her mind a whirl as she tried to work out what must be happening.
Seeing the hurt and confusion on her face, the king placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
‘I’ve given orders for her to be buried,’ he said not unkindly.
*
As the beasts quietly, maybe even reverently, lifted Sis’s limp body out of the casket and transferred it to the stretcher, Lil watched the whole unhurried operation with an intense foreboding: yes, Sis had been yet another, endlessly recurring catastrophe imposed on an already severely suffering humanity – and yet there had been a formidable sense of purpose about her, such that Lil had seriously begun to believe that this Memesis might be the saviour of man after all.
Despite the obvious care being afforded to Sis’s lifeless body, Lil somehow felt that she was being profoundly disrespectful in witnessing the preparations for her immolation, a once supremely powerful being now brought so low that her body was being manhandled from casket to stretcher. Briefly, she glanced away, no longer wishing to see her friend being treated in this way.
Unintentionally, she caught glimpses of the surrounding caskets. These, too, were occupied. Yet instead of these being the bodies of injured warriors, as she might have supposed from the king’s description of the caskets’ remarkable capabilities, those encased beneath the glass lids seemed too small – too childlike.
Lil shuffled closer to one of the other caskets.
Yes, it was child who had been lain out in here.
One who was probably still alive, too, judging by the slight flickering of the eyes, the heavy rise and fall of the chest, the mist of moisture collecting on the glass just above the boy’s nose and mouth. Alive despite the many, still half bloodied wounds and lacerations covering his entire body, many of which had apparently been crudely stitched.
Indeed, there was so little of the original child remaining, Lil was hard pressed to determine that he was in fact a boy.
For he was now more foal than human.
*
Chapter 26
Eye’s wide with a terrified dawning of understanding, Lil looked over towards the other nearby caskets.
This were also occupied by barely alive children going through the process of being transformed into bestial humans, their skin severed and spliced, or pulled back and stretched, all so it could undergo grafting with an equally split and lacerated animal.
Isn’t that what Sis had identified when she had investigated the dead body of the eagle-king? That the grafting must have been undertaken at a very young age for it to have taken so reasonably successfully.
Of course: children couldn’t work in the mines – at least not for too long, and they would have precious little arduous work to show for their deaths.
But a child blended with a beast of burden? How much harder could they work?
Around her, she spotted a child who was now part mule, another who could have been a cow, while a third was blended with a goat.
On each casket, she also spotted something that she hadn’t noticed before.
It was just one word.
Milton.
*
The king couldn’t fail to observe Lil’s rising air of distress.
‘It isn’t what you think…’ he began to explain, drawing nearer.
‘You’re transforming them into–’
Lil fortunately stopped herself from continuing.
How wise would it be to use the word ‘beasts” when the king was himself one of this new breed of man?
‘Yes, transforming them into a new people more adapted to this new world!’
The king finished the sentence for her, but not in a way she would have preferred. He spoke proudly, too, almost with awe.
‘Adapted?’ Lil almost gagged on the word. ‘Adapted for slavery? To work in your mines?’
The king gave a shrug of either indifference or, at best, an acceptance that there was no other choice.
‘Only for now,’ he said, ‘while we recover what we can from the earlier age.’
Placing one of his immensely powerful arms about Lil, he quickly led her towards another casket, one in which the child had been grafted and merged with a bear cub: one of the elect, those chosen to rule over the lesser beasts.
‘See,’ the king declared proudly, pointing out how the transformation was already underway, ‘we’re also creating here the future race; a man blended with rather than fighting against the earth.’
With a tap of a finger, Lil indicated the word painted across the casket’s glass.
‘Milton: that’s why you took an interest in the book I’d brought?’
The king nodded.
‘It was the name of the project set up during the Golden Age to create this new, better generation of man. We thought its name had simply been taken from a place also called Milton just a day’s hard walk from here, where the project seemed to have started from.’
‘But now you also know that Milton’s a man? But…this project could still be named after this place you mentioned; not this man.’
The king nodded in agreement once more.
‘Yet what if the operation hadn’t started there, but had simply opened an offshoot at this Milton? If it’s named after the man, why would that be the case? What is it about his way of thinking that the project’s originators believed so important that they named it after him? If we can find that out, it might give us further insights into what’s expected of us.’
‘But what of your god? Isn’t he the one who would know everything?’
This time, the king shook his head.
‘As the testimonies tell us: it is Milton who gave us our god!’
*
Chapter 27
Once more, Lil was interrupted before she could ask any further questions, a bull-man entering the chamber to inform the king that it was time to attend the ‘resurrection at the tomb’.
The king responded with what could have been the beginnings of a leap of delight, reaching out for Lil’s hand to ensure she followed after him: but his hand grasped nothing but empty air. He looked back in surprise to see that Lil was hanging back, her face creased with dismay and bewilderment.
‘You must see this–’
‘No, no, I can’t!’ Lil insisted vehemently, glancing nervously about the room as she realised that Sis’s body had been removed without her knowing. ‘I must find Sis!’
She had been so unforgivingly engrossed in the hybrid transformations taking place within the caskets that she hadn’t even heard, let alone seen, Sis’s pall bearers wheel her away.
She moved towards the door, but her intention wasn’t to accompany the
king; rather, she was hoping to determine where Sis’s body had been taken, for she wanted to accompany her friend on this last journey on earth.
The king reached out a powerfully muscled arm, preventing Lil from rushing down the corridor.
‘She’s dead,’ he said bluntly. ‘You’re interest now should only be in the living; indeed, with the god who is no longer dead!’
‘But Sis–’
‘Can be honoured by you shortly, for the confirmation of my kingship by our god will take little more than a few moments!’
The way he fiercely emphasised that this was the way his kingship would be ratified brooked no argument from Lil.
With bowed head, Lil acquiesced to his demand, following morosely after him down the long, stark corridors leading back to the tomb.
*
The ‘tomb’ was already crowded.
The king was escorted through the crowd, Lil accompanying him to the front, where they both had a clear view of the glass casket.
The guards still surrounded the casket, but they were now all staring intently at what was happening beneath the transparent case; for the shrouded figure was moving, if only slightly, and slowly.
The movements, however, were increasing in both speed and breadth of their actions.
On their way here, Lil had managed to at last persuade the king to clarify his apparent declaration that their god had been created by Milton.
‘How can a god formed here on earth be someone we should listen to?’ Lil had protested. ‘That makes no sense at all!’
‘Formed here on earth only in that he’s made manifest here!’ the king had snapped back as he hurried along the corridors, for fear of missing any scene of the resurrection. ‘Brought down from the heavens so that we may see him in his true image: for of course, his creation doesn’t just include man but also all the other, wildly varied creatures that had once been unfairly incarcerated in a zoo near here.’
Before them now, the glass lid rose with the same breath-like sigh that had accompanied the opening of Sis’s casket.