The ultimate blast slammed across the sea, threw him on his face once more as the whole world rocked on its foundations. The northern sky caught fire, became a sea of molten flame.
Meriones did not try again to stand. What was the use? He lay with a calmer mind than he expected, his head turned sideways, cheek pressed against the road. “This is the end,” he heard himself say. No one contradicted him. But somewhere close by, a dog whined piteously.
Meriones shifted enough to be able to see the white hound lying in a heap beside him. He reached out and drew the dog against his body. It did not seem any more injured than he was. Merely scared to death.
Scared to death. The term had new meaning. It meant being so scared that fear itself was slain and one waited placidly, like a bull awaiting sacrifice. Looking at the ax.
Listening for the voice of the god.
Then the god fell silent. Seventy miles to the north, the sea was rushing in to form a seven-mile-wide lake of boiling water and steam embraced by the ruined crescent of lava cliffs that was all that remained of the island of Thera.
From the shock of that monstrous reforming a great wave spread out and moved across the sea. In deep water it was like a ripple traveling across a pond when a stone is dropped in. But as the giant ripple neared the land and the sea bed was shallower, the wave swelled upward, building into a mighty wall with a crest towering hundreds of feet into the shocked sky.
With the speed of the gods, the wall of water rushed toward Crete.
Meriones felt a certain disappointment that he was not dead. Instinct told him the dead might be the lucky ones. But he was unquestionably alive. Slowly, expecting to be knocked down again at any moment, he got to his feet and examined his bruises. They were numerous but not serious. Then he turned the same attention on the dog. It had no broken bones but whined continually, a thin, high-pitched moan that did not sound like a dog at all.
He picked it up and cradled it against his body. The feel of another warm and living being comforted them both.
Meriones’ gaze moved along the road toward Knsos, noting how the paving slabs had heaved. For the first time he realized there were a few other people on the road. He saw them as dark lumps illuminated by the hideous light of the flaming sky. Some of the lumps were stirring, groaning.
Others lay unmoving and silent.
Meriones thought suddenly of Hokar and Ebisha. What had happened to them? Should he go back? He looked over his shoulder, indecisive, then thought of Tulipa and whirled around again, gazing toward the city and the harbor …
… and stood transfixed.
The cloud that had been Thera was clearly visible on the horizon, glowing like a firebed. In the foreground of this horror were the residents of Knsos, staggering away from a city reduced to rubble. They resembled the survivors of a destroyed army. Some wept, some cursed, some moaned in pain. Some whimpered like the white hound.
The foremost reached Meriones and passed him, unaware of him. They had no thought but horror and escape. They went on, leaving Meriones staring.
He saw the wave come up out of the sea. But it could not be a wave. It could not be anything known and familiar. It was a giant, malevolent entity from an underworld that spawned monsters. Irresistible, it sped toward the harbor where the masts of the fleet still rose like a forest of sticks.
The tidal wave slammed against Knsos, smashing the glory of the world’s largest fleet into splinters. In the blink of an eye the forest of ships was devoured by the ravenous sea. Its appetite unassuaged, the monster swallowed the shoreline and gobbled up the ruined city beyond, crushing everything beneath a mammoth wall of water.
Staring, unbelieving, Meriones waited, fully expecting the tidal wave to continue inland and cover Labrys in the valley, then rage up the slopes of the mountains themselves, putting an end to one insignificant musician and the brilliant world of Crete.
It came very close.
But the land had a strength of its own. As the tidal wave swept across it the earth robbed the waters of their energy. At last they fell back, exhausted by their own fury. The water drained off toward the sea with a ghastly sucking noise, leaving a spoor of dirty foam and piled mountains of unidentifiable debris.
Still Meriones stood, and stared.
He did not know how much time passed. It seemed eons. Surely he had been watching there since the birth of the world, witness to the contest between land and sea for supremacy.
