The Medieval Murderers - The Lost Prophecies

‘Buy a fish, mister?’ A voice at his elbow startled Shiva. The two urchins stood beside him, the little girl holding up the carp, the sun reflected from its golden scales.

‘No, thanks. I’m staying somewhere where they give you food.’

‘Only one euro. Off the ration.’

‘No. Thanks anyway. I have to go.’

He stood up and walked away. The sun was hot now, so he took his canvas hat from his pocket and put it on. Behind him the children argued about where to sell their fish.

Tonight he would send Parvati Karam his first e-mail. He had already done a genuine search on genealogical sites to find her, in case somehow she retraced his steps on her computer.

There were demonstrators at Birmingham airport; the few airports left in the world had permanent pickets. Shiva, watching the banners beyond the fenced-off enclosure, could understand their anger. Most agreed that the explosion of air travel in the years before the Catastrophe had hastened the warming. Now it was strictly rationed, limited mostly to politicians and diplomats who needed to travel to the Tasman Islands or Patagonia, and the scientists monitoring Antarctica. One could not get to the southern hemisphere by boat, for like the land the tropical seas were too hot for human survival. Luggage was limited on the plane; there had been no question of bringing his statue.

He entered the little airport building. It was hot and muggy outside and worse indoors. As he waited to be searched he looked through the far window. The plane was sitting on the tarmac. It seemed a small and fragile thing to take him so far. He looked around at the other passengers, mostly middle-aged and prosperous-looking.

When they took off and Shiva looked through the window, he felt the clutch of fear in his stomach they had warned him about. The world was spinning away, the city transformed into a patchwork of miniature houses in a sea of green.

‘First time?’ the passenger next to him asked sympathetically. He was a spare man with a grey beard, dressed less formally than most of the other passengers, a jacket over a white kaftan. ‘It’s a bit disorientating. At first.’

‘Yes. I suppose it’s a privilege, an experience.’

‘I’ve done it nine times. It’ll get boring. The refuelling stop in Tibet will come as a relief.’ The man sounded weary. ‘I’m a hydrologist, going to have another look at the Antarctic icecap. I’ll be taking a second flight down from Dunedin.’ He smiled sadly. ‘It’s hard on my wife and children.’

‘Are they in England?’

‘Leeds. Name’s Bill Allen, by the way.’

‘Shiva Moorthy. I’m a diplomat. Joining the embassy at Dunedin. Cultural attaché.’

‘Long posting?’

‘Couple of years.’ He changed the subject. ‘I hear the Antarctic rivers are still rising.’

Allen nodded. ‘Inevitable now the icecap’s melting faster – its area’s a fifth of what it was. It’ll be gone in a few decades, and then the sea will stabilize at last. But as the seas warm up down there, the heat’s releasing more methane from the seabed, like we had in the north last century.’ He looked at Shiva seriously. ‘We’re still not safe.’

‘Will we ever be?’

‘I don’t know.’ The scientist paused. ‘I saw a methane eruption from the air once, miles of sea frothing and bubbling, even burning in places, throwing all that stuff up into the atmosphere.’

They talked a little more, about Antarctica and Dr Allen’s family and Shiva’s fictional job. Shiva used the scientist as a practice run for the story he would tell Parvati Karam, and related his fictional background in the civil service. After a while Dr Allen said there were papers he must study and left Shiva to look out of the window. They passed high over the fields of Germany, through a brief interlude of scrub, then into the great brown desert. Endless stony plains and mountains, the dried-up Danube and its tributaries visible as dry veins and arteries. He saw the jumble of an abandoned city beside it – Budapest, perhaps. Already it was hard to believe there were once great cities here. In time, as they crumbled away, perhaps people would forget they ever existed. He turned away.

Dr Allen had fallen asleep over his papers. Shiva reached into the bag he carried on his lap and brought out his copy of the Black Book. He had studied it carefully over the last few weeks, reading through the verses of prophecy. In the original book, which had been carbon dated to the seventh century, the verses had been in Latin. He was surprised that they still rhymed in English; surely the translator must have interfered with the verses’ meaning. Most of the prophecies related to events in medieval and Stuart England, and all of them, the believers said, had come true. The verses seemed to Shiva to be no more precise than the rambling incoherences of the Book of Revelation, which he had read as part of his preparation. He read once more the final verse of the Black Book, which the Shining Light people said applied to the present day:

Five hundred thirty years, then God returns to save

His chosen, once the sinful have been purged.

Their wicked cities flayed by burning sun and drowned in

purging flood ,

And at the end a sun-bright fire of blood.

When it was first discovered, the book had been no more than a curiosity, until the Shining Light Movement had declared that the earlier prophecies coincided with real events, and that this showed that the book had been inspired by God. And this year, 2135, was five hundred and thirty years since the Gunpowder Plot that was the subject of the previous prophecy.

‘And at the end a sun-bright fire of blood.’ It sounded like a nuclear holocaust. But as Commissioner Williams had said, there was no nuclear power in the Tasman Islands – old arsenals enough in the north, but none down there and no way of getting nuclear equipment. The only physical communication with the north was flights like this one, every passenger rigorously searched – but for explosives, not books, which was how Parvati Karam had got away with the original Black Book. The Shining Light Movement firmly believed that the world would end this year but claimed not to know exactly how. That would be for God to reveal. But then why recruit these scientists and engineers? What were they planning? Shiva looked down at the cover of the book.

They were over blue water now, the plane casting a tiny shadow on the sea. There was an island in the distance – the Crimea, an isolated desert crag in the centre of the vastly extended Black Sea. Shiva returned his copy of the book to his bag. He thought about the religious dogma he had had to read about in these last weeks. In the years before the Catastrophe, fanaticism had been everywhere, in Islam and Christianity and Hinduism and in a secular faith too: the blind belief in pseudo-scientific free-market theories that had succeeded Communism. The globalizers had believed in endless growth, that in some mystic way technologies to defeat global warming would appear. Like Marx, they had talked of the inevitable destiny of mankind. Their dogmas, like their world, were dead now, and they were hated for the blindness their ideas had brought. Humanity was tired of faith; the world today was a practical place; it had to be if humanity was to survive. But now Shiva wondered whether perhaps that practicality was only skin deep, perhaps always had been, the urge for the simplicities of faith always ready to surface. Outside, the colours changed, from blue sea to the grey moonscape of the Caucasus.

The face of the murdered old watchman came to Shiva’s mind. He had been a breadwinner, supporting two grandchildren in a crumbling Birmingham terrace. His life had been snuffed out like an ant’s. Shiva promised himself that whatever else transpired in the Tasmans he would see Parvati Karam arrested and tried for his murder.