Spears of God Read online

  “At least we won’t have to machete our way through,” Michael said as he pushed foliage aside and plunged on ahead.

  “What brought your aunt here in the first place?” Susan asked, sweeping a broken spiderweb away from her face.

  “I think she first came to the tepui when she was a graduate student in anthropology. She also had a strong interest in your field, ethnobotany.”

  Susan grunted, preoccupied with making her way through the undergrowth.

  “By the time she was a postdoc, she was convinced that a particular Pemon myth about the Mawari was true.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one about ancient sky-gods who crashed their essence to earth as spores of the ghost people’s totemic—and hallucinogenic—fungus.”

  Susan nodded.

  “An undiscovered people possessing a potent medicinal plant not previously known to science. I can see how that might intrigue anyone interested in ethnobotany.”

  “It became something more than just an interest in a hypothetical plant.”

  “Oh?”

  “According to Paul, my aunt felt she not only needed the Mawari, but they needed her, too.”

  Making their way into and under the tree canopy, through ever denser cloudforest growth, the two of them heard water flowing and falling with almost musical cadence. The air grew warmer, more sticky-humid, and thick with the smell of life and decay.

  “What made your uncle suddenly interested in funding this expedition now, after so many years?”

  “You’ve got me there,” Michael said, holding a leafy branch aside so it wouldn’t slash Susan in the face after he pushed it out of his way. “He’s been obsessed with minerals and caves for as long as I’ve known him. It’s what made him rich, after all. And Jacinta did tell him the Mawari fetishized a glassy mineral, stones of a particular ‘tone,’ which they required if they were to ‘sing their mountain to the stars.’”

  Michael held his breath a moment, wondering if Susan might ask him about his own interests in stars and stones. His fascination with rocks from the cave of the sky was even more widely known than his uncle’s particular obsessions. Michael was relieved when she focused on something else.

  “And that had something to do with their ‘needing’ her?”

  “Jacinta felt it was her destiny to help the Mawari create some kind of crystalline shamanic machinery that would transform this mountain into, well, a spaceship of sorts.”

  Susan shook her head in frank disbelief.

  “That sounds flat-out crazy. Your uncle Paul didn’t strike me as the type to believe in such a wild idea.”

  “He’s not, but he’s more than willing to throw money in the direction of finding some unique stones.”

  They continued downward among misted and dripping plants. Susan identified them as lianas, orchids, epiphytes—seemingly of a thousand kinds.

  “Some of these have to be endemics. Remind me to collect samples on the way out.”

  As the sound of a waterfall grew steadily to a roar, blotting out everything else, conversation became impossible.

  Picking their way over the slippery downed trees that forded the torrent at the gorge’s bottom, they both looked off to that place—somewhere not very far downstream—where the torrent-turned-waterfall thundered away into empty space, sending back up the gorge a twofold sound like an immense echoing heartbeat.

  Stepping down onto the rightside bank, they continued east. Soon they found themselves moving along a track that was more and more obviously a footpath. Michael shot Susan a glance, which she pretended not to see.

  After following the path for a time they came to what could only have been a trail made by humans. As the trail veered sharply up a small branch canyon, the thunder of the tepui falls at last receded enough to allow the insect and animal sounds of the forest to return. Susan and Michael walked on in silence, caught up in their separate thoughts.

  Gradually they gained elevation, enough that the mist cleared around them and the jungle thinned perceptibly. The air had begun to cool again by the time they encountered several foot-trampled pathways converging on an earthen slope beneath a high cliffside.

  In the cliff face were some half dozen holes or cave entrances from which a brisk breeze issued steadily.

  Out of the forest, powerlines and cables snaked—purposeful vines of black, gray, and red, all headed toward the cliffholes. They stopped and stared.

  “I think this may be proof, beyond her own words, that Jacinta was here,” Michael said.

  “Why her, specifically?” Susan asked, still skeptical. “And why here?”