Where a rich seaport had been was now nothing. The little yellow house was gone. Tulipa’s goat was gone. The olive tree was gone.
Tulipa was gone; gone with Knsos.
Its streets had disappeared beneath the mud and slime that frescoed the site. The stench of the sea bottom floated up to Meriones and he bent to one side to vomit, spewing out his horror without ever turning loose of the dog clasped tightly in his arms.
Knsos was gone.
Tulipa was gone.
As if from a great distance, Meriones heard the shrieks and wails of the survivors.
But Tulipa was gone.
Knsos was gone.
“I would be gone too, but for Hokar’s gold,” he heard himself say to the dog.
The sound of his voice stilled the hound’s whining. It twisted in his arms and tried to lick his face with its wet tongue.
“How strange,” Meriones said wonderingly. “I could be out under the sea with Tulipa. Isn’t that strange?”
His voice sounded calm, unemotional. He might have been commenting on a minor event in an ordinary day.
He did not notice the tears running down his cheeks.
He stared at the sea and the burning sky, and the empty place where the city had been.
“Hokar’s gold,” he said after a while in the same uninflected voice.
His body turned itself around and began to walk in the direction of Arkhanes.
13
Shortly after Meriones left them, Ebisha’s strength deserted her. Her legs felt like water. She sat down abruptly on the unstable earth and stared helplessly up at Hokar. “No more,” she said.
He gave a worried glance at the peculiar sky, then reluctantly sat down beside her. “Just for a little while,” he said. “We can rest for a little while, then we have to go on.”
“Where?”
“To my house, in the hills beyond this valley. It might be safer there.”
“Can we breathe there, in the hills?” Ebisha coughed, shook her head, coughed again. “The air is so bad here. So thick.”
“It will be better at Arkhanes,” he assured her with a confidence he did not feel. He sat with her for a little while then tried to get her on her feet again. When he tugged at her arm she sat like a lump of soft clay, unwilling to move. “Come to my house now,” he pleaded. “I have something for you there, something I’ve been keeping for you. It is the gold …” Suddenly he remembered. His stolen gold. Meriones said he had it, but Meriones was gone.
Gone off with my gold, Hokar thought. His mouth narrowed into a bitter line.
“What do you have for me?” Ebisha asked, pulling his attention back.
The words were ashes in his mouth. “The gold necklace I made for you, the seashells.” It’s all I have left, he was about to add, feeling the anger flame in him.
But at that moment the first blast struck.
Ebisha screamed and cowered against the earth. Hokar stood swaying, his ears ringing. Then the second great thunder drowned out all other sound and hurled him to the ground.
As the final explosion ignited the sky, he twisted violently to shield Ebisha’s body with his. Wrapping his arms around her head, Hokar pressed his face down beside her and waited for death.
Waited in a ringing silence.
Slowly, astonished to find himself alive, Hokar began trying to disentangle from the woman. A white-hot pain lanced through his hip.
Ebisha was crying in soft little hiccups.
When Hokar tried to stand, his wrenched muscles screamed. He tugged at Ebi
sha. “You must help me,” he told her through gritted teeth. “I’m hurt. I don’t think I can get up alone.”
With an effort, she controlled her sobbing and peered at him through a curtain of disheveled hair. “Hurt?”
“My hip.” Waves of pain lapped at him. “But we cannot stay here. Help me.”
Ebisha got to her feet. Then she bent and helped Hokar drape an arm across her shoulders. She wrapped both her arms around his chest.
Very slowly and very carefully, between them they got him upright, standing.
Hokar was briefly nauseated, but it passed.
“That’s better,” he breathed. He straightened his spine and lifted his head, moving out of her embrace to stand independently. “I’m all right now,” he said with conviction.
But when he tried to walk he knew he was not all right. The injured hip could not be trusted, and every movement of his leg was a painful effort.
Ebisha, watching him through narrowed eyes, moved close again without being asked and draped his arm back across her shoulder. She could not afford weakness when he needed her strength.
