by Richard Farr
“But,” I insist, restacking wet suits to make more space, “where were the people?”
“There’s a whole chapter here on the capital city. He describes it as the largest in the world. He also says it was designed as an outer defensive ring, in twelve segments, with the main city as a spiral of eighteen segments running up to the summit temple.”
A ring of twelve, and a spiral of eighteen. “You mean they designed their entire city based on a Phaistos Disk?”
“I’m sure the city came first, and then Disks. Anyway, he says the city was confined to the upper half of the mountain. If your gods are located at the top of a mountain, and they tell you to keep building, because your reward will be heaven, are you going to run away from them or go to them?”
Morag shakes her head in disgust. “Death’s never the end. The gods promise a fabulous time in the next life if we just do the right thing in this one. Death is just a point of transfer to the sweet eternal. It’s the ultimate come-on: be obedient, give your whole life to us, and then step through the door for your fucking reward.”
“That’s exactly what Quinn says,” I point out. “And what the Akkadians believed—at least until your Shul-hura blew the whistle.”
I crawl into my sleeping bag, shivering at the thought: a great city, built around the summit of a volcano, precisely where it can best be destroyed. “Wow. When the right moment comes—when the gods are ready, or the volcano’s ready—boom. A civilization vaporized whole, without a trace.”
“That’s right,” Pandora says. “No survivors, no trace—except the diskoi. Which were their religious texts. They mass-produced them for several centuries, and scattered them like seeds all over the region.”
“Eratosthenes actually calls them diskoi?” Morag asks.
“That word is in here, once or twice. But the inhabitants apparently preferred another word, which he translates into Greek as ‘o logos tēn demiourgon.’ ”
Morag frowns and concentrates, like a student faced with an exam question. “Logos is ‘word’ or ‘reasoning,’ yes? So O logos tēn means—I’m guessing here—something like ‘the language of’?”
Pandora nods approvingly.
“What’s the last bit?”
“The noun demi-ourgos is an interesting word. It can mean ‘municipal worker’—like the man who’s employed by the city to mend potholes. It can also mean ‘designer.’ ”
“One kind of designer is an architect,” Morag says.
Pandora nods. “Yes. And Plato used it to mean the original designer. The architect of the universe. God.”
CHAPTER 18
DEVIL IN THE DEEP BLUE SEA
We’re in the darkening blue of forty meters, near the practical safe limit for diving without a decompression chamber. Above us, brilliant afternoon sunlight is flooding across this corner of the southern Aegean Sea, and an army of long-wavelength photons—red, yellow, green—is surging down toward us. But they run out of energy and drown up there: only blue light has the buzz to swim this deep. Down here, the color and the silence give the dive site a spectral feel, like the crypt it is.
On our first dive, half an hour after sunrise, it was still dark underwater. In the glow of our headlamps, we removed a couple of two-thousand-year-old elm planks to reveal a neat line of a dozen more Disks. After all those years of searching and digging with Dad, I wanted to laugh out loud at how easy it was; wanted so much to have Dad here, share the moment with him.
The site is on the crumbling lip of an underwater cliff. Algae-crusted rocks on one side; on the other, a swift plunge into darkness. Pandora moves methodically, her body suspended above the edge, recording the Disks with a new underwater camera. This gear uploads pictures directly to a laptop on the boat, which is anchored in shallower water a quarter mile away; it also tags the photos with time, GPS location, and both the magnetic bearing and the angle at which the camera is being held. The geospatial software will have built us a 3-D model of the whole site before we even get back on board.
Morag’s in the Zodiac, directly above us, looking green. A night without sleep—a night without an answer, more to the point—and she’d do just about anything to be on land. Good thing the work is quick, and not only for Morag’s sake. We’ve squeezed this second dive as close to the first as the chemistry of nitrogen absorption will allow, and our dive plan allows for only a few minutes of bottom time before we must begin the dull routine of returning, via timed safety stops, to the world of normal pressure and unbottled air.
