Desert God

by Smith, Wilbur

  I was about to turn away and go below to try to get a little rest, for I had slept hardly at all since leaving the Bay of Zin, but just then something on the horizon ahead caught my eye. It was a thin undulating dark line. I stood and watched it for a while until I realized that it was a flock of birds flying directly towards us. I am very fond of all the avian species, but I could not recognize these until they came much closer. Then I was astonished to see that they were common crows. The Cretan crow is usually a solitary bird, or paired with a mate. Furthermore, crows always stay close to land. It was for all these reasons that I had not identified them from a distance. This was a flock of several hundred of these birds and they were at least a hundred leagues or probably much more from the nearest land. I watched them pass overhead. They were cawing to each other with an urgency that sounded to me like a distress call or at least a warning cry.

  When they were gone I looked again to the north and I saw more birds in flight approaching. Some of these were also crows but there were many other species as well. Ibis and herons, kestrels and eagles and other raptors passed over us. Then came the smaller birds: robins and larks, sparrows and doves and shrikes. The sky was filled with birds. Their numbers almost darkened the sun. Their cries were a strident cacophony that was almost deafening. There was a sense of desperation in this feathered exodus.

  A tiny yellow canary dropped from the sky and landed on my shoulder. It was clearly exhausted. Its whole body was trembling and it piped pathetically when I took it in my hand and stroked its head.

  I looked up again in wonder and still the flocks passed over us in their multitudes. Hui and Zaras came and stood with me, both with their heads thrown back and their faces turned upwards.

  ‘What is happening, Taita?’ Hui demanded.

  ‘It seems to be a mass migration. But I have never seen anything quite like it before.’

  ‘It looks more as though they are fleeing from some deadly threat,’ Hui suggested.

  ‘Wild animals and especially birds have an instinct for danger,’ Zaras agreed, and then looked to me for confirmation. ‘Is that not so, my lord?’ I ignored the question, not because I did not know the answer but rather because at that moment there was a splash alongside the bows of our ship which was made by some heavy body.

  I looked over the side, and the surface of the sea was boiling with life. Great shimmering bodies were tearing under our hull. Another mighty shoal of tuna was following the same direction as the flocks of birds that filled the sky above us. I looked ahead and saw that this shoal stretched out to the northern horizon.

  Their silver shapes streamed past us endlessly, and then there were other creatures mingled with them. Glossy black porpoises ripped through the surface with their dagger-sharp dorsal fins, throwing up rooster tails of spray behind them. Whales which were almost as long as our ship blew clouds of steam through the vents atop their heads as they surfaced to breathe. Sharks striped like tigers and with evilly grinning mouths lined with jagged teeth dashed past us, heading southwards.

  It seemed that all of creation was in panicked flight from some terrible cataclysm taking place beyond the northern horizon.

  As the hours passed so this great agglomeration of flying and swimming creatures gradually thinned out, until there were no more of them.

  We were alone in a deserted world; we few mortals and the tiny yellow canary which had stayed with me, sitting on my shoulder and trilling sweetly in my ear.

  Night fell over us, and we rowed on doggedly through the darkness with only the stars to light our way. With the rise of the sun I saw that the sky and the sea were still devoid of all life. The silence and the loneliness seemed ever more ominous and oppressive.

  The only sounds seemed to be the creaking of the oars in the rowlocks thrusting us onwards towards Crete, the whisper of the water along our hull and the boom of the drum tolling the beat. None of the men spoke or laughed.

  Even my yellow canary had fallen silent, and just before noon he slipped off my shoulder and flopped to the deck. He was dead when I picked him up. I took him to the stern and committed his tiny body to the care of Artemis, the goddess of the birds. I dropped him into the ship’s wake. Then I climbed to my station at the masthead.

  I scanned the horizon eagerly, but it was empty and my disappointment was difficult to bear. I sat in my perch for an hour and then another; watching and hoping.

