Godzilla vs. Kong by Greg Keyes (e books free to read TXT) 📗

and some others. Kong’s parents fought them. So did Kong.

I didn’t know you knew that story, Ilene said to the girl.

I was very little, she said. I don’t remember very well. But they told it with hand-shape-shadows at night around the fire. It was scary, but funny sometimes. There were other stories, too, like the one about the Mother Long Legs that raced the Mountain Turtle.

Ilene nodded. Jia’s account sounded like a children’s version of a story she had managed to get one of the elders to tell her years before. The version she had taken down had been much longer, much more complicated, and probably seventy percent of it had been an intricate Iwi genealogy which began in mythic time—in the “Long Ago Below”—but also involved incorporating later arrivals to the island into the Iwi people—that part of the epic was known as the Marrying of Strangers. The most prominent of these were a group of people led by a woman named Atenatua who arrived on the island around five or six centuries before; these people spoke a different language from the Iwi and had different customs, but by a series of marriages and rituals the Iwi and the newcomers eventually became one people, and Atenatua was an important ancestress, despite her overseas origins. Ilene’s guess, based on the few words of their language that survived, was that these late arrivals had been Polynesians, speaking a language similar to that of Easter Island. The atua in Atenatua was almost certainly the word for “god” or “spirit.” A fragment of this story had been recorded, in garbled form, by Aaron Brooks—but she had been the first to learn that the core of the Iwi claimed to have come together with the Kongs—there had originally been many of them—to the island from a lost paradise deep in the Earth.

I heard that story, too, she signed to Jia. It reminded me that many people believe they emerged from beneath the Earth, in many places. And many believed they were leaving enemies behind them, under the ground. And, as with the Iwi, those bad creatures sometimes followed them to this world.

It was true. The Navajo, for instance, the Hopi, the Choctaw.

Jia was leafing through the other images, stopping on one.

Zo-Zla-halawa, she signed again.

“Yes,” Ilene said. This time the image was less ambiguous; drawn not by someone depicting a rumor of a creature but by someone who had almost certainly seen it. It was bipedal, like the first, but the tail was long, decidedly lizard-like, as was the snout; its arms were short and clawed, and it had fins on its back that at this point almost anyone in the world would recognize.

This was carved on a wall in a city under the water, she told Jia. Some friends of mine saw this and took pictures. And see, with him? She pointed to the much smaller figures clustered around the lizard-like giant.

People, Jia signed. Not Iwi.

Ilene nodded. I think that long ago, the creatures you call Zo-Zla-halawa and the family of Kong fought a war. One of your elders said that, but there are stories from other places. Many people believe the gods fought a great war, long ago.

They fight it still, Jia said. I remember that now. It is sad.

Why?

What are they fighting about? Jia asked. No one ever said.

I don’t think anyone knows, Ilene replied.

There is only one Kong now, Jia said. Must he go to war?

Not if I have anything to say about it.

Jia thought about that for a minute. The Zo-Zla-halawa. What do the Awati call them?

Awati was the Iwi word for anyone that wasn’t Iwi. It meant “people from the sky,” and referred to the pilots who had crashed on Skull Island during World War II and the later, Monarch-sponsored expeditions that had arrived by helicopter.

Godzilla, she signed. And then, aloud, putting Jia’s hand to her throat and exaggerating the movement of her lips. “Godzilla.”

Godzilla, the girl signed. How many of them?

I’m not sure, Ilene replied. But I think just one.

Jia held her Kong doll a little tighter. I hope their war is over, then, she said.

So do I.

Because if it is not, Jia went on, I will have to fight with Kong and help him kill Godzilla.

FIVE

From the notes of Dr. Chen

The ancient Maori believed there were ten worlds beneath the surface world. The lowest was the home of the goddess Miru and her hordes of reptile gods.

—TU-TE-WANA’ from TU-PARI gat KAWEAU, TUA-TARA,

PA-PA, MOKO-MOKO, lords of lizards and of reptiles;

O’er them MOKO-HIKU-WARU rules as deity and guardian,

Rules in peace!—a god of evil, he in darkness dwells with MIRU,

In the eighth gloom dwells with MIRU, goddess of three nether regions;

Dwells in evil thoughts with MIRU…

TU-TE-WANA’ from MAI-RANGI gat the many gods of reptiles

That in darkness sit with Miru…

…Conflict endless, rends the dwellers in thy waters; Unremittingly thou warrest on the creatures made by TANE’,

Slayest trees, and birds, and insects, preyest on thy forest brother:

Internecine warfare shatters sons of thee on earth, in ocean!

Excerpts from Maori Life in Ao-Tea,

Johannes Carl Anderson, 1907

Monarch Office, Pensacola

Mark spent the next eight hours reviewing Godzilla’s last known activities, all of which had happened years before. He had told Chloe that he thought Godzilla was mopping up the competition during that period, but maybe he’d been wrong about that. People tended to anthropomorphize animals and their actions, and it was possible that he and the rest of Monarch had fallen into that trap.

Mark had been there in Boston, after Godzilla—with the help of Mothra and the united military of the human race—had defeated Ghidorah.

There were still a lot of questions about that fight. The Titans seemed to be hierarchical in nature; they had a pecking order, and whichever one was strongest, whichever one came out on top, seemed to control the rest. Godzilla and the three-headed Gidorah had been battling for that top spot until the government made a bad call, overruling objections from Serizawa and other Monarch scientists. They had