The Covenant of Genesis

‘Let’s hope there’s an easier way back down.’ Nina looked round as he put his coat back on, and saw Sophia crouching by one of the pillars. ‘Hey! I said to wait.’

‘Yes, you did,’ was the dismissive reply. ‘I can read some of this text - it’s talking about the tree of life.’ She stood, anticipation clear on her face. ‘Whatever it is, it’s here.’ Sophia’s flashlight illuminated the passage, revealing a chamber at the far end. ‘Come on.’

She hurried down the corridor. Exasperated, Nina caught up, Chase following.

The three torch beams swept across the chamber’s entrance to reveal what lay inside. Beneath the omnipresent ice, Nina made out stone shelves, much like those she had seen inside the ruined chamber in Australia . . . but these were intact.

And still held their contents.

‘Oh . . .’ she said in wonder as she entered the room, moving the light along the length of one of the shelves. It was filled with clay tablets, a long rack containing dozen upon dozen of the flat rectangles, standing on edge like books. She continued to pan the beam, revealing more tablets . . . and more . . . and more.

And beyond them, more shelves. And more. The chamber stretched away as far as her light could reach, a vast warren of ancient knowledge. Chase and Sophia also probed the room, finding yet more stacks of tablets receding into the distance.

‘We - we need more light,’ she gasped, pulling off her backpack and fumbling in it for a packet of glowsticks. Almost dropping them in her haste, she bent them to crack the inner glass tubes, chemicals mixing and fluorescing to give out an orange light, the first warm colour she had seen since entering the frozen cavern. ‘Look at this! Look!’ she cried, almost skipping into the nearest aisle in her excitement as she placed glowsticks on the shelves. ‘It’s a library! It’s the entire knowledge of the Veteres!’

Chase rummaged in his own pack for a lamp and switched it on, noticing a large gap on a shelf. ‘It’s not that entire. Somebody’s taken a bunch of stuff off this shelf. Hate to think what the overdue fines are after this long.’

‘There are more missing over here,’ Sophia added, peering down another aisle. ‘And here, too.’ Whole sections were empty, entire shelves gaping.

Nina took off her gloves, lifting a tablet at random. The ice crackled before finally giving up its prize. She recognised a handful of the words upon it; there was mention of wind, cold and storms. A record of the weather?

Another snap of ice from a few aisles away. ‘This one seems to be about some sort of dispute between families,’ said Sophia after a few moments.

Nina retrieved a couple of glowsticks and moved deeper into the maze, stopping at an empty shelf. Examining it, she made out words carved into the stone slab itself. ‘Sophia, look at this,’ she called. Sophia and Chase joined her. ‘I think it’s an index - it’ll tell us what’s missing, rather than what’s been left behind.’

Sophia brushed away the frost. ‘I think it says “grain”. Some sort of crop, anyway. And that’s “water” - not the sea, but fresh.’

‘Something about farming?’ Chase suggested. ‘Like how to grow grain?’

‘How to irrigate grain,’ Nina realised. The reason why some sections of the library were empty while others had been left completely intact was becoming clear. ‘That’s something that’d be useful if you had to pack up and start from scratch. But historical records, accounts of legal disputes . . . not so much.’

‘You think they took the missing tablets with them?’ asked Sophia.

‘They cleaned out the rest of the place when they left, so there’s no reason why they wouldn’t take valuable knowledge with them - the kind of knowledge that would help them survive. But this . . .’ She pulled another tablet free. ‘This is still an incredible find - it’ll give us an amazing amount of information about how the Veteres lived. But when they went back to Australia to escape the changing climate, they left it all behind, because it would just be dead weight. And when you’re sailing thousands of miles in primitive boats, the last thing you want aboard is dead weight.’

Sophia sounded almost offended. ‘So all this is worthless? They took all the most important tablets with them and left the junk behind?’

‘It’s not worthless,’ Nina said irritably, professional pride insulted. ‘I just said —’

‘It’s of absolutely no use to us right now. And it doesn’t help us deal with the Covenant. We already knew the Veteres left here and went back to Australia - we’re no better off than we were before. Just a lot colder.’

‘There’s still plenty more to look at,’ Chase said, standing beside Nina. ‘This tree they kept going on about might be just round the next corner.’

Sophia swung her torch back and forth, finding only more shelves. ‘Somehow I doubt that, Eddie,’ she said with a sneer.

‘I don’t mean literally the next corner, for fuck’s sake. Christ, this is just like when we—’

‘It’s not literal,’ Nina interrupted. Chase and Sophia looked at her. ‘The tree, I mean,’ she continued, mind racing as a new idea took form. ‘It’s not literal - the translation doesn’t literally mean tree! Ribbsley got it wrong, just like he did about wind and sand - it’s symbolic, something with multiple meanings depending on the context.’ She paced rapidly back and forth along the aisle. ‘What else can a tree represent? What’s the symbolism behind it?’

Sophia quickly overcame her anger to focus on the problem. ‘Growth and change,’ she said. ‘Or cycles, cycles of nature.’

Chase’s thoughts were more practical. ‘You get wood from trees. Or fruit.’

‘The tree of the gift,’ said Nina, ‘the tree of life. If it’s not a literal tree, then what is it? The something of life, the something of the gift.’

‘It’d help if we knew what the gift was,’ Chase said.

Nina tried to remember the Australian inscription. ‘The Veteres thought their god was punishing them. And their term for “god” included “tree” - “the one great tree”, wasn’t it?’ Sophia nodded. ‘So to them god and tree were interlinked. What were they thinking? How did their minds work?’ Words clicked through her own mind, alternative meanings flashing past like possible solutions to a crossword clue. ‘So what is God? God’s the creator, the provider, the giver of life . . . the source,’ she concluded. ‘The source of life, the source of the gift, the one great source. And a tree is a source, of lots of things - it gives you shelter, food, wood . . .’

‘It fits,’ Sophia realised. ‘They used the word tree as a symbolic representation for source - of anything.’

‘Which means,’ Nina said, looking at the shelves, ‘that we’re in “the source of the gift”. The library is the source of the gift.’

‘So what is this gift?’ Chase demanded.

‘It’s knowledge!’ Nina said, laughing. ‘The gift from their god was knowledge! The ability to record and pass on everything they’d ever learned to their descendants, who passed it on to their descendants, and so on. And all of this at a time when we thought humans hadn’t even developed cave paintings. My God, this is amazing!’

‘Their god wasn’t quite so impressed,’ said Sophia. ‘He tried to destroy them, remember? For “giving the gift of God to the beasts”.’

Chase looked dubious. ‘How do you give knowledge to animals?’

The answer came to Nina. ‘You train them. That’s what the hypogeum must have been - a training area. Start them out in harsh, cramped conditions under constant supervision to break them, then move them to easier surroundings once you’ve got control. First the stick, then the carrot. I doubt PETA would approve, but it’d work.’

‘So their god decided to freeze them to death for teaching their dogs to fetch? Bit steep.’

‘That’s primitive religion for you. If things go bad, the only conceivable explanation is that you’ve somehow angered your god.’

‘So if “the tree of the gift” is actually the source of knowledge,’ said Sophia, ‘what about “the tree of life”? The source of life?’

‘I don’t know,’ Nina replied, ‘but that sounds like something the Covenant would be interested in, don’cha think?’ She gathered up the glowsticks. ‘Let’s find it.’