Crematorium for Phoenixes (3 page)

In this way, today’s homebody can become a
sailor or buccaneer; the peaceful, quiet gentleman can become a
mercenary. People who have disappeared and then reappeared become
inexhaustible sources of wonder, gossip, and rumors.

And this particular region, always on the
edge of Zipangu’s wilderness did not differ much in its thought,
and the love of living is what drove these people to look back and
forth; they continued to exist like a slowly dying fire that only
needed a small breath of air to crackle again.

Therefore on this morning, with its bisected
twilight rays and heated micaceous cliffs glowing to portend a
glaring change, you will see the unanticipated outcome.

It all started with a visit from the traders
of the southern islands. Periodically—every lunar and solar
cycle, when the need increased, this armada headed toward the north
to collect the tanned skins of sheep and even more importantly, the
highly regarded sharkskin, coarse cloth, and wool; salted meat and
dried fish; fat cheese and pressed wild tea and herbs; plane boards
and metals; the feathers and down of poultry and other wild birds;
wax and honey; and all kinds of ceramics and tiles; the traders
sought all the products that could be found or produced on these
lands. In return, they drove up with ropes, all kinds of
agricultural implements and metal containers, fine jewelry, sour
milk, beer, fragrant and healed oil, other formulations, and the
most highly coveted item of all, people. The latter were
self-taught teachers and dentists, veterinarians and healers.

Even in those archaic times, tribute was
paid to these crafts. The proof of which could be found in the
cloth bags that these people carried around to fill with gold
nuggets, ears, rings, and bracelets.

But these doctors, whether you want to
describe them as advanced with their knowledge or antediluvian,
were powerless against the progressive deterioration and fragile
mortality that accompany mankind. Our life stories are little
more than bypassed roads; at intervals there appear points where
rising towers can be observed. The people themselves are chained in
such places by suffering and despair, and their guards, in the form
of hope, have taken a leave of absence from whence it seems they
will never return.

So in this vast world, grown like smelled or
poisonous mushrooms, hospitals, asylums, and prisons arose where
the guards of pain and eternity stood ready to hit with their
batons in hand. Even while hiding their faces with their hands
they come out of nowhere in the hours of darkness, dragged as heaps
across a cement floor.

Similarly here in Zipangu, like a crumbling
cemetery of rocks near the shore, there existed a leper colony.

“Powerless” is the sometimes the pen that
outlines the characters in the emotions of the soul, and some words
are not meant to be expressed (as might have thought the first
engraver who etched a message into a gravestone). We will again
repeat that there was a leper colony on a cliff. It rose as a
cloistered monastery, and every day food came elevated in a basket.
In return, from time to time, corpses wrapped in canvas would be
cast down.

It was just a waiting room for the
afterlife—a republic of ghosts waiting for the appointed hour that
breeds them together and uses all of us. Guarded by the walls, the
overwhelming disease took one life after another, while the great
dispenser of cards, of life, continued to distribute new decks of
them.

Every night, one of the sick stood guard in
a tower overlooking the colony. A system of mirrors and fires cast
a yellowish headlight while the guard waited for the traders to
arrive and sometimes the rest of the sick citizens would find him
dead in the structure the following morning.

This deathly rhythm was propagated along the
coastline, where the dead were waiting to be healed.

Sometimes, a few of them would leave the
rock—the healing powders from the outside world had helped, but the
recovered one didn’t tell of what had happened to them. Like
passengers coming from a long, exhausted journey in a land of
shadows, they wanted to forget about their past.

People came and went, counted the days, and
tossed and turned in anticipation one of those days when one of
them might perhaps be gifted with a new life.

So it was one morning, when the sky was as
black as graveyard dirt and lightning was illuminating the colony
with its opal arrows, that the disturbed water began to smash into
the solid stone.

At first came the usual sea trash: pieces of
wood and chips mixed with membranous algae, while the ocean
gradually began to bring barrels and boxes up until finally it was
wearing a canvas of bundles.

