The Emperor Awakes (62 page)

The old man smiled. Was that a jubilant expression on his face or did they imagine it and their mind was playing tricks on them? Was it the food that was making them see things that were not there, ghosts and chimaeras where there were none?

There could be no doubt. There was, indeed, a triumphal expression on the old man’s face, if even for a tiny moment in time that if you had blinked you would have missed it.

‘As a gesture of gratitude, there will be a visual feast to compliment the meal you’ve just had. The effect will be temporary. Farewell, friends. Thank you for taking this on. Good luck.’

Suddenly the space, the square Katerina, Vasilis, Lara and Aristo were standing in and the hanging balconies and cities and every nook and cranny was filled with figures, human-looking, but glowing as if to say thank you. At least the four visitors felt this was what they were telling them.

And they saw it, the promised show up in the sky and all around them, the whole landscape and its inhabitants becoming one giant collection of images, merging and changing shape and form as one entity, unwrapped and revealed before their eyes in all its glory and beauty. Naked bodies slim as wraiths, bathed in light and words, formed dazzling patterns and multi-storey formations on the ground in front of their feet.

The ground became a mosaic, at the same time solid and fluid. Katerina, Vasilis, Lara and Aristo felt as if they were swimming with the landscape around them in one delicious soup, with taste and smell unknown and indescribable, but undeniably pleasant.

As the colours changed around them, they were on an emotional rollercoaster themselves as on a demonstration of the gamut of feelings. As suddenly as it began, the show fell like dominoes and vanished. That was the message that it was time for them to leave. The four visitors found themselves in a vacuum. They had one foot through the door of the next destination. They pushed the door to open.

CHAPTER 62

Cyprus
Present day

They left the realm of the cliff people behind and came to the territory of the people of the mist. Once clear of the gorge, there was nothing on the other side, but a chasm, and beyond that and all around them they were surrounded by a white space like a dense all-absorbing mist, sucking energy from all living things, the edge a sheer drop into depth unknown.

They almost crashed into some unidentifiable forms in the middle of a thick mist soaked in fog. Some strange short humanoid figures appeared.

‘Thank you for saving us.’ They said with one voice.

What a luscious silky voice they had.

‘How did we do that?’ Katerina asked.

‘You helped our enemies. The curse has been lifted. We got tired of their constant mutations and attacks. We are twins as are all our friends here.’

Katerina seemed to have continued as the four visitors’ spokesperson in this part of their journey inside the bizarre worlds of the cave inside Mount Zalakas. ‘We are glad to have been of assistance. Now, please tell us how to proceed to the next stage.’

The plain started to fill with pair after pair exiting their low-hung dwellings, as if the signal was given that all was clear. Katerina and the others looked down at them, bewitched.

Within minutes they were surrounded by a throb-bing throng, and probed by desperate, curious, willing and prying hands. Assaulted was more like it, but it felt affectionate, and, assuming that it was the local habit and also that the locals had not seen anything like their visitors before, Katerina and the others did not react for fear of offending them. The locals made them feel right at home.

‘You had placed under your care some children of our neighbours. There is something you should know about those children. They were the result of an experiment to produce the ideal ruler, when our royal line died.

‘They were taken by our neighbours as hostages, in the hope that, if we were rudderless, we would be rendered incapacitated. That act did not destroy us, but it did cause us irrevocable damage. The structure of our society could not survive such upheaval following the removal of its hierarchical head, and it almost collapsed, as everybody wanted to rule and demagogues appeared to plague us and seduce us.

‘The extreme perfect democracy that followed kept stirring the pot of discontent - a bit of disloyalty here, envy and animosity there, you get the picture -into a vortex that placed us at each other’s throats.’

‘Just like in Athens and the modern world.’ Katerina said.

‘The children are made out of the genes of Plato, Aristotle and Pericles and DNA collected on one of our trips through the portals. We wanted to adopt Plato’s rule of the philosophers as the way of government for our society and to use Socrates’ dialectic method to confuse and defeat our enemies and we wanted Aristotle and Pericles, because we admired them too.

‘Now, because of the conflicting philosophies and ideologies of their “fathers”, the children are in terrible internal conflict and we must help untangle the webs of their minds that are fighting a novel civil war, giving the term infighting a new meaning. If we don’t solve that internal war, we could not resolve ours. And there lies the crux of the matter, what you must do to help us. That will be your test for the opening up of the final stretch of road out of here.’

‘But how can we help you?’ As Katerina said this she had a strange image of being at a weekend camp on personal development and bonding and having to lead the process for solving a challenge, a test.

‘Your blood will do that. We only need a little bit. It has been foretold that the blood of the visitors will save us.’

Vasilis, Katerina, Lara and Aristo looked at each other. They did not need words to say the thought they knew each of them shared. They had become a blood bank. This was the blood donation van. Call to all fans. Climb aboard. Would there ever be enough? Thank God they had some time to recover. That lovely meal certainly helped.

The blood transfusion seemed to work for the children and the rest of the inhabitants of this place, but it had a curious and dangerous side effect. It started to randomly open up portals around the place. The expected screams of the crowd did not materialise.

They had already admitted that they used portals to other worlds for their experiments. This meant that they must have seen this firework-like portal-opening display before. Perhaps it was an event that occurred frequently, at regular or even irregular intervals. It seemed it was definitely not just a one-off occurrence, a side effect of the blood transfusion.

