Tulipa’s headache had returned, increasing to alarming proportions.
Householders along the northern coast were complaining of a greasy ash that settled on everything, ruining food and fabric. Men began wandering down to the harbor to talk to experienced seamen, then stand and stare at the ugly light in the north. On their way home they visited the various sacred shrines and left lavish offerings to Poseidon Earth-Shaker.
People invented excuses to visit the inland mountains, or relatives in the south. Then they gave up making excuses and began fleeing openly, running from the unnatural evil that hovered on the northern horizon.
First singly, then in families, they had descended on the palace to demand protection from their god-king. But as they pressed in upon him, The Minos had panicked. He gave orders that the guards were to admit no more outsiders.
The court concluded that expendables such as craftsmen and entertainers would be next. It looked as if only the royal family and the most influential officials would be granted sanctuary within Labrys.
Meriones had come this morning, against his better judgment, to make one final attempt to retrieve the gold for Hokar before access to the palace was denied him. He would have preferred to stay with Tulipa. No one, he felt sure, would have noticed or cared. People were too preoccupied.
But his promise to his friend compelled him.
Now that he actually had the gold, his first thought was to turn around and go home. But that would look more suspicious than if he had not come at all. No, he decided, better to wait until after dark, then leave as usual.
Finding a hiding place in the meantime should not be too hard, really; not for a man who knew Labrys so well.
Entering the palace, Meriones made his way to the upper levels. There an antechamber had been set aside for the exclusive use of the musicians, who visited it when they needed to repair their instruments. Aside from that, the room was never visited.
Meriones slipped into the chamber and pulled the door closed after him. The room was empty. With a sigh of relief, he dug the bulky package out from his clothing.
He could not resist opening it for just one look.
When he folded back the last flap of cloth, Meriones drew in a sharp breath. Gold gleamed like fire, like chunks of stolen sunlight. Pure, raw, massy gold, in nuggets worth a fortune.
So much gold! No wonder it was heavy. He realized at once that he could not leave it here, no matter how well hidden. He had planned to secrete it at the back of a small cupboard crammed with bits of wood and wire and pots of fish-glue. But that would never do, not for such a treasure. It would surely be found. Questions would be asked, musicians come under suspicion …
He would have to take it with him. No one would pay any attention to him now, he reasoned, not with Labrys rocking on its foundations. There would be no better time to get the gold out of the palace.
He wedged it back between his apron and his loincloth, wincing as the bulky nuggets dug into his belly. He wasted valuable moments readjusting his leather girdle to hold the package in place. His waist was no longer elegantly slim, he noted ruefully.
Then he brushed his hands and stepped out into the corridor trying to look nonchalant.
The atmosphere was changing rapidly. People’s expressions were tense, their movements frenetic. Officials scuttled up and down the passageways, exhorting others to remain at their posts. Until the last, the minions of The Minos would strive to keep order.
But it was rapidly becoming a lost cause.
The bellowing of a bull reverberated through the stone-walled chambers of Labrys. Meriones realized sacrifices were being offered in an attempt to placate Poseidon Ennosigaion. The Great Central Court would run red with blood.
Priestesses howled eerily. Incense thickened the air.
Men and women started running; directionless, panicky.
“I don’t suppose anyone will be expecting me in the kitchens today,” Meriones remarked to no one in particular. Then, hitching his apron to make certain the gold was secure, he set off in search of the nearest safe exit.
He was almost knocked down by a man who came bolting out of an antechamber. “Watch where you’re going!” the fellow snarled, sweeping Meriones aside with a wave of his arm.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean …” The musician waved his fingers apologetically. But the other had already run off.
The floors were shuddering violently, Meriones realized with a thrill of horror. Not only walls, but the foundations themselves might collapse under such an onslaught!
A bull broke free from the sacrificial pens and ran headlong through the palace, his frantic bellowing adding to the mounting hysteria. A madness seized the palace animals. Pet monkeys bit and clawed. A hound savaged a royal child.
