Shadows on the Aegean

by Suzanne Frank

  Hello?

  “This is weird, Cheftu.”

  He kept looking, pleading.

  “Something else puzzles me,” she began.

  “That is?”

  “Why do I change bodies? Twice now you’ve been the same person, the same body. What happened to RaEm’s body?”

  “It was destroyed. Trampled.” Cheftu’s gaze flickered away. “If you’d been in it, you truly would have died.”

  Chloe felt her skin crawl a little. If the body she’d had was gone, where was the real RaEm? Still wearing Chloe’s red hair and fair skin in nineteen ninety … six, now?

  “Also, if you had not been Sibylla, how would I have found you again?”

  “You wouldn’t have deigned to look for me in a washerwoman?” Chloe said dryly.

  “I carried your corpse, Chloe. I was not looking.” His gaze was intense, unnerving Chloe more.

  “How did you get well, Cheftu? What is the elixir?”

  “What is the elixir? Herbs and fluids and essence of crab.”

  “Excuse me?” Chloe said.

  “The formula. Spiralmaster gave it to me.”

  “Your photographic memory did the rest,” she concluded.

  “I never forget anything I read.”

  “Exactly. So how did it work?”

  Cheftu looked away. The ash was falling lightly, not so cloying and thick that they needed masks. Chloe waited, watching Cheftu’s healthy body. Still she was scared, almost repulsed, but she fought to get over it. He’s healthy, so be grateful.

  “In al-khem,” Cheftu said, “oftentimes a reaction is arrived at only by adding two compounds in a certain order. Taking all of the ingredients and mixing them together would not work. But letting them interact with each other before combining, that is something entirely different.”

  “Just so,” Chloe said.

  Cheftu licked his lips, his long fingers picking at the edge of the raft. “The Aztlantu Golden, the people you call Greek gods, were cannibals.”

  “What?”

  “It was a religious ceremony. Rather than bury the wisdom and accumulated knowledge of a leader, they would ingest it.”

  “Literally?”

  “Aye.”

  “They ate his brain?” Chloe fought back a wave of nausea. Other cultures did things other ways, she reminded herself. “You know, the Aztecs ate the hearts of their enemies, hoping to consume their bravery. I wonder if the Aztlantu and Aztec civilizations are somehow related.” The pyramids were certainly similar, she realized, and that would explain why the Aztlan empire initially sounded like a Mexican resort.

  “So,” Cheftu said, “the illness came from the cannibalism. I don’t know how, but the bulls were infected also. They had the same holes in their brains.”

  “Everyone was dying? Slow or fast, they were all dying? Even you?”

  “Aye. Then some of us, notably Phoebus and I, received the elixir.”

  “Phoebus is dead.”

  “Aye, it must need blood in which to work.”

  “You healed,” she whispered. She brushed some ash off the raft.

  “The elixir itself was not the thing. The interaction of elixir and the illness, that is what revived Phoebus. Somehow the sickness and the elixir mixed in the blood, an al-khem reaction that resulted in …”

  “So …” She swallowed, feeling awkward. He was Cheftu, but he was also someone, something, new. “Are you … immortal?”

  Cheftu laughed. “Phoebus died, and he had both. Longevity, I believe, is the most to hope for. It cannot work without a lot of blood. It does heal, however.”

  “Did you eat anyone?” she asked cautiously.

  Cheftu just stared at her until Chloe was embarrassed. She fought not to scoot farther away. This was Cheftu! Her husband! Her lover! But he seemed so eerily alive, especially in these surrealistic surroundings. She’d seen him covered in blood. Now he was whole? “What now?” she asked hoarsely.

  Cheftu reached out to her, laying her hand palm side up. “I have the stones.”

  “What stones? What are you talking about? Did you share anything with me here? Did you confide even one thought?” Chloe asked, crossing her arms over her chest.

  “Chérie, don’t be hurt—”

  “You didn’t trust me, Cheftu. You kept everything from me!”

  “I did not know until the end about the cannibalism.”

  “When did you know you were fatally ill? Were you going to tell me or just let me wake up next to a cold body?”