  “Paul says her Mawari ‘destiny’ required that she squandered all her research money—and then all her personal funds—on high-tech equipment irrelevant to tepui exploration. I think all this may have something to do with that.”

  “Okaay,” Susan said, still uncertain, “but where are the people, then? I haven’t seen any.”

  “Me neither. How about taking a look inside these holes here?”

  “Lead on.”

  He scrambled up the slope, toward the largest hole, into which the greatest number of powerlines and cables converged. Stopping at the entrance, the two of them took spelunking coveralls and caving helmets from their backpacks. They slipped the coveralls on over their hiking clothes and fastened on the helmets, each topped with an LED headlamp.

  Making their way inside, they walked crouched over, descending into twilight. They soon found that all the cave entrances eventually came together in a single, larger tunnel. The green smell of the cloudforest outside gave way to the scent of damp earth, then to the muddy stink of slow decay as their lights played on the cave walls and into pitch-dark side chambers.

  In the first few side chambers they found only squeaking and rustling bats, the stench of their guano, and the delicate milk-on-Rice-Krispies crackle of meat maggots eating the flesh of nightfliers unlucky enough to have fallen to the cave floor.

  Beyond where the bats dangled, they passed spectacular stone formations. Stalactites and stalagmites gaped like teeth. Farther on, those formations joined to become pillars and curtains of stone. Susan and Michael had barely finished marveling at them before they came upon more open spaces, and still clearer evidence that the aborted destiny of Jacinta and the Mawari might indeed have been real—or at least a powerfully shared delusion.

  Susan and Michael found several pieces of high-tech equipment—an autoclave, two diamond saws, a foldout satellite dish, an uplink antenna, half a dozen each of camcorders, optidisk player recorders, and microscreen TV sets—presumably all items Jacinta had managed to get through the Gran Sabana and onto the plateau, before Michael’s uncle Paul stepped in and stopped such craziness.

  In the beams of their headlamps, Michael and Susan saw that the tech—once cutting-edge but now nearly two decades outdated—seemed to have never been used. It also looked almost too pristine, as if it had been maintained against the cool and damp of the cavern with an almost sacramental devotion.

  The same seeming devotion had likewise been lavished upon piles of small shining stones, found wherever side tunnels came into the main tunnel.

  Looking around him as his beam played about the chill damp darkness, Michael felt that in such a place as this, the range of both the probable and the insane were vastly enlarged. Here the boundary between the believable and the unbelievable seemed vanishingly thin.

  That boundary broke completely when they came upon a great central underground room—and the first corpse.

  An involuntary gasp of horror escaped each of them as they looked upon a young woman, her hands thrown up in a futile attempt to protect the remains of a face that had been blown away, leaving behind only a ruin of torn flesh and shattered bone. Lithe-bodied and auburn-haired, she was dressed in a purple-and-black loincloth and nothing else. As far as they could tell, she had been carrying no weapon when she was killed.

  Shocked into silence, Susan and Michael shone the
ir lights before them. Ahead, in the middle of what looked like a shallow lake—or perhaps a place where a slow-flowing subterranean stream broadened out into a wide channel—there stood a long low hummock or island.

  All the way to that hummock they saw before them scene after scene of horrible carnage. A dozen or more corpses lay contorted and broken, spattered with ragged bits of flesh and bone. To the simple stone ornaments that had adorned these people in life had been added chaotic tattoos of their life’s blood, dry upon their skins.

  The two outsiders crouched on a bank beside the broad stream. Some of the corpses lay on the bank, some half submerged in the shallow water—more black-or auburn-haired people, dressed in varying amounts of that same woven fabric of purple and black. That they were also all barefoot only made them seem all the more vulnerable in death.

  Abruptly Susan stood up and turned away. A moment later Michael heard her vomiting. He turned to see her leaning hard on her knees as she emptied the contents of her stomach. He fought hard against the same impulse, keeping down his gorge only by forcefully reminding himself again and again how much he hated the burning taste of vomit in his throat and mouth.

