Star Gods: Book Four of Seeds of a Fallen Empire

by Anne Spackman

  She returned to the steep land of Taruisa, a land that bred the harmless foal and trained the war horse, also a pastoral scene of quiet, drifting sheep whose fleece was spun into fine woolen garments, a seaside city where both war boats and fishing boats bobbed on the waters of the bay. She remembered the grandeur of the southern gate when she had first entered the city and rode past the many terraces lined with houses, up the main street, past limestone towers so finely jointed that they needed no mortar, up to the royal palace of Paraimu and his son Aleksandus, the dark, uncompromising warrior, a veteran of battles from Tyre to the Aegean.

  And then her new people, the Taruisha, trying to fortify the weak western wall with soldiers after the Ahhiyawan scout scaled it in the dead of night. The fishing boats had fled, the horses had been taken, the people within the walls cowered in fear. She remembered the thunderous sound as the invading Ahhiyawan armies rammed down the broad, outer walls of the city with the siege engine, the battering ram of Poseidon, Ahhiyawan god of the sea and god of horses.

  And she remembered how the beautiful grey potter’s wares crashed to the floor in the megaron hall of the palace as the artificial earthquake shook them. She remembered the sound of the women screaming in the women’s hall. Then the triumphant Ahhiyawans who called themselves Achaiwoi had dug the walls down and overturned the stones, killed the defenders whose blood flowed like a river that seeped into the horrified ground; the victors poured into the city, looting, seized the women they called Toroja, brought her among them back over the Green Sea...

  “Yes,” Kiel abruptly admitted. His mind also took him back, but to another morning. He kept the fall from his thoughts, remembering only the long journey to Troia when the winds finally changed in the Achaiwoi’s favor, the calm blue sea underneath the Achaiwoi ship and flat to the horizon, the smell of the olive groves on the shore, the bright silence of a clear day, silent except for the sonorous rhythm of the oars tearing into the still water.

  She shook off his invading memory, trying to hold on to her anger, even though she knew it would be brief.

  “I knew you were there,” she said. “I heard stories about you, in the camp–”

  “I sensed you were nearby,” he said. “In warrior’s guise?”

  “I wanted to do something, but I knew you were there, that you’d stop me from doing anything. That–neither of us would leave until it had ended, one way or another.” Her present words were contrite, contrite because she had disobeyed orders more than once. “And Aleksandus wouldn’t allow me to interfere, either. Nothing was worth the price of his honor, you see. So I let Taruisa fall. I stood there, as I had promised. And I did nothing–”

  “Until the Achaiwoi tried to kill the children in the megaron hall.” He finished.

  “You knew?”

  “I wasn’t there when it happened, but I knew about it–”

  “You,” she said, her eyes widening with a realization that hit her. “You were the one who led Aineias and the other group of survivors from the city to the boats.”

  He nodded. “When I came back to the city, you were gone. How did you know?”

  “I returned to Troia before I came here, to Clas Myrddin. Some of your survivors had returned and rebuilt the city. There were still stories of the siege all over the area.”

  “I thought to find you on the copper isle of Alasiya when the people of Ugarit fled there. I don’t know how much you know about what happened after Troia fell. The empire of Khatti fell soon afterward, and there was a great migration of their feudal subjects to the south, towards Sidonia, Caanan, even to Kemet.” He explained. “Everything was such a mess! I found Lierva and Celekar on a boat of Lukka from the territories of the former Khatti Empire. They were on their way to Kemet to launch a sea battle against per-ao Rameses. For he had done many wrongs, and they felt he needed punishment.”

  Alessia turned to him with an expression of interest.

  “My Achaiwoi friends as you call them were there, too,” Kiel continued. “All of Hellas has been conquered by illiterate peasants from the north, all of their fair palaces razed to the ground, and with the Khatti gone, they couldn’t depend on a living of trade anymore, so the heroic kings of Hellas took to the waters.”