At least while we’re down here I don’t have much to do. My job is only to be Pandora’s safety buddy, keep my eyes open for anything we might have missed, keep track of the time and the pressure levels. So I’m just floating, trying to puzzle out what a man like Quinn can really want with Dad—or Morag, or Rosko. Surely he’s spoken to the “Architects,” or thinks he has? Surely he knows everything already?
Seems we’ve only been at work a couple of minutes when my dive computer starts winking at me: only five more before hitting our safe margin for ascent. I look up at the bottom of the Zodiac, a flexing shape on the surface, and follow the long sloping line that reaches down from it to the spare tanks. The hull’s shadow shows up quite distinctly on a big boulder at the lip of the trench, like a throw rug drying on a wall.
A pretty scene, though the dark chasm to my right is unsettling. I rotate lazily, get myself one more look at the patterns on the surface, and take my knife from its sheath on my leg. I’m just about to tap three times on my tank with the metal handle, to get Pandora’s attention. Then I turn and look at her for the first time in thirty seconds.
Something is very, very wrong.
At the end of basic scuba training there’s a scary little rite of passage. You’ve shown that you can maintain depth. You’ve aced the test on hand signals and emergency drills. You know how to buddy-breathe from your pal’s tank. You can even do those gnarly little calculations about pressure, multiple-dive nitrogen accumulation, stop time, ascent rate. (Important, getting the math right: it greatly reduces the chance that you’ll pop up too quickly after a long dive, then die an agonizing death as your blood celebrates its return to normal pressure by turning into pink champagne.) So: the final ritual. After carefully explaining what’s next, your instructor takes you down to twenty feet or so, checks your gear, probably sits you on the nice sandy bottom. Then rips off your mask and tosses it away.
Your job: don’t panic. All you have to do is keep your eyes open—they sting less than you expect—then reach for the mask, put it back on, breathe out through your nose to expel the water. Oh, and give your instructor the thumbs up. You’re a diver at last.
I’m years beyond that elementary stage, and Pandora’s a senior dive master who has trained dozens of people herself. But nobody forgets that early experience with the mask. Fear. Liberation from fear. Achievement. It’s what I think of immediately, as I see her mask floating gently down into the darkness.
She’s drifting, neutrally buoyant, with her head down as if she’s watching the mask disappear. Then the current, combined with the flotation in the PFD, rolls her over, so that she’s on her side, as if sleeping.
By the time I reach her, the regulator has fallen from her slack mouth and is floating beside her, gently bubbling. A few more stray bubbles are coming from the side of her mouth. As I reach for the regulator I notice a kind of stain in the water behind her. Because the colors are all wrong, the first thing I think of is spilled coffee. But coffee isn’t what you get when there’s a harpoon sticking out of your back.
Part of my brain says the obvious: she’s dead. But part of it must be running a forgotten subroutine from a CPR course, because my right fist, as if working on its own, reaches out and punches her in the stomach. The water resistance softens the blow, but it’s enough: she lurches forward, mechanically expelling water, and I stuff the regulator back in her mouth.
Miraculously, she inhales, and her eyes come back to life. Then she starts
throwing up. I hold on to her firmly, hold the regulator in place—gross, but they’re designed for this. Eventually she’s breathing properly again.
I look around frantically. There are shadows moving in the depths that might be something, and probably aren’t. I can see the fear in Pandora’s eyes, see too that she’s trying to master it. Thank goodness we’ve been diving together for so long: our basic hand signals have developed into almost a complete sign language. When I convey my intentions to her, she repeats them and nods weakly: I will hold on to her as we work our way dutifully up the dive line, stopping at the correct depths but cutting the stop times in half—balancing the fear that we’ll both die of the bends against the fear that she’ll bleed to death first.
“Thank goodness you’ve come back up, D. I’ve been dying to tell you—I figured it out! The third home. It’s so easy. I should have thought of it right away. It’s—Oh shit.”