Cracks appeared in the smiling faces on the frescoes. Tiles fell with a clatter in the bathing chambers. Something grated; something crashed. Cries of distress were coming from the royal apartments. Plaster crumbling added its dust to the already polluted air. An enormous spiral shell made of stucco fell from the ceiling of the queen’s megaron and crashed at Ebisha’s feet. With a shriek of terror, she ran from the room. No one tried to stop her.
Hokar also was running through the dust-choked hallways of Labrys. A rumor that the gates had already been closed and barred had reached the workrooms, stampeding the craftsmen. Each was determined to find some way out for himself.
Upset and disoriented, Hokar lost his way. He found himself at the head of the Grand Staircase just as Ebisha came running up it. People swarmed over the stairs. Someone bumped into her and she fell to her knees. With an oath, Hokar plunged down the steps to help her. The face she lifted to him was blank with fear.
He caught hold of her arm. “We must get out of here. Can you stand?”
Ebisha jerked free of his grasp and shrank back.
“I’m Hokar,” he said, “don’t you know me?”
She shuddered like the trembling earth. “Hokar?” The syllables sounded meaningless on her lips.
“Yes, Hokar the goldsmith, remember? Stand up now, that’s it. Here, this way … do you know how to get out of here?”
“Out of here?” She was mimicking his words without understanding.
The air was darkening perceptibly. Even the light wells failed to dispel the gloom. A cloud seemed to have blotted out the sun.
Hokar guided the dazed Ebisha back to the top of the Grand Staircase, where he tried to figure which way to go next. Broad corridors lay in either direction but gave no clue of their destinations. “Which way does that go?” he asked Ebisha, pointing along one.
She stared at him with wide green eyes.
He swore under his breath and started in the direction he had pointed, drawing her with him by putting one strong arm around her trembling shoulders. “I think this is the way toward the Zeus Gate,” Hokar said to no one in particular. “It’s the gate nearest Arkhanes.”
The mention of Arkhanes made him think of his little house there with a sudden, fierce longing. Everything in that house was Thracian in style. Familiar. His own.
He would take Ebisha there.
Someone wearing the stiff formal headdress of an offical stumbled past. “Which way to the Zeus Gate?” Hokar shouted at him. But there was no answer. The goldsmith’s voice was lost in the wordless scream that was becoming the voice of Labrys.
People were running everywhere. The press of bodies shoved Hokar and Ebisha until passing through a doorway, they found themselves on the colonnaded porch that overlooked the Great Central Court. Below them people scampered across the mosaic tiles like a nest of disturbed ants. “The Minos has deserted us!” someone cried. “He has evacuated his family and left us here to die!”
The last restraint dissolved. Whether the rumor was true or not, it was enough to instill blind panic.
People began clubbing each other with their fists, fighting for space, for air, for access to an exit, or just to relieve their unbearable emotions. Meanwhile
the floor beneath their feet heaved and buckled like a living thing.
Ebisha screamed and clung to Hokar. He could hear her gasping names—the names of gods, he supposed—but they were not names he recognized.
Everyone seemed to be crying some name aloud. Some called on their mothers, others cursed or prayed to The Minos. Or Poseidon. Or Zeus. Or any of a hundred other deities, large and small, the particular image of a particular belief to which one might cling when the world was collapsing.
Nothing stopped the collapse, however.
The crowd was a mob, a mindless sea that moved like a tide first in one direction, then another, sweeping Hokar and Ebisha along with them.
Ebisha had one frightening glimpse of a great dark hulk lying on the floor of the court below. It was the corpse of the last bull to have been sacrificed to Poseidon. Forgotten now. The sacrifice refused.
“Hokar!”
The goldsmith heard his name, but in the melee he could not tell who was calling him.
“Hokar! Over here!”
He craned his neck. Then he saw a slim arm waving frantically.
“Hokar! It’s me, Meriones!”
The musician hurried toward them, twisting and weaving through the crowd. When he reached Hokar he managed a harried grin of relief. “What are you doing here?” he asked his friend.
