CHAPTER FIVE ―
THE TEMPLE OF KADU
Tommy plunged down into the water between two large rocks, before being brought to a jarring stop as his back met the pebbly bottom of the river. The breath was forced out of his lungs, and he was dazed.
Looking up through the clear water, he could see the light dancing on the surface. He reached for it, kicked off the river bed with his feet and shot upwards, fighting against the powerful urge to relieve the pain in his chest by trying to breathe. Black spots danced in front of his eyes, and he was sure that he would pass out and drown.
Breaking the surface, Tommy gulped in a mixture of air and spray, and was immediately swept away by the rapids. He felt like a white water canoeist… without a canoe.
It was Speedy that saw Tommy bob up like a cork far below them. “I think he made it,” he said to the others.
“How can we save him?” Sam said. “He’ll be smashed to pieces on the rocks.”
“Follow me,” Gorf said, setting off like an Olympic sprinter.
The river curved away from them, forming large S-bends, and by cutting overland instead of following it, they were sure that they had got ahead of Tommy.
“Now what do we do?” Ben asked. “It’s too steep to climb down.”
Fig and Speedy solved the problem. They crouched beside a gnarled cypress tree and concentrated their dwindling powers on a large root that grew out of a crevice on the rock face at the edge of the gorge.
Nothing happened at first. Ten seconds passed, then another ten, before the root began to tremble. And then it grew, became wrist-thick and snaked down to a stony ledge just above the crashing waves.
Gorf climbed over the lip, gripped the root that now looked like a long, leaf-covered creeper, and climbed down it. The rest clambered after him. At the bottom, Gorf removed his bow and quiver, took off the animal skin bag that hung by a strap from his shoulder, and pulled a coiled length of stout cord from it. He tied one end around his waist and handed the other end to Ben.
“If Frog comes by, I’ll swim out and grab hold of him,” Gorf said to the others. “Then you can pull us both back to the shore.”
“He’s there!” Sam shouted, pointing to a spot upstream. And sure enough they could see him rushing along, going under the surging water at times, to reappear waving his arms about wildly.
Gorf readied himself. He knew that this was a do-or-die attempt to save the boy. It was all about split-second timing. He gauged the speed of the current, and guessed which channel between the rocks that Tommy would most likely be swept through, before diving into the river and swimming out to the middle with powerful strokes of his muscular arms.
He was going to miss. Tommy was almost level with him, but four feet to his right and heading straight for a jagged outcrop of rock that would without doubt break every bone in his body. Gorf saw the panic in the young human’s eyes.
Tommy caught a glimpse of Gorf swimming towards him. He twisted his body, kicked with his feet, and used his last ounce of energy to lunge sideways.
Strong fingers locked on to his arm, almost crushing it, and Tommy was suddenly in the embrace of the giant ape-man.
“Now!” Ben shouted, and they all leaned back like a tug-of-war team, dug their heels in and took the weight of their two friends. Slowly but surely, hand over hand, they pulled them ashore, and Tommy and Gorf lay on their backs gasping for air.
“Are you okay, Frog?” Ben said.
“I’m fine,” Tommy spluttered. “Why wouldn’t I be? I only fell about a thousand feet, nearly drowned, and was smashed against a million rocks.”
Ben grinned. “You’re exaggerating.”
“I don’t feel as though I am,” Tommy said, and then passed out.
Gorf – being by far the strongest of them – used some of the cord to secure Tommy over his shoulder. He then climbed back up the creeper to safety. One by one they all made it back to the top with no further mishap.
When Tommy came round he felt as weak as a kitten, and was covered in scratches and bruises, following his ordeal.
“Thank you all,” he said. “I thought I was a goner. You saved my life.”
“If it hadn’t been for Gorf’s quick thinking, I reckon you’d have been fish food,” Sam said.
Tommy smiled at the troll. “Thanks, big guy,” he said, raising his hand up towards Gorf. “Gimme a high five.”
“Five what?” Gorf asked with a puzzled expression on his face.
Tommy showed him.
