Dam had met the two watchmen when he had gone out that night. They knew he liked to wander around on his own, and they gave him no hassle about it. Dam thought about telling them that he had heard something or someone out in the fields, but it could have been his imagination so he said nothing. The watchmen greeted him in Atlantean, and Dam answered back in the few words of their language that he had learned. The watchmen stood aside with their iron crooks to let him pass.
When Aerander, Lys, and Dam had come below to find refuge for their countrymen, they had to retrieve the Oomphalos from the serpent slave-drivers of the underworld, the New Ones, and return it to Old Ones’ warrior-queen Ysalane. Ysalane had promised to shelter their people. The survivors had been living in asylum for seven fortnights as best as anyone could figure. Some of them were still frightened of the underground people. Some made up ridiculous stories about them, like they were unclean or backward, or secretly planning to keep them as prisoners.
Atlantis had been the Navel of the World, beckoning traders from all its exotic colonies and importing domestic slaves from conquered nations. Dam had met enough different sorts of people to understand that a man’s character, whether virtuous or evil, was tempered by peculiarities much more complex than physical appearance or race. It stood to reason that it must be the same way with the underground dwellers. Dam hadn’t met a member of their kind who hadn’t been gracious and polite.
Over centuries, they had adapted to living in the sunless underworld, but they weren’t so different from aboveground people. The ways that they were different were actually better. The Old Ones didn’t have a noble class and a poor class. None of them were highborn or lowborn. They were just born. Everyone was treated the same, and everyone was provided for.
Their city plan was strange by aboveground standards. They didn’t have the normal byways like streets, alleys, or canals. Their storage houses, factories, homes, and garrisons were built up in quarried stages. From the outside, it resembled a giant ziggurat like the temples of Lemuria. From the inside, it was like an enormous hive with a mazelike network of interior and exterior stairwells, corridors and footbridges. Traveling around was a hellish trial for the legs, disorienting until the route markers from here to there became familiar. Lifts powered by giant, stone cog watermills moved goods from one stage to the other. Boys had taken to catching rides on them, and Dam had done so from time to time.
When he reached the quay on the city-side of the tunnel, Dam boarded a lift piled with musty ore for the smithies. It would take him up to the precinct for the evacuees. That trip gave a view of the tall succession of berths that comprised the city. When Dam, Aerander, and Lys had discovered the place, it had been conquered by the New Ones. The city had been demolished into rubble. Besides their lifts and aqueducts and scores of smelt works, the Old Ones had built up tiers of granite houses for the Atlanteans. The boys called it “the Honeycomb.” The complainers among them called it “the Cells.”
At night, the Honeycomb stood out from the rest of the city with its many gas-lit lamps. That was another bit of ingenuity the Old Ones had introduced to the evacuees. Underground gases could be harnessed for fire, and they burned better than oil or coal, with less smoke and stench. The Old Ones used that gas to fuel the furnaces of their smelting factories. They didn’t need it to make light for themselves. Their eyes could penetrate the depths of night, and they could generate light into their hands when they needed to lay bare their surroundings. During the day, the radiant Oomphalos, installed in the city’s tallest watchtower like a lighthouse, showered everything with its strange luster.
In the evacuees’ precinct, some of the highborn boys had etched the walls and floors with drawings, both decorative and bawdy. They didn’t have gilded columns or bunting with family crests to make the place more like the homes that they had once known. Moreover, they didn’t have subjects to bow down when they passed by or to bring them tribute of fine wines and delicacies from their country provinces.
But they still found ways of maintaining the ranks. The New Ones’ freed slaves who had survived the liberation of the city had the below-houses. They were one hundred common men who had been bartered to the serpent race by the High Priest Zazamoukh. Many of them had been kept alive for hundreds of years through the mysterious energy of the Oomphalos. The lowborn boys and the seven common women who had survived the flood took a middle floor. Naturally, the highborn boys had the top houses.
