“Now what?” Jask asked.
“Now we try to get some sleep,” the bruin said. But he did not make any move to lie down. He wiped at his blunt snout with one thick, furry hand, and he seemed not to be in a good mood — though his anger was not directed solely against Jask, for once. He cleared his throat, spat, and said, “We could have made a fatal mistake here.”
“How's that?”
Tedesco sniffed at the air as if he found something offensive in the crisp night breezes. “We forgot that we're in the Wildlands and not at home. Because the place looked so damned peaceful, we let ourselves get sloppy. We're not going to make that mistake again; we can't afford to make it if we're going to survive.”
“Aren't you exaggerating the situation?” Jask asked. Suddenly they seemed to have reversed roles. Jask never thought he would hear himself defend the peaceable Wildlands.
“No,” the bruin said shortly. “I'll take the first watch. I'll wake you in a few hours; then you can play sentry until after dawn.”
Tedesco scrambled to the top of the limestone formation and sat down where he could survey the entire meadow.
“But,” Jask said, “nothing really dangerous happened. They weren't out to harm us.”
“The next time they may be,” Tedesco said. “Now get some sleep. I'll wake you if I need help.”
16
In the morning, after a meal of roast rabbit and wild fruit and berries, Tedesco checked his compass and his maps, pointed the way, and started them on a new routine that lasted more than two weeks and was even more demanding than what they had subjected themselves to during their tedious journey through the bacteria jewels. After breakfast they walked no fewer than thirty and usually more than forty kilometers a day, no matter if the sky were clear or if they were pelted with cold rain. In the late afternoon or early evening they stopped and set up their camp, ate a dinner of fresh game and fruit. Then, together, they did their exercises — Tedesco, so that he might get back into shape after his ordeal in the jewel sea, and Jask, so that he could add muscle to his slowly thickening biceps and chest. They took turns at watch, slept a bit less than they would have liked to, and began the next day as they had begun the one before it.
In the rich forest through which they traveled there was an abundance of life unlike the beautiful but barren landscape of the jewel sea. At first they encountered only small animals that were too frightened of them to pose any serious threat. They killed what looked edible and went on, undisturbed, waiting for the moment when they would finally come across a formidable beast, as they knew they eventually must.
Among the trees lay the ruins of ancient metropolises, grown over with crawling vines, nests now for rats and rabbits and squirrels, all but unrecognizable as the works of man.
They passed many curious artifacts that had survived the centuries intact, or nearly so, but they investigated very few of them, lest they stir some antagonistic force they were not equipped to deal with.
On the third day after they left the meadow they came across a column of yellow metal that gleamed as if it were new, despite its antiquity. It was ten meters in diameter and soared sixty meters into the air, unhampered by the crush of trees and vines that proliferated elsewhere. Indeed, where the vines and undergrowth had edged too close, they were blackened, as if a flame had been touched to them. Around the pillar, etched in perfect block letters, was this wisdom: JESUS SAVES, TRUST IN HIM… JESUS SAVES, TRUST IN HIM… The legend wound around and around the magnificent column, repeated perhaps a thousand times.
“Who was Jesus?” Jask asked.
Tedesco looked up at the shiny tube with its cryptic message and said, “He was a god.”
“When?”
“Before the Last War.”
“What happened to him?”
Tedesco smiled. “Died, I guess. Killed as all gods are.”
“Gods can't be killed,” Jask said.
Tedesco smiled even more openly and said, “I'd agree to that.”
“Of course.”
“Because,” Tedesco added, “they were not alive in the first place, just figments of the imagination.”
Jask refused to let himself be dragged into that, by now, familiar argument. He approached the recessed door in the base of the yellow column and said,' 'Can't we have a look inside?”
“I wouldn't recommend it,” the bruin grunted.
“We have our rifles.”
“And we may not get a chance to use them. Death is always swift, otherwise it isn't death but injury.”
“When we began this trip,” Jask said, “I was the coward, afraid of every new experience. Now it seems—”
“I'm not susceptible to that kind of psychological game-playing,” Tedesco said. “If you want to go in there, by all means go. I'll wait out here and have an apple. We can afford a rest break, but for no more than ten minutes.”
“I'll be back by then,” Jask assured him. He touched the ornate handle of the golden door and jumped, startled, as it swung in without any effort on his part.
He stepped into a tiny foyer from which a series of roughened metal steps led downward.
“The church was underground,” Jask said.
“Umph,” Tedesco said, leaning against the door jamb and chewing a mouthful of apple. “Probably built it during one of the wars; didn't want it blown to smithereens during a ceremony.”
“Didn't they trust in their god?” Jask asked.
“As much as most men,'' the bruin said. He spat out a seed as large as a strawberry. “In theory they knew he protected them. In reality it was every man for himself.”
Jask stepped onto the first stair, listened to the sound of his footstep echoing scratchily down the winding well.
Nothing responded to his intrusion.
On both sides yellow metal light standards were bolted to the smooth walls at intervals of ten feet. Half of these no longer functioned, but the other half provided sufficient illumination to show him the way. As he progressed, the lights behind him went out and new lights sprang up ahead, so that there was always a pocket of impenetrable darkness close at his back and another not too terribly far ahead.
Three hundred steps later, six complete turns in the stairwell behind him, Jask walked out into the main chamber of the church. Of the four hundred lights placed there, a hundred and fifty popped on, leaving a few corners shrouded in shadows but providing him a fairly good idea of the nature of the place: rows and rows of pews, a railing around the section where the ceremony took place, an altar and one enormous symbol fully thirty feet high and twenty wide, a cross of silvery material that had spotted with rust during the eons since it had been venerated.
Jask was fascinated by two things: first, the great number of pews, enough for five thousand celebrants, more than the number of men in the entire enclave from which he came; secondly, the fact that the worshipers apparently paid obeisance to the great cross and had no provisions on their altar for the placement of things of Nature, plants and animals, the things man should attribute to the benificence of his gods. The first item was simply a mathematical shock. The second was a moral indignation. Why worship idols when god's creations, plants and animals, were the things meant to be idolized?
He was still standing in the middle of the church, considering this, when something crashed in the back of the chamber.
He whirled, bringing up his power rifle to face whatever was behind him. The rear of the church lay in so much shadow that he could not make out the thing until it moved again. It had entered the main room through a pair of double doors barely wide enough to admit it: a huge crablike creature fully four meters across and three meters high, traveling on six jointed legs, its antennae quivering back and forth, its enormous pincers exceeded in ugliness only by its serrated beak, which it slowly opened and closed without making a sound, an act that would have been less terrifying if accompanied by noise.