They set off once more in the direction of Arkhanes.
People were streaming past them. A small child, bloody and naked, appeared in their path, shrieked unintelligibly, and fled like a mindless animal. Moments later they came to the collapsed house where the child’s family lay crushed. One clenched fist protruded from the rubble.
There was nothing to be done. Hokar and Ebisha went on.
Once the goldsmith glanced back toward the north, but the sight of a monstrous tower of flame invading the heavens so appalled him that thereafter he kept his eyes fixed on the ground in front of him. The ground was cracked, broken, the familiar way to Arkhanes already altered beyond recognition. But better than fire in the sky.
Shielded by the contours of the hills, Hokar and Ebisha were spared the sight Meriones would never forget, the massive wall of water rushing down on the defenseless coast. The concussion of the tidal wave was, to them, indistinguishable from the other tremors running continually through the earth.
The tidal wave did not reach the House of the Double Axes. The valley rim that had shielded Labrys from the rapacious view of sea pirates in former times now sheltered the palace from the most savage pirate of all. Poseidon did not carry away the treasures of The Minos.
But Hokar and Ebisha heard a change in the quality of the distant screaming. An added wail of terror was carried to them on the wind from the northern coast.
Hokar forced himself to a shambling run, a sort of hobbling hop half supported by Ebisha trotting beside him. Surprisingly, the effort eased his pain as if he were forcing some misaligned portion of himself back into place.
The hot wind, the long overdue wind, was blowing more strongly every moment, bringing a cloud of pumice and ash. In time it would begin delivering the fragmented flesh of Thera.
Hokar and Ebisha journeyed through nightmare. For a while he stopped thinking of her as a woman. Getting-Ebisha-to-Arkhanes became a task he had set himself, like fashioning fine gold wire. His mind fixed on that as the only reality, rejecting the unreal surrounding them and the surreal horror of the situation.
Struggling, stumbling, cursing, he guided her—he the cripple and she the crutch—through an endless filthy darkness in which a thousand raging fires were springing up as blazing cinders began to rain from the sky.
Hardly a structure they saw was still intact. Homes and farmsteads, their stones scattered, littered the land with rubble. Dazed people wandered about as aimlessly as dazed livestock.
Some survivors, less dazed than others, had already begun looting.
As Hokar and Ebisha approached Arkhanes, several times they encountered small groups of men going from one ruined homestead to another, taking anything of value they could find. Snatching, grabbing, grinning, running.
“They are like the men who capture free people to make them slaves,” Ebisha said with repugnance.
But the looters did not bother them. They were so ash-covered and begrimed they looked as if neither ever had anything worth stealing.
Arkhanes had been a small but important town. It was on one of the main roads leading from the south, and was also the site of the royal tombs of minor members of the ruling families of Knsos. Generations of sisters and nephews and mothers-in-law slept there peacefully with their grave goods piled high around them, fearing no grave robbers, for graves were sacred in the land of the sea kings.
At least, they always had been. Before.
“My house is just up ahead,” Hokar told Ebisha with obvious relief. “If it’s still standing.”
The goldsmith’s house was at the end of a road leading to the Hill of Tombs. An ugly glow behind the hill might have been sunset—or sunrise—who could tell?
Hokar directed Ebisha to the familiar pathway. Now he was looking ahead. He could hardly believe his stinging eyes.
His house stood relatively unharmed, with just a slight cant to one side.
They hurried gratefully inside.
The door could not be closed behind them. The doorframe was out of alignment. Putting his shoulder behind it, Hokar forced the door as far as it would go, which was no more than halfway, then sat down, panting, on the nearest couch.
The pain in his hip had become only a memory of fire. But suddenly he was desperately tired. He just wanted to sit. Not think, not feel. Just sit. He hung his head and closed his eyes.
Ebisha stood indecisively for a moment, then began exploring the goldsmith’s house.