Dam climbed a stairwell to the middle-houses. When everything had been built, he could have taken a home at the top level with his cousin. Due to some intermarriage with Aerander’s family, House Atlas, Dam’s father had owned a parcel of land where he had bred horses. When Dam’s father died, he had left that land to Dam. But Dam had only been a baby. Aerander’s grandfather, the Governor of House Atlas at the time, had taken Dam in as a ward.
Raised in the Citadel palace, Dam had grown up feeling more noble than country burgher though he had been precisely neither. He and Aerander had been born a month apart, and they had shared nursemaids, baths, and even a bed since the time they had crawled on all fours. The difference between them had become apparent when they turned thirteen and Aerander began his training for the Panegyris. Dam wasn’t going to be feted with snippings from the vine, contests for victory fillets, and a parade of chariots. He had no father to sponsor him as Aerander had. Aerander had been the family’s gilded legacy. He had been his father’s only son, and after his grandfather had died, he had become prince regent.
That summer of their thirteenth birthdays, Dam had left the palace to make his own way as a priest. Despite Aerander’s protests, Dam decided to live among city folk after the evacuation. He wasn’t destined to be a military general, or a champion of the games, or a politician of renown like the highborn boys with their proud family names.
His place in the world had always been obscure. He held the deed to his father’s stables, but they had fallen into disrepair. It would have taken resources Dam didn’t have to restore them. Dam hadn’t been suited for professions that required hard labor or skill, and he had no interest in them. The priesthood had offered room and board and wages after five years of service. That hadn’t seemed like a bad way to earn the coin he needed to take up his father’s trade, not that Dam had known anything about breeding horses.
The only interest that had ever captured Dam’s imagination was finding that special person he belonged with. Maybe that was because he never had a mother or a father. It shamed him to remember how he had waddled after boys like an abandoned duckling as a child. His aunt Thessala used to tell him that he needed to grow into his own heart, which was so big and yearning, it made him follow whoever happened to touch it. But Dam had changed since then. He had been boarded and schooled with the priesthood’s novices, which turned out to be more like stockade living than apprenticeship. The novices had all been orphans and throwaways who had no better prospects than serving the priests. That cured Dam of his delicate nature and taught him how to look out for himself.
Dam hoped to sneak in quietly, but gas-lighting shone out in warm haloes from the adjacent houses. He heard voices here and there. When he reached his home, the house lamps burned at half-fuel.
His roommate Hephad, a former novice priest as well, was awake, and their friend Attalos had come over to visit the survivors’ greatest pride, the kittens. When Hephad went below, he had grabbed one of the stray cats who hung around their dormitory. He didn’t know that she was carrying a litter. The birth of the kittens—three orange and brown tortoiseshells—had brought about the most excitement the Honeycomb had seen. Even the highborn boys came down to the middle house to bring the cats scraps of fish from their suppers. They had named the mother Pleione after the ancestral Mother of Grace, and they had named her little blind tabbies Alcyone, Electra, and Maia after three of Atlas’ daughters, the Pleiades, who were emblems of virtue and hope. Happily, the kittens were all growing healthy and strong.
Dam made his
way directly toward his bed in the far corner of the room. Then he noticed that Aerander’s boyfriend, Lys, was sitting on his pallet. Like lightning shot from the sky, Aerander materialized in front of Dam. Everyone’s eyes were upon the two.
“Where did you go?” Aerander said.
“The bathing lake,” Dam said. He walked past Aerander to the clothing shelves. His tunic was soaked through in places. The evacuees hadn’t had time to grab belongings before coming underground. They were left to rewash what they had been wearing or to dress in rationed garments. Dam stepped into a pair of scratchy trousers and wrestled out of his tunic.
Aerander stared at him, somehow appearing to be genuinely baffled. He wore the bone amulet given to him by the heavenly princess Calaeno before they had all evacuated Atlantis. That bit of regalia plus his bossy manner gave him the credentials he needed to lead the survivors. He told Dam, “You know how dangerous it is.”
