The Inca Prophecy

15 Tales of Perdition

On board the Cóndor, an interesting development was unfolding. Purdue and Sam had both mistook the trawler’s flag for that of the sinister organization they had been battling in secret for the past few years — The Order of the Black Sun. They soon found out, however, that the sigil flying from the finial represented something entirely different — the Children of the Sun. The only question was if it called on equally wicked support.

“That’s right!” Vincent cried after Hannah guessed at it. “The lady wins a bottle of Aragh Sagi, courtesy of my own collection!” Hannah smiled, taking a sip of her as yet untouched wine.

“Where do you get Arak from? It’s rare, is it not?” Purdue asked, referring to the ancient Persian distilled drink, traditionally not easy to come by in conventional corners.

“Why would you ask that?” Sam jested. “Can’t you see the man has the robust voice of a pirate?” Sam winked at Vincent, who found him very amusing.

“Your friend is correct, Mr. Purdue,” Vincent cheered. “I travel almost everywhere at sea, and by the sea I obtain my desires. In this case, the batch Miss Hannah here will be rewarded with was produced by my good friend Amat in Shiraz, a man I worked with on fishing charters for eight years.

While the men were talking, Hannah’s eye fell on a beautiful gilded item that reminded her of a cartoon-shaped dog bone. It fanned out on both ends of a flat strip, upon which illegible carvings had suffered some erosion.

“My father-in-law gave me that,” Vincent commented when he saw her staring.

“He lives in the most beautiful place, the eye of Pachamama, I tell you!” With a mischievous twinkle in his eye, he leaned forward and asked them all, “Would you like some Arak?”

Purdue vehemently declined as gracefully as he could, citing the wine as plenty for his sensitive palate. Sam, however, was a sport. Both he, Peter, and Hannah agreed to the challenge, on the condition that the captain would relate to them all the superstitious basis of the region’s waters.

“What is Patama-what?” Sam asked, wishing he had his voice recorder with him. It had been salvaged, but it was still below deck in the bunk where he had rested after the Cóndor rescued him from the rubble of the crash.

“Pachamama,” Vincent said sincerely. He leaned over to one of his deckhands. “Adrian, go get the Arak for us, would you? Um, Pachamama is the name given by some of the indigenous peoples of South America to Mother Earth. You know, like Gaia, for instance,” he explained to his guests.

“Ah,” Purdue replied. “So you are from South America?”

“With those baby blues?” Hannah chuckled. “I doubt that.”

Vincent smiled and shook his head. “My wife is. My wife is from Lima, born and raised, but her parents are a bit more…,” he cocked his head and winced a bit, “…traditional. It is from my father-in-law that I got the name of this boat, you see?”

“The prophecy of the condor and the eagle?” Hannah asked.

“My, my, young lady, you know a lot more than your quiet way leads on.” The skipper looked immensely impressed.

“Oh, please do not look so amazed, Vincent,” she objected coyly. “It is all from my brother’s rants and the information he forced into me over the years that stuck all this stuff in my head. In fact, the reason I took this particular gig with Mr. Purdue was because I heard that he was planning to traverse this part of the waters. I wanted to make my brother jealous by sailing across the Alboran Sea.”

Purdue was elated that the traumatized woman was finally loosening up a bit, hopefully putting the tragedy behind her as best she could now that they were safe from the perils of the elements and the gods that controlled them. Vincent looked a bit solemn at Hannah’s words. He blinked slowly and replied in a soft voice, “You might change your mind if you knew what slept under these waves, Miss Hannah.”

Sam and Peter received their Arak with enthusiasm, but soon they regretted their zeal. The drink rendered them breathless for a good few seconds, ripping their chests open with a ghastly rush of ethanol and raisins.

“Oh my God!” Sam choked, slamming down the glass to the skipper’s amusement. Hannah had not liked what Vincent had to say about her wanting to sail here, but she hoped it was just an alpha-male response and nothing more. Peter was leaning over, halfway to the floor as he coughed profusely. He could not utter a word, and Purdue was in stitches.

“What is sleeping under us?” Hannah asked abruptly, partly because she felt shirked by Vincent and his confidence, and also because she wished to know more about the artifact. “Did you get that under the waves too?”

“I told you, it was a gift from my father-in-law,” Vincent told her.

“It exhibits signs of deterioration: marine corrosion, most likely,” she added.