It was nothing like the House of the Double Axes. Simple to the point of being stark, it was a utilitarian residence for a man usually occupied elsewhere. A few couches, one of which served as a bed; some low wooden tables; a couple of chests carved in designs she did not recognize. Coarse woolen rugs hung haphazardly on the walls—though with a sense of color, bright dyes enlivening the plain white stucco. On one of the tables was a pitcher with dying flowers.
Ebisha smiled to herself when she saw the flowers, and nodded, as if they carried a particular message.
“Is there any water?” she heard Hokar say behind her.
She took the flowers from the water and carried the pitcher to him. He drank gratefully. The water was flat and stale but it cleared the dust from his mouth.
When he ran his tongue over his teeth afterward, he could taste the dead flowers.
Gingerly, he stood up. His hip ached, but it was bearable. Crossing the room to an assortment of householders’ tools leaning in one corner, he selected a heavy metal bar. With the bar he pried up a flagstone from the floor.
There was a hollow beneath the flagstone, and a small parcel wrapped in linen in the hollow.
Wordlessly, he handed the parcel to Ebisha.
When she unwrapped it her eyes widened. “The necklace!” She turned the thin links over in her hands, her eyes following the spiral design of the tiny nautilus shells.
Hokar said diffidently, “It’s … ah … the best thing I’ve ever done. Not very heavy though. If I had more gold …” He broke off, scowling. The memory of the stolen gold burned in him.
“You have a very great gift,” Ebisha said reverently. “I think the gold speaks to you.”
Hokar was embarrassed. “That’s not possible. I’m just, ah, good with my hands.”
“You don’t think gold can speak to a craftsman? I do. Everything has a voice. Not as powerful a voice, perhaps, as one of the immortals, but …”
“What do you mean by ‘the immortals’? Are you talking about the gods?”
Ebisha’s forehead pleated with the effort to explain. “Not like the gods you have here, Hokar. Not giant men and women or magical animals or some blend of the two. The immortals my people know and understand are alive, but in a different way. They are the very forces of life. They provide what we need for our existence as long as we treat them with respect, but they … they are not …” She broke off, coughing.
When the seizure
passed she resumed, “Water is one of the immortals. Among my people are some to whom the water speaks. They can find it hidden far beneath the earth. They hear the voice of unknown springs and show others where to dig their wells. The water calls to them, and they listen.
“My grandsire has a different gift. He knows the soul of fire. Fire is another of the immortals. Something in the fire speaks to my grandsire and he listens. They … communicate. He can make sparks leap from his fingertips or set a tree afire with a glance. Do you understand?”
Baffled, Hokar shook his head. “It’s magic. I know nothing of magic.”
The lurid light of the flaming sky shone through the window, painting the interior of Hokar’s house the color of blood.
A face peered around the half-open door. “Hokar?” someone inquired. “Is this your house? Are you in there?”
Hokar stiffened.
Ebisha gave a squeal of joy. “Musician!”
Meriones entered the house warily, as if expecting it might collapse at any time. Hokar wanted to hurry forward and welcome him, but something held him back. “Why are you here?” was all he could say. His tone was surly.
Meriones peered at him. “I had to bring your gold to you,” he said. It was the only answer he could think of.
Hokar exhaled a great sigh of relief. “You brought it back.”
“Of course I brought it back, did you think I—you did! You thought I’d stolen it for myself!”
“Of course not,” Hokar said, too heartily. “It never entered my mind!”
“It never entered my mind either,” Meriones told him in a soft, sad voice.
Abashed, Hokar hurried tardily forward and clasped Meriones by both hands. “What about your wife? Did you reach Knsos?”
“Knsos is gone. Tulipa is gone.”
“Gone? What do you mean, gone?”
“Gone. The sea took them.” Meriones’ tone was flat and dead.
Hokar and Ebisha exchanged shocked glances.
The Elementals Page 15
