Beneath the Dark Ice

Twenty-five

Having pulled back from the rock fall, the creature surged forward to test the boulders that barred its path. It pushed some out of the way, but encountered far too many for it to get much more access and the confined area didn’t allow it to bring its enormous strength to bear. It laid its long clubs against the solid walls and grew still — it could sense the small vibrations of movement coming back from the warm bloods — they were still close by. It withdrew its tentacles and unfolded itself out of the rift crevice, back into the larger cave. Long-past images flashed into its brain. It knew there were other entrances it could use.

The bleeding from its ragged stump had slowed now to little more than a trickle and in a few hours it would be sealed over and the regeneration would commence. However, the bleeding had created a river of blood, not debilitating for a creature of its size but enough to create an irresistible blood scent trail that attracted all manner of carnivores from the lake cavern now far behind it. As the creature pursued the humans, it unknowingly drew behind it a silent, pulsating wave of teeth and claws.

“It doesn’t look like it’s been destroyed, more like it was just abandoned.” Monica’s observation seemed accurate as there was little sign of devastation or that the Aztlans had been pursued through the tunnels by a giant cephalopod. The corridor opened into a larger chamber perhaps 200 feet long with a high carved ceiling. Around the walls the glyphs were interspaced with carvings of pictorial scenes sculpted in splendid detail. The raised stone tableaus showed a level of craftsmanship that would have challenged some of the greatest artisans of today. Beautiful scenes of what the countryside must have been like, displaying heavily wooded forests or fields of low plants like grass. Many were of hunting parties capturing all manner of strange beasts of enormous proportions.

“Aimee, do you recognise these animals?” Matt was touching his hand to some magnificently carved images of great land creatures.

“Wow, they’re perfect. Diprotodon, dromornis, thylacinus. This is a window to our past.” Aimee pointed as she marvelled at the closest thing modern humans would ever get to a living representation of the long-extinct mega-fauna beasts.

“Say what? Dipdo who?” Monica smiled at their enthusiasm and encyclopaedic knowledge of the obscure as Aimee scrutinised another scene of a giant land-based lizard caught by the Aztlans in a sophisticated noose trap.

“And this reptile could be a megalania. These are all perfect images of extinct reptile and mammalian creatures — giant animals that died out tens of thousands of years ago. This one here, the diprotodon was the big brother of today’s cute and cuddly wombat, but it stood as tall as a grizzly bear with claws to match. This here, the dromornis, was a thunderbird. Ten feet tall and over a thousand pounds, they were fearsome predators and voracious meat eaters.”

Aimee stepped in closer to look at more of the fantastic images when Matt spoke. “It’s not uncommon that we should find these. Many early civilisations depicted hunting in their religious and artistic carvings. It’s the closest thing we archaeologists have to snapshots of the flora and fauna of the times.”

“And what’s this one?” Monica was pointing at a creature that looked to have a strong, four-legged body but instead of jaws it had a curving beak and two strong wings folded across its back.

Matt looked at it, looked at Aimee, who shrugged, and then shook his head. “A griffin? Nah, impossible. They obviously included some mythological creatures as well.”

Matt looked again at the strange winged creature. The detail was perfect, right down to the tiger-like striping across its muscled back. He shook his head and moved on to the start of a series of more detailed and royal-looking glyphs. “OK, here we are; it’s the story of Aztlan. Looks like it’s set out in chronological order — now where does it start?” Matt’s lips moved silently as he drew out the meanings from the stone story before him.

“Ah, and here is where we begin.” Monica and Aimee followed Matt around the chamber’s perimeter as he told the story of a civilisation now long dead for many millennia.

Meanwhile, Alex scanned the room, looking at the entrances, the debris size, and shape, and the ceilings above. He strained all his superhuman senses for any sound or sense of movement or life other than their own. For now they had time to look at the life and death of perhaps the first great civilisation the world had ever known. Maybe it could tell them how to fight the creature or, better yet, escape it.

“Bear with me as this’ll be a subjective translation. I’ll be filling in the gaps myself with what I think fits or looks right.” Matt turned and shrugged, then went back to the glyphs. “The Aztlans believed they were raised by the gods from the very soil itself. The gods lifted, or maybe that’s crafted them, from earth and stone and gave them the world as a gift. This symbol means they went forth over the waves and knew of many other lands. These lands were mainly populated by the ‘hairy men’ or ‘hairy people.’ This is incredible. This history could be around fifteen thousand years old — at that time some continents had creatures like saber-toothed tigers and mammoths roaming their plains. Most of the indigenous natives would have been little more than hunter-gatherers. To them, this advanced race must have been awe inspiring.” Matt continued reading from the wall, pointing at one symbol, giving its meaning and then moving on to the next.

“Aztlan was a land of sunshine and abundance. The people were healthy, crops were plentiful and the gods cherished them. They believed of all the world’s people they were the favourites of the gods. This looks interesting; this symbol could mean an earthquake. One day the earth started to shake and many of their buildings fell down. They were all thrown to the ground. They believed they had angered the mightiest god in Xibalba, the underworld, and he was coming to punish them himself. I bet this was when their digging broke through to the subterranean sea. Before then, it had probably been undisturbed for hundreds of millions of years.”