After a while, when Gorf’s thick covering of hair dried out, and Tommy felt fit enough to carry on, they headed off in the direction of the Desert of Storms, but stopped at least four miles short of it, under a massive tree with a thick canopy of leaves that acted like a giant umbrella, sheltering them from the sun.
“We should stay here tonight and get some rest,” Fig said. “It has been a long and eventful day. Let’s eat, then later we can start a fire and drink the last of our berry wine.”
By dusk they were sitting round a roaring fire, talking about the stone gargoyles of Doom Mountain, and of how miraculous it was that Tommy had survived his fall into the raging river.
“I wonder what else is ahead of us.” Sam said.
Fig shook his head. “I have no idea, Sam. All I have heard are fanciful stories that may not be true. Only Gorf might know what lies beyond the Desert of Storms.”
“I know the dangers of the desert,” Gorf said to them. “Not what might exist beyond it. But you are pleasing to be with. I would like to join you on your journey to the Crossroads of Time. Unless you would rather I didn’t”
“That’s ace,” Tommy said. “I want you to come with us, Gorf.”
Fig was more than a little pleased that Gorf wished to join their ranks. He and Speedy had all but lost their powers. They needed all the help they could get, and the giant troll-come-goblin had already proved how useful he could be.
“Then it is settled,” Fig said. “You shall join us, and we shall face the unknown together.”
“If we are to be companions, then trust me with the real reason why we are to risk our lives,” Gorf said. “I want to know what I will most probably die attempting to do.”
“We have a gold chalice.” Sam said. “It’s very special in some way, and must be returned to a place known as Iceworld.”
“Why?” Gorf asked.
“Because legend has it that the chalice was forged of gold, good and evil,” Fig said. “It can save or destroy the whole of Allworlds, depending on who holds it, and if that person or creature knows how to unleash its power.”
“Then the trials ahead will not be without good reason,” Gorf said. “But mark my words, I do not hold out much hope of us succeeding. There will no doubt be countless dangers to face, that may prove harder to overcome than a few dim-witted granite demons.”
“It is better to have tried and failed, than not to have tried at all,” Tommy said.
“Neat saying, Frog,” Ben said. “Where did you hear it?”
Tommy grinned. “No idea. Something else I must have read.”
“Wise and true words,” Fig said. “We can do no more than be brave-hearted, and take one step at a time into whatever the future holds for us.”
Using their bags as pillows, all but Gorf went to sleep around the fire. Gorf was like a bear or a hedgehog. He hibernated in winter, when thick blizzards covered the land from where he came, and food was hard to find. Other than that, he never tired, just closed his eyes once in a while and was refreshed.
Gorf was pleased that he had met the travelling band of fairies and humans. Being half troll and half goblin made him almost an outcast in his own land. Trolls treated him as a goblin, and vice versa. He did not fit in, and spent the greater part of his time alone, out hunting on the fringe of the great desert.
As a new dawn broke, and the sun rose to colour the sky a flamingo pink, Sam woke to find Gorf skinning a furry animal th
e size of a large dog.
“What is that?” she asked him, crinkling her nose up at the smell.
“A marsh hopper,” he said. “I went hunting before sunup and found it sitting on a rock, about to eat a blistergut it had caught. They will make a good meal for us, before we move on.”
Sam got up. She was aching from lying for so many hours on the hard ground. She stretched, yawned, and went across to inspect Gorf’s catch. The marsh hopper resembled an otter with long legs. And the blistergut was similar to a giant toad, with a yellow body covered in orange, warty lumps.
Leaving Gorf to prepare the animals, Sam climbed up to the uppermost branches of the tree that they had spent the night beneath. Pushing her head through the leafy crown she looked about her and saw Doom Mountain partly shrouded in cloud to the north. There was heath and moor land to the east and west, and what seemed to be coral pink sand stretching away to the south, only broken by sparse rock columns of the sort seen in Roadrunner cartoons, which seemed to grow out of the desert floor.
