The Cave of Treasures

By May Koliander

The Earth was ailing, men were ailing. Blind greed had compromised the very processes underpinning life on the planet... Something had to give. It was then the Second Angel sounded his trumpet and the upheaval was panoptic, the world as men knew it was blown to pieces : swarming cities and gangrenous industries were obliterated, leaving dazed, fearful survivors striving to chart out a new course for their lives. Not far inland from the eastern seaboard, the powerful Krateor slowly emerged, ruling unchallenged over the seven K-towns, little realizing that its days were numbered when Violeta gave birth to Dimitar in Kyros.
But fate is whimsical and the bearers of change are often unaware of their destiny...until the veil is torn and they see into the future...

• Language: English
• Publisher: May Koliander
• Release date: Aug 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9782970088264

May Koliander

I was born in the States, the outcome of an Oklahoma - Pennsylvania love story, but bred in Europe. My taste for stories started a long time ago with Mom reading to us every evening for hours and giving us free access to the stash of Classics Illustrated a mile high she had thrown into the great ocean liner trunks along with other artefacts, such as vegetable peelers and pie tins, when she decided to cross the seas with her brood. As we grew in years, we graduated from Uncle Wiggly, Uncle Remus and Pogo to the great epics and then on to the world's classics. I still remember my brother's laughter when we got to The Pickwick Papers and must confess I fell asleep during most of The Brothers Karamazov, but was totally enthralled by War and Peace. I sometimes try to draw up a list of my most loved books, something like a top ten. It would read - today - like this : Lolita by V. Nabokov War With The Newts by K. Capek God's Grace by B. Malamud Anna Karenin by L. Tolstoy La Soif et Autres Nouvelles by Ivo Andritch Ferdydurke by W. Gombrowicz The Barsoom Novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs The Things They Carried by T. O'Brien Le Testament Français by Andreï Makine A Good Man is Hard to find and Other Stories by F. O'Connor Us by E. Zamiatine Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Of course, it's easy to remember the works that have marked generations. However, we don't only feed on 'literature' - there are myriads of other books out there of a less lofty nature that we have read and thoroughly enjoyed, but whose titles or authors have faded from our memory. So, the big blank space in the middle of the list is for all those writers whose work has given me countless hours of excitement and pleasure - writers of genre fiction. One day, however, the unthinkable happens - you reach for a book and after a few pages, you let if fall back down. It's not what you wanted - the shoe doesn't fit - so you pick up another and it happens again... Then there's only one thing left to do - sit down at your computer and start writing...

Book preview

Prologue

For a short while all was quiet on the 96th floor of the Jupiter Tower in midtown Manhattan. The cleaning team had locked up their equipment, clocked out and spread through the dark empty streets, hunching over to fight the fierce gusts of wind swirling around the buildings, that were now, more often than not, unoccupied. On his way down, the old janitor checked the executive offices on every floor. Suddenly, he stopped. Noise   a kind of thump   was coming from the Treasurer's office. Clutching his Maglite harder he pulled out his cell phone as he shuffled down the corridor, frowning, but then a grin cut his face in two and the cell was dropped back into his pocket. The rhythmic thumping was accompanied by groans and moans. They were at it again, of course. He suspected some of the night cleaners to take the job just to have a quiet place to hump. When he was young, it was easy to find a woman, but nowadays birds were getting scarce, what with birth rates plummeting, and having a woman on the team made the guys frisky. There was no light filtering from under the paneled door but the tempo inside had clearly increased and the raucous sounds and grunts made him breathe faster as he felt a slight stirring bellow his belt. They probably wouldn't hear him pull the door open but the beam of his flashlight would bring them back to their senses all right, make the guy go soft. He chuckled. For sure they were doing it on the Treasurer's great mahogany desk and banging the man's fancy metal chair against the wall. He took a deep breath, swung the door open and nearly fell over. The floor beneath his feet had begun to sway and the beam of his Maglite traveled erratically through the room, only briefly illuminating a man's hairy buttocks wedged between a pair of pale thighs and another bloke standing nearby, waiting his turn. The whole building rocked and shivered madly once more and then settled. The old janitor let go of his grip on the door knob and with trembling hands, focused his light on the couple. The disheveled woman had caught hold of the man's shoulders and was trying to pull herself up off the desk. Both faces, pale and sweaty, were turned towards him, features blurred. There was a moment of perfect silence and then a low rumble, like a furious beast's growl resounded from the forest of high-rises beyond the building. The floor hiccupped wildly, sending the old man to his knees, as the woman, still pinned down by her companion, let out a shrill cry. The tower was now vacillating sickeningly and the deep rumble had become a deafening roar blanking out all thought. They veered as one to the large plate glass windows and froze, unable to take in what they saw. Traveling at jet speed towards them, toppling buildings as if they were houses of cards, a monstrous column of water spiked with a jumble of cars, boats, debris of every size and shape, was bearing down on them. In the split second before the wave crashed onto their building, they caught sight of a huge shark embedded in the wall of water, jaws agape, row upon row of jagged teeth exposed. The plate glass windows burst, and the shards of glass propelled inside spiked the onlookers as they rolled around like skittles before being bashed against the exploding walls. The great building was a wisp of straw shaken by some godlike hand and it sighed and cried as steel twisted and snapped.