These people admitted that they had also used the portals believing they were calling for the help those doors of hope hid. They thought they saw the promise behind those places that seemed so much better than their own. Well, anything would in their desperate situation.

But the portals turned out to be a curse. They knew now that they should no longer use them and should no longer let anyone come out of them. The four visitors had done all they could for them. They would have to do the rest themselves.

At least now they had a fighting chance to rebuild their lives. It was time to go. The people thanked their benefactors and they in turn wished them luck.

* * *

A gelatinous substance began to seep out from the sheer rock turning itself into Ruinands who were repeatedly hurling themselves at Katerina and the others at great speed.

When Katerina and the others thought they had seen from the Ruinands all they had had to throw at them, more Ruinands appeared from all directions surrounding them. Katerina and the others muttered under their breaths: “Not more of them”.

They felt like the four “musketeers”, four friends in the same boiling pot. They thought they were finished; they were so vastly outnumbered.

But when they thought the game was up, the Ruinand lookalikes were then transformed into white light, angel-like creatures that spoke with one voice.

‘We bring a message for you and for the future.’

The last Byzantine Emperor look-alike walked through the angel-like creatures and came to a stop before Katerina and the others.

‘I’m not finished with you yet. You have done well so far, but you will have to mix your blood with that of your enemies.’

The Ruinand blood was the last ingredient they needed. They put that into the mix expecting fireworks. The Emperor look-alike was playing with our minds, they thought. The finished product was foaming at the edges, at the edges of Katerina’s and the others’ sanity and of their conscience.

But the process had a good effect. They made peace with their erstwhile enemy, for at least this one night. They injected the mixture into the people of the mist and the side effect caused by the previous formulation of the cure disappeared.

But some Ruinands did not honour the at least one-nightly truce that had been declared, like an ancient Olympic truce that was sacred through the duration of the games.

The Emperor look-alike smiled. ‘You have done all you could do here. Don’t forget your final gift. Good luck on the final leg of your mission.’ A jar containing the last Emperor’s brain landed at their feet. The final piece of the jigsaw.

The Emperor look-alike’s famous last words redolent with finality. Yet they hoped it was not his final farewell, otherwise that meant that they had failed in their ultimate mission to wake him up. Then they heard an echo.

‘It is important that you do not remember what you saw. Now tell me, have you misplaced your brain with help from your old friend, Alzheimer’s, the taker and thief of memories?’

Katerina and the others felt involuntarily coerced to obey. All four of them replied with a loud and wholesome “yes”, as if replying to that voice was what was expected of them.

They emerged out of the cave dazed, the adrena-line still coursing through their veins at the speed of a poison, but slowing down. But they could not deny it was an exhilarating experience. Nobody would believe what they had just witnessed. They couldn’t believe it themselves let alone convince others.

It was still pitch black. The date and time was still the same as when they entered the tunnel on Mount Zalakas which could mean that, even though they appeared to have outrun the Ruinands inside the tunnel and the cave, there might be Ruinands still waiting for them outside so they proceeded with caution.

They wondered what the Ruinands coming up behind them would make of the things they would witness inside, the worlds they would pass through in their pursuit of Katerina, Vasilis, Lara and Aristo.

They wondered what the inhabitants of the worlds in that cave would make of the Ruinands and whether they would manage to restrain them, for their own sake, and to stop them from coming after Katerina and the others.

They wondered whether the Ruinands would cause irrevocable damage in the worlds of that cave. But there was nothing Katerina and the others could do about it now.

They were convinced that they could not go back there once they had accomplished their mission and resolved the issues troubling the worlds of the cave. They had to let those creatures fend for themselves and survive like they seemed to have managed to do so far.

Relieved to have completed the ordeal, Katerina, Vasilis, Lara and Aristo let themselves collapse on the ground for a much-needed rest that they could not afford. They soon ended getting up for, with the resilient Ruinands on their tail no doubt, the completion of the mission was now more urgent than ever.

CHAPTER 63

Limassol, Cyprus
Present day

Katerina, Vasilis and Aristo returned to their respective tunnels. Vasilis joined Giorgos and John on the seaward-side tunnel. Katerina and Aristo joined Elli on the castle-side tunnel.

Lara never did appear to be allowed to exit the opening and come with them. She reluctantly stayed behind, bitterly disappointed to miss the forthcoming action, the drama and the excitement, and, perhaps, danger, as she believed she had caught its unmistakable whiff.

But as they came back they narrowly avoided serious injury. They just managed to miss, by only about a couple of inches, the chandeliers that appeared in the tunnel.

After what they had all experienced, they tried to hang onto reality with gritted teeth. They tried to control their imagination and their curiosity from running wild.

There were more openings, but they did not seem to allow access to what was beyond them. Another time, perhaps? Wishful thinking, perhaps? Who knew? They hoped to find out sooner rather than later. But it appeared that for the time being it could wait.

It seemed that they had what they needed and had to proceed to the doorways opening up to the main area containing the fabled structure they longed to see with their own eyes.

Aristo was first in line. As he went under the doorway he stopped abruptly with Katerina and Elli crashing into him. Aristo stopped just in time to prevent his falling to his death, for in front of him was a huge chasm. Thankfully, Katerina and Elli were walking slowly and had their wits about them, which was crucial for them to put the brakes instantly and only gently bump into Aristo. Otherwise had they been even the slightest distracted they would have pushed him over the edge to oblivion.