Sam’s spine felt as if it was turning to ice. She was scared, and wasn’t ashamed to be. It seemed madness to voluntarily set out across such a hostile landscape, and yet that was precisely what they intended to do. It would have been better if she had not climbed up the tree to see what lay ahead of them. Maybe they could avoid crossing the desert by going around it.
Back on the ground, she saw that the others were all awake. Tommy groaned with every movement he made, due to the bruising he had suffered colliding with rocks in the rapids, but he was not seriously hurt.
They ate some of the now cooked marsh hopper. Ben thought it tasted like beef, and would have given anything to have had some roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding and gravy with it. That reminded him of home, and he wondered how his mum and dad were coping. Blinking back tears, he pushed the thought away and concentrated on the here and now of the situation.
“Wouldn’t it be safer to go around the desert?” Sam asked Gorf.
“I’m afraid not,” he replied, popping one of the blistergut’s back legs into his mouth. “Boiling hot sulphur springs are said to border it to the south, which is the way we must go. They stretch for hundreds of what you call miles, and no one knows what lies beyond them. The desert is like a giant pathway through. It’s not so bad, if you have plenty of water and travel after moonshow when it’s not so hot that it will boil your brains.”
After Gorf had fashioned a large bag from the waterproof skin of the marsh hopper, they made their way towards the very edge of the desert, filled all the bottles and bags from a stream, and waited for the coolness of night before setting out into the wasteland.
For a few nights, all went well, and they covered many miles, spending the days sheltering in the shadow of high ridges, or in caves.
It was just before dawn on the fifth day that they saw the outline of tall spires in the distance. They looked ghostly under the strange light cast by the coloured moons.
“What is it?” Ben asked, stopping to study the far-off towers.
Gorf frowned and said, “An old goblin, who wandered through the desert for much of his life, told the story of a magnificent temple at its very centre. No one believed him, or would accompany him when he set off to find it again. He never returned. Perhaps this is it.”
By sunup they were in a patch of dense jungle. It was an oasis with underground springs making the area fertile. There were palm and fruit trees, and many exotic plants and flowers that none of them recognised. Brightly coloured birds flitted from tree to tree, and the whoops and calls of other creatures filled the air.
“We’re still at least a mile from the building,” Sam said. “Let’s fill our water bags and bottles, and then find some fruit to eat and rest for a while. I’m exhausted.”
They found a wide stream and drank their fill, before picking fruit that looked and tasted like dates and figs from the bushes that lined the stream’s banks.
After all but Gorf had slept for a few hours, they moved on again, and were soon climbing vine-covered steps, up to a massive doorway that Sam, Ben and Tommy thought was similar to the entrance to the Natural History museum in London. Although this building was much older, and the brickwork was crumbling.
Sam gasped. Carved into the stone above the giant door was the same type of cryptic symbols that were engraved on the chalice. She stared at them and to her alone they moved and formed letters she could understand.
“Can you read it?” Tommy asked her.
She nodded. “It says, The Holy Temple of Kadu.”
“Let’s explore,” Ben said. “This might be where the chalice came from.”
Gorf hesitated. “I don’t feel that we are alone,” he said. “Maybe we should just leave.”
“Then wait outside for us,” Sam said. “Ben’s right. The writing is the same, so there must be a link. We might learn something about the chalice.”
Gorf had no intention of letting them roam about in the temple without him. He was not scared of anything or anyone that might be lurking in the shadows. He was just cautious, and believed that trouble, especially of the unknown variety was, given the choice, best avoided. He walked forward and pushed open the large door.
Sunlight slanted through crescent windows high up in the walls, and the dust mote-filled shafts hit the tiled floor to form a circle of overlapping segments. They approached it, and behind them the thick wood door slammed shut with an echoing boom, making them all jump and turn round.
“I told you,” Gorf said. “We are not alone here.”
Speedy took two paces towards the doors, and stepped on a tile that sank an inch under his weight and triggered the release of a dozen arrows from slits in the wall. He leapt back as the lethal barrage flew across in front of him. One arrow went through a fold in his tunic, grazing his skin.
“Wow!” Tommy said. “Booby traps. This is like being in an Indiana Jones movie.”