  “I know.” She laughed. “Joining piratic fleets with their former enemies, the Taruisha, and all of the other peoples of Khatti they once fought with, the Lukkans, the Shardana, even the Kaptarans…”

  “Seems such a crazy world,” he shrugged. “Friends become enemies and enemies become friends.”

  “You might say that.”

  “I went everywhere looking for you, too. But then, I suddenly remembered Diraovedas. When I didn’t find you among the Galatoi people of Dana on the mainland, I came on one of their ships to Clas Myrddin, land of the dead–now a complete island itself, I see.”

  “It feels safer here, now, now that no one can march across the marshes to get here.”

  “Yes, there was once a land bridge to this island, I had forgotten. Yet even now, a small stretch of water is nothing to a sturdy boat. The Phoinikes have visited this island looking for precious metals, and even sailed beyond the pillars of Melqart to the south.”

  “Well, the red people of Tyre—Canaanites—or Phoinikes as you call them, would have stayed where they were on the cedar plains in Canaan and left this land alone if the pirates of Kaptara and Hellas and Daneland hadn’t joined them and given them their chance to take over the seas…”

  “I don’t want to argue with you, Alessia.”

  “I’m not arguing,” she insisted. “Merely pointing out a fact. Don’t think I’m bitter about the fall of Kaptara and Khatti or that the Taruisha have fled to the northern desert of the Great Green. I’m not bitter. I felt sorrow for the losses of the people I knew, and that is all.”

  “Strange that you mention that. I found Talden, Vala, and Mindra in a new Taruishan colony in the lands of the Villanovi west of Hellas. When Rameses defeated the sea pirates, they came west looking for land while their land armies settled in Canaan. Gerryls was living in a colony on Shardina–”

  “I feel terrible. If we leave the world now, we leave it in a dark age little better than when we arrived.”

  “Not true, but if it is, there is nothing we can do about it. Slow progress has been made.”

  “Kiel, I wonder why it is that we never crossed paths before Taruisa–Troia, in all those years, outside of that rendezvous at Eridu.” She pulled the cloak tighter around her. “Maybe you were always one step ahead of me.” Her face broke a half-smile.

  “And yet I find you here. I see the priests of the sacred oak still memorize knowledge of the ancient days,” he commented; she supposed he had already been to the villages, or duns, looking for her. “Even the things they don’t understand.”

  “They are a superstitious people.”

  “I agree, but they are who they are.” He added as an afterthought.

  Alessia stirred, watching him, watching his silence. He pressed his back against the stone, so comfortable against the stone...

  He didn’t want to leave, either! But he knew they had no choice, she realized, as she saw his thoughts again after so many years, after so many years estranged from him and from their Seynorynaelian past.

  She still loved him, and all of the explorers, though some had become enemies to her briefly on this world, divided over their fostered “children”—now, it was all over, and they must apologize to one another and return to their own spaceship and mission home.

  “Kiel, I don’t want to leave this planet,” Alessia said, overcome by a sudden pang of despair.

  “This isn’t our home,” Kiel said quietly. “And we must now go home.”

  “So where are the others?” She asked a moment later.

  “You’re the last to return, since you missed the last rendezvous.” He replied, his eyes unaccusing,
only stoic. “The rest are waiting on the isles of springs past the pillars of Melqart.”

  “And you? For all your talk of honesty, you’ll keep your secrets, I suppose.”

  “We all must.” He said, his lips a thin line. “We must bury them in the past, leave them on this world. We must start over again, and return to our own people and its way of life.”

  Without a word, she stood and picked her way out onto the rain-drenched plain, never looking back at the misty quiet of the stone temple behind her.

  Never again, she vowed to herself, I will never invest so much emotion in a race not my own, or a planet not my own. After a moment, she summoned composure, enough to safeguard herself from suffering any more pain.

  But first she bent down to the earth and took a dark stone from the ground as a symbol of this era come to an end. She rose again, fingered the cool, smooth stone, then clenched it tightly in her hand.

  Good-bye, Kiel3. I must leave you now, and I will never again return. She vowed.

