The Medieval Murderers - The Lost Prophecies

He did not reply. Smith smiled, showing bad teeth. ‘Not talking? You will.’

‘You realize you’re all slowly dying of radiation poisoning?’ Shiva said.

Smith nodded. Like Parvati, he did not seem to care. ‘There was a small leak in the reactor. It’s closed now, but it polluted the area badly. We’re all dying, I guess, like the birds, but we’ve time for what we need to do.’ His look at Shiva was cold and hard.

Shiva took a deep breath. ‘There are others waiting for me to report back, in Dunedin. My movements were being watched. They’ll know where I am.’

Smith smiled again. ‘Don’t try to fool me, son. Have you any idea how remote this place is? There’s only one way in, on a train we own, on a line we own. No one saw us put you on it. And we have watching-posts all along the way. We’ve had only three visitors in the five years we’ve been here, wanderers who wanted to see the Sound, and even they were captured a few miles off.’

Shiva said nothing.

The big man nodded slowly. ‘We need to find out just how much you do know. That’s why we brought you here. And we will. You’d be best to cooperate, son,’ he added in a heavy, paternal voice.

Shiva looked at the great bulk of the submarine behind Smith. It was so big and so close he had to bend his neck to look up to see the conning tower. He decided to ask a question of his own. He had already guessed that they would not allow him to leave here alive; he saw only one slim possibility of escape.

‘How did you get the submarine?’ he asked.

Smith smiled heavily. ‘We didn’t get it, son. God led us to it. The first man to come here in decades was one of us. He felt called to come out into the wilderness to listen to the voice of God. He found the submarine beached just where it sits now. It’s an old British one. It must have been caught in a methane upwelling in the last century. All the crew were killed – just skeletons when we found them – but the hull wasn’t breached.’ Smith looked down the fjord to the sea. ‘The sub just drifted here and sat here for eighty years until God brought us to it. Isn’t that something? The crew managed to close down the nuclear reactor inside before they died, but it’s still functioning, the missiles and warheads intact. Four Trident Five missiles that can reach a target eight thousand miles away, each carrying a warhead that’ll atomize everything for miles around the impact site.’

Shiva felt his face tighten in horror. ‘But I thought you were dismantling them.’

Smith laughed. ‘Hell, no.’ He glanced at the bombs on the jetty. ‘Those aren’t the missiles; the missiles are huge. Those are just a few conventional torpedoes they had on board. We don’t need those – hardly likely another submarine will attack us, now is it?’

‘You… you’ll kill millions.’

For answer Smith reached into his canvas bag and pulled out a small black book. It looked incredibly old; the covers were wood, battered and stained and peppered with nail holes. The Leader held it up. A ragged clapping sounded from the workers who had been watching. Smith held the book up so they could see it.

‘We’re nearly at the climax now,’ he told Shiva. ‘In a few weeks we’ll be ready to sail the submarine away. As far north as we can go. Then we’ll fire the missiles, at Birmingham and Berlin and Winnipeg. The Europeans and North Americans will think the Chinese are making a pre-emptive strike, like they did at Russia during the Catastrophe, and they’ll fire back. Then the prophecy will be fulfilled, and in the midst of the last war Jesus will return and we will be raptured up to heaven. So you see, son, the radiation doesn’t matter.’ He raised the captured book above his head again and the people clapped and cheered. So these scientists and engineers were willing to go all the way, Shiva thought. The others, the ones who died mysteriously, must have refused.

Smith opened the book carefully and turned the thick, ancient parchment pages covered with handwritten Latin script. He placed a thick, grimy finger on a passage near the end, then read aloud to Shiva. ‘“A sun-bright fire of blood”,’ he intoned. There was something in his hard, passionless delivery that made Shiva despair, made him realize that nothing and nobody could move this fanatic from his course.

‘We wondered how the end would come about,’ Smith went on quietly. ‘Then we found the submarine and realized what the prophecy meant. Sometimes God requires men to act, to bring His wishes to fulfilment. When the Jew Oppenheimer exploded the first nuclear bomb, he quoted your namesake, the pagan god Shiva: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” He was afraid of what he had done, but we are not.’

‘That was Vishnu, not Shiva.’

Being corrected seemed to annoy Smith more than Shiva’s pursuit of them or his lies about others coming. He frowned. ‘All these Hindu gods are aspects of each other, don’t you know that? You skinny little heathen thing.’ He returned the book reverently to his knapsack and turned to the two brothers.

‘Have him questioned. Don’t worry about the methods. We need to know if we have a real threat here.’ The Leader turned and walked away without a backward glance.

They took Shiva up the jetty to the wooden buildings set against the cliff. Looking up, he saw more of the sickly-looking parrots sitting on ledges. The brothers tied his hands in front of him with more rope, then opened the door of a small, solid-looking shed and hauled him inside. The floor was of bare rock with an iron ring bolted into it, the end of a length of rope secured to the ring. The brothers bound Shiva’s hands again with a thin but strong rope, binding them separately, a strand of rope about an inch long connecting them, like handcuffs. Then they tied the strand to the length of rope connected to the iron ring. He cried out as they jerked at his shoulder, but they paid no attention. They tied his feet together, then left without looking at him again, shutting the door and turning a key.

He sat up painfully. The shed was dim, with only a tiny unglazed window less than a foot square at the back, facing the cliff. Shiva leaned against the wall to give his hurt shoulder some support.

He knew they were leaving him to reflect before the interrogators came. Don’t worry about the methods, Smith had said. He took a deep rattling breath. He considered his story about people in Dunedin ready to follow him. With practised speed he developed it in his mind, building it up to sound consistent, true. Even if they believed him, he realized, they were hardly likely to delay the project; they might even speed it up. But he had to try to scare them. His life didn’t matter. Even if by some miracle he did get out of here he might be badly affected by radiation already.

He had one hope of escape. In the restaurant he had deliberately concealed that he was trained to fight. Even with a strained shoulder, he thought that if he could get free of these bonds and into single combat with one of them he might have a chance. But they were well tied. He struggled with them for a while before giving up. Even if he could escape, he realized, he could never make it across these trackless mountains with people who knew them in pursuit. But he had thought of something else he could do, if he could get free. He thought about it hard and sweat ran down his brow, because he knew that if he succeeded he would certainly die.

He jumped and whirled around as a sound came from the barred window and a shadow fell over the room. One of the grey parrots was there, its clawed feet on the sill, looking in with bright beady eyes above a sharp, hooked beak. It glanced at Shiva, then peered over the floor. Shiva realized it was looking for food; the keas must live by scavenging the camp. When the bird saw there was nothing to eat it flew away. It had looked sick and scrawny, like the one on the post. Shiva glanced at the circle in the centre of his ring again. It seemed red now, though it was hard to tell in the dim light of the shed.