The Gods Look Down Read online

  The Gods Look Down

  Book Three of the Q Series

  Trevor Hoyle

  First published in Great Britain in 1978 by Panther Books Ltd

  This ebook edition published in 2014 by

  Jo Fletcher Books

  An imprint of Quercus Editions Ltd

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 1978 by Trevor Hoyle

  The moral right of Trevor Hoyle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84866 930 7

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk and

  www.jofletcherbooks.com

  Also in the Q Series and available from Quercus and Jo Fletcher Books

  Seeking the Mythical Future

  Through the Eye of Time

  We engage in rituals in order to transmit collective messages to ourselves.

  Edmund Leach: Culture and Communication

  For Elizabeth: a good friend,

  a fine person

  Contents

  Part One

  1 The Tribe from Nowhere

  2 Pillar of Fire

  3 Deciphering Ancient Dreams

  4 Transmission

  5 The Aleph

  6 Diverse Mytho-logical Speculation

  7 Dreamscape

  Part Two

  8 The Ark of God

  9 Machine from the Future

  10 An Experiment with Time

  11 Angel of the Lord

  12 Cytogenesis

  13 The Protoplast

  Part Three

  Acknowledgments

  Part One

  ‘And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.’

  Exodus 13:21

  1

  The Tribe from Nowhere

  Our Tribe had been nomadic dwellers of the desert for as long as anyone, even the elders, could remember. It was on the day of my fourteenth birthday that I asked my father, Nethan, to relate once again the story of all the generations who had wandered the desert plains: the legend of our Tribe said that twenty-eight generations had passed since we first embarked on our quest, though my father told me privately that it was many, many more; the line reached back into prehistory and yet the elders were reluctant to admit their ignorance.

  ‘If the truth were known, Kish,’ he said to me that day, ‘we are a people without a true past. We like to believe we are seeking our home but no one in the Tribe knows where our home is or if we ever had one – or even how to recognize it should we stumble across it by chance.’

  He was smiling as he said this, for my father was always amused at the way in which the elders tried to deceive everybody into believing them to be wise and all-knowing. He himself knew that they were as lost and bewildered as everyone else but tried desperately not to show it.

  I was perplexed by this, and curious too, and trying to understand better I said, ‘And what about the stories of the Prophet, the one who will lead us out of the wilderness? Are they true? Does he exist – or will he exist in the future?’

  My father leaned forward, holding his cloak close to his body (the desert is bitterly cold after darkness has fallen) and in the firelight his eyes were immensely deep and brooding. ‘I cannot answer that honestly,’ he said at last. ‘My father Jaaziel, and his father Nethaneel, and his father Benaiah all believed in the coming of the Prophet. My grandfather himself preached to the people that they were to expect his appearance within seven generations. But I don’t honestly know.’

  ‘You don’t believe in him?’ I said. It frightened me that my father was unsure. He was a rock, solid, unchanging, and it disturbed me to see that he too had doubts. I wanted him to be perfect.

  ‘Belief is not a matter of choice,’ he told me. ‘It is an act of faith. I did once believe that the Prophet would come amongst us – my father’s conviction made me believe it – but as we grow older the uncertainties multiply. If we have waited for twenty-eight generations why shouldn’t we have to wait for twenty-eight more? Or a hundred? Or forever? Is it preordained that a prophet should suddenly arise out of nowhere and lead us to the promised land? I don’t see why; I don’t understand why.’

  He was speaking to me for the first time not as a child but as a man, and I felt proud, and also apprehensive. It suddenly came to me that the confusion inside my head was not going to miraculously disappear now that I had become ‘a man’: it was there as a permanent condition of adulthood, just as my father had had to live with his own inner confusion. He was not, as I had believed, infallible and unafraid, but filled with doubts which perhaps would never be resolved. This terrified me more than anything for it meant that the responsibility for my life, and for the future of the Tribe, rested with a timid creature filled to the brim with self-doubt – a creature called Kish.

  The wind rose up and fanned the embers to white heat, pressing the flames close to the pale charred wood. In the furthermost circle of light the flapping tents were like billowing shadows, cracking and whipping angrily. Most of the people were asleep, wrapped in goat’s-hair blankets, their feet tucked inside saddle rugs. No doubt they were dreaming of barren wastes, of rock-strewn wadis, of bleak skylines and ragged hills – for there were no other images in their minds with which to furnish a dream. Tomorrow was like yesterday, each day barely distinguishable from the other, the terrain a never-ending monotony of rock and scrub and shimmering heat making the horizon seem unreal.

  Was this all that life offered? The emotions of youth are sharper than any that follow and I remember clearly the sense of profound despair and hopelessness that my life lay before me, waiting to be lived, and yet already the taste of it was like ashes in my mouth. I was committed to the prison of heat and sand and endless blank vistas, the wearisome miles of futile wandering stretching away to eternity. There was more to life than this – there had to be.