“Trying to find a way out. I got lost. What are you doing here?”
“Trying to find a way out. I was in this part of the palace looking for a place to hide your, ah …”
“My gold? You have it?”
“I do. But we don’t have time to worry about it now. After we get … Look out!” Meriones cried suddenly. He grabbed Ebisha and pulled her aside just in time to keep her from being trampled by a clot of running men.
“What are you doing with this woman?” Meriones asked Hokar while Ebisha stood, panting, flattened against a wall.
“Trying to get her out too. I want to take her with me to Arkhanes. But there’s a rumor that the gates have all been barred.”
“Possibly,” Meriones conceded. “But even if they are, there are many ways out of a palace as big as Labrys. Not everyone goes in and out through a public gate, Hokar. I haven’t been here all these years without discovering that. I was just trying to decide which exit to use myself. I don’t think anyone will question us under the circumstances.”
“You talk too much!” Hokar snapped. “Just get us out of here if you know a way!”
Meriones nodded. “Come on, then. And bring her,” he added, nodding at Ebisha. “Let’s leave before the ceiling falls on us.”
Taking a deep breath, Meriones plunged into the swirl of the crowd like a bather diving into a cold sea. Hokar glanced up at the ceiling, turned pale, hooked Ebisha with his arm and ran after Meriones.
For a measureless eternity they struggled through packed passageways and crowded corridors. Meriones, who was shorter than Hokar, kept disappearing. Finally Hokar caught hold of the fold of hair at the nape of his friend’s neck and held on with all his might, though the pull brought tears to Meriones’ eyes. Hokar dared not let go. If they lost Meriones he and Ebisha would be truly lost.
They ran up some steps and down others, scuttled across audience chambers, dodged through counting rooms, sidled along narrow passages meant only for slaves, and eventually emerged from a steep stairwell to find themselves on the lowest level of the palace. The walls of unplastered stone smelled of niter. A pervasive gloom was relieved only occasionally by a few plain bronze lamps burning in small niches set into the walls.
They had left the maddened crowd behind, but its roar could still be heard, echoing through the labyrinthine corridors of the palace.
Meriones paused, looking around. “There is an entrance down here somewhere that gives porters coming up from the sea direct access to the main storerooms. If we can find—”
He was interrupted by a thundering crash almost directly above their heads. The walls around them vibrated, the huge blocks of stone ringing like gongs.
“It’s going to fall on us!” Ebisha cried. “We’ll be crushed!”
The goldsmith folded the woman in his arms and bowed his head over hers protectively, as if he meant to take the weight of the palace on his shoulders rather than let it touch Ebisha.
In that moment, Meriones envied his friend. “It won’t fall on us if we can get outside,” he said urgently. “Come on!” He began running again.
They followed him through unlit areas floored with bare earth and rubble; stumbling, their breath burning their throat, the world they knew disintegrating around them.
“Here we are!” Meriones whooped suddenly, plunging toward a common planked door standing ajar in the thick wall.
The trio emerged into a daylight they scarcely recognized as daylight. The sky was as dark as mid-winter dusk, but with an evil yellowish cast.
The porters’ entrance was let into a north-facing wall in the foundations of the palace, and had been abandoned at the first tremor of the earth. A flagged pathway led away from the doorway, but Meriones did not follow the paving. Instead he hurried away from the palace at an acute angle, making for the open ground beyond. Here the land began to slope upward, out of the royal valley.
The trio climbed the slope in silence, trying not to hear the screams and crashes coming from Labrys behind them. Other people ran past them from time to time, their faces distorted with terror.
Meriones led the way to the rim of the valley. There he paused. “You said you wanted to take Ebisha to Arkhanes,” he reminded Hokar. “You’ll want to go that way.” He pointed.
Hokar’s jaw dropped. “Aren’t you going with us?”
“I can’t, I must go home to my wife. I should never have left her this morning. I wouldn’t have, if I’d thought things were going to get so bad.”