  Cheftu had the grace to flinch. “I didn’t want you to—”

  “To have a choice? To decide for myself?”

  “Chloe—”

  “I’m not some sheltered nineteenth-century noblewoman, Cheftu! I’m your helpmate, your partner, I thought I was your best friend—”

  “Chérie, Chloe, forgive me.” His hand was still held out, palm up, to her. “You did not answer my question. Will you stay with me?”

  She looked away, aching without and within. He’d lied by omission, he’d not trusted her enough to confide in her. What did they have if he couldn’t tell her the negatives? The raft ceased moving, the air turned static and silent. The hair on the back of Chloe’s neck rose on end. Cheftu was frowning in the half-light.

  The night around them turned instantly black. A sudden bone-rattling roar pounded into her skull. Chloe screamed as the air pressure suddenly changed. The concussive blast flattened her like a rag doll.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE FINAL ERUPTION PELTED FIRE AND LAVA on them. Chloe and Cheftu lay on the raft, paddling madly as rocks flew by. They hadn’t known they were so close to the volcano.

  Within minutes they were alternating the tasks of paddling and kicking hot ash off the raft. The stuff was cloying, irritating against their skin, clogging their ears and eyes and noses and mouths. Cheftu relinquished his kilt to tear into masks, wearing only his sash with the stones. He dropped into the water and propelled them deeper into the sea, swimming and kicking as Chloe directed them through the hazy, burning day. Or night. Who knew.

  Chloe couldn’t feel her arms and she wasn’t sure if her eyes were open, because the scenery never changed. She was moving like a robot—in and pull, in and pull—feeling the water and current tugging against her, hoping that she inched them forward a little bit more in the gray sea. Occasionally she changed raft sides, always moving onward. They weren’t heading to Prostatevo—Akrotiri—she guessed. Where were they going? It was too much effort to ask. Her stomach cramped with hunger, and her palms stung from salt and air.

  She worked in a timeless haze of grayness. Cheftu’s face was a paler shade as he moved around her to paddle on the other side. He kissed her forehead, smoothing back the tendrils of hair that still surrounded her face. The crown of her head was bald, blistered, her eyelashes and eyebrows singed from the heat. He touched her lips and her nose.

  Pockets of hot air rushed by them. “Is the mountain still erupting?” Chloe asked.

  “It is. We must find a way out of here, out of this time.” He turned away, paddling again. “If only I knew where Niko’s island was,” he muttered.

  “Niko’s island?” Chloe said into the wind.

  “The island of the stones,” was the last thing she heard before pain and exhaustion pulled her into darkness.

  CHEFTU GLANCED OVER and saw that she had passed out. She was bleeding from a dozen different wounds, though she had worked with superhuman effort to get them away. His warrior, he thought, smiling. Not only was his own body unscathed, he was seemingly impervious to fatigue. The elixir had worked.

  Dion said he had taken the elixir also, but he’d not had the plague, had he? Did the elixir confer immortality? Or merely longevity? Not that it mattered right now. They needed to find the island. Cheftu checked to make sure the stones were secure in his sash. It was such irony! The Urim and Thummim of the Hebrew people had been used by Greeks, whose ways they would shun. Why did he have them now? Where should he tak
e them? Where were they to go?

  Had he and Chloe been in this time period for a year?

  Worries engulfed him. He drew Chloe close, cradling her to his chest. She whimpered as the rough pumice tore at her skin, but she didn’t awaken. Eee, my beloved, what will become of us? Brushing his lips over her brow, he held her, facing into the gray unknown.

  MY SHEETS NEED A HIGHER THREAD COUNT, Chloe thought. These feel like sandpaper.

  Then water drenched her and she reared up, only to be soaked again. Tossing brittle hair over her shoulder, Chloe tried to get her bearings. Cheftu was paddling furiously in the whipping water.

  Cautiously she crouched on the raft, gripping the rough stone edges, resisting the waves. Where were they? Shadows seemed to lurk inside the gray, a darker, more solid gray.

  Another wave almost washed Chloe overboard. Cheftu grabbed her wrist, and she squealed as her stomach and breasts were yanked over the pumice.