  My father touched my shoulder. ‘Perhaps in your lifetime you will see the Prophet,’ he said, but I felt that he sensed my desolation and was trying to comfort me. ‘You’re a deep one for a boy of fourteen. Don’t think too many deep thoughts; they become a burden you will always have to carry.’

  ‘I want to be like you.’

  ‘You will be like me but you will also be yourself. A generation lives to give birth to a new generation.’

  ‘But there must be a purpose,’ I said, looking into the glowing embers. ‘Are we born just to have children? What does that accomplish?’ As I said this I realized that it was an insult to him: it implied that his life had been wasted, with nothing to give it meaning but the birth and rearing of three children.

  ‘You are now of an age when you can ask the elders these questions,’ my father said. ‘They will listen to you and answer you seriously.’

  ‘But you don’t believe in their answers. You don’t believe that the elders know any more or any better than we do. Why should I ask t
hem questions they can’t answer?’

  ‘It might be,’ he said slowly, ‘that their answers will mean more to you than they do to me. Perhaps true wisdom is in the seeker, not the giver; their answers will allow you to find the truth within yourself.’

  ‘How can I know the truth if no one has ever told me?’ I asked, perplexed. ‘I don’t know what the truth is.’ This seemed to me to be so obvious that it annoyed me to have to say it.

  From beyond the huddle of tents came the mournful braying wail of a camel, a hoarse melancholy sound which mingled with the wind and was lost somewhere out there in the encircling darkness. The fire was fanned low and hot as the wind blew straight across the open plain, carrying with it particles of sand which rustled amongst the dry tinder and dead thorn bushes. It looked as if there was going to be a sandstorm: the crescent of moon was dimly obscured by brisk-moving cloud. I said:

  ‘You expect me to listen and pay heed to the elders – and yet you disregard what they say. I want to be like you, father. I don’t want to be told lies and pretend to believe them.’

  ‘Any belief is better than none at all.’

  ‘Is that what you believe?’

  Within the folds of his head-cloth I could see his lips curved in a smile. Even now I distinctly remember the quality of his face, the tough weathered skin formed in deep creases and the broad prominent nose with its flared nostrils. He was the colour of old sandstone and had the texture of a worn camel-saddle.

  It occurred to me that from now on I should have to stop thinking and behaving like a child; but there was so much I had to know and it was only by asking questions that I would ever learn. Was his smile one of gentle mockery? Did he expect me to know these things without asking?

  As if reading my thoughts he said, ‘My father, Jaaziel, on my fourteenth birthday, said that the young already know much more than their elders. I probably asked him the same questions you’re asking me. What I’m saying, Kish, is that the old have nothing to teach the young, we merely pretend that we’ve attained a state of wisdom. The truth is that we’re further away from it than ever – further even than you, with all your questions.’

  ‘Is there no one who can teach me then?’

  ‘You want the truth, and the truth is …’ And he shook his head.

  The wind seemed to blow colder as he said this, though I knew it to be my imagination; but when the sand stung my bare ankles I realized that the wind had actually strengthened, despite my imagination. A storm was on the way, if not tonight then certainly in the morning.

  The cloak billowed round my father, who sat silent for a time, gazing into the flames. Eventually he stirred and said, ‘I have wandered the desert for forty years. Do you think that you will have found an answer when you are my age?’

  ‘If the Prophet comes,’ I answered, and this made him laugh and I could see the gleams of his teeth in the firelight. ‘The legend of our Tribe says he will come. Perhaps I shall be the one to see him. We have waited twenty-eight generations.’

  My father raised his finger as if cautioning me. This may sound silly, but in that instant, his finger raised, his face closed yet watchful, I loved him more intensely than ever before. It was such a commonplace gesture and yet somehow it concentrated all the feeling I had for him.

  ‘You forget,’ he said quietly. ‘My grandfather said the Prophet would come within seven generations. You are only the third by that reckoning.’

  ‘A man may live more than one generation,’ I pointed out. ‘He might live to see two, possibly three. If I live long enough I shall be alive in the seventh generation according to your grandfather’s prediction.’

  ‘Yes, you are like me,’ he said, smiling again. ‘I had all the answers when I was your age – at least I thought I did. And you could be right; the young deserve to be right because in old age we are more often wrong than right.’

  Again I felt the lurch in my heart that my father was a fallible human being, not as invincible as I had always imagined him to be. And my trepidation was in part the fear that uncertainty was the condition of human existence: my father was not wise and all-seeing after all, and now I could never achieve it for the simple reason that it didn’t exist.

  It was a night I shall always remember, indeed one I can never forget. Perhaps with hindsight I can say this confidently, knowing that the following day was to be the most momentous in the history of the Tribe: when we first found the sacred place and there came upon the ark of the Lord.

