The Medieval Murderers - The Lost Prophecies

It was getting dark when they landed to refuel in Tibet, on the airstrip that had once served Lhasa. Here, at the southern end of the vast desert that stretched to the Chinese settlements in Siberia, a group of guards drawn from all over the world kept permanent watch over stores of aircraft fuel. Ten years ago a group of eco-warriors had got on to a scheduled flight and had managed to blow up the fuel dump. Nowadays the passengers were herded into a secure outbuilding while the plane refuelled.

Walking from the aircraft to the building, Shiva was amazed by the clearness and coldness of the air. In the distance, between a dried-out riverbed and huge mountains, he saw the ghostly jumble of deserted Lhasa and, above it, the old Potala Palace, tier upon tier of empty windows. He felt a sense of wonder at the journey he was making and was conscious of the huge distance he was from England, from all that he knew. The sun set behind the mountains, and the long shadows merged into darkness.

‘Amazing sight, isn’t it?’ Dr Allen whispered beside him. ‘Makes me want to cry when I think what we’ve lost. Better hurry up,’ he continued gruffly. ‘Don’t want to catch a chill.’

The concrete building where they waited was another relic, faded pictures of drowned Chinese landscapes lining the walls. They sat on wooden benches, and a group of guards distributed rugs and bowls of soup.

‘I didn’t know it could be so cold anywhere,’ Shiva remarked.

‘We’re very high. Over three and a half thousand metres. Makes some people ill. I don’t envy the guards. A ghost city and no one else within two thousand miles.’

‘No.’

‘And we fly south over India next. The great jungles, all the new plants.’ Enthusiasm entered Dr Allen’s voice. ‘Tree ferns two hundred feet high, huge sprouting flowers we don’t even know the names of. The plants have adapted to the heat faster than anyone could have guessed. Pity it’s too hot down there to do any proper scientific surveys.’

‘What about animals?’

Dr Allen shrugged. ‘People say there are big creatures down there. They see the trees move from the air. God knows what they are. Some people say there are even people on the Himalayan slopes.’

‘Survivors?’ Shiva asked eagerly. ‘From India?’

The scientist looked embarrassed, no doubt making the connection to Shiva’s ancestry. ‘It’s just that some pilots flying over thought they saw smoke rising from the jungle, like campfires. On the upper slopes it’s not too hot for people to live. But condensation often rises from forests when they warm up in the mornings. It could be people, though, it could be. One day when things are more settled we’ll go down there and find out.’ He smiled uneasily. ‘We’re lucky in a way: we have a whole new world to explore.’

‘Yes.’ Shiva thought of people who looked like him, perhaps living a Stone Age life down there, cut off. If the Black Book was right, before the year’s end God would kill the lot of them.

‘What are the Tasman Islands like?’ Shiva asked.

Dr Allen laughed. ‘Prosperous. Busy. Old-fashioned. Very like the old world in a lot of ways. Dunedin’s pretty, nice view out across the bay.’

‘I hear they’ve got a big fundamentalist movement,’ Shiva said neutrally. ‘Gets a lot of votes in the elections.’

‘Less than they did, thank goodness. Maniacs.’

They talked a little about the scientist’s work, then he went to sleep again in his chair. Shiva looked out at the huge old palace, grey in the moonlight, high jagged mountains rising behind. He thought of the most recent message he had received from Parvati Karam: ‘Look forward to meeting you on Thursday. Mackenzie’s Café, George Street, Dunedin. 2.30.’

He thought of Alice, who had given him the radiation ring. It was two years since they had parted. She had loved him but he hadn’t loved her back, or not enough. He often disappeared for weeks at a time because of his work, but she was always waiting for him on his return. There was something smothering in her devotion and in the old-fashioned way in which she wanted him, as the man, to decide and initiate things, even their lovemaking. Shiva hadn’t wanted that sort of power himself. Strange, though, that it was always leaders – people who wanted or wielded power – to whom he had been drawn since school, mixed in somehow with a desire to bring them down, show their feet were made of clay. Like Marwood. He saw the fraudster’s face again, heard him cry out that he was innocent. The case had affected him more than any other. There had been something in the way the man actually believed his own lies that had made Shiva ashamed to deceive him. Marwood had been generous, had desired affection. Yet that did not make him any less wicked than any of the fraudsters he had brought to justice over the last ten years. Marwood had deceived farmers who were trying to scratch a living from thin mountain soils, surviving on the edge.

He felt a similar unease about Parvati Karam, about using their own shared heritage to deceive her. He shook his head. These qualms didn’t make sense in moral terms. He was just tired. Tired to the bone, he realized. He had spent sixteen years in the police, twelve in the fraud department. It was time to leave, he thought; he needed to change his life. But where would he go? An inspector he knew had retired early and gone to work in the refugee camps; a number of people did. But he didn’t want to do that. He wasn’t built for it, apart from anything else. He looked at his hands, thin and bony. His parents had called them Brahmin’s hands, though they weren’t Brahmins. A boy at school had once called them girl’s hands. He could kill a man with them if he had to; he had been trained to do so long ago. That ability, though, was about knowledge of anatomy and lines of force, not strength. He leaned back in his chair and slept, a deep and dreamless sleep until a guard shook him awake. The guard was tall and stocky, with high cheekbones and slanting Asiatic eyes. ‘Time to get back on board, sir.’

It was still dark when they flew over India, so Shiva saw nothing. There was turbulence that the pilot said was tropical storms below. He slept again and awoke, eyes sore, to find they had crossed the Indian Ocean and were above a red desert stretching endlessly to the horizon. Australia, once partly inhabited but now the hottest desert in the world. A few hours now and they would be there.

In his mind he reviewed his correspondence with Parvati. He had started with a tentative e-mail saying he had found they were distantly related. Her reply, his first words from her, had been equally tentative, but he fostered the correspondence, feeding her information about his family, a mixture of truth and invention. When he had said he was coming to work in Dunedin, where she lived, she had said that was a coincidence. Shiva had wondered whether there might be any underlying suspicion there but decided it was imagination. He sensed an underlying keenness to meet him. When he gave her the date of his flight, her next reply had been enthusiastic, asking about his life in England. She said her own was dull: ‘I work long hours, boring computer stuff for the government, but I have a nice house overlooking Victoria Bay and the islands. Work for my church takes up my leisure time.’ She suggested they meet in a café near the EU embassy once Shiva had settled in.

His first meeting with Alice had been in a café, set up through a dating site. He recalled sitting in the little café, batting off mosquitoes, sweating because it was just before the monsoon, annoyed that the pretty white girl opposite him looked quite cool. He wondered where she was now.

The engine note changed, the front of the plane tipping slightly forward. Dr Allen leaned across Shiva to look out of the window. ‘That’s Dunedin,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Nearly there.’