Matt pointed to an image of small figures kneeling before a giant, tentacled creature. “Introducing Qwotoan himself,” Matt read on. “The following pictures show more and more Aztlans kneeling before Qwotoan. Looks like they were upping the sacrifice ante each month, but all it was doing was feeding an ever-growing appetite.”

“Feeding dependency, they created safari park lions. The creatures made humans their natural food source,” Aimee said.

Matt nodded and continued, “Qwotoan was also coming up into the city and taking the people without waiting for the sacrifice ceremony.”

“How? How was the creature getting into the city?” Alex stepped forward eagerly.

“Doesn’t say, I’m afraid. He was haunting them with visions of their lost ones — this must be the mimicking we’ve seen before. The people were terrified, and with all the sacrifices they were making, I think they actually started to thin out their population.” Matt was pointing at one of the images depicting hundreds of tiny figures kneeling before the waving tentacles.

“The people decided they had had enough and forced the king to act. The king assembled his army and put his two most trusted warriors in charge — this is the bit we know. It tells again of the brothers Hunahpu and Xbalanque who are sent into the underworld to, it looks like, negotiate with Qwotoan, with — and here’s those number glyphs again — about two thousand warriors. Hard to tell whether their job was to fight or be sacrificed. Either way, the king hoped to attain some sort of peace for Aztlan.”

Matt moved along the wall again. “Ah. Damn it, and here is our brave Hunahpu’s reward.” Matt’s training had taught him to be dispassionate about events that occurred long in the past — they could not be changed, only learned from. Many cultures had very different concepts of mercy and sometimes an execution was actually an honour. However, he couldn’t help feeling sad for the brave little warrior whose footsteps they had followed, who had survived one of the most dangerous and fantastic journeys in the history of his or any race, and who had unwittingly even guided them up from the depths.

“After Hunahpu had led the royal troops into the underworld, after he had lost his brother, after he had found and fought the great beast and managed to return alive, he was executed by the king for failing in his divine duty.” Matt shone his torch on the pictoglyph. It showed a warrior figure being torn apart by several oxen-like creatures. Matt seemed to be in a trance and his eyes watered, not just from the dust they had been kicking up. To bring him back Monica pointed at the next picture along.

“Even I can read this one. They’re using fire to drive the creature off.”

“Looks like it. They used fire, or Kinich Ahau’s gift as they refer to it. I think they had their fires burning in the mouths of the caves for decades. It never drove it off, only slowed it down — the creature was always finding new ways to get to its food supply.” Matt moved to the next pictoglyph and started to read, “Their winters were growing longer and colder, and because of the change in seasons there was less food. They believed that Qwotoan had cursed them and all their land. This could be the onset of the glaciation epoch when Antarctica was becoming frozen again. The timing tallies with our geological and meteorological evidence that puts it at about twelve thousand years ago.”

Matt moved along again. “The new king commanded they build a giant fleet of boats and collect as many of their animals and seed crops as they could. He and his generals would command an expedition to sail in different directions and find a new Aztlan; he would take his bravest warriors, the alchemists, the priests and the healers. Looks like all the elite and intelligentsia had been chosen to get the hell out; the rest were to remain behind and wait for the boats to return so they could be transported when a new home was discovered.”

The last pictoglyph was incomplete and Matt could tell the drawings and writing was of a slightly different style. Perhaps the previous artisans had departed in the boats. Matt read the last words from Aztlan, “The cold is always with us. There is no food and no wood for our fires.” The last piece was more a lament of resignation and similar to the one they had seen in the upper caves at the beginning of their journey. “Qwotoan is angered and is always among us.”

“Those poor people.” Monica was shaking her head as if to blot out the image of the remaining Aztlans trapped in a city that was becoming iced over, with a giant hungry creature waiting for the fires to go out so it could rip them to pieces in the dark.

Aimee also couldn’t help feeling pity for the small race of people who had loved the sun and were doomed never to see it again. “They would have been forced into the city because of the cold, and that’s exactly where the orthocone wanted them.”

“We don’t know that for sure and probably never will — perhaps a few survived. What if some of them escaped down to the underground sea? There’s certainly food, water and warmth. Who knows what was living on the far shores down there.” Monica smiled weakly at Aimee, looking for some sort of confirmation that perhaps the small race didn’t all perish.

Aimee nodded and turned to look at Alex who had been silent behind them; his eyes were half closed and he looked to be in a trance, listening intently to something only he could hear.

Alex was straining his senses to try and pick up any sound or impression that they were being followed or about to be ambushed. He couldn’t feel the sliding vibrations or hear the wet slithering sound that told him that the creature was near but he could not help the feeling in the pit of his stomach that it was close and they were extremely vulnerable.

One by one they pulled themselves out of the sand on the black beach with a leathery, sliding sound. Each of the worms was roughly thirty feet in length and as thick around as a large horse. The blood-red segmented bodies were covered in short bristles that increased in length towards their feeding end, which was little more than a hole with hook-like teeth circling the entrance.

These creatures were the stuff of nightmares. Adapted to living beneath the wet, black sand, they had never existed in any fossil record.

The Antarctic worms hesitated at the mouth of the cave, their blunt heads raised and waving back and forth, tasting the air as their bodies pulsated greasily. In a quivering peristaltic motion they moved into the cave the humans had escaped into. However, it was not the scent of the small mammals that drew them out of the sand; it was the orthocone’s blood that they followed. Even though the nightmarish creatures were blind, to them the blood trail was as wide and clear as a well-lit highway.