  She joined him battling through the rough water. If only I knew how to surf, she thought as another wave hit her.

  Ash continued to fall, suffocating. Who needs bad guys when you’ve got Mother Nature? Cheftu touched her hand, then pointed to the side. One of the darker shades of gray. Land? They paddled harder, trying to ride the waves. The breakers were getting more powerful, higher, slamming the tiny raft down onto the roiling surface of the water. As she was considering the relative benefits of swimming, the raft flipped.

  She came up clawing for air. The current tore at her, pulling her, then tugging her away. She spotted an island and swam toward it, fighting the current.

  Then it dawned on her … current … waves … shoreline … duh! She didn’t have to swim, the current could take her.

  Chloe tried to float, but the waves were too violent. She let herself be buffeted along until she crashed against a rocky floor. The jagged pebbles that lined the beach were not much more comfortable than pumice. For a moment she reveled in being on solid land, until another wave knocked her back toward the sea. Concentrating, she gained her footing and picked her way up the strange beach, forested down to the water’s edge. Standing on shaking legs, she looked around. Vegetation, encroaching water, Cheftu approaching, stumbling on the stony beach.

  She staggered up the shore to the center of the small island.

  “Mon Dieu!” Cheftu shouted. “Of all the islands that surrounded Aztlan, we found the right one!” He ran to her, grasped her hands. “Chloe my love, be happy for this!”

  Chloe looked above her. A red sandstone archway stretched over a fifteen-cubit span, rising high above them with no central support. Beneath the archway lay a mosaic made from rocks and shells. Her skin broke out in goose bumps the size of Volkswagens.

  They had found the doorway. “What did being in this time mean?” she whispered.

  Cheftu’s glance slid across the mosaic ground, past the well, to the sea. “The sea is so close.” He swallowed audibly. “The island is sinking. See the trees?” They stood in cubits of water. Waves lapped at the far edge of the mosaic pattern, mere cubits from where they stood. The tip of a hill was just vanishing beneath the waves. “How long do we have before we’re immersed?” she asked.

  He looked up at the sky, trying to see through the ash and haze that covered the sun like a veil, leaving them shrouded in half-light. Chloe forgot everything when she looked down at the stone-covered ground. A mosaic.

  It was not Minoan work—that was a no-brainer. The design was less stylized. It appeared to be a chart of sorts. Chloe looked more closely. Two fish, together. A ram, a bull, human twins. She searched through her memories of art history. They were familiar, but these weren’t depictions she’d seen in class. She’d seen this in person, not on a slide.

  She halted, then counted the symbols. Twelve. “Holy shit,” she hissed. It had been a while since she’d seen a daily paper, but it looked like a zodiac.

  “What is it, beloved?” Cheftu asked.

  “I’ve seen this mosaic before.” Her scratchy voice rose in excitement. “In Israel. This one must be thousands of years older than the Israeli version. Why would a piece of Hebrew artwork be on this island?” she asked.

  The Voice, the one she’d heard only a few times, whispered to her heart. Trust. The hazy light cast the lintel’s shadow over Cheftu.

  The alcove in Egypt, the cave on Caphtor, and now this sinking island. Chloe wondered if around midnight the moon’s shadow would move to the goat—Capricorn—the sign for both of their December 23 birthdays. She shivered. If they were here, and Aztlan was gone, was God going to rescue them? Was it a year later? Would the door open tonight?

  Would they step through the gateway in time?

  Chloe and Cheftu sat side by side, watching the lintel in fear it would disappear if they turned away. If they could glimpse the sky, Chloe was certain they would see celestial bodies drawing into alignment.

  Grapes and oregano had been their dinner. Not quite gourmet, but better than sand, the only other option. Cheftu had dragged her to the well, and they’d both washed and drunk until Chloe thought “marking” would be no challenge at all.

  The bottom-line question was why.

  Sitting here was worse than waiting in an airport. Chloe clenched Cheftu’s hand. They had seen and done so much, but why? She turned to him. “What was the point?”

  “Of Atlantis?”

  “Of us here,” she said. “Why bring modern people to this ancient world?”