The backcountry was dangerous, with boiling geysers, tremors that rattled through the land every now and then, and fire scorpions the size of bulls. But Dam knew his way around better than most. He wasn’t about to tell Aerander about the confrontation with Calyiches. That would rile up Aerander and Lys, making him look even more like the helpless cur that Calyiches and his friends thought he was.
“Why are you checking up on me?” Dam said.
“Someone has to do it.”
Hephad squirmed a bit as he sat cross-legged with the kittens on his lap. Aerander had that effect on people. Even the kittens didn’t mew. Dam sat down on Hephad’s vacant pallet, kicked off his sandals, and examined his feet. He had been meaning to trim his nails. Like his hair, they seemed to grow twice as fast underground.
Aerander hovered in front of him. “I asked you to respect the rules. You want everyone to go running off on their own whenever they please? People will be losing their way in the backcountry or breaking a leg and getting trapped in a gulley. You could get killed by something out there.”
Dam retrieved a coring knife from beside the pallet. It did a fine job stripping off overgrown nails. He started working on his big toe.
“You’re selfish.”
Dam said nothing.
“Do you want to get yourself killed?”
Dam carved an arch of white from the nail of his big toe. The rest of his nails hadn’t grown out too bad. A file would do the trick better than his coring knife.
Aerander’s voice rose, quavering. “For crying out loud, Dam, you’re all I have.”
Dam looked up from his trimming. Aerander had lectured him before about family obligation, but something about the way he said it this time pressed the meaning deeper. Aerander had lost his father, his stepmother, his half sisters, and everyone else to the flood. So had all the boys except for a few who had made it underground with a brother or a cousin.
Dam had become a bit cold to that. He had lost his mother and father years before. His father had been orphaned at a young age like him, and he hadn’t known his mother’s side of the family. He had heard that they were poor, which was why Aerander’s grandfather had plucked Dam from the countryside, stowing him away to protect the family land.
He noticed that Lys had turned his gaze to the floor. It hadn’t been the best thing for Aerander to say in front of his boyfriend. Dam felt bad for Lys sometimes. He was monumentally in love with Aerander, and Aerander didn’t give him much in return.
“You can’t keep me like a pet on a leash,” Dam said.
“You’re so dramatic.”
Dam looked up at Aerander sharply. “I’m back now. You can get some sleep.”
Aerander heaved a breath. It seemed that he didn’t have the fire in his belly to push things further that night. Dam noticed that his cousin looked more pale and weathered than usual. Living underground had taken its toll on everyone, though no one more than Aerander. He had taken on the responsibility of the welfare of the evacuees. Not only did he manage complaints from the others—their quarters, the food, petty fights, the health of the aging men in the below-houses—he also dealt with the constant questions of when they would be able to return aboveground.
The amulet he wore was enchanted. Somehow, it forged a bond between Aerander and the goddess who was sworn to be his guardian. Calaeno would tell him when the sea had pulled back and it was safe to come above. Every day, many times a day, Aerander checked in with her. Days had stretched into months with no good news. That had to weigh heavy on his cousin. Dam thought Aerander ought to take worrying about him off his list of troubles.
They exchanged a quiet glance. Aerander turned to go. Lys followed him, looking at Dam on the way out. That made Dam feel terrible. He would help, but what was he supposed to do? Aerander wanted him to keep the boys in line, but that wasn’t what Dam was good at. He wasn’t much good at anything except sneaking around on his own. He’d look like a phony reminding people about rules, not to mention that no one listened to him. The ones that caused trouble, the highborn boys, treated him like dirt.
Distantly, he was aware of Hephad and Attalos moving toward the doorway. Aerander left a thick wake of guilt in the air, and everyone was best off packing it in for the night. Hephad and Attalos were probably making their farewell with hand gestures they had made up to communicate. Before the flood, the High Priest Zazamoukh had cut out Hephad’s tongue so he would never speak properly again.
Dam went over to his own bed. Attalos left, but then Hephad went over to the doorway again. Another visitor? Dam glanced over. Hephad had gathered the kittens into his arms, and he was greeting Hanhau.
