Into Eden: Pangaea - Book 1 (37 page)

“What’d think?”

“I think that you look like a human with a black shirt over your head,” said Enoch. “Your muzzle’s still a tad too short!”

Jesse looked around the room. He went back to the bull-head skull that he had just relieved of its horns and went back whacking away at it with the broadsword again. This time he removed the nasal bone that formed its muzzle. This he jammed up into the helmet, wedging the shirt between it and the helmet. Putting it back on, he turned to Enoch and Perez, “Now what’d think?”

Enoch studied the bull-head mask for a moment. “Better,” he said. But you’d still better ditch the sleeves and buttons.”

In a few minutes both Jesse and Perez were busily at work constructing masks from Jesse’s shirt and the remains that were scattered around the room. It took them several hours to complete the job, sewing the masks with needle and thread that Perez had brought for the journey, and replacing the long-rotted leather straps on the armor with leftover cloth from Jesse’s shirt. In the weapon’s room they found a whetting stone to remove the rust from a couple of broadswords, and by the time that they were done they could pass for a couple of the black-masked an-nef—as long as no one looked too close. Body-armor and gauntlets added to the effect, but the problem was that their new disguises added new weight.

“Do you intend for us to walk the rest of the way to New Sodom in these things?”

“Yes!” Jesse replied. “It’s the only way that we can enter the city undiscovered. We can ditch the disguises as soon as we’re back outside. But for now it’s either wear the disguise, or end up on an Eden cross.”

The prospect of being crucified by the an-nef was all the persuasion that Perez needed. He would endure the extra weight. It was decided to leave their swords and Jesse’s quiver and bow to be picked up on their return home. They already had enough to carry. Jesse stuffed his quiver with ancient arrows from the armory’s weapons room and laid it aside for the return trip.

With their disguises ready they cleared a space in the weapons room for the three of them to bed down for the night. The thought of having a full night’s sleep without being rained on or being watched by eyes from the shadows was a good one, so they went back up the stairs to the courtyard to gather palm fronds for bedding. It was long dark by this time, and when they exited they were cautious to make sure that none of the dogs had found a way in. They had not, but when they looked toward the barricade that they had erected at the courtyard entrance, they could see several pair of yellow eyes glowing from the other side of the stones. They were being watched.

All slept well that night, and by daybreak they were ready to leave Old Sodom behind. They gathered their things and headed up the stairs toward the armory entrance, Perez leading the way. When he reached the courtyard he stopped. Their barricade lay in ruins by the courtyard entrance, its large stones strewn for several feet.

“No dogs could do this,” Perez remarked. Fortunately, no dog had taken the opportunity that the ruined barricade presented. Perez started across the courtyard when he heard Enoch cry, “Stop!”

“What’s wrong?” Perez asked.

“I smell frogs!”

Immediately Perez drew the large broadsword that he had strapped to his back. It felt heavy in his hands and clumsier than the saber that he was used to wielding.

Jesse had now joined them at the armory entrance and the three of them scoured the courtyard for any signs of oversized lizards.

“There!” Enoch cried, pointing with his nose. “By the palm-tree!”

Now the boys could see it. A large lizard perhaps three paces tall stood by one of the palms growing in the courtyard. Its brownish-green color made it blend-in perfectly with the surrounding foliage. It looked like a miniature of the giant lizard with the big head that had chased them on their first day in the rainforest, except its head was smaller in proportion. But the teeth that ringed its mouth looked every bit as deadly. It stared at them with slit-orange eyes.

“Jesse,” Perez whispered, “perhaps you should get your bow.”

Jesse turned and darted down the hall and ran down the stairs. As he did, he lost his footing on the moss on the top stairs and tumbled the rest of the way down, clanging armor and bruising his hip as he did. He found himself entangled in a heap of bull-head and ram-head skeletons at the bottom of the stairs and struggled in the dim light to free himself. Up above he could hear Enoch start to bark and some creature bellow a roar. He shuffled across the dark room quickly, stubbing his toe on some solid object just above floor-level, and finally feeling in the dark for his bow and quiver. Locating them, he turned and headed back toward the light, his hip aching with every step. Above he could hear Perez screaming, “Aaarrrrrgh!”