Vincent scoffed, changing the cheerful atmosphere to one of uncomfortable silence. His demeanor looked labored, and his male guests hoped that he would be tolerant of the lady and not let his temper flare again. To their surprise the skipper answered with lenience, “It was discovered by divers in 1958, off the coast of Peru, my dear girl. One of those divers was my father-in-law, Harim. If you have to find something bad about it, about my possession of it… Harim stole that relic, alright? It is a stolen item from a find over sixty years ago, and part of the reason why he gave it to me was because he was on his deathbed.”

The cabin was silent.

The only sound was the night waves crashing invisibly in the darkness that surrounded their solitary, floating haven. Hannah felt like shit for prying. She cleared her throat and reached for her wine. Vincent waited for a counter-argument, but she had abandoned her pursuit, it seemed. Sam broke the stalemate. “Tell us about this cursed stretch of water, oh captain.”

As always, Sam’s boyish jesting quickly recovered the merriment, much to Hannah’s relief. Peter attempted another shot of Arak with her, while Vincent gathered his thoughts. He took a few sheets of paper from a small treasure chest made of finely crafted wood and ivory inlays, By the looks of them, they were very old, and by the correlating holes punched along their sides, they appeared to have come from the same book. Without introduction, Vincent began to read.

“Phantom ships hosting soldiers from a hundred nations across the Great Sea, across the measures of that before the Lord and that after, came to fall where the devil has blue eyes. No matter the breed and color of men at arms, they fell to the lost world as soon as their journeys made way past the Pillars of Hercules, whether hither or thither. The hand of the Great Giantess claimed all what had not gold to appease.

Not ‘ere the Sun could not sate the belly of the blue-eyed devil with its insatiable craving for gold. Not ‘ere the Sun, the Great Almighty, could satisfy the floor of the hellish waters. From Pharaoh to Queen Isabelle, they all sent men to find gold and with gold as their anchor, they sank to the depths where Scylla’s children feared passage.”

“It is said that since antiquity, Egyptian pharaohs dispatched ships to sail into the Strait of Gibraltar to battle with unknown hordes,” Vincent reported as he looked up. “Have you heard of the “solar barge” boats?”

The group shook their heads. Vincent explained, “In ancient Egypt, they were ritual vessels used during the funerary rites of kings to carry them across the heavens along with Ra, the sun god. Gold. They were all obsessed with gold. Many of the battles waged here were between Spanish armadas and so-called phantom vessels, across many centuries, even since the Gauls and Visigoths. They would sink and be devoured by the sea before trace could be found,” he said hastily, “which, as we all know, is impossible unless you speed up time by a century per day.”

“And all that is said to have happened here,” Peter asked, hardly able to control his tongue after two shots of Arak. Vincent nodded, “Or they would simply disappear.”

“This explains the chopper pilot going insane and heading for the blue, hey?” Purdue nudged Sam sincerely.

“My brother told me similar stories,” Hannah declared. “But he said that gold seemed to be like chum in this part of the Mediterranean Sea. But chum for what?”

“Intriguing question,” Purdue replied, his mind adrift with possible answers locked in science or physics. “If this is indeed similar to the Bermuda Triangle, nothing should be left. But they found remnants of ships. Besides, whatever is claiming these vessels is feeding on war and digests gold like fodder.”

“You see, part of why we came here, is because of this artifact,” Vincent confessed, holding up the prayer stick, “but when you showed up, we had to suspend our search for the prophecy it speaks of. We had to wait at a distance for you to leave.”

“Why?” Purdue asked.

“Because your yacht had anchored precisely where we were bound to dive, David,” the roughshod skipper replied categorically. He looked terrifying with his light eyes shining through the blackness of the shadows playing on his features. “This prayer stick Miss Hannah is so infatuated by was recovered from a World War II shipwreck off the coast of Peru, as I said. But with it came many other treasures, and among that salvage cargo were ledgers of German officers, claiming that some of their ships had disappeared on their way through the Strait of Gibraltar. Two identical ships were dispatched in secret by the SS High Command to divert attention from one another’s gold hoards. Both sank at the same time, to the hour! One off the western coast of South America. The other, short of the passage through the Gibraltar Straits.”

“That is a stone’s throw from here,” Peter mentioned.

“Correct,” Vincent said, “but that is why we are sailing west for now. Had we stayed where the crash occurred, the authorities may have questioned our presence there and our prospective scout would be compromised.”

“So you are just waiting for the dust to settle?” Sam asked.

“Yes,” Vincent affirmed. “We cannot abandon our exploration because of this glitch.”

“So, how did you know that we had found the gold?” Peter asked. Purdue’s eyes grew wide in exasperation. He could not believe that Peter had so carelessly ratted out their find to strangers they could not yet fully trust.

Vincent’s expression changed. “We did not know… until you just told me.”