Alien's Concubine, The (24 page)

There would be no time in the course
of the day to study the mosaics. If she wanted to do so, she was
going to have to do it on her ‘own’ time.

It was creepier going to the temple at
night alone than it had been during the day. She would’ve liked a
weapon … a club, at least, to discourage any of the soldiers that
took it into their head that her presence, alone at night, was an
invitation.

She took a long gripped flashlight,
deciding it was heavy enough to discourage anyone that might get
that idea … as long as it wasn’t a gang.

Most of the floodlights had been
focused upon the pit, leaving shadows along the wall, but the cross
beams from one side of the chamber to the other chased away all but
light shadows. Flipping the flashlight on that she’d brought with
her, Gaby started just inside the door and walked slowly around the
perimeter, trying to decide where the story began and ended. Was it
in chronological order? Or any order at all? And was it as true and
accurate an account of events as the recorders could manage? Or had
politics influenced the account?

The walk-by didn’t enlighten
her.

Returning to the mosaics on either
side of the entrance, she stood and stared at each in turn, trying
to interpret what she was looking at. Finally, deciding the
depiction to the right of the door was the beginning, she settled
on the floor and tried to figure out what the event was that was
supposed to be depicted.

There were at least a dozen figures in
it, all of them prostrated as if in worship. In the center of the
group was fire that burned with blue flames. She’d been staring at
it for so long the cold from the stone floor had turned her butt
cheeks to ice before it finally dawned on her that the face she saw
behind the column of blue flame wasn’t a figure on the other side
as she’d first supposed. The face was a part of the column of
fire.

She might have tumbled to that sooner
except that the face wasn’t Anka’s. Getting to her feet stiffly,
she moved a little closer, but the pattern of the colored stones
was lost when she moved too close. Stepping back just far enough to
detect the pattern, she examined the face in the blue flames for a
while and then studied the other figures. One stood out because of
the elaborate headdress he was wearing. A priest, she wondered? He
looked older than the others, in fact his hair was white. Beside
him was a woman, also white haired. Her garb, like that of the old
man, was more elaborate than the simple clothing worn by the
others, she realized.

Still clueless as to what the meaning
was, she moved to the next depiction. This one was easier to
decipher. It was a birth … obviously a birth of great importance to
have found its way into the temple. The same blue column of fire
appeared in it, and so, too, did the two elders that had figured
prominently in the first picture.

The old woman had the baby’s head
pressed to her bare breast.

The two old people weren’t a priest
and a priestess. As impossible as seemed, it still appeared clear
that they were the parents of the infant. The worshippers were
around the threesome now.

After moving back and forth between
the two pictures, Gaby decided the two elders were leaders, either
a priest and priestess, or possibly a Chieftain/King and his wife.
They were not only dominant figures in two different records, they
were the only ones besides the figure in the blue flames that had
any real detail to their features. And their garments were notably
richer than the garb the others wore.

A man and his wife, then, had prayed
for a child and been granted one?

A miracle child, because both were
clearly far too old to bear a child, assuming she’d figured it out
and that was what was happening.

The next five pictures were of
battles, or maybe just one great battle that they thought had
glorified the people enough to deserve several different
viewpoints. Gaby gave them only a cursory glance before moving on.
The segment following those depicted a boy or young man lying on an
altar. Blood flowed from a chest wound. Gaby had just decided it
must be a depiction of a sacrifice when she noticed that the same
elders appeared in this picture, as well, once more prostrate in a
worshipful pose, their faces lifted up as if in supplication to the
blue flame.

After staring it for some moments, she
moved back to the battle scenes she’d barely glanced at. She saw
then that it wasn’t, as she’d at first supposed, a single battle.
The pictures suggested different battles. At the center of each of
the first two pictures was the old chieftain. In the first he held
the infant, the second a tiny child. In the third the child stood
before him. In the last two, the old man was absent, but a young
boy stood at the center. She could tell by the size and build that
he would barely have been pubescent even in the last of
these.

A boy—the miracle child obviously—had
led his people in battle? Many battles if she’d interpreted the
pictures correctly.

And died, she saw, with a spear
through his chest. Blue rays of light spilled through the gaping
wound.

She stood thinking over what she
thought she’d deciphered for some time, staring into the distance.
She couldn’t seem to wrap her mind around it, however, and finally,
deciding she was just too tired to think straight, she abandoned
the quest for the night and sought rest.

She didn’t rest much. The scenes she’d
studied so hard intruded into her dreams and whether guided by any
truth or not, solidified in her mind as the story she’d pieced
together. The child hadn’t merely been a miracle of birth, though.
He’d been far more than that if he had led his people in battle—to
victory many times—before he’d even attained adulthood.

It took all Gaby could do to focus on
the task of separating and removing the remains in the pit the
following day. Her mind kept wandering to the story of the mosaics.
At lunch, instead of joining the others, she relieved herself,
grabbed a drink and a sandwich, and returned to examine the
pictures again to see if, with a clearer mind, she interpreted them
differently.

Try though she might, she couldn’t
pick up any other story that they might have been trying to
tell.

It dawned on her, though, that Anka
had lied to her. This was his temple. This temple was built to
worship him and the story contained on the walls of his temple
wasn’t just the story of the civilization that had built it. It was
Anka’s story.