That Sunday, November 24th 2041 at 3 am New York time, about 50 miles away a 3000 foot wide asteroid slammed into the ocean, parting the startled Atlantic waters down to the floor, sending a relentless succession of colossal waves towards the coastlines, as others of similar magnitude showered down all over the world. Walls of water up to 1200 feet high hit the Eastern seaboard. The Second Angel had sounded his trumpet as retribution for man's laughable efforts to curb pollution, fight epidemics and stave off the rising of the oceans, casting something like a huge mountain, all ablaze, into the sea. Wave after wave struck the coastlands, the ocean's gigantic maw sucking away countless lives and blasting man's proud constructions as the water receded, leaving in its wake pitiful mountains of debased objects when it didn't carry chunks of land out to sea. Smoke from firestorms and colossal amounts of dust and debris soared into the upper atmosphere, casting a pall over the world ; sea floors burst open and lava shot up, creating strange concretions off coasts and modifying sea currents…

The blast of the Second Angel's trumpet swept away the basis on which the once teeming life of anthill cities rested, but long before that fated November day the worm had been at work in the apple. Carbon dioxide spewed out by factories had turned the oceans into an acid bath and cooked the planet, unleashing monster hurricanes ravaging islands and coasts time and again, freeing methane and lethal viruses buried deep in the sea bed and thawing bogs. Low-lying countries were swamped, swelling like giant sponges ; dry summers led to poor crop yields and famines ; fires raged alongside torrential rains, puzzling meteorologists   even treeless Greenland was ablaze. Scrambling away from the ever-rising waters, men began to vie for land with those happy enough to still have dry feet. As politicians, arms flailing aimlessly, chanted their hackneyed mantras, companies went on using up oil supplies like there was no tomorrow while marketing geniuses stayed awake at night devising new ways to get people to consume ever more. For, as they expounded, at the end of the day, aren't we are all morally required to be patriots and uphold the economy ? Or do we want jobs to go down the drain ?

And the charade went on…

Even before the great upheaval, there had of course been plastic, the darling product of the throw-away culture celebrated by industrialists and ingenuous artists alike   "Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic," as Andy Warhol intoned.

And where did the staggering quantities of plastic produced congregate once they had outlived their ever shortening life-span ?