  “Are you all right?” he said, placing a hand lightly on her shoulder.

  “How could anyone seeing this be ‘all right’?” Shrugging his hand off her shoulder, she wiped her bile-mucked mouth on the sleeve of her coveralls and turned away.

  “It looks like they were armed only with stone-tipped spears,” Michael muttered dully to himself as he crouched down again and examined the dead around them. “Shot and killed in a skirmish with attackers carrying modern weaponry—machine guns, mortars, grenades, by the looks of it. They’ve been dead awhile—more than three hours but less than three days, judging by the state of rigor.”

  “God!” Susan said, standing up. “I know you’re a doctor, but how can you be so clinical? So dispassionate? This wasn’t a ‘skirmish,’ it was a massacre! A genocide, if these people were endemic, like everything else on this hellish tepui.”

  Michael rose from the charnel mass of twisted bodies on the floor.

  “I’m not dispassionate,” he bridled. “Not callous. Clinical is the only way I can handle this. We owe it to them to find out what happened here. Find out who committed this…this atrocity.”

  They locked eyes for a moment, until Susan at last looked away and nodded in agreement.

  “The attitudes of the bodies suggest they died protecting that low island, there.”

  Stepping carefully amid the bloody, broken, nearly naked bodies, they made their way to the low island, toward something even stranger than carnage.

  In contrast to the chaos surrounding it, the island was crowded with carefully and lovingly placed dead, so many it seemed made of bodies, corpses preserved by the cave’s stable environment. Fine masses of cottony white threads had spread and knit over the surface of each corpse’s skin and over the island itself, covering both so thoroughly that it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. Weird mushrooming stalks—convoluted like human brains but stretched anamorphically along the vertical axis—thrust up like alien phalluses from the corpses’ open mouths, from their ears, their eye sockets.

  Particularly large specimens jutted up from the corpses’ abdomens just below the rib cage.

  Even Michael could barely keep from retching. He looked away.

  “Some kind of traditional burial ground?” Susan offered. Michael nodded weakly in agreement.

  They saw that the far more recently and unceremoniously deceased, in the shallow waters surrounding the island, were free of the fungal winding sheets, at least so far.

  “They died defending the dead,” he said.

  “And maybe their totemic fungus too,” Susan said, reaching toward the strange growths rising from the dead, as if to pluck one. She stopped in midmotion, reconsidering her impulse. “Maybe your aunt wasn’t so crazy after all.”

  Michael wondered dimly why the same forces of decay that ravaged the bodies of the fallen bats in the outer chambers had made no inroads here. Perhaps it was more than just the cave’s stable environment that preserved even the much older corpses.

  “Look,” he said, pointing out to Susan the waffle-stomp of boot-prints on one corner of the island. “The defenders didn’t succeed, in the end.”

  “I don’t think this was the end,” she said, nodding her head in the direction she’d been looking. “Over there.”

  A trail of broken bodies led them onward, beside where the broad stream narrowed to a small whitewater river. The walls of the great room funneled down steadily narrower, toward where the river disappeared into a hole in the ground. Before that disappearance, however, the trail of bodies veered into a side tunnel that angled upward, into what looked like the last and most secluded alcove of the cave system.

  Here, the greatest number of defenders had died. Most of them appeared to have been killed protecting a great blackish stone in the middle of the alcove. The stone was almost completely encircled by the bloody, torn, and broken bodies of its fallen protectors.

  “Thank God your aunt didn’t live to see this,” Susan said. “It would have broken her heart, to see all the Mawari become ghost people—in fact as well as name.”

  “Jacinta didn’t tell anyone about this alcove,” Michael said, “not even Paul.”

  “Holiest of holies, maybe. A secret too deep to be shared.”

  From one section of the circle marking the tribe’s last stand, someone or something had unceremoniously shoved aside several of the dead defenders, out of haste to get at the stone. Reluctantly, Michael moved his heavy boot-clad feet among the bodies, following much more slowly and cautiously that same despoiler’s path toward the stone.