He’d been borne of human parents, or
at least a human mother. The being in the first mosaic didn’t look
like him because it wasn’t him. It was his sire, his true sire, a
being just like him that had sown his seed in the withered womb of
a woman far too old to bear children.

The next picture confirmed it, for her
at least. It depicted the same boy on his knees, with no wound. The
blue fire was all around him, and beyond the altar where he’d been
lying was a huge crowd of worshippers, some prostrated on the
ground, others with looks of awe or horror on their faces, some
running or cringing as if fearful for their lives.

This was what Anka had implied, that
he’d taken the body of the human when the soul had left it, but the
pictures before that clearly gave that the lie. No ordinary human
child would have been capable of the things attributed to this
child.

Why, she wondered, had he lied to her?
Why had he said the body they’d found entombed here wasn’t him when
it was? And if he’d lied about this, what else had he lied
about?

Doubts arose to plague her as she
finished the day’s work, but she didn’t know if that was because
she just didn’t want to believe Anka had lied to her or if there
was substance to the thoughts. She did know, though, that
historians had been known to exaggerate or outright lie. What if
they’d only depicted the tale that way because they had wanted to
believe he was special from the beginning? It wasn’t unusual at all
for humans to claim kinship to the gods. Pretty much all of the
ancient rulers had claimed to be gods, or the off-spring of gods.
Was that all it was? Was she as guilty as they were of wanting to
believe something that wasn’t true at all?

If that was the case, though, what
about the old ruler and his wife? Had they just thought they were
too old to bear a child and that was why they’d considered their
son a gift of the god they’d prayed to? Or had they not thought any
such thing, but told that tale to their people so that the people
would look upon him with the ‘proper’ respect and awe? Had the man,
old and perhaps in failing health and with no healthy heir to pass
his reign to decided to protect his son with the lies?

It was a possibility she decided. The
most significant miracle attributed to the young King of the Biac’s
was his resurrection, and that would’ve been when Anka had taken
over the boy’s body.

One other possibility emerged, but
Gaby forgot all about it when they made a new discovery.

She had focused most of her energies
on piecing together the story, had completely forgotten that her
original reason for doing so was to see if she could discover some
clues of what had happened in the temple. It took most of a week to
remove the bodies to a special tent that had been set up to study
the bones.

Gaby hadn’t really expected to find
anything of any significance beneath the bodies, perhaps random
bits of bone and/or more pieces of the garments she’d first found.
She certainly hadn’t expected to find that the stones in the center
of the pit had been removed and a shallow grave dug.

She hadn’t expected to find the
mummified remains of a woman and her unborn child.

Chapter Fourteen

Temple priestesses, Gaby decided as
she examined the pieces of garments she’d begun sifting from the
debris beneath the skeletal remains. Only now and then did she find
pieces large enough to identify patterns or specific parts of the
garment. Most of the pieces were little more than swatches.
Whatever materials had been woven to make up the primary parts of
their garments had deteriorated beyond recognition. The bejeweled
pieces threaded together with gold thread and attached to the woven
gold were borders, she finally decided, trying to envision what the
gowns might have looked like.

Simple in form and flowing lines, she
was certain. Fastenings of any kind were rare on ancient garments,
and few cultures had developed the tools to cut garments into
precise shapes, so most were nothing more than a series of squares
and rectangular pieces tied together. The larger pieces she found
seemed to bear up that theory.

Dr. Sheffield had wanted to put some
of the others with her, but she had convinced him that it would be
better if she worked alone to gather the pieces of the garments
since they were so fragile. Despite the number of bodies they’d
found, the pit was not a very large one and it would be hard for
several people to work inside of it without risking the loss or
damage of what they might find.

It was a valid argument, but mostly
she had just wanted to work alone. She worked better without the
distraction—she had enough to distract her as it was.

As she worked, only half her mind was
on the sifting search. The other half could not be dragged from the
story Anka. Occasionally her mind would drift from the friezes to
Anka himself and she would wonder where he was, what he was doing …
if he’d found the woman she’d insisted he should look for. Those
thoughts were far too painful, though, and she would shove them
into the back of her mind and focus again on unraveling the
mystery.

Without verification from Anka
himself, she was never going to know for sure which of her theories
was closest to fact. It was entirely possible that the answer to
that was none. She’d realized after puzzling over whether or not
the old king had made up the story that she had no way of knowing
if there even was an old king. The ancients hadn’t liked mysteries
anymore than modern man did. If they couldn’t solve them with
actual facts, they made up things that seemed reasonable to them.
The whole story might be nothing more than a myth to explain Anka’s
arrival among them.

It certainly was if what Anka had said
was true. No infant, toddler, or even young boy would have had the
capability of leading an army, not a purely human one. An
intelligent, already mature, being with powers far beyond humans
might have directed a battle, even from within the body of a child.
And, of course, she’d seen some of what he was capable of. Whatever
the age or strength of the body he occupied, he could have thrown
the opposing army into complete disorder, manipulated them into
believing what he wanted them to believe.

So, she now had at least three
theories. Any of them were possible, and she had no way to
eliminate even one.

She had uncovered parts of the remains
before she realized she’d found another body. Pausing when she felt
a shape beneath the dirt she’d been brushing at, Gaby peered down
at it for several moments before she realized it was a body and
that this one had been mummified.

She had to revise that first
assessment when she had cleared the dirt from around the body
enough to see it better. Someone, she realized, had attempted to
hide this body.