Like creatures alert to magnetic fields, abandoned detritus and cast offs risen from flooded landfills nosed their way to the monstrous trash vortexes disseminated across the oceans. On that fated November day, as yet unperturbed by the chaos wreaked by the shower of asteroids, the biggest vortex of them all, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, gently belched under the bland sky weighing down on it, spreading ripples through its gelatinous mass, causing the debased molts of civilization to sluggishly bob up and down as they offered their bleached faces to the sun. A faded plastic computer processor shuddered, hesitated, then toppled off the thick rope knot it was perched on and bounced against a faded blue potty, frightening a bird who took off, wings flapping like wet laundry. With an indignant squawk, the gull landed a few yards away on a family-size shampoo bottle poking out of a tire. Far off, on the fringes of the swelling leviathan, an armada of ghostly white plastic bags, like so many jellyfish, were gracefully propelling themselves through lifeless waters to join the congregation, sucked in by the earth's rotation. Above them, flush with the surface of the water column, a fresh shipload of still brightly colored flip flops that had jumped ship during the last tempest, seemed to be treading the water in their haste to escape the vast loneliness of the ocean and intermix with their plastic kin. The Great Patch welcomed them all. It sighed with ease as it expanded its vast girth, blocking the sunlight the plankton and algae needed, and thereby stamping a deadly seal on the mighty ocean. Its real strength, however, lay not in the vast field of tangled junk few men had yet seen. The source of its formidable power resided in the column of lethal peppery soup suspended beneath the floating landfill. Every now and then the ever-growing patch gyred like a monstrous toilet flushing down its unsightly contents and spreading far and wide mermaid tears   shards of broken down plastic containers, nurdles, face-wash micro beads, snowy flakes of disintegrated plastic bags, down to microscopic particles of chemical sludge teeming with bacteria and eagerly sponging up persistent man-made organics adrift in the ocean. For decades now, aquatic organisms all over the planet had been gobbling up these tiny toxic sponges as they mixed with the ever-declining plankton, and the deadly payload they carried had dutifully swum up the food chain and reached the bloodstreams and tissues of man. Had the patch been some demon bent on wreaking havoc or even a wrathful God intent on destroying mankind for its sins against nature, it could well have gimbled with glee. Plastic, the new miracle, was cheap and, just like diamonds, eternal, but unfortunately, unlike diamonds, it was not a girl's best friend. Indeed, the bitter witch's brew made up of flame-retardants, aromatic hydrocarbons, phthalates, Bisphenol A, pesticides, fuel contaminants and industrial chemicals all creatures had unwittingly been ingurgitating for decades had begun to take its toll. The first sign that something was amiss, apart from an alarming increase in the number of cancers and unexplained cases of child obesity, was the rare form of color blindness   a blue-yellow blindness   showing up in statistically significant numbers. Before long, as scientists were still scratching their heads, wondering what could induce a non-inherited trait, pediatricians had to acknowledge that two out of three newborns were indeed tritanopes.

But that was not the whole of it…

The great garbage patches gyred and gimbled, chuckling to themselves, as they consolidated their reign and fed back to man the poisons he had unleashed upon nature. Women stopped producing girls. The number of female babies plummeted, not only in regions of the world where girl embryos had systematically been weeded out for centuries, but all over the planet and very soon the gender imbalance shot up to 140 boys to 100 girls and the population began to dwindle ever faster as unheard-of viruses escaped from the warming bowels of the earth and circled gaily around the world singling out female fetuses and sucking them dry.

In the aftermath of the asteroids’ crash, swarms of dazed, wounded people sought to escape the desolation and pollution of areas where great cities had once stood, their towers challenging the sky, and after wandering around aimlessly, like so many blinded beasts, they began to regroup further inland in small communities. It was the dawn of a new era…