  *

  As expected there was a fierce sandstorm which blew continuously all the next day and drove us in search of shelter. The desert is a fearsome place when the elements unleash all their fury and for several hours we staggered through a blinding wall of sand which stung our eyes and turned our lips to raw puffed blisters which split open like fat maggots roasted over a fire. (We hadn’t eaten such delicacies for many a long day.)

  I was leading my father’s camel, an obstinate old beast, and it required all my strength to make her move a step and then keep her in motion. I remember thinking that it wouldn’t be too long before my family would be sitting round the fire feasting ourselves on her scrawny meat and licking the fat from our fingers. Ahead of me – only a few paces – was the blurred figure of Elud, husband of Jael and father of Hannah, a pretty, smooth-skinned girl about the same age as me. Several weeks ago Elud’s camel had fallen and broken a shinbone and now he and his family had to carry what few possessions they could manage whilst hoping that the Tribe would encounter a caravan of traders or merchants who would be willing to sell them a pack animal.

  The wind was the worst I could ever recall and we plodded on hopelessly into the grey wall, one faltering step after another, totally lost, going round in circles for all anybody knew. My two younger sisters were with my mother further down the line, roped together with the other women and children, trying to shield themselves from the brunt of the storm by following the main party. My father was up ahead somewhere, one of the four pathfinders whose task it was to lead us to sanctuary – though how he was supposed to do that when you could hardly see a hand in front of your face I don’t know.

  By luck, accident or divine providence, I’m not sure which, we came to a jumbled outcrop of rock – huge boulders piled one on top of the other – which offered some kind of refuge. In the lee of the rocks (whose surface, I discovered, was rough and pitted like lava) I could just make out a ragged grove of palms, their fronds lashing in the wind: though it would have been too much to hope for that we had stumbled across an oasis out here in the middle of nowhere.

  We tethered the animals and then sought any suitable nook or cranny large enough to crawl into, away from the stinging sand. Most of the larger ones were quickly occupied by entire families and I skirted the boulders in search of a crevice or small opening that would shelter me. There was no point in looking for the rest of my family until after the storm had abated: in any case they wouldn’t be worried about me, for it wasn’t the first time we had been separated because of a sandstorm. On one occasion I had lost contact with them for three days when the Tribe had been attacked and pursued by a band of marauding Moabs.

  Hugging the rocks and feeling their curious rough surface beneath my fingers I came to a deep narrow cleft, partly filled with sand, which I barely managed to squeeze into, despite my thin shoulders and small hips. It was much deeper than I thought and once inside, over the heap of sand at the entrance, the floor dropped steeply into a kind of hollow. I crawled down into it, feeling my way, the air suddenly very close and still; it was almost in pitch blackness. This would do splendidly, I thought – out of the wind, a snug little hidey-hole where I could curl up into a ball and sleep the storm away. I hoped there were no snakes with similar notions, though really it was too late to worry about that.

  I reached out my hand to gauge the dimensions of my little refuge and touched something soft and warm. Before I had time to think if snakes were warm to the touch my hand was bitten and somebody gi
ggled in my ear.

  ‘Is it you, Kish? It is, isn’t it?’

  I let go the breath which had been caught in my lungs and nodded my head weakly – a futile gesture under the circumstances. ‘Yes,’ I managed to say at last. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Hannah. Did you follow me? I bet you followed me and saw which hole I crawled into.’

  I touched her shoulder and then her neck to convince myself it was really her. After a moment I was able to make out the vague bulk of her shape, though it was too dark to distinguish her features. I said with slight annoyance, ‘I thought I had this all to myself. And how could I follow you with sand too thick to spit through? You are stupid.’

  ‘If you’re going to be like that you’d better remember who got here first. This is my place. I could tell you to get out and find your own.’

  ‘Try it,’ I said, and we wrestled about in the dim cramped space for a while until she grazed her elbow on the lava-rock and yelped and said we should call a truce: share and share alike. We settled down in the sandy hollow and made ourselves comfortable.

  ‘I hope there aren’t any snakes,’ Hannah said.

  ‘Huh, who’s scared of snakes?’ I said. ‘Anyway, hard luck for us both if there are. Shall we say goodbye now?’

  ‘Don’t say that.’ There was a shudder in her voice. ‘My sister was bitten once and her arm swelled up like a goatskin.’

  ‘Do you think this is an oasis?’

  ‘I saw some trees.’

  ‘So did I. They could be fed from an underground spring. Wouldn’t it be great if we could bathe? Lying back in the cool water, opening your mouth whenever you felt like it and drinking as much as you wanted.’

  ‘Nobody saying “That’s enough, you’ve had your share! There are others besides you!”’

  We both laughed at her impersonation of the grown-ups’ continual strident warnings to conserve every drop of water; they were obsessive about it, harping on the subject night and day.