Getting Pandora onto the Zodiac ought to be neat, swift, dignified—in some alternative world. In reality, I’m still in the water and Morag is trying to haul her on while leaning out of a pitching inflatable and asking fifty questions. It’s not working.
“Don’t talk, just get her in.”
We waste five minutes in struggling and shoving, but we can’t get her in.
“You’ll have to tow us to the boat. Slowly.” For five more agonizing minutes, I hang onto the Zodiac’s deck line with one hand and the back of Pandora’s PFD with the other. Can’t even tell if she’s still conscious. At the boat, we can’t get her out of the water either, despite the steps at the stern—but by using them as a kind of lever I do at last get her into the Zodiac.
“Leave this to me,” Morag says, jumping in beside her. “Easy job, not a problem.” She’s talking to Pandora, not me, trying to calm her as she takes my knife and starts to cut away the wet suit. “Look at me, Pandora. Concentrate on breathing slowly and calmly. You’re going to be fine. My mother trained as a nurse, and I’ve handled worse than this. D, get me the first aid kit. And a cloth. A T-shirt, anything.”
“Someone attacked her and stole the camera,” I’m explaining, as I climb from the Zodiac onto the dive boat.
“Two guys,” Pandora says weakly. “They were wearing military rebreathers—no bubbles. Came out of nowhere. But it doesn’t matter about the camera. The imagery uploads in real time, remember? Already on the laptop.”
She flicks her eyes in the direction of the pilothouse.
“They’ll come right back for the Disks themselves, soon as they have a chance.” I’m talking to myself as I watch Morag at work, but I’ve said it out loud and Morag must think I’m seriously proposing to go back down. With a hard edge to her voice she says, “I think we have more important things to worry about.”
When she peels the neoprene off Pandora’s wound, blood floods out onto the deck. It looks like dark velvet in the sunlight. Shocking, but Morag visibly relaxes. “Not as bad as I thought. I can’t get the tip of this out of you without causing more damage, but that’s not arterial. Once we stop the bleeding you’re going to be OK.”
“Time to get out of here,” I say, and I head for the wheelhouse.
Things are way, way worse than I thought.
First of all, the laptop’s gone. Second, I’m standing at a slight angle to the wheel, and a quick look in the hatch confirms my suspicion. The engine compartment is filling with water: someone has put a hole in the boat, and we’re sinking.
“Can we bail it?” Morag asks when I explain the situation.
“Not fast enough. We have ten, fifteen minutes, max.”
“Then we’ll have to get Pandora back to Antikythera in the Zodiac.”
A loud, harsh No! from Pandora, followed by a whisper. “Morag. You were about to say something about the third home. You found it?”
“Aye, but that doesn’t—”
“Tell us. Quickly.”
“It just came to me. I should have thought of it a long time ago. Thera, or Strongyle, was a volcano. Nearly all the Mysteries have been associated with volcanoes, or with mountains anyway. What’s another volcano in this region, associated with gods?”
I get it at once. Almost went there with Mom, in fact, only we couldn’t get the climbing permits.
“Ararat. Because of Noah.”
“One out of two. Mount Ararat, yes, but not because of Noah. It shows up in Armenian mythology a thousand years before the Noah story was written down. The ancient Armenians believed, just like the Greeks believed about Olympus, that Ararat was where their gods lived.”
“Great. Ararat is a seriously remote mountain in the badlands of far-eastern Turkey. If you’re right, we have maybe thirty-six hours to find medical help for Pandora and then get there.”
I’m already running through a long list of issues, options, problems, but Pandora beats me to it.
“Here’s what you are going to do, Daniel.”
I have to crouch down to hear her.
“Whoever those guys were, they’ll be looking for you—for us—on Antikythera and in Crete. You don’t want to run into them, so you cannot take me there.”
“But—”
“Please. Shut up and listen. Best is if they believe we all drowned. Yes? So you are going to hope the boat stays afloat a little longer, and take it north, just as if we hadn’t noticed anything wrong. Then get into the Zodiac, let the main boat sink, and get us to Kythera. Bigger island, bigger hospital. And a direct ferry to Athens.”
