My time in Kal-Do
Luke Frostick
If you’ve made it to Kal-Do, you’ll see the ruins, the towers, the waterfalls cascading down into the pea green lake at the craterous heart of the broken city into which everything is inexorably tumbling . However, the thing that’ll stick with you, as it did with me, is the quiet.
All the time I was there, though the ruins throbbed with nature; insects buzzing, crocodiles hissing at the water’s edge, apes howling, and goats fighting, those noises seemed muted and distant as if somebody had thrown a blanket over everything. That dulling quiet together with the humidity and the scorching midday heat left me constantly feeling like I had woken up from a drunken nap.
I can not claim a large part of the discovery of Kal-Do. Nor can Susan if we are being honest. The tribesmen of the desert were well aware of its location - had been forever. They just avoided the place, looped hundred of miles round it while traveling. They claimed that the buildings were infested with djinn and although there was ample water, a dragon had made the ruins its lair.
Susan was the first person from The Commonwealth to take the idea that Kal-Do was real seriously, however. It was her who spent years cloistered in libraries poring over ancient texts and the journals of desert adventurers, putting the history together and forming theories about its whereabouts. She’d planned to make an expedition earlier, but the war had put that plan on hold.
Afterwards, when the bombs and guns were put down and we tried to scrape together what was left of our lives, she had invested the last few pounds of her inheritance and the revenue from a modest academic grant to employ me as her guide and assistant for her desert journey. I’d been all over the desert in the the war, running arms to the nomads so they could more effectively raid the Osmali train-lines, sitting in scorching trenches while artillery turned the desert into glass, and nearly losing my life more times than I want to recall in the deathtrap armoured cars we raced round in.
It was nice to turn my knowledge to something other than warfare. I was able to sit down with Susan’s notes and work out an approximate location of the city. I could then rely on my wartime acquaintance with the tribal chiefs to get us to the rest of the way. I didn’t share Susan’s fantasy that a lost civilisation was waiting out in the sands and expected that we would find one of the countless boggy, malaria infested old wadis, a ruined caravanserais, perhaps even tumble-down castles that were built and abandoned as part of the normal ebb and flow of dessert civilisation if we were lucky, but the journey was something to do and the last thing I wanted was to remain in commonwealth territory as the politicians and generals set to the region’s map with their rulers and big red pens.
I certainly couldn’t have imagined the metropolis we found. I wouldn’t have been able to form a picture in my head of the great crater, the towers rising up out of it and tumbling back into it, the minarets with their riffled stair cases, and the domed temples all collapsing into the lake that filled the crater.
The stories of Dragons suddenly seemed more plausible. Their smaller cousins were a constant menace for travellers, but a fully grown dragon hadn’t been seen, as far as I could tell for centuries. I thought it more likely to be a large or particularly ugly species of crocodile, bloated by legend and desert people’s innate hatred of anything that disturbs their water supply.
We got our first look down in the crater from the back of our camels. I remarked that the city looked like it had been punched by an angry god. Suzan pointed out to me the way that the city had been pulled apart by a great upheaval in the earth and the way that the towers had tumbled into the crater where they remained some just piles of rubble, others stayed almost completely intact as if that angry god had picked them up and set them down round the edge of the crater in a moment of absentmindedness. Water ran out of fissures in the crater's edge and man-made pipes flowing into the lake. With that water came life. Palm tree anchored themselves into the soil, grasses and cacti grew out of the cracks in the stone and all manner of vines and climbing plants hung onto the sides of the buildings.
If the city was more real than we thought, we had to take the possibility of the dragon more seriously too. During our first day in the city, still trying to process what we had found, we left the camels on the outskirts on solid ground and together scaled one of the tower blocks jutting up out of the crater’s edge. Once we had reached the top using what internal staircases that remained and running ropes up the section rendered inaccessible by collapse, we spent the day watching the water through our field glasses. We watched the waterfalls churning up the green water and stirring brown silt into the mix and the crocodiles lounging on the stones along the edge. We only saw it once, a ripple of water and a flash of light of emerald scales as something huge rolled in the water’s depths; something too massive and lustrous to be anything but a dragon.
Proceeding with every caution, we made camp in one of the towers, one that was at a safer distance from the lake and its resident. We abseiled down the back of the building as it was missing its front and looked like a honeycomb. We both now wondered which of these skeletons had been ruined by the tectonic forces and which ones had been pulled apart by the dragon.
Once we had reached about half way down the structure, we stopped and made a camp. We lugged all our supplies and equipment down from the camels and cut them loose to graze as they pleased on the scrubland outside the city proper. The apartment that Susan chose for our camp must have been quite grand at one point. Each doorway had a different geometric pattern forming its lintel.On the sides of the building not smashed to pieces great panes of glass stood in the windows. However, if I am going to be honest, I preferred the broken side of the building, the missing west wall and the open vista it gave us across the lake and the three tower blocks standing in the water was a sight to behold.
We paid great attention to our security, not only from the dragon and any locals who might take offence at our presence, but the other smaller threats that harry any expedition. We cleared away all the vegetation in the rooms to deprive the snakes of hiding places, we secured our rations so that they didn’t attract rodents and their predators and set a fire to frighten away any leopards that might be lurking in the ruins. Lastly, we put dried sage leaves in the flames to discourage the mosquitos.
The apartment was cool and pleasant enough to lie in. Even at the hottest, most humid times of the day, a breeze was pulled through the rooms keeping us comfortable and rested there during the hottest parts of the day so we could focus our exploration on the morning and evening.
I think most people, save the horribly unfortunate, have a memory of childhood wonder and discovery where the imagination and the reality march in step and the world seems so rich and full.
It is a feeling that everybody tries to recreate and simulate as the crushing disappointments of adulthood beats down on them. Those first few days walking in slack jawed wonder round the buildings Susan and I were two of the rare ones that got as close to that feeling of escape as is possible for grownups. We were happy to wonder in a daze from room to room in silent apartment stumbling on gardens gone wild on rooftops while looking for yet another vantage point to gaze at the city and the lake from. We let a whole afternoon slide past us watching the lake, the water lapping against the central three towers still protruding from the water and trying to catch another glimpse of the dragon lurking beneath its cloudy surface.
That dreamy phase could not last for long. We had work to do and routine took hold of us and didn’t let go. While I would have been happy climbing towers, exploring the apartments, and sunbathing nude on the roof tops, Susan had ambitions and studies that she wanted to complete. She was awake before me every day, making plans for the next phase of exploration and, as I watched the moonlight on the lake, she sat by the fire writing up in fanatical detail our day’s discoveries. And what discoveries, statues, mosaics, frescos, ceramics and architectural curios. There was not much in the way of physical artefacts, much had been taken by the elements, but still there was more than we could possibly record.
In the desert, my role as guide had been clear. In the city, I needed a new one, beyond assisting with the climbing and abseiling we often had to resort to to get round the city. Susan told me that I could be of use by drawing, to give the folks back in The Commonwealth an idea of the city and to annotate the books and articles that Susan was already drafting in her head.
Much as I am struggling in these pages, I found that I couldn’t catch the full majesty of Kal-Do and what it had become in my crude scribblings, so instead I focused on things that took my fancy, small details, a vine covered arch with a geometric pattern above the lintel, a tower precariously leaning like a drunk on the Cliffside or one of the many mosaics and frescos that we found.
I also drew the local people. No doubt our arrival quite startled them, but they showed us nothing but hospitality. On our first meeting when we walked into one of the five hamlets dotted round the city and the lake, they offered us dates and strong coffee in exchange of gifts rituals not unlike those of the nomadic tribesmen. We gave them a pair of field glasses which they seemed satisfied with.
Physically, they looked similar to the desert tribesmen, though they had no need for the long sand-proofing robes of the nomadic folk. Instead they favoured raw linen trousers and shirts, modest but well crafted that hung loosely and let them climb easily and quietly. We didn’t find communication especially changeling.their language resembled the desert men’s enough that I could express myself albeit crudely. We tried to trade gold pieces with them, but they had little interest in the stuff. I handed a gold sovereign to one of the men we met. He gave it to his toddler to play with. They primarily traded in silver coins and still practiced the custom of clipping them to weight. They were, moreover, open to barter, happy to provide goat and python meat, unleavened bread, coffee and fruit in exchange for our salted beef, canvas cloth and pictures I quickly sketched of them that would set them to giggling when I handed them over.
Susan and I remained cautious, keeping their lives at a respectful distance and they were happy to not have us in their villages and space at all times. But they remained friendly when our paths crossed. The only time I saw any of them angered was entirely my own fault. I’d taken it upon myself to kill one of the wild goats that made their homes on the almost vertical piles of rubble for the meat at the sport. The rams jousted and tussled on slopes that I would have to use a rope to ascend. They were incredibly nimble and the sly ram I’d got my sights on was a tricky devil. In frustration, I was firing my carbine more liberally than a good soldier should. One of the locals, a young man named Namilk scrambled towards me over the rocks almost as fast as the goats, waving his hands for me to stop. When he got to me he clamped his hand over his mouth, pointed at the lake with the other to quiet me.
I closed my eyes and nodded to show I understood and was sorry. I felt like a damn idiot because, truthfully, in that moment, I had forgotten that a damn monster dozed under the gentle water. The city and its inhabitants made more sense to me after that; the gentle bird song and the way the goats and gazelles didn’t cry out when ensnared by a python or crocodile. It helped me understand the people too, they, out of necessity- spoke rarely and softly conveying much nuance in touch, gesture and expression.
It was as if the whole place and all its living inhabitants understood one thing, “If the creature in Kal-Do lake ever wakes, all will suffer from the most ancient gnarled crocodile to the youngest human babe.”
I learned to appreciate the quiet of the city a little more.
Susan and I fell into a peaceful pattern. We had plenty of supplies loaded onto the camels and the water that ran in clear streams through the apartments was sweet. We could set traps for the small partridge-like birds, pick fruit from tree and even fish in some places.
The gathering of such resources was my responsibility. I did the cooking, tended the camp and kept it clear of snakes and scorpions. We lived comfortably, considering the circumstances we had ample food padded beds and some nights would squeeze fresh lemon juice into our tin cups and slosh in the gin I’d stashed in the saddle bags.
On one of those nights, we sat with our legs dangling off the edge of our apartment’s smashed-in side, looking at the lake she asked me why we don’t talk about the war.
“I get tired of explaining it to people that weren’t there.” I replied.
“I was.” she said. I think an ungainly gawp covered my face following her answer. She shrugged at me. “I was a medic less than a kilometre from the front.”
“So you know there’s not much point in talking about it then.”
“If that’s how you feel…”
I’d upset her and before an unreachable silence filled up the gap between us, I added. “The thing about being here is that I don’t have to think about it. It is so calm I can feel myself calming down. I don’t have dreams about it anymore. I think I’m starting to heal. You were a medic, is that something that happens to people? Do you feel the same?”
“I do. This place is good for me.”
We didn’t talk about the war after that. We didn’t really talk about the past at all. We stuck to the present, the immediate future or the long lost past. She explained the buildings we found in the city to me and built up complex theories about what their function had been.
I talked about the practical, discussed how we could make difficult climes to the more inaccessible and precarious points at the tops of the towers or down into the vaults. She would discuss the things we found, explain theories about how an artefact, room or piece of art was built or how it was used. Some nights when the worse of the heat lifted and breeze cooled us, we had sex. She was an efficient lover, not selfish exactly, more like she knew where she needed to go and didn’t totally trust me to get her there. I didn’t mind. I include this information here not as a juvenile boast, or sordid confession, but simply so I can relate this tale as honestly as possible. Should the facts of this case ever make it to public view, I would not want a surprise revolution of our intimacy to detract from the more substantive points of this account.
After sex, comfortable and relaxed, was the rare exception that we might talk about the past. We talked about our families far away. Mine were comfortably going grey at my brother’s stately home. I hadn’t written to them in years, but couldn’t articulate exactly why, so I said as little about them as possible. Hers were dead, but she was burdened by a famous father who’d had left a lasting impression on her. He had on me too, there wasn’t a boy in The Commonwealth who hadn’t at some point read an account of Baldwin Mogg’s adventures, hunting dangerous beasts, discovering lost treasure and doing battle with savages. I met him once, though I didn’t tell her. He was ignorant about the desert and dismissive of its people, though from the way he swaggered you’d think he’d been born there himself and had crossed the Salt heart of the Nomin his own self and wasn’t simply the braindead son of minor aristocrats. He was the kind of man who saw different and savage as synonymous and, thus, every expedition he went on resulted in a frightful tole on whatever unsuspecting population he came in touch with. As I said, I kept my impressions of her father to myself. It wasn’t my place to challenge the legends Susan had built up of her heroic sire.
The first phase of our stay was exploration of the towers, making maps, sketches and expansive notes. When Susan was happy that we had a good record of what was above us, we started going down. In the dark we discovered extensive crypts, cisterns and tunnels that opened up new areas of research. Susan took this new discovery very seriously and soon a spider’s web map of the interconnected underground was drawn up.
Time became a bit squidgy. The days blended into each other. Happy and tired I slept, ate explored. Every now and then, when it pleased us, we would take a day for ourselves. I spent mine gazing at the tile work and frescos going on long walks, climbs and scrambles taking me past my favourite mosaics, frescos and views, watching the lake for the dragon.
I rarely saw it. The murky water of the lake allowed for little espionage. I occasionally saw a ripple on the water too large for a crocodile or a gust of wind and a flash of emerald scales. Neither of us were drakologists but Susan had some theories about its origin.
“I think it was drawn from the north.” she said. “Young drakes are attracted to chaos. Think of how many accounts there were of dragons being drawn to the trenches during the peak of the war.” I didn’t want to, but I remembered. “It would have come here centuries ago. Maybe millennia to bask in the madness of Kal-Do falling apart.” She told me it could be one of the oldest living creatures in the world in the same category as craggy old pine trees on the tops of mountains.
I asked her what it did for sustenance. She said there were probably enough goats and camels out in the dessert to keep it going. “They are like other reptiles. They feast, then they can rest for extend stretches of time.”
“Unless disturbed…”
I only got one good look at it. It surfaced one day; just its head lying on the top of the water. The head alone was the size of a damn armoured car. It lounged in the water next to one of the lake towers like a crocodile, but unlike those reptiles, when I looked in its eyes, there was intelligence there. I never want to look into eyes like that again. I am well acquainted with terror, but something in those depths cut straight into a deep primal fear, monkey brain stuff. That night, I didn't sleep and quaked on my matt like a schoolboy in shorts.
I was extra cautious moving around the city after that. I treated the city as if it had a dying relative at its heart that I had to tiptoe around. I was sometimes joined on those walks by a local, Namlik, the same man who had stopped my reckless hunting. At first I suspected he was keeping an eye on me, making sure that I committed no more stupid blunders. However, even if that were originally his intention, he quickly started coming for his own curiosity and enjoyment. We could communicate after a fashion. As I became more comfortable understanding his speech it became clear to me that, although I am no linguist, he was speaking a dialect of the nomadic tongues, not just a similar language. Perhaps they shared a common ancestor. This opened up some interesting questions that I put to Susan. She agreed that there could well be a connection between the people dwelling in Kal-Do and the nomads. She suggested that after the fall of Kal-Do to the earthquake and its builders had departed, some desert people made the calculation that living in proximity to the dragon was a worthy risk for limitless water.
I wanted to take the argument one step further that Namlik and his kin could be the descendants of Kal-Do’s citizens, but she had little time for that and said that modern historic methods had shown that nomadic people wouldn't be capable of building a city of the scale and sophistication of Kal-Do. I lacked the academic knowledgeability to challenge her assertion, but felt she was mistaken due in part to the many fabulous things I had seen in my travels with the desert folk, but also to an incident that happened on one of Namlik and I’s walks.
He was a valuable guide to the city. It was him who had shown us the glass factories where the great panes were made and so much more. One day he took me to a grotto in one of the lower-rise buildings. It struck me as a religious building of some kind, but I can not say for certain. Within were frescos of the highest quality, they had remained protected from the rain and despite a little flaking, the dark figures in scene of hunting, court ceremony and a great king on a throne of knotted gold were almost perfectly preserved. I tried to add them to my notebook, but again my pencil work was poor. I had sat myself down on a pile of fallen masonry to draw. It was stupid. I didn’t think about what might be lurking in the cracks and crevices of the broken stones. I didn’t see the black heart viper till it was too late. It is not the most poisonous snake in the desert , but has the most malicious temper.
I have been close to death before as shells fell around me and I crawled out of a burning armoured car. I have been shot serving The Commonwealth. Had Namlik been a heart-beat slower, that snake would have tagged my calf and I would be dead. He snatched it at great risk to himself. There is no antidote to black heart venom, not this far away from commonwealth hospitals. Still, he yanked on the snake’s tail and it span, lunging at him like a jack-in-the-box straight from hell. He expertly stayed out of the reach of the snake’s fangs, pinned it down with a stick and then when it tried to wriggle backwards, he grasped it behind the jaws. I would have killed the bloody thing then and there, but Namlik let it go. He held the belief that I had seen elsewhere in the desert that djinn like to take the form of snakes. Killing one of their number is a great risk as even the good clans of djinn are vengeful. So the black heart viper was allowed to slitter away unpunished and unrepentant. After letting go of the snake, he stood up and I saw him next to the fresco of the king. It is to my shame that it took him saving me from death to see the resemblance between him and the monarch in the fresco, in features and in noble bearing, clearly of the same clan.
I did not share my newfound conviction with Susan. She was more interested in the city than the people who now made it their home as if, for her, the city’s history had ended when the earth tried to swallow it up.
We lay in my rollout bed one night, a last drop of gin in a shared tin cup passing between us and she said to me, “You know when we get back to The Commonwealth, we’re going to be famous.”
“Oh yeh?”
“Don’t try to pretend you haven’t thought about it. We are sitting in possibly the greatest discovery since… I don’t even know.”
“Yes.” I suppose I had realised. “I didn’t come out here to get rich and be invited as a guest speaker at the Drones Club though.”
“Just keep it in mind… we’ll need to take precautions. We won’t be the only people interested in this place after our reporting. When we get back to The Commonwealth, we should write up as quickly as we can, score new funding and get back out here as soon as possible.”
“We’re coming back?”
It may well seem ridiculous to you, but I honestly hadn’t thought about what came next. It was so obvious when she said it. Of course people were going to take an interest. Crews from universities all round the world were going to pick the city over, cart its finest points back to museums in capital cities.
“Universities in other nations will want to send teams here.” She said.
“We should downplay it. We can let on what we’ve found in limited terms. Try our best to ensure that only a few select people will know.”
“I think it may be hard… even writing up a limited report is going to cause a stir.”
“But anything we can do to stop a scramble between the great powers for this place is responsible isn’t it?”
“It is… we should be cautious.”
I thought this matter settled. It would raise its head again once we got to seriously exploring the catacombs, however.
At first, I didn’t really see what Susan was trying to accomplish in the cisterns, crypts and tunnels that spread like roots under the city given that we had so much to explore above ground. Until, that is, we found the stairs.
They were, at first, unexceptional, a neat spiral of brick like the one we had descended. We walked up in the cool and damp until we found ourselves in a great hall. It was a room three stories high, with a thick column holding up the roof so broad two men holding hands couldn’t wrap their arms round them.
Set in the walls were hexagonal windows with the amazing quality glass of Kal-Do. A moody green light seeped through them.
“We are underwater.” I said, realising Susan’s genius. “In one of the three towers standing in the lake.”
She raised a finger to her lips and I shut up. Somewhere outside in the soupy water, a monster lurked.
She whispered in my ear like she was unable to keep her excitement to herself. “Have you ever seen anything like this?” I shook my head. “When we return, I’ll bring an engineer and they can explain how this thing is still standing.”
We walked up to the top of the tower. There was no need for climbing or scrambling here. The upper levels had become the nesting ground for birds and the place stank of their leavings. The birds attracted the snakes and we had to tread carefully and keep a weather eye out for black heart vipers. We were able to make it to the top and the thoughts of bird shit and snakes were completely wiped from our minds, along with almost everything else. It was glorious: the lake, the crumbling towers and the crater cliffs hemming it all in. It was made all the more magnificent by the thought that we might be the first humans to ever view the city from this perspective, assuming that the locals hadn’t found the way here. I promised to ask Namlik, though I wouldn’t get the chance.
We spent the rest of the day there, looking through the telescope, drawing what we could, trying to map everything out. It was like we had been doing a jigsaw puzzle one piece at a time and for the first time, had taken a step back and seen the whole picture.
At one point, while I struggled again with my wretched drawing skills, she waved me over to her. She was lying on her belly looking down the side towards the water. She pointed to her eyes and then down at the water to a dark shadow.
“Dragon.” She mouthed. We crept over to the other side of the tower and looked there too. Its shadow was all around us. It was coiled round the building as if it were a child with a stuffed animal.
We had the same idea at once, reckless, but unavoidable. We gathered out gear and raced down the tower as fast as we could. Back in the submerged hall, we slunk in the green light to one of the hexagonal windows, and pocked our eye over the windowsill like a pair of school boys trying to get a glimpse inside a burlesque house.
As I said it was reckless, but you must understand we had become accustomed to novelty and neither of us could resist such a fine vintage. We thought that we were going to be disappointed. We could only see a few feet beyond our porthole.
Then the darkness outside moved.
Like a mountain had decided to up and relocate itself, the bulk of that massive creature shifted. We only saw its green chain mail hide for a second before it stirred up enough silt to hide it again.
We both gasped. Gold. In amongst the silt and mud, gold. Not just a fleck or two, a shower of coins, like fish scales in the sea after a feeding frenzy, swirled and flashed in the water.
We watched slack jawed as the wealth of an empire rained down just out of reach.
We talked on the way back to the camp desperately excited.
“No wonder the tribes here about have no use for gold.” Susan commented.
“How much do you think is there?” I asked.
“Banks’ loads.”
“Does this change things?”
“Don’t be dense.”
She was right. I was being dense. Of course, this changed things.
We didn’t talk that much when we returned to camp. A mistake, I think, looking back now. I had chores to do and she wanted to write up as much as she could while it was fresh. We slept apart that night. When I woke, she was already gone. Not unusual, so I made coffee on the fire and when it was done, picked up a handful of dates and walked to the water facing side of the tower to eat them along with my coffee.
I sat thinking of home, the noise of the city, cars, people, guns, tanks and gas. The war machine engine jumpstarting again. A panic rose up in me, but before it could reach up out of my gut, take hold of my heart and paralyse me, a sound drew me back to the world. It was a little thing. A quiet bleat of a goat. I took a swig from my coffee and picked up my field glasses. I scanned the buildings and slopes of rubble for the animal. The repetitive task was soothing to me. I spotted a ram, wandered away from his pack. He had to be cautious. Though I had yet to see one, I was sure the leopards were about in the ruins. There was also Namlik. I only spotted him by chance. He didn’t fire blindly and randomly like a banker pretending to be a country gentleman on water Estate. One arrow from his horn bow and the goat went down. His family would eat well tonight. Namlik had domesticated goats of his own, but liked to hunt the wild ones for pleasure; he had told me that the meat of the wild goats had a more complex flavour that he would pull out with spices and tried fruits.
I sat there for the rest of the morning, thinking. When I couldn’t think any more I returned to the camp to review our notes and maps from the day before. When I tired of that it was back to the water view. Susan joined me there and we watched a crocodile half-heartily stalk a crane on the water’s edge.
“So the gold changes things.” she said. I was glad she was ready to start the conversation. I didn’t know how to begin.
“Not for the better I suspect..
“If what we saw is even an inkling of the dragon’s hoard, there is the wealth of a kingdom there.”
“There is a dragon sitting on top of it.”
“We are in modern times, you know as well as I that we have weaponry that can reduce army to nothing in seconds. There is no place for dragons in that world. The only reason it has survived this long is that it is out here in the middle of nowhere.”
“Try not to say it with too much glee.”
She stopped, stung.
“What would you have us do?” She asked. “When we write up what we have found here, others will come. That is unavoidable. They will find the gold as well. Then it sets off a scramble. In case you haven’t noticed, the peace out there is tenuous, the desert chiefs will want to take their cut of the loot as will the the other great powers.”
“We go home. Say we failed, found nothing here. Let the place stay as it is.”
“The world is getting smaller. Somebody will find it again. No doubt.”
“But then we don't have to have it on our conscience. Let it be somebody else who brings about the end of this place. Give it a few more years of peace, let the people here live out their lives for a bit longer. It’s theirs after all. Their ancestors built it.”
“Even if that was true, they let the city slide into ruin. Their claim to it is long void. If we leave, it changes nothing. Someone else will come, someone else will claim it. I won’t go down in history as the woman who failed to find Kal-Do.”
“And that’s the honest truth isn’t it.”
Out of the lake emanated a deep hiss, like a gas leak in hell.
We realised that we had let our passions get out of hand and our talk had turned to shouts.
We zipped our mouths shut right fast and waited. The whole city waited with us to find out if there would be punishment for our transgression.
No parrots cawed, the goats didn’t bleat and even a heart-back viper coiled up at the edge of the room seemed to control its spiteful nature and waited for the dragon’s next move.
I marked the time on my watch, the hand dripped along like honey on a spoon. By the three minute mark, I had started to relax. By the seven I heard the gentle coo of a dove. By the tenth, the bleat of a kid goat. By the eleventh, Susan had walked out of the camp without even a dark look back at me.
I half heartedly chased the black-heart viper out of the cave with a stick. It escaped between cracks in the rocks and I didn’t have the energy to pursue it further, though good procedure would have been to do so.
I took a walk to the edge of the city where we had left our camels, who, too big to be threatened by the leopards, had been living comfortably. On the walk back, things clarified for me and the obvious course of action had presented itself. Susan hadn’t returned yet and it was not without a certain trepidation that I lit a fire at the edge of our camp.
I got it good and hot, then began feeding it. I started with my own work, the drawings. That seemed fairer somehow. I put them in one a time to begin with, but then, as picked up speed, in handfuls. Next to go were my maps. Without them a return to the city would be hard, if not impossible. I wouldn’t make them again and I wouldn’t furnish anybody with my own insight into the rout.
Then I started on Susan’s notes. Books and books of them. That may seem cruel… it was cruel, but I was certain of myself and in motion without anything to break my free fall. I burned her journals, her notes and her maps all except the one to the central tower that I shoved into my pocket. Finally, I put her personal diaries in.
I hesitated before doing so. It felt like an execution of somebody I cared for. Though I was already over a threshold, nothing would be salvageable between us. I knew that. All was ash. I put her diary in. I could have read through it, found a passage that hinted at the location of the city, ripped them out and tossed them into the flames.
You might think that I did it to protecter her confidentiality, but that would be gullible on your part. It didn’t cross my mind. When all the documents were in, I sat and watched, ensuring that the thick books burned all the way through by prodding at them with a stick.
Susan understood what had happened the second she entered our room.
I’ve seen people kill each other with knives, entrenching tools and their hands. The looks on their faces were nothing like the cold fury on her face.
I stood up to greet her. There was no need for me to explain. She understood. She belted me round the face, lighting up my cheek and ears. Fair enough. She deserved that one, but I would tolerate no further assault.
“We could have talked…” she said, gasping for air, trying to stay angry and not let disappointment drag her apart. “found a compromise.”
“Maybe. But I lacked the imagination to see a middle point between us.” I said trying to put the blame on my own fault in a sad and hopeless effort to salvage something between us. “I couldn’t let this place be torn apart.”
She didn’t reply at once. Once she had composed herself, she said, “oh you’ve got imagination enough. You see yourself sitting in the city. Trying to forget about yourself, trying not to loathe yourself, hoarding this place as sure as the dragon, keep it as a jewel for you alone.”
“I’m not staying here. I plan to go back to commonwealth territory as soon as possible. I’ll say we found nothing, that the stories of Kal-Do are just that.”
She didn't need things explaining to her. She understood that she had to leave with me. That she lacked the skills needed to safely transverse the desert on her own.
“You are such a piece of shit.”
I shrugged.
“I’ll find my way back you know. You are not as important to this as you clearly think. There are others who know the desert as well as you. I’ll be back with colleagues without your juvenile sentimentality for a reptile in a swamp.” She said.
“I’ll deny everything. I’ll paint you as a fraud and a charlatan, making up tall tales and hoping your father’s reputation will give you credibility.”
She took another swing at me. I could have let it hit me. I wish I had. She would have damaged little more than my pride.
But, I didn’t.
I kept a childish promise to myself. I caught her wrist and gave it a good stern twist. The unexpected change in momentum and the pressure I put on her joints caused her to stumble. She put out her other arm to break her fall. Right next to a crack in the wall. Right next to a black heart viper.
I don’t have the heart to tell you about how Susan died, to go into the sorry detail of how the viper’s venom took everything from her and how she was forced to die with only her betrayer for companionship. I don’t have the heart. It is too fresh and awful for me to look in the face. I’m a coward.
So what is a coward to do now? Go back to the commonwealth and lie about everything that happed? Perhaps. Whatever I decide to do, I will leave this letter here in the camp -a confession if somebody ever comes out here, so there is a chance truth can be told, I will deal with any consequences from that when it is done, if I am still around to be made responsible. Then I will take the underground path to the tower in the lake, walk to the top. There, with the city all around me, I will decide if I deserve to keep on living or I’ll throw myself to the dragon.
*