The Tower: Part Four

Gabriel drifted in and out of consciousness. At times he raved, howling and bucking against the bindings, other times he was calm enough to converse with the doctors for minutes at a time, giving them insights into how the infection felt, like a drowning man describing the experience in snatched breaths to someone in a nearby boat before another wave engulfed him and dragged him back under. He fought, he screamed, he scratched and he cried – but he did not die.

Athanasius watched it all from a seat by the bed. He was there at night when the flicker of candles and flambeaux cast ghoulish light across Gabriel’s face, and in the day when the sunlight streamed through the huge rose window, dappling the damned with colour. The beds surrounding them emptied and filled, over and over as the tide of sickness ebbed and flowed, and more and more people entered the mountain. First it was those who had rested in quarantine in the Seminary. Then new faces began appearing, steady in number, their brief stay always numbering a day or two at most and always following the same journey: carried in writhing and screaming, carried out silent and still to the centre of the mountain and the firestone where the pyre always burned.

Then, on the second day of the fourth week after the Citadel had opened its doors to the sick, Gabriel opened his eyes and they stayed open. It was the middle of the afternoon after the doctors had finished their rounds and Athanasius was away attending to the organization of what was left of his flock. He lay there, staring up at the soot-blackened stalactites high above him, listening to the drugged moans of the infected and the creak of their bindings as their bodies clenched and twisted all around him. He lay there a long time, bracing himself for the moment when the fever would drag him back down again, as it always had before. But this time it did not.

‘Hello,’ he called out, his voice raw and unfamiliar. Murmurings rose from the beds surrounding him, the sick roused from their drugged slumber.

‘HELLO,’ he called again, loud enough to hurt his throat and bring footsteps hurrying. A face appeared above his bed, brow furrowed, eyes ringed with the shadows of deep fatigue. Gabriel didn’t know him but he recognized the contamination suit he was wearing – and he also noticed the loaded syringe.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to do that. I feel better.’

It was as if the doctor hadn’t heard him, his sleep-starved brain running through the well-worn routines of patient sedation. Gabriel felt the cold alcohol swipe of an antiseptic swab on his arm. He tried to twist away but the bindings held him fast.

‘WAKE UP!’ he shouted, as much to the doctor as to those surrounding him. ‘WAKE UP!’

The effect was instant, the faint murmurings erupting into howls as the sleeping sick were shocked into wailing wakefulness. The doctor looked up at the chaos now surrounding him, every patient around him now bucking and thrashing against their bindings as they howled in torment. He looked back down at Gabriel, his eyes shining with annoyance at the trouble he’d caused, he held up the syringe and readied the shot.

‘What are you doing?’ Gabriel growled, his throat raw from his shouting. ‘I do not need sedating. See to the others first. Their need is clearly greater.’

The doctor hesitated, looked like he was still going to spike him, then a shadow passed over Gabriel’s face and he glanced across to see the smooth-headed figure of a monk standing on the other side of his bed. ‘It’s OK,’ Athanasius said to the doctor, ‘I shall sit with him. You see to these other poor souls.’

The doctor blinked as though a spell had been broken, then turned away to start dealing with the others.

Athanasius pulled the stool out from beneath Gabriel’s bed and settled on it. His eyes were bloodshot and sunken and he smelled of wood smoke. Gabriel breathed it in, relishing the smell. It was the first time in a long while he had smelt anything other than the strange and permanent odour of oranges. And there was something else. He was cold and his sweat-soaked bindings felt wet and unpleasant against his skin.

‘The fever,’ he whispered in realization of what this meant. ‘It’s gone.’

Athanasius laid a warm hand on Gabriel’s forehead and straightened in his chair. ‘Thank God,’ he said.

Another figure appeared by the bed and held a thermometer in his ear. It beeped and he checked the reading. He reset it and did it again.

‘Ninety-eight point six,’ he said, the hint of a smile on his weary face. ‘You’re probably a few points cooler than I am.’

‘Dr Kaplan, allow me to introduce Gabriel Mann,’ Athanasius said.

Gabriel nodded a greeting. ‘I’d shake your hand but someone tied me to this bed.’ Kaplan smiled again. ‘Tell me. Did the quarantine work. Has the disease been contained?’

He knew the answer before either of them spoke. He heard it in the pause and saw it in the flick of their eyes as they looked away from him.

‘There have been new cases,’ the doctor replied, ‘ones that have originated beyond the line of the original quarantine in the metropolitan districts of the city. We have continued to remove the infected and quarantine those at risk but we have so far been unable to contain it. As of last week a state of martial law has been in place in the greater city of Ruin to try and prevent the further spread of the disease. The army and the police have set up roadblocks on the road leading out of the mountains. No one is allowed in, no one is allowed out. But we have made significant steps since moving here. And you may hold the key to all of our salvation. No one has fought the disease as long as you have, and no one has recovered – until now. But it’s still early days and you may yet relapse.’

He looked up at Athanasius. ‘We need to move him somewhere isolated.’

‘No,’ Gabriel said, ‘I’ll stay here, I don’t need special treatment.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Kaplan said. ‘You need to be in isolation, not just for your own comfort but for the safety of others. Your body may have defeated the infection but there is another possibility. Sometimes the body’s natural defences do not entirely vanquish a hostile agent. Sometimes a kind of truce is arrived at where the disease is kept in check and the symptoms disappear. If this has happened then you may now be an asymptomatic carrier of the disease, immune yourself but deadly to anyone who comes into contact with you. There is also the possibility that the infection has mutated inside you and formed a new strain, one that your body is immune to because it helped create it but one that is every bit as deadly as the first strain – maybe even more so.’