Pockets of surviving city-dwellers, who for decades had been pent up in the sprawling cities, strove to build shelters and till the soil, as best they could, having little or no knowledge of how to cultivate plants or husband farm animals. But producing food was not the only problem. As communities slowly grew, pieces of the blasted social order began to congeal, giving rise to a new order where males ruled. As the years went by and the shortage of girls was ever greater, women who in the still recent past had enjoyed near equal status with men, were once again considered as a commodity and competition for them among crowds of single, frustrated males was fierce. Violent crime, stabbings, rape, trafficking   even of small girls   skyrocketed and the submission of women took hold once again. It started out benignly as a movement to protect them, keeping them inside the home, out of harm's way until a solution was found to the fix the sex-ratio, but very soon it degenerated and women were ipso facto deprived of their rights and reduced to the status of walking wombs. However, this enslavement did not solve the issue of scarcity and the great numbers of unattached men led to a situation of near anarchy within the budding society until one man, Amos, drawing upon the wisdom of the ancients found in texts miraculously salvaged from the catastrophe, rose above all others in the largest of the new communities and as a mighty prophet of old, called upon all to repent for their sins, bellowing out to the crowds that the future is not what it used to be. Now was the time of hard work and discipline and keeping a tight reign over the female folk for woman was the Devil's gateway, the root of all evil. Had she not, through her foolish vanity, urged men to earn ever more, to rape the planet to satisfy her every whim ? Trust not the female ! he thundered, For under her seductive trappings she is a cold creature with the malice of the asp. Now her duty was to repair some of the harm done and people the Earth.

Men, whose world had collapsed, listened to Amos only too readily and it was decreed that every woman was required to produce as many offspring as nature would allow. For every girl born, the family would receive a plot of land and could keep one boy. If no girl was born to a family, the sons were to be reared by the state in an institution   the Androterion   where their energy and sexual frustration would be canalized by hard work useful to the community. However, if a male child was a Seer   not a tritanope   he was placed in the Eidoterion, an institution sitting at the center of the community, right behind the town house where people gathered on Mondays   the day of the Moon and female cycles. Amos hoped that male Seers would sire healthy, normal children on the women of the community who were duty bound to offer themselves at least once shortly after their first period. Female Seers were jealously watched and allowed to mate only with a Seer to try to hasten the reversal of the harm triggered by the pollution of land and sea.

Those unfortunate women who failed to bear children were removed from their homes, to be replaced by a younger or more fertile woman and put to work in the highly prized B houses where they offered their services to male customers.

Amos and his men kept watch over the Seers not only because they hoped their genes were unaltered but also to protect them from the wrath of the crowd. Indeed, a rumor had spread that a Seer would again topple civilization, be its gravedigger and Amos, who firmly believed this to be true, had the words : BEWARE THE SEER painted above the entrance to every communal building and enclosed the Eidoterion within tall walls.

A new social order slowly began to emerge, based on sustainable farming practices and economic self-reliance. Amos ordered men to turn their back on the sea and its contaminated products and set up home-centered systems of production using wind and running water as a source of power. Thus Kyros, the first town of the Krateor was born and the community grew and thrived but Amos distrusted people congregating in great numbers so he sent out six of his seven sons, all born before the new laws, to found communities or take over fledgling ones both to the north   Kaeltown, Kiziltown, Keirantown   and to the south of Kyros   Kendricktown, Kaldentown, Kynetown   each town bearing the name of one of his progenies.

At first, the six new autonomous groups struggled to survive but then grew into towns and built up networks between each other while sea levels were still rising. Global warming was on a roller-coaster and nowhere near slowing down in spite of the sharp decrease in carbon dioxid production after the destruction of oil fields and refineries. Those who had not fled the seaboard fast enough and remained too long among the wreckage were despised and considered pariahs   Hibaks   shunned, excluded from commerce with the emerging communities who prided themselves on being made up of pioneers, men who had dared move on and brave the unknown. The contaminated ones were easy to spot   they had a raucous cough they couldn't suppress, radioactive dust from the gutted nuclear plants and high levels of pollutants having attacked their lungs. To protect themselves from these outcasts, the Regents, as the ruling members of the Krateor named themselves, kept thick books in which they recorded the genealogy of all the inhabitants of the towns.

At first the towns under the rule of the Krateor were assertively egalitarian, all men working for the common good and sharing their meagre means of production and crops. However, as people began to forget the catastrophe, in spite of stark reminders such as gaunt vagrants who kept appearing from the seaboard and recurring shortages   grumblings started to be heard. People, whose stomachs were now being filled, questioned the Krateor's harsh rules and demanded more freedom to put into practice ideas to improve their lot, or tried to refuse to give up their sons and daughters, so Amos and his sons tightened their hold over the population with the help of the young men in the Androterions who were trained in combat and the use of weapons. A safety valve was also provided by the annual three-day festival of Wife Attribution Day where lots were drawn in the Gamosgamble and a chosen few of the men in the Androterion were given spouses so they could start a family. On these days, rules were somewhat relaxed so the people could let off steam and vagrants were seen to drift up from the seaboard.