  The merciless sunlight hurt my eyes and after a while I began to see things that did not exist: phantom ships and illusory islands. I closed my eyes to rest them.

  When I opened them again I was astonished to find that my hallucinations had intensified. The watery horizon ahead of our little ship was rising up towards the sky like a range of mountains: solid rather than liquid. Every moment these mighty oceanic Alps grew taller and more menacing. Now they were capped with glistening foam, white as freshly fallen snow.

  Then I heard the babble of voices coming up from the deck below. I glanced down and saw that Zaras and Hui and the other deck officers had hurried forward into the bows of the ship. They were huddled there, pointing ahead and arguing with each other. The men on the upper deck benches had ceased rowing and were standing and peering ahead. The ship was losing way and drifting to a halt.

  I jumped to the backstay and slid down it to the deck. When I reached it I ran forward, shouting to the men to take up their oars and get the ship under way once more.

  The officers in the bows heard my voice and turned to me. Zaras ran back to meet me.

  ‘What is happening? Is the world turning upside down?’ He pointed over his shoulder. ‘The sea is rising to fill the sky.’ He was close to panicking.

  ‘It’s a wave.’ With an effort I kept my own voice calm and level.

  ‘No.’ He shook his head vehemently. ‘It’s too big. It is coming too fast to be a mere wave.’

  ‘It’s a tidal wave.’ I spoke with certainty. ‘The same as the one that drowned the Empire of Atlantis in antiquity.’

  ‘In the name of all the sweet gods, is there naught we can do to escape it?’

  It was unlike Zaras to give up without a fight so I shouted in his face, ‘Warn your crew, damn you! Make sure they have the spare oars at hand. When that thing hits us we are going to take damage. It will snap off our oars. We have to maintain steerage and hold true. If it gets us side-on it will roll us over like a log and swamp us completely. Get all the hatches battened down. Ship the masts and lash them down. Rig lifelines along all the rowing benches or else the crew will be washed overboard.’

  Zaras responded at once to my peremptory orders and shouted for Hui to join him. I did not interfere any further. I left them to it, and stood in the bows and watched the wave coming.

  The closer it came the higher it climbed and the faster it seemed to race towards us. We barely had sufficient time to prepare to receive it before the front slope of the wave caught us.

  It lifted our bows so swiftly that my knees buckled under me and my stomach pressed up against my lungs, forcing me to gasp for breath. Up and up we climbed. Our stern dropped and the deck slanted back at such a steep angle that I had to cling to the bulwarks with both hands. The loose gear rolled and clattered down into the stern sheets.

  Despite the pandemonium Hui and Zaras kept us head-on to the wave with brisk commands to the men on the rowing benches to ‘Heave port!’ and ‘Avast heaving starboard!’

  The men shouted entreaties to their gods and their mothers to save them but they kept rowing.

  The higher we climbed the steeper was the slope, until our deck was almost vertical and our bows were pointing to the skies.

  For a brief instant I was able to look ahead over the crest of the mighty wave. We were so high that I could see clearly on the distant horizon the southern shore of Crete and above it the tower of smoke billowing up from the vented peak of Mount Cronus on the far side of the island. The sulphur-yellow clouds roiled up upon each other, filling the entire northern sky to the very heave
ns. Then the creaming crest of the wave curled over us, and buried the Outrage’s deck under a fathom of green water.

  One of the lifelines snapped under the strain and four of our crew members were swept over the side with it. We never saw them again. The rest of us were smothered by the racing water like rats trapped in an overflowing sewer. The coarse hemp lifeline around my waist was cutting me in half. I was not even able to scream to alleviate my terror. My vision began to black out. I knew that I was drowning.

  Then suddenly our bows burst out through the back slope of the tidal wave. I was able to snatch a breath of sweet clean air before we dropped into the void. We fell free for what seemed an eternity. Only the lifelines saved the rest of us from being hurled overboard with all the other loose gear.

  Then at last we struck the surface of the sea again with a crash and a shock that threatened to shatter every plank, bulkhead and strake in our hull. Our oars were sheared off at the rowlocks like dry twigs.