Dam suddenly felt very exposed in just his trousers. A pulse of light shone briefly from Hanhau’s face as he noticed Dam. He grinned handsomely. The underground warrior had helped Aerander, Dam, and Lys defeat the New Ones when they had first come below to evacuate the kingdom. Since then, Dam and Hanhau had become friends.
“I saw your lights. I figured you were awake,” Hanhau said.
That voice was nice. Everything about Hanhau was nice, and Dam felt shy. He managed to nod. Hephad retreated with the kittens to the margins of the room.
“You said you’d like to see the Glowing Cataracts,” Hanhau said. “I thought I’d show them to you.”
Now?
“It’s the best time to see them. Before the faults shift. It happens once a night, making a crack in the riverbed. After that, there’s not much more than a trickle until the fault shifts back again.”
Dam wedged his feet back into his sandals and stood. Why not? He wasn’t sleepy. In fact, he was itching to move again after Aerander’s latest scolding. Thankfully, he had just washed and probably didn’t stink. Dam gave Hephad a warning look not to tell Aerander. He followed Hanhau out to the terrace of the middle-houses.
Chapter Three
They went by foot on a winding route down the city stages to its basin and out the tunnel. Dam had to push himself to keep up with Hanhau. The underground dwellers were built for hiking great distances. They could take mountains of stairs without stopping for a breath. Besides, Hanhau stood a head above Dam.
Once they were outside the city tunnel, Hanhau led a path that skirted to one side of the dead lava fields. The underworld was a boundless cavern scooped out from the pith of the earth. It had its own mountain ranges and steppes and seas and climates.
Hanhau knew every fingerbreadth of the region around the city. Before they had reclaimed their city, Hanhau and his people had moved from one backcountry camp to another. They had to hide from the New Ones, who had split off from their kind many ages ago to horde the Oomphalos. By the ancient artifact’s strange power, those dissidents had become grotesque giant serpents. The Old Ones had once been a race of many thousands. Over centuries of being hunted down, they had dwindled to some thirty score.
Hanhau had been through raids. Like the other warriors of his tribe, his upper arm was scarred to show his conquests in battle—five hatch marks for the five giant serpents he had killed. He had seen hundreds of his tribesme
n die. Hanhau had told Dam that his people had relocated more times since he was a little boy than he could remember.
Time and age meant something different to the Old Ones. They didn’t count months or years the way they did in Atlantis because no moons or seasons were underground. Instead, they accounted for generations. Hanhau had said it was easy to follow because they couldn’t afford to have their women carrying babies too frequently. Men and women made babies when they found land that was plentiful with food and water and hidden enough so that they could stay for a while. In that way, their children all tended to be born around the same time.
Hanhau had told Dam that he was from the Dung Beetle generation. That had made Dam smirk until he had seen Hanhau was being serious. He said it was an honorable generation. It had produced a fine leader of their kind, the warrior-queen Ysalane. The children had been named after the dung beetle because their camp had been infested with the pests at the time. Now they took those disgusting little creatures as a portent of good fortune. The Dung Beetle generation had grown up to achieve their greatest victory in ages, the defeat of the New Ones. They were held in great esteem by their people.
Hanhau had explained that the Dung Beetles were his people’s youngest generation. As best as Dam could figure, that meant that Hanhau and his warrior kin were around the same age as Dam, which made him feel rather unaccomplished in comparison. Since the Old Ones had rebuilt their ancient city, they had decided that it would be safe for birthing again. The next generation had already been named the Children of the Resurrection. They would be the first of their kind to grow up in a time of peace since the New Ones had laid claim to Agartha many centuries ago.
Dam and Hanhau seemed to be headed forever into darkness. Dam’s feet were tired and sore, though he didn’t want to complain. The air had turned damp, suggesting a water source somewhere near. Dam hoped it was the Glowing Cataracts.
Banished Sons Of Poseidon Page 2