  He shrugged.

  “Was it to help with the illness?”

  “I cannot see that, since everyone died.”

  “What about the elixir?” she asked.

  “Only three of us have taken it. Since I destroyed the disk that bore the formula, there is no way to pass it on. The illness and the cure are gone forever.”

  What if we were supposed to keep the disk? she thought to herself. “We didn’t save anyone.”

  “We saved a few, Chloe. We did all we could do. We are not asked more.”

  She picked at the ground in silence. “What about the stones? What are they? Could they have been the point?”

  Above them gray haze was melting beneath starlight and a half-moon. Cheftu sighed, then answered slowly, “The stones are Hebrew oracular stones. The Hebrew high priest used them to communicate with God.”

  “Easier than mere prayer,” Chloe observed. “Why here, though?”

  “These people predated the Israelites, but they worshiped the One God.”

  “Until they started in with the bulls,” she said.

  “Aye. Every nation has fallen away, though, Chloe. Even the Israelites themselves did. God forgave and forgave—” His words stopped as the shadow from the lintel became clearer.

  It seemed to be growing brighter around them, a rosy glow. Was the lintel itself glowing? They crawled farther inland, onto the mosaic, beneath the archway. Chloe grabbed Cheftu’s hand. “It must be the twenty-third of December.”

  “Aye.”

  The moon-cast shadow was moving, crossing the stones one at a time, shifting to the goat sign. They watched it, mesmerized. Finally Cheftu stood up, tugging her with him. Chloe fought the urge to giggle. Her husband wore only a belt around his waist, the two stones tucked on either side of his body. With his unbound hair waving over his shoulders and back, he looked as though he’d been lifted from the cover of a lurid novel. She, on the other hand, looked like a witch who’d been yanked from a burning pyre. Cheftu smiled as though he could read her thoughts.

  He kissed her gently. She felt him lace his fingers with hers and opened her eyes. Water splashed up onto their calves. Time was almost gone.

  Her husband pulled her closer, backing up until they were standing on the mosaic goat, its horns tinted with gold. They held each other, and she felt his heart pounding in his throat.

  The water beat against the island. They were either going down or going somewhere else. The bases of the archway were long submerged, and the glow from the lintel reflected on the
wave-soaked rocks. The water surrounded them now, and she didn’t know if she felt his trembling or hers.

  Cheftu stepped away, holding her at arm’s length. He reached down, grabbed a broken shell from beneath the water, and scraped it across his palm. Blood beaded up black on his skin. He rubbed his lips with it and then hers.

  The Aztlantu vow. The blood vow.

  He spoke slowly, his English broken and thick. Chloe felt her eyes fill with tears. His gaze was intense, seeing through her, past a wreck of flesh and bone to her immutable soul. “We are entrusted with the life and welfare of each other. My blood is yours, yours is mine. I seek to love and cherish you all my days, in whatever world we live.”

  He kissed her, and Chloe tasted the hot silk that was his tongue, the copper liquid that was his life. “I love you,” she whispered. “I’ll be with you anywhere.”

  He clasped her tightly, whispering into her ear, “Dear God, how I feared you’d never say those words.” His hands were trembling as he touched her wounded body. “Hold on to me. Don’t let go.”

  She caressed his cheek, looking into his eyes. “I won’t leave you. I vow it.”

  He closed his eyes, tears streaking the ash on his face. The one request he’d made: that she stay with him. She’d taken so long to answer. “We’ll be together,” Cheftu said, opening his eyes to stare into hers. “I promise. I will travel anywhere to find you, any time.”

  Oh God, they might not travel together. He realized it, too. Chloe whispered, “I promise, too.”

  The water was now to their waists. The island would be submerged in a matter of hours. They held each other’s hands tightly, memorizing each other’s images.

  It happened suddenly. The familiar wind whipped around her and Chloe felt herself pushed, her battered fingers melting away from Cheftu’s unscarred hand. Instead of water, she felt only space, and then a psychic roar as she was transformed from flesh to pure energy, lost in the cacophony of mixed senses.

  Lost from Cheftu.

  Help me keep my vow, she prayed.