The winds hit the coast of Zipangu and
formed a powerful typhoon.

Dozens of ships were caught in ashen, murky
waters. They bent in the wind and toppled like puffs of dust.

Some of the natives rushed forward to rescue
survivors. Some were there for the more precious cargo.

But no one noticed—or actually, it was very
difficult to see—an unusual egg-shaped box of polished metal,
tossing against the rocks and ringing like a small bell with each
beat . . . .

After the last coastal resident was fetched
out of the water and returned home, the chest came to life; it
opened its cobwebs and its hemispherical walls split like a flower
blossoming. Out of this mysterious structure arose a man who went
forth into the colony.

Chapter
Four

The Leviathan was really huge. Around
giant titanium rods, like whale ribs, were riveted hundreds of
steel sheets, and it boasted a diamond-hard keel. The ship was like
a huge beehive or an anthill, immersed in water, whose complex
cobweb-like maze of compartments had been in the spirit of a
golem.

And although the crew that had been
miraculously “collected” had learned all of the information
necessary to control Leviathan, they needed time to get used to
it. They were like children who had entered a huge, monstrous
fair in which attractions and pavilions greeted them with grinning
demonic and protruding faces.

Therefore, after passing through numerous
funnel-shaped corridors and coming to the command bridge—a
spherical Plexiglas bubble—each and every one of them had the
feeling of being inside of a beast.

Amos Oz stared at the clicking equipment and
the cooling fans. He was the first person who dared to question the
stranger, “We can talk as important, super smart professors in
which case I would say that we no longer belong to our time or
yours. Will you explain what happened here?”

“The truth is among us,” smiled the
man. “Six years ago, or six centuries ahead, people found a
way to travel in time. But the body is far more fragile than
we can imagine. Time traveling modifies it, giving a man
strengths and weaknesses. People sent into the past become
monsters or gods. I’m just at the final stage, which should
fix this.”

“I do not understand, for what kind of
monsters are you talking about?” asked Amos.

“Rightly said. I speak of monsters that are
not weak, mutants that would not die outside their incubator
containers. They are, in fact, creatures with unimaginable power;
they will tear humanity apart before it is ready to oppose them . .
. You’ve heard the legends?”

“But they are nonsense used to put children
to bed.”

“Well, my friend, I understand where they
are coming from and you are right not to wake up. My name is
Victor Drake, and I will take you through stories while you
yourselves become legends. That is if you stay alive, of
course. Now, gentlemen, northwest is the course that lies
ahead of us.”

All of the chairs creaked; the submersible
sank its flaps and the propeller drove around its axis, leaving a
trail of gurgling, bursting bubbles.

Then the adventure really began with one
single step.

The Leviathan moved with many nodes per
hour, emerging from time to time on the surface, and before they
knew it the body-brown waters of the Atlantic Ocean were in front
of them. It was full of slimy algae and pieces of drifting ice from
the Arctic shield in the north. The waters were also marked by the
passage of fish, chased by predators like thin clouds in the
wind.

That’s the old truth that reveals the ocean
as a place with no memory, an object that will invariably carry the
pain in our hearts.

On that surface, even in the coffee-black
rocky islands that comprise an ever-rising and -sinking
archipelago, every one of us could find the peace that humanity
seeks while wandering between spirit and matter.

This is because the human has been created
to wander until he finds the parts of himself, the parts of others,
and God in the very end.

And here, in the space before them, water,
land, and air—all the threads of the tapestry of life—were
intertwined and created precisely those pieces that make up the
horizon.

It was here, among the elements of the
northern hemisphere that simultaneously quickly and slowly, like a
train running through the endless prairie and taiga, the Leviathan
moved. The great vessel passed over the abyss and its unlimited
creations, overlooking sunken remains of galleons full of caskets
studded with gold and silver. It ignored these deposits of precious
metals, these treasures beyond the imaginations that created the
stories about Samarkand and Bukhara, Cairo and Alexandria, Damascus
and Baghdad. Such actions caused the crew to look at the sights
through Victor’s eyes and realize the folly and vanity with which
they had recently lived.