  I thought we would be driven deep under again. But our gallant little ship shook herself free. We bobbed on the surface, listing heavily, our decks awash. Men and equipment were heaped upon the deck and piled upon each other.

  Zaras and Hui raged over them, cursing and kicking them back to their places on the benches. However, some of the crew were gravely injured with broken limbs and crushed rib cages. These were dragged to one side. The spare oars were strapped to the deck beneath the benches. The rowers heaved the shattered stumps of their oars overboard and lifted the new oars into the rowlocks.

  Then we all fell to bailing like men possessed. Slowly the Outrage rose high and light in the water once more. The drummer picked up the beat. The rowers stumbled back to their seats on the benches, and the blades of the oars bit and sliced through the surface. We sped forward towards Crete. From this low angle it had disappeared below the horizon once more. But now I had the volcano smoke from Mount Cronus to guide me.

  A little after noon the wind picked up, and blew half a gale out of the south. The crew raised and restepped the masts and hoisted all our canvas to the following wind. Our speed was almost doubled. The water left behind the tidal wave was choppy and turbulent, strewn with the debris of trees and wreckage of ships and buildings that had been ripped from the island ahead of us. But we barged our way through it, with a team of men in the bows to fend off the more dangerous flotsam.

  Within another two hours we raised the silhouette of Crete from the sea once more. It was tiny and insignificant in comparison to the heaven-high column of volcanic smoke that stood above it. Now the rumbling and bellowing of the mad god Cronus swept over us. The uproar was barely muted by the distance, and the surface of the sea itself danced to the fury of the god.

  The oarsmen looked back over their shoulders in awe and trepidation as they pulled towards it. The off-duty crews huddled on the deck with the wounded and the dying. All of them were white-faced with terror. But I drove them on remorselessly towards Crete. When they seemed on the verge of mutiny Zaras and Hui unfurled the slave whips and stood over them, ready to use them.

  As we drew closer to the land I was awed by the damage that the tidal wave had left in its wake. When we came in sight of the port of Krimad I could barely recognize it. I identified it only by reference to the peak of Mount Ida that stood up behind it.

  All the buildings had been carried away by the wave, and even the heavy slabs of the breakwater had been tumbled into the sea like the building blocks of a petulant child.

  The forest and cultivated land along the foot of the mountain had been stripped bare. Great trees, the ruins of buildings and the hulls of once mighty ships were mangled together into a mass of rubble.

  What perturbed me the most was that the stables were gone. The grooms and horses must have been swallowed up by the wave and washed out to sea. My princesses were on the far side of the island. Without horses it would take days to reach them through the tangled remains of the forest.

  I considered trying to circumnavigate the island, but I abandoned the idea. In these perilous conditions it would take many days; and there was no way to tell what we might find if we did succeed in reaching Knossos.

  All I could hope for was that a few of the relay stations that I had laid out across the spine of the island were high enough to have escaped the full fury of the tidal wave, and perhaps some of the horses had survived.

  We anchored on the edge of the deep water, two cables’ length off the ruins of Krimad where the ship was protected by the bulk of the island. Then I called Zaras and Hui to me and told them, ‘Each of the relay stations across the mountain has between ten and twenty horses in their stables, if they have survived. With one rider up and two men hanging on the stirrup leathers each animal can carry three men. Pick thirty of your very best men to come ashore with us. They must carry weapons only, no armour to overburden our mounts.’

  When the shore party was ready we launched those skiffs which had survived the ravages of the great wave. When we took to the water in these tiny craft they were dangerously overloaded.

  I prayed silently to Inana as the waves battered us and the water came sloshing in over the bows. I reminded the goddess that I was simply following her dictates, and she must have been listening. We reached the ruin of the breakwater with only three men swept overboard, and even one of these managed to swim back to the Outrage.