“One step at a time,” Fig said. “Let’s expect the worst and tread carefully.”
At the other side of the circular chamber, they entered another doorway and ventured down a steep stone staircase to the lower floors or vaults of the temple.
“It’s like a crypt down here,” Tommy said. “And where is the light coming from?”
Before anyone could answer, a heavy, grated gate made of steel dropped down in its vertical grooves behind them.
“Somebody doesn’t want us to leave,” Sam said as Gorf went over to the portcullis and strained every muscle trying to lift it up. Even with his great strength, he couldn’t.
“We can’t go back or just stay here, so we’ll have to keep going,” Ben said.
The first doorway they came to was on their left. They checked to see that there was no door or gate that could trap them before going through it.
The stone-walled room they entered was in reality a very wide corridor, lined on both sides with niches in the rock that held bodies embalmed and wrapped in mouldering cloth that was falling off them.
“This isn’t on my list of things to do,” Ben whispered.
“Looks like they’ve been dead forever,” Tommy said, unable to stop himself from going over to the nearest shallow recess to get a closer look at the corpse propped up inside it. “And I think they were human.”
The skeleton was leaning forward slightly, with its arms crossed in front of its chest. The skin still remaining on the grinning skull was brown and leathery, and put Tommy in mind of an Egyptian mummy, and of the old cracked cowhide-covered settee that was in the living room of the terrace house where he lived, or had lived at with his mother.
Long yellow hair hung in matted clumps from the skull’s scabby scalp, and shrivelled eyes like currants seemed to stare out from dark sockets. It was a loathsome sight.
“Keep away from it, Frog,” Ben said. “It might come to life and grab you.”
Tommy knew that dead was dead. This thing had been here for a long,
long time and wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. It would still be here in another thousand years, unless it just fell apart and crashed down to the floor like an empty suit of armour.
“AAAGHHH!” Tommy screamed, falling back on to the floor with his feet up in the air. The jaws of the skull had snapped open, and from between the teeth slithered a slender black snake.
Ben began to laugh, and Sam and the others joined in.
“Di-did y-you think it w-was sticking its tongue out at y-you?” Ben managed to say to Tommy through fits of laughter.
Tommy got to his feet and dusted himself down, all the while snatching sideways glances at the figure that for an instant he really believed had come to life.
“It isn’t piggin’ funny,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re all laughing at. I could have dropped dead of fright. Or been bitten by that snake.”
The light in the corridor brightened.
Fig became serious. “It should be as black as night down here,” he said, and the others stopped laughing.
“Where is it coming from?” Speedy said. “I can’t see any torches, or openings that daylight might reach us from.”
Sam saw them: Small, round, glowing pebbles or pieces of glass that had been placed on stone shelves, high up on both sides of the crypt. “Up there,” she said, pointing at them.
“Let’s get out of here,” Gorf said, heading off, readying his bow with an arrow.
They hurried along the corridor, keeping to the centre and not looking at the scores of mummies on both sides of them.
They had nearly reached a wide doorway at the far end when they all heard the sound of chanting voices. At first it was an unintelligible babble. It came from all around them, out of the bone-filled recesses, the walls, the ceiling, and even the stone floor they walked upon.
The walls appeared to move, to swell out towards them, as if the long underground room was a living, breathing entity. The volume of the voices increased, and they clapped their hands to their ears and stopped, not knowing what to do, only to be blown off their feet as the skeletons exploded into bone dust that billowed out and filled the air in a thick cloud of chalk-white particles.
As the echoing boom faded, they got up, coughing, almost choking, wiping at their eyes, sneezing and spitting out the finely ground powder.
“Come on, run, run,” Gorf shouted to the others. But they were too late.
Something shuffled out into the now flickering, dim light, and took shape before them. It was a mummified figure that had not exploded. They waited to see what it would do, not wanting to approach it, but knowing that it blocked the way they had to go.
The skeleton’s skull came up from where it had been drooped forward on the tattered shroud that hung from it like a loose, grey bandage. It appeared to look at them, and as it did, marbled, red muscle and fat formed on the dull bone. The shrunken eyes swelled and regained sight, and skin rushed up from under the bindings to cover its neck and skull. What had been little more than a bag of bones was filling out to become a living person again.