Those who are going through life, real life,
are no longer the same, really, because beyond the darkness of the
horizons are those things that lured unfortunate souls like Sinbad
the sailor.

We will be doing it, dear reader, because
these dreams are built in those halls that exist in the crowns of
treetops, in the floating cities lodged within unfamiliar waters,
in the unending bastion of pinnacles whose masonry crypts lie
forgotten and filled with gold. These are the dreams that shine
like torches, flaring in our lives.

The men in the Leviathan were in the shadow
of the Nordic coast, passing through the watery depths of the
Northwest, which in antiquity humanity portended to be paradise and
in the Middle Ages was hell on Earth.

They walked hundreds of miles, separated
continents from continents, and before them rose a bluish, smoke
mirage: the land of the ice—Iceland.

This piece of land, swept into the fog of
the North, sounded by flocks of sheep and farms, full of vulcanized
rubber and eternal ice, this piece of earth is interested in our
history because here, hundreds of leagues below water, on the
continental shelf nested the legendary Kingdom of Thule.

It should not surprise you, gentle reader,
how this story emerges with ease from the realms mentioned in old
letters, as though it were one of the tales of the Far East, where
gardens with fountains and waterfalls and jeweled palaces came into
being from nowhere overnight. It is like them and this one contains
part of the trough.

So, cut into the soft limestone cliffs,
there were galleries, tunnels, cellars, and premises. They were the
work of ancient miners who had lived through the ages, fueled by
the legend of the lost Atlantis.

If only you, dear reader, had the chance to
glimpse the man-made stone that showed white as ivory, the carved
columns like rows of trees, the statues of the Titans, supporting
and covering the monumental buildings. If only you could see the
architectural genius under which the fabulous city of Petra would
have stood ashamed.

The copper-red submersible, cast from brass,
floated here like a fish through a watery passage (shimmering like
a flash off of a metallic eyeglass) and journeyed around the
underwater city to its depths and the surface. The Leviathan filled
the cool cave dungeons that had been carved from wax-yellow
crystals of incalculable wealth.

Now, however, the kingdom had become a tomb
for the dead. The gray dust and slowly oozing water filled level
after level of arched tunnels, and in the throne rooms lurked
creatures that wanted to be outside.

Maneuvering between the buckled piers of
what reminded—petrified structures that spread like the tentacles
of an octopus or fish and algae farms, the Leviathan gradually
approached its target. As it moved, it illuminated arches, domes,
and giants that looked like the overgrown Palaeogene fossils of
predators.

Finally, after hours of navigating between
the ruined buildings, which although seemingly frail and fragile
like the bony hands of the undead could actually quite easily
penetrate the ship’s hull, the Leviathan reached Thule’s main
entrance. The submersible floated alone and small like prophet
Jonah before the mouth of a whale.

The shell-shaped entrance towered over the
submarine. It bore carvings of symbols for long-dead language:
cuneiform, hieroglyphics, runes, and more were concentrated in
clusters across its surfaces.

Squeezing by, the Leviathan sank into
it.

Chapter
Five

The whiff of wind rocked the surface of the
airship, reminding one of a twisted, pleated flag or trembling
flesh, throbbing upon every exhalation of the breath. The
whitish-yellow sunlight reflected off of the vessel’s fabric in
such a way that it looked like it was glowing; it was a mighty
animal bladder framed in silver.

The gondola, little more than an aluminum
appendage, also swayed with the rhythm of an awkward dancer.

The comfort of the captain’s cabin spread
itself in this part of the airship, revealing a dizzying panoramic
view for the gathered crew and the stranger to behold. Stretching
out like colorful pieces of pleated drapery, their eyes were
treated to a vista of extensive fields and pastures. It was a
greenish-brown staggered mosaic that spread out in every
direction.