  The skiffs were pounded to splinters almost as soon as we touched the rocks. However, we were able to scramble on to the remains of the breakwater with linked arms to support each other. We reached firm ground without suffering further loss.

  Then Zaras formed the men up into double file and I led them through the remains of the drowned town. It was deserted except for a few swollen corpses, half buried in the rubble. Then we climbed the lower slopes of the mountain which had also been inundated. I was searching for the beginning of the road leading to the first relay station. All trace of it had been obliterated. We might never have found it had we not been guided by the bugling of a hunting horn in the forest above us. Three men of the relay team had watched our arrival from the heights and had come down the path to meet us.

  They were terrified, but they had convinced themselves that we had come ashore to rescue them. Their disappointment was pathetic when they realized that was not the case. I led my men up to the relay station at a jog trot that defied the steep gradient. The ground under our feet trembled and shuddered, or rocked and bounced like a small boat in a rip-tide as the temper of the mad god Cronus flared or fell unpredictably.

  When we reached the first relay station we found there a total of six men and twenty horses who had survived the devastation. The horses were almost mad with terror as the earth shook under them and the stink of burning brimstone from the mountain across the bay stung their nostrils. It took all my skills to quieten them sufficiently to be able to saddle them.

  We tarried there just long enough to check our weapons. I was relieved to find that my recurved bow was still dry in its waxed leather case. I was not so satisfied by the state of my spare bowstrings. I appropriated a wallet of fine dry bowstrings from the captain of the relay station, much to his chagrin. But I held his eyes steadily as he began to protest, and he stammered into silence. Then I ordered him and all his men to remain at the relay station to cover our rear when we were forced to retreat.

  I wasted not another minute but shouted at Zaras and Hui to mount up, and I led our little convoy up towards where the pathway crossed the shoulder of Mount Ida.

  We had almost reached the crest when there was the thunder of hooves and the snorting and bellowing of a herd of wild beasts coming down the track towards us. I was just in time to lead my men into a dense stand of trees beside the path before a mass of monstrous bodies swept down the pathway towards us.

  Of course I recognized them immediately. They were a herd of wild aurochs cattle. They pounded past us with glaring bloodshot eyes. Their backs were humped. Their hides were uniformly brindled black and dark
brown. Their tongues lolled from the gaping mouths and the frothy saliva splattered their heaving shoulders. They were driven on by panic and terror, thundering along the pathway that skirted the sheer cliff.

  As we watched, another tremor shook the mountain under us. I saw a deep cleft open in the rim of the cliff, full in the track of the aurochs herd. The mountain slope was so steep and the momentum of the herd so irresistible that they were unable to avoid the drop. The entire herd poured over the cliff, the animals behind forcing those in front onwards until every one of them plunged into the void. We heard the massive bodies striking the rocks hundreds of feet below. Afterwards there was silence, until that also was shattered by the next roar of the volcano.

  I led my band back on to the pathway and we climbed the last steep slope to the crest. Here we paused again. I looked back to where the tiny shape of the Outrage was anchored off the ruins of Krimad. Then I turned in the saddle and looked ahead at the ruins of what had once been the city of Knossos, capital of the mightiest empire on earth.

  The great harbour was no more. There was no sign of the lighthouse. It must have been thrown down into the harbour basin. The harbour walls had been carried away, not leaving even their foundations. The wild seas dashed unhindered over the bare rocks on which the great city had stood.

  The Supreme Minos’ vaunted fleet of ten thousand ships had been hurled up above the tideline and smashed into kindling and splinters. There was no trace of a single floating hull in the whole wide bay. But the waters were thick with floating wreckage and tumultuous with the waves that still hurled themselves against the shore.

  The palace in which the Supreme Minos had married my princesses was gone; as was also the Admiralty building and every other stone-built edifice which had lined the waterfront.

  Beyond this chaos the twin volcanoes thundered and blew out flame and smoke to fill the heavens.

  In disbelief I let my gaze travel over the devastation. The Minoan Empire was no more. It had been obliterated by its own crazed god.