It’s a horrible idea, for a whole lot of reasons, but I don’t have a better one. I grab a mesh dive bag, stuff it with essentials—dry clothes, passports, money, a couple of jackets—toss it down to Morag. By the time we’re ready, the dive boat is listing another five degrees to starboard.
Luckily the engine catches immediately, despite all the water down there. As I come up to about half speed, the Zodiac starts to buck horribly on the wake, so that Morag has to cling on to Pandora just to prevent them both being thrown out. Nothing to be done; I press on, making another couple of miles northeast.
A quick scan with the binoculars. No other boats around, and Antikythera is fading out of sight. I give it another two, three minutes at half throttle, and it seems I’m doing fine. The engine coughs ominously. Then a larger than average swell catches the hull broadside, causes a sickening slow roll, and for a minute I think it’s going to take me over.
No sign of land now. “Time’s up. Coming to join you,” I yell.
Morag yells something back, waves an arm, points.
“What?”
I can’t make it out, and the boat’s lurching on the swell like a drunk on a trampoline. Throttling back to slow, I center the wheel, untie the line, dive over the stern rail. Seconds later I’m back in the Zodiac.
The dive boat putters away without us, on a slight arc to the north, leaning over like a man with one short leg. It looks as if it could go on like that forever, but on the next big wave crest it straightens and heels over the other way. Then it heels over some more, stops almost completely on its side, and vanishes as if tugged from below.
Morag is staring after it as if she’s witnessed a cold-blooded murder.
“What? What were you waving about?”
She takes about three shallow breaths before answering, then nods in the direction where the boat went down.
“Still in the wheelhouse.”
“The laptop? No, I looked.”
She shakes her head. “The Geographika.”
“Oh crap. Please tell me I didn’t do that.”
“You didn’t. We did. We just destroyed the last surviving copy of one of the greatest lost works of antiquity.”
Dad would rate this right alongside burning the Mona Lisa. But Dad is precisely the reason we can’t waste time thinking about it. Good to be with Morag at a moment like this: she blows out a long breath, as if ridding herself of the thought.
“It’s gone, D. Nothing we can do. The question is, what now? What’s the plan?”
<
br /> I point north. “The plan is, we go that way and try to stay warm until morning.”
Night’s coming on. We’re in an inflatable that has a mosquito for an outboard, with no lights and no compass. We need to cross a notoriously rough patch of sea that’s also one of the busiest shipping lanes in the Mediterranean.
At least the flashlight shows plenty of gas in the tank. “It’s twenty miles, twenty-five allowing for current. We get there by dawn, we can be in Athens tomorrow afternoon. And we’ll know nobody followed us.”
“We have enough time?”
I shrug. “Either we do or we don’t.”
As the air cools, the air currents should fade too, calming the sea. Instead, the wind veers until it’s directly against the current, forcing the surface into a steep, uneven chop. We thump laboriously north, waves coming at us out of the dark at an awkward diagonal, making the boat slew and lurch. What will it be like, I wonder, for some marine archaeologist to explore the mud beneath us a couple of thousand years from now and come across a rusted motor, some fragments of rubber, a single steel harpoon point?
Thank goodness it’s a clear night. Which means we’re too cold, but at least I can see the Big Dipper pointing north. Just hope we have enough gas. Just hope Pandora stays alive.
CHAPTER 19
CROSSING TO KYTHERA
It’s another half hour before Homer’s rosy fingers of dawn are due to show up, but the darkness is already thinning. The waves have subsided into ripples at last. When the island of Kythera appears, a beached gray whale on the horizon, I throttle back to the slowest possible speed, then take us a mile closer. But the noise still sounds outrageously loud in the still air, so I cut the engine, fit the oars into the oarlocks. I’ve been standing in a steady breeze, wet with spray, all night. I’m exhausted, shaking with cold, desperately hungry. Wonder if my numbed arms are up to the job.