Gorf sensed the growing danger that was forming in front of them. He drew back the string of the mighty longbow, took careful aim and released the thick, flint-tipped arrow.
Even as the now solid figure took a deep breath, the arrow smashed into its chest and passed through its body to fly on into the darkness beyond.
Gorf waited for the reanimated corpse to drop, but it remained standing and showed no sign of having been shot.
The man, for that was what he now was, grew long black hair and a beard. His rags became a knee-length white costume trimmed with beads, feathers and gold. And he also wore a feathered head-dress that, to Tommy, was just like the war bonnets worn by Red Indian chiefs.
“You have come to the Temple of Kadu with the Chalice of Hope, and returned me from eternal sleep,” the ‘Chief’ said to them. “The power of the chalice has given me the strength to reform and be whole again. I thank you, strangers.”
“Who are you?” Sam asked him.
“I am Sharlo, the high priest of this temple. And you are a human. What brings three humans and other assorted creatures to Kadu?”
It was only then that Sam realised that she, Ben and Tommy were no longer small and green. She reached up, ran her fingers over the tops of both ears, and found them to be rounded again. The spell cast by Fig was broken, now that his and Speedy’s powers were finally gone.
“We found the chalice in our world,” Sam said in answer to Sharlo’s question. She then went on to quickly tell him everything else that had happened.
“The chalice was here at the temple for a very long time,” Sharlo said. “And then the Dark One’s army of Horgs, imps and psychopomps attacked Kadu. I managed to open a portal in time and hurl the chalice through it, before we were all put to death.”
“What are psychopomps?” Tommy asked.
“Unworldly beings,” Sharlo explained. “They appeared to us as bird-shaped shadows and escorted the souls of the others to a place of torment, wickedness and misery. The power of the chalice saved my soul from the same fate, but I was trapped in Limbo, which is a region bordering hell. I was doomed to stay there for eternity, until the strength of goodness from the chalice you carry reached out and touched my decaying body. Now I am whole again, and with the chalice returned I will be able to restore the temple to its former glory.”
“We can’t leave it here,” Ben said. “It has to be returned to the Keeper at Iceworld.”
“It was stolen from a Keeper in the first place,” Sharlo said. “Kadu is as safe a place as any for it to be lodged for the rest of eternity.”
“No,” Sam said. “You want it to serve your own selfish purpose. We’re leaving now, and taking it with us.”
Sharlo held out his fisted right hand, opened it, and in his palm was a dazzling crystal the size of a large plum. Laser beams of red light shot out towards them from the facets cut into its surface, and the group were at once set in place, unable to move. And from above them, thick steel bars slid out from holes in the ceiling, to drop down and imbed in the stone floor, forming a circular cage, inside which they were imprisoned.
They could move again, but were trapped. Gorf seized two of the bars with his hands, and with muscles bulging, straining and rippling, he pulled, shook and heaved with all his might, but the bars neither moved nor bent a fraction of an inch.
“Let us out,” Tommy said to the grinning priest. “This isn’t a very nice way to treat people who have returned you to life.”
“You didn’t do anything,” Sharlo said. “It was fortunate for me that you decided to explore the temple, but it was the chalice that brought me back from Limbo. Now, you can turn to dust where you are. The chalice will be safe down here. I shall seal the catacomb from above, so that no being will ever be able to enter it again.”
“But we’ve done you no harm,” Sam said. “We came in peace.”
“Your furry friend tried to kill me with an arrow. That was not what I would call a peaceful gesture. Better that you take the secret of where the chalice is to wherever you creatures go to in the after world.”
Without another word, Sharlo walked out of the chamber, and a huge block of stone slid noisily across the doorway, leaving them entombed in total darkness.
“I think we just ran out of luck,” Ben said. “I’ve got the feeling he won’t be back.”
“We’re all going to die,” Tommy whispered with more than a trace of panic in his voice.
―