“And they may well get worse,” Hokar warned. “If we’re separated now, we might never see each other again. Stay with us, Meriones, let’s all help each other. Don’t try to go back to Knsos now, you might not make it. Stay with us,” he repeated, putting all the strength of his personality into his urging. “Please!”
Just for a moment, Hokar thought he could hold Meriones. Then the earth shuddered as if Poseidon Ennosigaion was stalking across the land on giant feet, rumbling destruction with every stride.
Ebisha flinched and gasped.
“I have to go home to Tulipa!” Meriones cried frantically.
Hokar unleashed his temper. “Go, then! Desert your friend. Be a coward, who cares? Who needs a wasp-waisted lyre player? I can take care of Ebisha without you!”
Meriones blinked. Then he gave a thin-lipped nod, turned on his heel, and hurried off in the direction of Knsos.
Hokar stared after him with rising dismay. When the musician was almost out of earshot, he relented and called out, “Meriones? My friend? Be … careful!”
Meriones heard. He paused and turned around long enough to give Hokar a Cretan salute. Arching his back like a bow, he made a fist and pressed his knuckles to the Palace of the Brain. “My friend,” he echoed. “Try to be … cheerful.”
Then he spun around and ran for home.
He had run for some distance before he became aware that his movements were being hampered by a bulky object thrust between his loincloth and apron.
He had forgotten to give Hokar the stolen gold.
12
A dead calm lay on the sea. On board the Qatil, Tereus felt his hackles rise. “Pull!” he yelled at his oarsmen. “PULL!!!” But it was too late. A growling roar, far away at first, swiftly came closer, increasing in volume until the ship’s timbers vibrated and men clapped their hands over their ears. It sounded as if the ocean floor was being wrenched apart.
The roaring grew to unbearable intensity then doubled; trebled. A tremendous thunderclap reverberated throughout the Aegean Sea, slammed across the Ionian Sea, rang the waters of the Mediterranean like a giant bell.
While the world still shook with its f
orce, a second thunderclap boomed with enough power to dwarf the first. Then, impossibly, there was a third, mightier and more terrifying than anything that had gone before. It was a sound to freeze the blood and stop the heart. It was a sound to announce the end of the world.
Geysers of steam shot upward, hot fountains jetting from the sea bed into the sky. Pumice and ash rained down to meet them. The air stank of strange gases released from the bowels of the earth. When horror had exceeded all limits, with one final gigantic blast the world exploded.
A volcanic eruption mightier than any within the memory of mankind tore the entire side out of the island of Thera and hurled it into the sky. A monstrous flower of incandescent light blossomed, burning white, hot beyond heat, setting the air ablaze and drawing all breath, all life into itself. An enormous pillar of boiling smoke, shot through with orange sparks like evil eyes and lit from within by a lurid glow, rose from the disemboweled island. The cloud mushroomed upward, billowing into a burning sky.
The first shock wave rapidly radiated outward. It hit the Qatil like a battering ram. Tereus fell face forward on the deck, clawing long splinters out of the wood with bloody fingers. He screamed and did not know he screamed.
Outraged, the sea rose on its hind legs to bellow fury at the heavens.
Meanwhile, Meriones was pounding down the familiar road that led to Knsos, his house, his wife. He hardly noticed when the white hound darted out from somewhere to join him. The animal was whimpering with terror. Man and dog ran together, fear making them lightfooted.
They had gotten as far as the long hill commanding a view of the harbor when the voice of Poseidon thundered across the sea and knocked Meriones flat on the earth.
He lay dazed, then pulled himself to his hands and knees, spitting earth and pebbles. The god again cried aloud, with a great booming voice. Meriones wet himself in his terror and drew up into a ball, waiting to die.
The god roared with the greatest anger that had ever been unleashed in the world. Meriones knew he was dead. He thought his heart stopped.
But he did not die. He lay helpless while the tremendous explosions echoed and reechoed throughout Crete. Eventually, the musician realized that he was still alive. Probably. He got to his knees again, very shakily, and tried to find the courage to stand.
The Elementals Page 14