  Rain blurred the trees ahead, to the south, where the transport shuttle would be waiting, ready to escort her and Kiel back to Selesta.

  She never looked out as the shuttle ascended, bearing her away from the planet below.

  The henge of stones was still with her when she closed her eyes.

  After eleven thousand, eight hundred, and seventy-nine revolutions, the explorers finally left the planet they had named Kiel3, having found no sign of the "singularity" in all the time they had been on the surface, though that didn’t mean that it wasn’t still there. Already they had been too careless, and tales of their intrusion lived on, though diluted by myth and time, documented in the language of the planet's humanoid population. However, they had made efforts to cover their involvement so that none of the human race would ever suspect that their world had been visited by aliens.

  They would never know how the planet flourished after this day. As Selesta turned from the blue-white world of Kiel3, its explorer crew could only hope that humanity's curiosity led them to the stars so that it might view the world as they saw it now, so that the human race might one day behold the rare and tenuous wonder of their planet, so that they might learn to take the explorers place and protect it for the generations to come.

  * * * * *

  The great ship Selesta was now homeward bound, though there were likely to be a few more stops on the way on their journey home.

  Life had returned to as close as normal as possible, though few of the explorer crew had spoken of Kiel3 since their departure from that planet. They knew that the planet was lost to them for all time.

  Kiel had set the tachiyon engines to take them back to the centipede hole that linked galaxy group seven to the Great Cluster, that they hoped would return them to the time they had left when they had come to the Kiel3 system. If they were successful and re-emerged near the edge of the galactic plane of galaxy group six, they had decided to travel outside the galaxy. From there they would chance a long space warp around the Great Cluster to the far side, closer to Seynorynael but on the other side of the territories they had visited in their initial mission guideline.

  Gerryls seemed certain that the explorers could protect the live specimens they had collected from adverse reactions in the space warp, though none of the explorers looked forward to it.

  According to their mission guideline, the explorers were to rendezvous with the settlement that had probably been founded on Gilned2 by now, though it had only been a proposed colony when they left.

  However, before they reached Gilned2, they had plans to explore the edge of the lai-nen territories near the other side of the Great Cluster, taking advantage of the lai-nen's own centipede hole gates. Near the lai-nen Empire, reports showed a cooler blue-white star than Valeria. A star that had twelve planets in its system.

  Marankeil had outlined a guide for them to travel to this star system, to the class 4 star Rigell. Rigell was so far the only known blue-white star system, other than Valeria and Dela, where a great planetary system had evolved. And if reports from the lai-nen Empire's emissaries could be trusted, life had evolved on three of the planets, on the second planet and the binary planets a little further from the star.

  Marankeil's plan was for the explorers to make an outpost on the binary system, called Celestian one and two. Though he had no real ideas of outfitting a colony as yet, he had intended to make it known to his only great rivals that Seynorynael had intentions of galactic expansion, even to lai-nen's very borders.

  But who knew? By the time Hinev's explorers arrived, perhaps the two galactic rivals may have signed a peace settlement. Seynorynael did not need the remote territory, so far from any other humanoid systems. Between the lai-nen systems and the Federation territories few centipede hole gates operated, making real-space inter-stellar journeys too long for most travelers.

  And the lai-nen had not really wanted the planets in the Rigell system, either. When the explorers left, no one had yet known whether or not the lai-nen could survive the intense radiation of a bluish-white star. Perhaps the lai-nen had even agreed to join the Federation. Perhaps they had at last accepted the invitation that Kudenka's explorers had extended the wandering lai-nen spacecraft so long ago, on Seynorynael’s first great voyage of discovery.

  Feeling the ship make its final turn towards the Great Cluster, Alessia couldn't wait until they could return home to Seynorynael. Only the sight of their home world would be able to cure them of their stay on Kiel3, rid them of the memories from that place. However, it would take several more thousand years before they completed their mission, but much of that time would be spent in the confinement of Selesta through the deep space between the lai-nen territories and the Federation with few planetary detours.