Jesse ran up the stairs and tripped again as he got to the top. This time he caught himself and he got back up and ran down the hallway to the courtyard entrance. Out of breath, heart racing and limping badly, he finally made it back out into the courtyard. Looking around he saw Enoch sniffing the bloody head of the large lizard, and Perez standing by its headless corpse, swinging the broadsword back and forth.

“Man! I like this thing,” Perez exclaimed. “I think that I could get used to this big sword! What took ya so long?”

Jesse just shook his head, “Let’s drag the body over by the wall so we don’t have to smell it when we return.”

After they had removed the lizard and put back the bow and quiver, the three of them struck out again for New Sodom. Jesse’s hip pained with every step, but he said nothing to Perez or Enoch. Oh, they could tell that he was hurting by the limp. But he wasn’t about to be the one to start complaining. If I endure it for a few days, he thought, it’ll be well, just like the other wounds that he had endured. He still had the scar from the bolt that the jackal-head had shot into his side, and his chest was scarred by claw-marks left by the lion attack, but he always mended. Jesse could not have known that after fighting an-nef and lions that the limp that he had gotten from falling down a flight of stairs would stay with him for life.

Chapter 18
Canaan’s Own

By nightfall they were south of the city and the jungle was starting to get more dense. They bedded down early to give Jesse a chance to rest his aching hip, but they went back to their routine of sharing the nightly watch. They had seen signs that the dogs were still trailing them, but Enoch assured them that their numbers were nothing like what they had encountered in Old Sodom. Just a small pack, if that.

Over the next ten days they pushed on down the Green Highway, enduring the daily rain showers and ducking for cover whenever Enoch warned them of approaching an-nef. The stone caravans were no longer an issue, but occasionally smaller groups of an-nef would come down the highway headed toward Old Sodom, and on a couple of occasions they met small columns of Eden’s legionnaires marching along, singing in cadence.

“Kill the humans with the sword!”

“Stomp them flat, and leave them gored!”

Catchy, really.

The long, boring days gave Jesse plenty of time to think. On the Southern Highway he and Enoch had discussed history and theology. Between the Pishon and Old Sodom, Jesse thought about little else besides the upcoming duel between Perez and him. Now that was behind him, he thought of Adah. He tried not to, but his mind could do little else. He thought of their walks around Bastrap, how pretty she looked in those dreadlocks. Who ever gave braided hair a name like that, anyway? He ran his fingers over the wooden pinecone that she had carved for him and dreamed that some day he would see her again. He
had
to see her again. But what then? Dark people were not welcome in Atlantis (Atlantis for the Atlantans!). Mountain Shadows was a cosmopolitan city, but with the an-nef preparing for war how long would it be safe? These things troubled Jesse, and he wrestled with them as he limped along the road toward New Sodom, but the most troubling of these thoughts was that they seemingly had no resolution. He had to have her. He longed to see her again. But to do so would almost assuredly require him to give up his place as Master of the house of Nashon: to turn his back on his mother. Jesse didn’t think that he could do that. There had to be another way.

On the eleventh day out of Old Sodom the three of them stepped out of the jungle into farmland. The terrain was flat, and the horizon dotted with small farmhouses made of wood with thatched roofs, and an-nef worked the fields of cotton, tobacco and tended groves of date-palms and orange-ball trees. Jesse and Perez donned their disguises of black masks, gauntlets, and horned helmets, and hoped that the an-nef farmers working alongside of the road wouldn’t look too closely. At least for the first day, they didn’t. By midday of the second day the houses were getting closer together and traffic on the Green Highway was becoming regular. There was no hiding under a fern anymore. They were out in the open and tried to keep their heads down whenever they met an-nef on the way. In the distance they could see the city rise from the plain: New Sodom. A certain fear came across Jesse now that they were really this close. Thus far, despite their many close-encounters, they had been lucky. In New Sodom there were no Seths or Kenans to come to their rescue. They were on their own. Jesse was just thinking about how alone they were when from behind he could hear the plodding clopping of an approaching oxcart.

“Hail, Canaan’s Own!” a voice from behind yelled.

Jesse and the others ignored the salutation.