  Having made his way as reverently as possible to the stone, Michael saw that those who came before him had not treated the stone itself so respectfully. A large chunk had been sawn from it and carried away—in the not too distant past, to judge by the gleam of the cut. He stared at the break, then took from his belt the magnifying lens and small but powerful magnet he carried with him from force of long habit.

  “Well?” Susan asked. Beneath the glow of her headlamp, her face drifted moonlike above her spelunking coveralls. “What is it?”

  “A meteorite,” Michael said. The distance afforded by scientific observation and analysis granted him a peculiar, detached comfort amid all the horror around them. “Blackened and fusion-crusted, from the hot passage through the atmosphere. Oriented, too—shaped a bit like a squat cone, from ablation as it came in. A little over a meter tall, a meter and a half wide at the base.”

  “You said there are different kinds of meteorites. Any idea what kind this is?”

  “Carbonaceous chondrite, maybe, but there seems to be significant iron present, too. Iron crystals and shaling in some spots. It’s a strange one. Extremely well preserved, for something stored in a cave. This room must be drier than the rest. No seepage, see?”

  He thought of the Mawari myth of sky-gods who had crashed their essence on Earth. Struck by a sudden inspiration, he made his way back through the broken ring of dead defenders far faster than he had come.

  Clear of the endlessly staring dead, he took off at as much of a run as he could manage in the dark of the tunnel leading out of the alcove, along the way they’d entered.

  “Where are you going?” Susan called from behind him.

  “To the big main room,” he called over his shoulder, “and those piles of shining stones.”

  By the time Susan caught up to him, Michael was examining a stone from a pile of the glittering things.

  “Shocked quartz,” he told her. “Meteoritic impact glass, likely coesite and stishovite.”

  “Of a particular ‘tone’?” Susan asked. “Pitch or resonance, or whatever it was? Like their myth?”

  “More like a particular lattice configuration. Coesite and stishovite are chemically identical to quartz, but they’re both considerably denser than
quartz. Their crystal lattices are different, too. That difference is detectable only through X-ray diffraction experiments, so far as I know.”

  He looked off, down the tunnel, toward the alcove. He thought of the broken meteoritic stone there.

  Then he looked toward the dead defending the isle of the dead. “Who would kill so many people, just to get at a meteorite?”

  “You tell me,” Susan said, something like anger and sadness rising in her voice. “You’re the big expert, Doctor Meteor. Maybe you were expecting to find everything we’ve seen here? You’re the one who told me about their spore crash myth.”

  “I didn’t expect anything like this,” Michael said quietly. For several minutes he could think of nothing more to say. His mind drifted far away, to where he’d found meteorites before, deserts both cold and hot—from Elephant Moraine in Antarctica to the Rub’ al-Khali, the Empty Quarter, in Saudi Arabia. He thought how little in the way of skystones he’d expected to find amid the rain forests, savannahs, and tepuis of this trip. Now that he’d found this one, the horrendous circumstances of the stone’s discovery had at last broke through his scientific detachment and prevented him from feeling any real joy in the find.

  Susan drifted away, too, though not as far. Hearing the sound of movement in one of the side tunnels, she went to investigate. In an instant Susan found herself being stared back at by four nearly naked children, caught in the beam of her headlamp and momentarily transfixed by it. Dressed in purple-and-black loincloths of identical snaking patterns, the four stood in the side tunnel with their backs against the walls of tight niches, crude stone-tipped spears in their hands and cornered-animal fire in their eyes.

  “Michael! I think you’d better see this.”

  The sound of Susan’s voice, calling him from one of the side tunnels, pulled Michael back into the moment. Following in the direction of her voice, he soon saw the scene Susan’s headlamp shone upon.

  “I was wrong,” Susan said, glancing at him. “Not all the Mawariton have become ghosts, at least not yet.”

  RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE