Orihah, Son of Jared, was the first to see the man floating in the water. Salt crusted the man’s skin, and Orihah thought at first glance that the man was dead. As the barge crossed the many waters he had occasionally seen bodies of the dead. As he called out to the body some of the others on the barge stood up to look. The man turned his head and opened his mouth but it made no sound.
They swam out to him and brought him into the fold. As water was given to the man he nodded and smiled. He used some of the water to drink and the rest to wash his body clean of the salt. He had some scrapes and abrasions, and around his neck was a green figurine of some animal with a wide head and large teeth. Orihah had never seen such an animal.
The man could not speak to them even after his thirst was quenched—the language of all had been confounded, and though they had seen some groups since they left the valley of Nimrod, no other group could understand Orihah and his family. They did come to understand his name—Rizlah. He would say his name as a way of greeting, or of thanks, as people brought him food. He understood the basic instructions of the barge, and helped them steer and guide it. His strength returned quickly and during the days he would smile and occasionally try to make some conversation.
One night Rizlah woke a whole barge as he thrashed in some nightmare spasms. Orihah tried to wake him up, but the man did not respond as he was shaken or as Orihah yelled his name. After a time Rizlah calmed down, but he could not communicate what it was he had dreamed. The green figurine was clutched in his hand and he held it up and said, “protection.” Orihaha nodded but he didn’t really understand. Rizlah eventually fell back asleep and no more spasms disturbed him in the night.
Over the next weeks Jared and Orihah spoke about Rizlah, and Jared agreed to pray to understand the man. While he had no more nightly outbursts, Orihah did notice that others shied away from Rizlah, especially when he clutched the green figure. It didn’t seem to be an object of worship, just one of comfort, like a child’s toy. Some nights Orihah would dream of the figure, moving and writhing off in the distance as if it was dancing, or fighting.
The weeks went by as they continued to cross the many waters. Jared said they would soon be reaching the great waters and the barges wouldn’t be strong enough to carry them. Rizlah spent that day holding his idol and speaking to himself. He did not help at all and Orihah had made the decision that if he did not work he could not stay with them. They would give him some food and send him on his way.
It was the next morning that a scout returned. He had been ahead a few days’ travel and had run through the night. He had found a building, mostly destroyed, but with some rooms intact. It was a large building, with doors the height of two men, and steps you had to climb. Inside of it there were great statues of animals and people, some animals he had never seen before.
When Orihah and his group finally arrived they found this giant building built into the side of a sheer cliff. They began to catalog the rooms and things therein. While some places were blocked off with rubble from collapse, they had soon counted hundreds of rooms. Statues in the thousands. All of them of animals and people. And the people, Orihah realized, were as tall as the doors.
They stayed for a few days in this place—a palace, or temple—and aside from the rooms choked off by rubble, they had explored it all. On the fourth morning, Rizlah went missing. No one on watch had seen him wake up. They hadn’t seen him leave through the front, either. In his bedroll was the green figurine. Orihah picked it up by the leather strap it was strung on, and stared at it. Was this a different one? The creature looked somehow more alien than it had before—the eyes seemed wrong. Orihah hadn’t spent much time looking at Rizlah’s figurine before, but now that he held it and could examine it, this figurine looked more familiar, but he couldn’t place where from. Orihah showed it to a few others but no one else felt as repulsed as he did. When his father, Jared, looked over the statue, he reckoned it came from some group who knew of the Ancient Father’s garden with the treacherous snake. Orihah had never considered that, as he barely thought the figurine a serpent, but that satisfied him. He put the figure in a pouch on his belt and continued searching with others for Rizlah.
As they wound their way, one of the others found footprints that seemed fresher than the rest. These wound aimlessly through rooms, occasionally coming in front of statues. As they examined the statues they noticed that it looked like someone had taken a chisel to them. Not to carve them, but to chip away at some features, so hands and feet were marred, fingers missing, eyes gouged out– but no one could remember if those marks had been there before or if they were new. Orihah hadn’t heard any hammering last night. Surely if Rizlah was responsible the sound would have echoed through the place. Orihah held a torch higher to illuminate the face of the statue and he jumped as he did. The statue was still now but as he raised the flame, he could have sworn he saw it move. Instinctively Orihah patted the pouch with the figurine inside. It seemed to give him a little strength and calm his heart.
Orihah kept following the footprints until they disappeared in front of a statue that he had not before seen—nor had any of those he brought with him. Glancing over the statue, he saw it bore a strange resemblance to the figurine now on his belt. He took it out and held it up to compare—while they had similar wide faces and rows of teeth, the statue was even more snake-like, with a long coiling body and eyes closer to the side of its head. The figurine had eyes on the top of its head, but it had no body. As Orihah turned the figure around, he noticed that on the back were a few small glyphs but he could not read them- they looked not like his language nor the language he knew from before the tower fell.
Someone in the group started talking louder and there was a scraping of stone as they lifted up a portion of the floor, revealing steps leading down next to the statue of the beast. The group looked around at each other until Orihah nodded and began descending. The stairs were tall so that each step down required him to either jump, or turn around and climb down. They wound downward and Orihah realized they were spiraling underneath the statue of the beast. He gripped the figurine tightly as he set the torch down and climbed down another step. He grabbed the torch and turned to repeat the process when he stopped and held up a hand for the rest to be still.
A sound echoed from below. It sounded like someone singing at first, until Orihah listened closer and realized it was a scream. He froze, torn between retreating and saving his people, or continuing to climb and risk injury to save Rizlah, if that scream came from him.
Orihah turned around and told half of the group to go back and report to Jared what had happened. The other half would continue down. They drew short swords as they scrambled down the large steps until there were no more steps. The spiral broke out into a long hallway. The hallway had smooth walls that curved at the top. The height felt wrong. Orihah wondered if the men who made this had been that tall. The screaming continued intermittently, and it sounded like they were getting closer to the source.
The hallway finally branched into two, each going opposite ways. Orihah tried to imagine where they were under the palace—were they further in the mountain? Or somewhere else. It was impossible to say at this point, and the darkness swallowed the paths beyond the reach of the torch. They listened and heard the screams coming from the right. Following the tunnel to the right they continued walking for what seemed like hours, but with no light it was difficult to say. They stopped to have rations and water and one of the party pointed to something on the wall. It was the first they had noticed that some of the wall was not bare—there was, lightly engraved, a glyph. It was the same as one of the glyphs on the figurine. Orihah traced it with his finger and felt a chill down his spine when another scream, louder and closer, echoed down the hall.
The group continued their walk and, finally, they saw an end to the tunnel—and a ladder leading up to a trapdoor in the ceiling. Light shone through this door and so Orihah extinguished his torch. The ladder was sturdy and, as he climbed it, the wood looked and felt unlike any wood he had ever worked with. The screams sounded like they were on the other side of the door, so Orihah breathed deeply to gather himself, then pushed the door but slightly to try and see what was in the room.
He peered around and saw torches on the walls lighting the entire room. He saw Rizlah, but not Rizlah, some monstrous form, screaming as his skin split and burst and green sinews erupted from the exposed skin. Over the not-Rizlah stood a gargantuan man all made of stone—Orihah thought he looked like the statue that had given him a start. The stone man was chanting and Orihah recognized it as the language they spoke before the tower. He listened through the screams as the stone man spoke.
“You escaped the punishment and you thought you were free. But the debt you owe to us was not paid in full. You were to lead them away from this place. Now that you have failed you will suffer the punishment again—”
The stone man stopped and turned, unaffected by the screams of Rizlah. He locked eyes empty though they were with Orihah and yelled, “THE SEAL HAS BEEN BROKEN! THE TOWER HAS FALLEN! YOU WILL NOT ESCAPE THE PUNISHMENT!” As the statue-man spoke these words he slammed his fist against the wall and the ground shook. Orihah fell from the ladder and his body slammed against the ground. His head was swimming as he stared up at the trap door. The men who had come with him helped him to his feet and Orihah yelled for them to run. They retreated into the darkness, spread out across the hallway to feel the wall and look for the turn back to the stairs.
After his legs felt like they would stop working and his lungs felt like they could not move any more air, one of the men called that he had found the turn. They followed him left down the path. Orihah realized when he turned that he did not have the green figurine any longer. He listened behind him and heard only faint screams and the occasional tremble of earth. They continued down the hall, climbing back up the spiraling stairs. They had to stop several times as the sheer effort wore away at them. When they reached the top of the stairs they realized that the stone had been moved back. Despite their efforts, they could not find where in the ceiling to push to get to the surface.
They began to panic as they took turns trying to hit the ceiling in the dark. There were no cracks to the surface, and, even if there were, the room they had entered was so far in the mountain that no light would reach it. As the group began to yell and cry, Orihah thought. They had made the turn, as he expected, but was it the correct turn? What was there to the left hallway? Why was this blocked off? Surely Jared and the others would not have covered it back up and abandoned them?
After a few minutes they noticed that the earth tremors had stopped and all was quiet. They sat in darkness, punctuated with the occasional sob or exasperated sigh. Finally, Orihah spoke. “We must go down the left path. It’s the only way.” He did not wait to hear a response, and began climbing back down the too-tall stairs.
When he reached the bottom he heard the others drop down the final step to follow him. He took a small bit of rope and tied it to his belt, telling the others to follow suit. They could hold on to the person in front of them so that they could stick together even in the darkness.
Orihah’s eyes never adjusted to the darkness, and the quiet sound of footsteps was the only sound now that the screams and tremors had stopped. Every step he worried that he would run into the stone man, or worse…whatever Rizlah had become. He shuddered as he remembered the unnatural way Rizlah’s body had contorted as things grew out of it. They reached the fork and turned left, staying close to the wall. He did not feel another glyph in the darkness and, even if he had, he did not know that he would want to.