Where in the early days assemblies had been lively, people eagerly coming up with ideas on how to make life better, now assemblies were mostly moments when orders or threats were given out to the cowering population. After a few years, men who had sired a girl or girls, took precedence over the others, demanding a larger part of the common resources for having contributed better to the prosperity of the community and were second only to Amos and his sons. Thus, the system began its descent into division and iniquity, particularly after Amos' death when Karel, his first born, seized the reins of Kyros and became Regent.

I. DIMITAR

1

BLOOD AND ROSES

The little plump hand reached up eagerly towards the face above it as the baby's lips opened, and the shadow of a smile appeared, dimpling one of the smooth cheeks before a large drop landed on the child's nose and then in one of its eyes and the little face scrunched up, rosy mouth pursing, as tiny fists flayed around in an effort to ward off the wet stuff dripping on it. With soothing noises, Violeta wiped the tears off the baby's startled, disgruntled face, her fingers lingering on the silky curve of the child's cheeks, before quickly brushing away the moisture caught in her long lashes. The front door had banged and she could hear Jordan coughing as he hung up his heavy leather jacket. When he stumped into the room, still wearing his thick work boots, the baby was clutching one of her long fingers and gurgling happily.

The man took in the scene for a few seconds ; there was a frown on his face and his jaw was set.

Don't let that one bawl you over with his pretty face, like last time. You know we can't keep him. His tone was rough.

She turned away from the baby so it couldn't see the anxiety in her eyes, but it sensed it in her voice and started grunting and keening when she spoke.

Don't make me give up this one   he's so beautiful ! she pleaded, quickly turning back to the child and attempting a smile so the little boy wouldn't start crying and make his father swear and shake the cradle.

You can keep a boy only if you produce a girl child, that's the law and you know it   your sisters all have had a girl, so why can't you ? There was no warmth in his voice. As a blushing young bride, she had hoped for his love and adorned herself to please him, brushing her long wavy hair till it caught the light and rouging her full lips with the juice of berries, but as her rounded belly produced son after son, two bitter lines had appeared around his firm mouth and there was no light in his eyes the few times he really looked at her ; for all her beauty, she had become transparent. He had now come up to where she sat and was waving his strong, tanned hand above the cradle, studying the baby's deep blue eyes.

But if this one's a Seer, he'll be worth almost as much as a girl   perhaps you have at last given us a valuable child.

Why would this one be a Seer ? None of the others were, you aren't and why is the Krateor so intent on getting their hands on all the Seers ? She looked steadily at her husband as she answered but inside she was quaking. There was something different about little Tar, notwithstanding the strange mark on the side of his neck that reminded her of a withered petal, and she couldn't afford her husband to notice it. Under the cover of her long sleeve, she pinched the baby's soft fingers, making it wince and begin to wail.

Jordan pulled back immediately. In a few months we will know for sure, when you take him for his physical. Jake had a Seer and when he handed him over last month, he got that plot of land he had his eye on for years.

I believe the baby needs a nap, she said as she got up. Her hands had begun to tremble and she not sure she could hide her feelings much longer if she just sat there near the child, let me get your meal on the table.

Jordan went to kick off his boots in the entrance, leaving a track of mud behind, and wash his hands, something he did with great care. She had always admired his long nervous fingers and perfectly trimmed nails. Few of his fellow workers in the communal repair shop could boast of such spotless hands, yet ever since Tar's birth, she had begun to mistrust them, as if she feared to see them tightening around the baby's tender neck. She didn't want to feel them on her body again either, absently stroking her before Jordan crushed her under his weight and took her, not for love nor even out of lust, but to