“Hail, Canaan’s Own!” the voice came again.

Jesse glanced over his shoulder to see a jackal-head driving an oxcart piled high with hay.

“Hail, Canaan’s Own!” the jackal-head called again.

“Say something!” Enoch whispered angrily.

“Hail, citizen!” Jesse called back. It was all that he could think of to say.

“I’ve never seen Canaan’s Own walk before,” the jackal-head went on. “There a reason that you’re out here all by yourselves?”

“Our…ah…chariot broke down,” Jesse improvised.

“Don’t say? I didn’t see a chariot. But then again, at my age I don’t see much of anything.”

Jesse breathed a sigh of relief.

“I’ve been married to the same she-jackal for nigh unto six-hundred years and she keeps telling me that she’s not a day over two-hundred! With these eyes I have to take her word for it! Say…you headed for the city? If you are, you’re free to ride along. The dog can follow along behind.”

Jesse and Perez threw their packs into the oxcart and jumped up in.

“The dog rides, too!” Enoch said in his best Jesse imitation. He then ran and leaped up beside them.

“Well, okay,” the jackal-head said tentatively. He then whacked the ox with his pole and they headed toward New Sodom.

The jackal-head, Moab, from the house of Ner, talked incessantly as they plodded along. They heard about his wife (go’n deaf, ya know), his thirty children, seventy grandchildren and two-hundred great-grand children. He loved every one. One of his grandsons was in Canaan’s Own, too. How proud he was to have a grandson in the Emperor’s Secret Police!

Jesse and Perez looked at each other when Moab said that. Another mystery solved. Their disguises were better than they had hoped for.

Moab talked throughout the afternoon as they slowly got closer to New Sodom. They learned that tobacco prices were at an all time high, the emperor was rumored to have chosen another bride (his forty-sixth, or was it forty-seventh, Moab couldn’t remember) his wife loved to wear red, he needed to re-thatch his roof, he had a dog, too, but it got et by a dinosaur (they didn’t know what a dinosaur was but they didn’t want to meet one), and that fifty of his great-grandsons were in the legion. This last fact concerned the three. Two-hundred great-grandchildren, half of them were probably females, and half of the remaining were in Eden’s legions. A fairly high proportion of the populace was in the military for a country that was not at war. And Moab was proud of them all.

Enoch decided that as long as the old jackal-head liked to talk, they might as well try to get some more useful information out of him, so he asked (in his best Jesse voice), “Anything happening in the city tonight?”

Moab laughed until the tears streamed from his cataract-covered eyes. “That’s a good-one! Anything happening tonight?! That’s a good one! Guess you boys’ll be marching up front, I reckon.”

“Yes…I reckon so...” Enoch said, not even bothering to try to disguise his voice. Moab had never tried to turn his head when speaking to them, he kept his dimming eyes on the road.

Now it was Jesse’s turn to try and pry some information out of Moab, “You ever heard of a general by the name of Anubis?”

Moab began to laugh again, but this time it seemed more forced.

“I’m kin to Anubis, you know! Well, not close, but my daughter keeps up with such things and tells me that we’re related. Cousins…or something like that.”

“How is your cousin Anubis?” Jesse pressed.

“You probably know better than I.”

“No. Tell us, what’s the word on the street? I really want to know.”

“Well, rumor has it that he’s been in poor health ever since he made that raid into Atlantis.”

Jesse paused. He was surprised that Anubis’ venture into Atlantis was common knowledge.

“That so?” Jesse asked.

“They say that since the emperor removed him from command he’s been terrible to be around. Just terrible. But as everybody knows, he’s always been terrible to be around. I can say that, I’m his cousin, you know.”

“So we’ve heard,” Jesse said.

Then Enoch asked a question, “Will we be going past his house on the way into town?”

“Why, his house’s just a few blocks from the parade stand! Right next to the emperor’s palace. But why am I telling you that? You’ve probably been there hundreds of times!”

“Of course.”

“Speaking of the emperor, I hear rumor that he has taken another bride. Number forty-eight, I think…” Moab went on, but the three were more interested in taking in the sights of New Sodom now that they were in hearing the rumors surrounding the emperor’s new bride.