Finally they reached a wall where the hallway ended. At this wall there was a ladder like the one down the right hall, though no light shone above them. Orihah climbed the ladder and peeked through the trapdoor at its top. The room was all darkness, and so he pushed the door open. It seemed to stick up nearly vertical, and Orihah had to push it hard to get it to open all the way. As he did, it hit the ground with a thump that echoed back down the hallway. As he climbed in the room and began to feel around one of the men whispered saying he heard something. Orihah strained to listen and heard a sound like a small stream coming from the hallway behind them. It was soft and sounded distant, so Orihah ushered the rest of the men in the room and took extra care to quietly close the door.
The men blindly groped around the room in the dark, making small tapping noises on the wall to locate each other and not collide with one another. One of the men tapped excitedly. His excitement was explained when the torch he had found lit up the room. The excitement was short-lived as horror took over. The walls of the room were all painted with scenes ripped from the nightmares of mankind. A mural around the whole room depicted massive snake-headed beings fighting and eating men whole, stone-men crushing cities as women and children burned in piles. Lightning from heaven striking a giant tower, with multitudes of people killing and eating each other below. Across one wall, Orihah saw the stone men retreating to the mountains, with the snake beings following. Only, he noticed as he looked closer, these snake beings were not the same as the monsters. They had bodies of long tentacles that looked from afar the same as the snakes—and these ones that followed the stone men had eyes on top of their heads.
Orihah stepped back, not realizing he was standing atop the trapdoor, and it gave a loud creak. He jumped off before it could break, but it gave him a start and the men all realized the sound of water was getting louder. They began frantically looking around the room as Orihah began to sob. “I’ve doomed us,” he whispered, squatting down and rocking with hands around his knees.
As he rocked the man with the torch called in a whispered yell, “Orihah, what is this glyph?” Orihah stood and walked over, wiping tears from his face. The glyph the man pointed to looked similar to the one on the cave wall, and one on the figurine, but there was a line missing from the top right. Orihah traced the glyph and told him it was incomplete. As he stared at the glyph, hearing the sound grow louder, Orihah was struck with inspiration. He grabbed a small bronze tool from his belt pouch and scratched in the missing part of the glyph. As he did the room began to light from above. The sound of water grew louder as the top of the room began to lift from above them, as if someone was tearing the ceiling away. Orihah panicked as he realized that they would not be able to climb- the walls were too high. He thought of the ladder they had climbed to get in and hurried to open the trap door. He was greeted with what sounded like a roaring river and a smell like wood rotting in water. He and another man worked the ladder free and began bringing it up. They set it against the wall and they began climbing, making their way out of the room.
Orihah was the last to climb out and as he did the floor began to give way. He leapt from a rung of the ladder as the floor collapsed behind him, reaching for the edge. A hand caught him. Before he was pulled from the room, Orihah glanced behind him, the floor was now gone and the ladder was swept away. To his horror, he saw the creature with the head of a snake with its eyes on top, tentacles following its body. It jumped from the tunnel floor and made a sound like a crashing wave as it snapped at Orihah, but Orihah was pulled over the edge onto the floor of the ruined building. When he tumbled to his feet he began to run—to escape and to follow the rest of his party. But as he started, he realized that no one else was running.
Orihah stopped and turned back—he and the men who had followed him were all in front of the statue of the serpent, the great monster that had eaten men whole. No sound of rushing water came from the open floor now. Orihah looked down and it led not into a room with a collapsed floor, but to the large stairs spiraling down. When Orihah looked at his men none of them seemed alarmed, though they did seem amused by his confusion. As he calmed himself down he blamed the darkness and tricks of his mind. The men sealed the door again and they agreed that if Rizlah had left of his own volition there was not much they could do to force him to come back.
It was morning when Orihah had escaped what he thought was his doom, and he encouraged Jared to keep the group moving to the great water. Jared agreed that they had explored the temple enough, though he also was sad that Rizlah had left them. They packed and began journeying out before the heat of the day, leaving the valley with the temple in its walls. Orihah turned back as they left to survey the scene. As they traveled that day, he occasionally would catch a smell like wood rotting in water, and his heart would race. They reached some woods and, a short way in, they found a small clearing and made camp for the night.
Orihah slept fitfully, dreams plagued by stone men and giant snakes. He was running through the palace, turning through doors, tripping on rubble until he collapsed in front of the stone monument that he thought he had seen move. He looked up and it loomed over him. Its face turned and morphed into that of a snake. It opened its mouth, rows of teeth glistening with black ichor and the stench of wood rot overtook him as it struck out.
He awoke with a jerk as one of the men shook him. It was his turn for the watch, final watch of the night. Orihah got up and stood at the edge of camp, peering into the distance. As he shuffled his feet, he felt a small rock underneath them. Bending down to inspect it, his heart froze. It was a small green figurine of a snake, eyes on the side of its head. He turned it over and saw the glyphs on the back. They looked similar to the ones he remembered except one was missing a mark in the top right. Orihah clutched the green figurine and looked into the forest. The only sound he heard was the crackling of the fire.
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Daniel Meehan has appreciation for a well-balanced blade.
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