Gabriel stared up at him. He hadn’t given conscious thought to his hopes until now. The one thing that had kept him going throughout his suffering and delirium was the thought of Liv. She was the one he had fought death for. He had left her in the desert in the hope that he carried the disease away with him. He had travelled all the way back to Ruin in the hope it may not have spread. He had insisted on being taken inside the Citadel where the blight had first come from and then refused to die in the hope that he might finally be reunited with her. Now he was told that he must stay here, isolated even within this place of isolation. There were many words to describe the pain that filled him, but only one that completely summed up the way he felt.

Cursed.

Athanasius read the pain on his face. ‘I know a place where we can move him,’ he said.

63 (#ulink_78d0dfc5-61b8-54a7-bd74-fb460ca82a4b)

Following her conversation with Arkadian, Liv scoured every news site and story relating to the contagion in Ruin until the laptop’s battery ran out.

She sat alone for a while in the sweltering heat of the building feeling like she had just experienced a bereavement. She closed her eyes and remembered the last time she and Gabriel had been alone together, sheltering from the dust storm in the cave out in the desert. She had thought then that her life was slipping away, that the Sacrament she carried inside her would die without finding its way back to the home it had lost, and drag her down to death with it. She had clung to him then like she was clinging to life. She remembered the feel of him, the salty taste of his skin as they had kissed when they had given themselves to the moment and each other in case it turned out to be the only night they ever had.

It was strange that someone she had spent hardly any time with and whom she knew so little about could have such a strong effect on her. There was something about Gabriel that calmed her soul when she was near him and made it ache whenever he was away – like it ached now.

She stood abruptly, angry at the world, the scrape of the chair legs cutting through the silence, and headed out through the dining hall into the bright sunlight. The thought of hard physical work seemed infinitely appealing in the wake of the emotional battering she had just experienced. She grabbed a pick, fell in line and happily took orders from Corporal Williamson, losing herself in work as they dug a pit big enough to bury all those who had drunk the poisoned water.

It took all day and when all the dead lay buried beneath the dry ground, the group collected by the water’s edge to wash and drink and relax. You could see in their easy conversation and open gestures that a new bond had been formed, one forged by hard work and collective endeavour. It was a testament to the human spirit that they had met that morning in a circumstance of mistrust and suspicion, one group inside the compound and one without, and in less than a day those divisions had been removed entirely. It reminded Liv that, despite all the darkness that had swamped her recently, there was so much goodness in the world, and so much good in people. It made her hopeful that, whatever had been started here, whatever ancient spark had been re-ignited by the Sacrament’s return, it might just have a chance to succeed and grow into something wonderful and free, the exact opposite of the Citadel in fact.

Something about this thought struck her and made her pull the folded paper from her pocket and study the symbols anew. Her eyes flicked between the upwards arrow symbol for the Citadel on the second line and another on the third which was its exact opposite.

She looked over at the fountain of water in the centre of the pool, forming an elongated ‘V’ in the air. The symbol was the fountain. The symbol was this place.

She looked back at the second and third lines again, searching for other points of comparison.

The moon sign appeared in both, linking them to the same time frame, and the T was there too, encircled in the first line and beside a circle in the other. She looked down at the perimeter fence surrounding the compound below her and understood now why she felt so strongly about not locking the gate. This place was meant to be somewhere the Sacrament was free, outside the circle not in. It had to welcome everyone and spread as far as the horizon if it needed to. The water had already begun this process, flowing out through the links in the fence and bringing the land back to life.

‘Not a fortress but a haven,’ she whispered.

‘What was that?’

Liv looked up and saw Tariq standing nearby.

‘Nothing,’ she said, aware that everyone was tired and the plan she had just hatched would keep. ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow.’

64 (#ulink_83a8629e-febb-5302-bf31-6483c35b4295)

Gabriel was wheeled into the Abbot’s private quarters at the head of a procession of equipment and medical personnel. The rooms had been left largely unused since the Abbot’s sudden death and the subsequent spread of the blight. Elections had been planned but the disease had ravaged the electorate before they could be held and since then, in a dark twist of irony, the only thing truly running the mountain was the very thing that had derailed the electoral process in the first place.

‘This is the main living room and office,’ Athanasius said, moving across the large space. ‘There is also a bed chamber through here that could be turned into a laboratory.’ He opened a thick, metal-studded door onto another cave containing a wooden bed, an ottoman and several smaller pieces of furniture. ‘And in here is a washroom giving you all the running water you should need.’

Gabriel surveyed what he could of the new surroundings from the fixed viewpoint of his bed while everyone else started to unpack. His mattress had been raised at one end to render him upright and the bindings that had held him so tightly and for so long had now been loosened, but not removed. Dr Kaplan had advised that they stay in place for the time being until they were sure he wasn’t going to suffer a relapse. He wasn’t allowed to walk either, which was fine with Gabriel. He was so weak that even keeping his eyes open was an effort.

He took in the room, this comfortable prison that would be his home for who knew how long. There was a huge fireplace as tall as a man that dominated one wall and a stained-glass window set into the rock, its ancient, hand-blown panes of blue and green glass forming a peacock motif that distorted the world beyond.

‘How are you feeling?’ Athanasius pulled a chair over and sat down as behind him the room began to be shifted around and dismantled.

‘Like a condemned man.’

Athanasius smiled and ran his hand over the smooth dome of his head. ‘I think we all feel that way to some degree, though I know you have suffered more than most.’ He leaned in closer and lowered his voice so only Gabriel could hear. ‘I sometimes wonder whether all this could have been averted – that if we had just left things as they were, left the Sacrament in place and not challenged the old traditions, all this pain and suffering, all this death would not have come to pass.’

‘You really think that?’