  We've done it, Gerryls' excited call interrupted all other thoughts on the ship. We've returned to our own time!

  Moments later, the bright collage of stars of the supercluster of galaxies swung into view above the observation window and merged as one; now there truly was no going back.

  * * * * *

  As Selesta emerged from the centipede hole to the Rega system, the radiation of the blue-white star dissolved the last of the Hinev mixture in their bloodstream for type M6oc humanoids, the mixture they had just used on their exploration of the planet Kuac.

  After some time, the Selesta approached twin planets in the system, Celestian one and Celestian two; Celestian two, a giant planet with dark, reddish, arid continents, reddish because of the fissures of fire that spidered across them, presently obscured their view of the smaller, blue-white world of Celestian one.

  "Such a shame that world has such a small water supply." Broah pulled at Alessia's shoulder, pointing at the ominous image of Celestian two outside the observation window. Alessia stopped analyzing the data from Kuac on her electronic book to follow Broah’s eyes to the view.

  A minute later, a message from Kiel called them to the bridge. Celekar, Ri-ari, Derstan, Jir-end, Wen-eil, and Vala had joined them in the elevation shaft by the time they arrived.

  "...and then we'll send a team down to Celestian two to scout out a possible position. How about you, Kellar?” Kiel was saying as they stepped from the elevation shaft. “Anxious for a trip to the surface? Because here's your chance–"

  "Somehow I knew you would suggest that, Kiel," Kellar sighed, looking up as the others gathered around them at the holo-monitor.

  Neither of them had said anything that might shed light on the vision Alessia had had back in the temple of Nippur. Had Kiel really died, as Lierva once had? She wondered. She didn’t know, though at times, such as now, she still wondered. Yet if anything, Kiel and Kellar’s friendship had seemed stronger than ever since the reunion of the explorers after their long sojourn on Kiel3. And the explorers had returned to their old ways and habits the closer they came to their journey’s end.

  Meanwhile, A
lessia’s eye strayed to Lierva standing by the data display; an irritated expression had taken possession of the intrepid woman’s face.

  "Kellar's right you know, Kiel," Lierva interjected, her eyes never leaving Kiel. "Celestian one is much nicer."

  "I know, Lierva. But you know I have no control over the mission guideline," Kiel responded calmly, watching the schematics of the surface change, registering a great planetary earthquake.

  "What's going on?" Broah asked, disliking the argumentative tension, and Kellar pulled her aside, pretending to whisper in her ear, but gave her a telepathic run-down instead. Alessia still stood by Lierva, watching the interchange in confusion.

  "Can't say I'm excited about it," Lierva persisted, with signs of resentment. "What's the point? No one will be able to live on the surface–if that was the council's intention," she added.

  "Actually, it should be relatively easy to make the atmosphere breathable," Gerryls said.

  "But why should we want to do that?" Lierva asked, more rhetorically than seriously. Nevertheless, Kiel responded to her.

  "The Federation wanted us to prepare the way in case they decide to send a colony here–"

  "Yeah, only to keep it from the lai-nen Empire," Lierva said.

  "That may be true," Gerryls conceded, "but the explorers who follow us might need a temporary base on Orian to supply them with raw materials and supplies–"

  "You know that's not true, Gerryls," Lierva interrupted hotly, then relented a little, conscious of the fact that they were all subject to the same miserable orders. "You know the Federation is anticipating conflict with the lai-nen. And don't tell me you don't know that this planet is full of raw materials and surface metals for spaceship production, that the black hole just outside this system doesn't make it the ideal place for black hole mining and anti-matter weapon production–"

  "Perhaps–" Gerryls began half-heartedly.

  "Why would the Federation build a base here for any other reason? Why would they need such a colony? What other explorers would come all the way out here?" Lierva shook her head. "This system is too far even by centipede hole travel for any profitable operation. No, they would only need it as an outpost to launch an offensive against the lai-nen.”