Blood of the Heroes

by Steve White

  Jason closed his eyes and bit down on his tongue hard enough to draw blood, so as not to cry out when he heard the crack.

  When he looked again, the Teloi were deep in conversation. “The exploration of this cache can wait,” Cronus declared. “This is more important.” He turned toward the portal.

  “Also,” Hyperion suggested, indicating the pathetic, crumpled body, “we should bring that, and remove the brain implant.”

  “Definitely. See to it.” Cronus passed through the portal.

  Hyperion turned to the remaining Teloi and gave orders. Two of them picked up that which had been Sidney Nagel, Ph.D., and they all filed through the portal. A few moments passed. The portal vanished. The idol stood dormant.

  Jason waited a few cautious moments. Then he rose and walked down the slope. He scooped up the plastic case that Nagel had died to leave there. He tore a strip of cloth off his ruined tunic, and used it to tie the case to his arm, almost tourniquet-tight. He paused for a moment beside the body of Oannes. There were no eyelids to close, and the appropriate rites lay beyond his knowledge. He departed the cavern and started down the tunnel, toward the submersible for which the Teloi hadn’t yet gotten around to searching.

  As he went, a realization penetrated the swirling chaos of his thoughts. The rock floor was steady under his feet. For some time, there had been no tremors and no rumbling.

  Deirdre, he was sure, would have been able to tell him what that portended.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Jason had been aboard the submarine, or its sister ship, on two occasions when it had submerged. But the frantic desperation of both those occasions hadn’t left him with enough time to watch Oannes manipulate the controls. So he still had no idea how to do everything.

  Which, he reflected, was probably just as well since he also didn’t know how to close the bubble canopy.

  He did know how to activate and control the drive. And he knew how to steer the thing … or thought he did. After his first few attempts to back away from the mooring, he began to wonder. But he finally got it started down the subterranean channel, and his steering grew surer and more confident.

  The eastern sky was paling with dawn when he emerged into the open sea. He activated the map display and set course for Crete, putting Kalliste behind him.

  It soon became painfully obvious that the submarine was not designed for surface cruising. Jason estimated that he was struggling along at five or six knots at most. Twelve hours or so to Crete, then—twelve hours continuously at the controls, given his inability to set the automatic pilot. And he was starting out hungry, sleepless and emotionally drained.

  He grimly kept on course, alone save for the dolphins that doubtless found this craft a novelty. As the sun rose higher in the sky, Kalliste gradually fell astern until nothing was visible above the horizon save the upper cone of the central mountain. More and more, as steering came to be second nature and his concentration wavered, he found himself watching the antics of the dolphins, just to stay awake.

  He was watching as one of those sleek shapes came cavorting alongside and then swerved away. He turned with a wan smile to watch it go.

  That turning motion, along with a subliminal sense that something wrong had occurred, caused him to turn around and look behind him.

  The cone of the volcanic mountain wasn’t there anymore. Instead, there was a region of night, spreading more rapidly than anything had a right to.

  Even as he watched that blackness expand to blot out more and more of the blue Mediterranean midmorning sky, a calm corner of his mind felt irrationally disappointed. Is this it? Surely there should be some noise, or something.

  Then, less than a second later: Oh, yes, of course, you ninny! Light moves a lot faster than atmospheric vibrations, including sound. Naturally you can see it before—

  That was when the shock wave hit him, blasted him over, and smashed him down against the control panel with a pain that he didn’t even feel because at the same instant the sound arrived. Except that it wasn’t sound, it was a … words like roar or bellow or thunder were too feeble. It was a thing that transcended sound. Jason didn’t hear it; he felt it.

  At the same instant, the spreading darkness engulfed him, extinguishing the sun and enveloping his entire world … except that it wasn’t altogether darkness. It was riven with blinding sheets of lightning whose accompanying blasts of thunder rose even above the general background noise, until they could be heard not just with the ears but with every suffering cell of the body. The universe was a drum, and he was inside it.

  Jason forced himself to stand, and righted the staggering hull. As he did, he glimpsed what seemed to be shooting stars, far above in the evil blackness. But then they began to curve downward, and he knew they were really red-hot boulders, spewed forth by dying Kalliste. With horrified fascination, he watched one as it began to fall. It grew—gradually at first, then with soul-shaking rapidity—and he knew it was bigger than his craft, bigger than a house … and it was headed for him.

  It struck less than a mile away. The water simply exploded on impact, then crashed back down into a wave that swept toward him. He managed to turn bow-on into it before it crashed over him, and held on grimly as his clumsy craft pitched and heaved. He didn’t even have time to give thanks for his lifelong freedom from motion sickness.

  The wallowing craft righted itself, largely from the inertia of the water sloshing in its bilge, and he had a moment to look around. Other burning stones were striking the sea, sending gouts of steam skyward. But they were smaller, and at greater distances. He felt a strange fatalism. If one of them struck him, he was dead, and that was all there was to it. But none did. What did begin to fall on him was fine and gray-white in the blackness. For an idiotic split second he thought: Snow? But it was ash. And then the rain began. Not a cleansing rain, as rain was meant to be. It reeked, and stuck, and stung.

  Acid rain , he thought with a clinging remanent of rationality. But the rest of him knew that all such thoughts were vain. Deirdre was wrong. This is the end of the world.

  Only , insisted the stubborn remnant, if the world ends now, in 1628 b.c… . then where did I come from?

  The thought steadied him. He made himself concentrate on the glowing control-board display, and steered by that, ignoring the pain and the din and the lightning-shot darkness. He even ignored the water—mud, really, mixed as it was with volcanic ash—that was now up to his ankles, and rising. He couldn’t let himself contemplate the unlikelihood that his vessel would stay afloat long enough to reach Crete. He didn’t even have a bucket to bail with.

  He had no way of measuring time in this continuum of horror. Bur sooner than he had dared hope, the sun became visible as a dull-red disc in a slate sky. The blackness, rumbling with thunder and flickering lightning, loomed astern, to the north where Kalliste lay. No, not any more, he corrected himself. Not Kalliste. Santorini, now. The black rain finally stopped, leaving him grimed with its sooty, tarry residue, but the sludge was now up to his knees.

  Then, by the dim light of the rustred sun, he saw the cliffs of Crete ahead.

  At first, his mind couldn’t accept the impossible input of his eyes. It can’t be—not already. There hasn’t been enough time. But then understanding dawned.

  He had ridden a tsunami.

  Out at sea, there had been no way to tell the sea was rising beneath him, lifting his craft and carrying it along at astonishing velocity. Only when it met a shore did that mountain of water become a monster of destruction … which it wasn’t through doing, for even at this distance through the gloom Jason could see the raging surf that battered the shore.

  He frantically brought the vessel around, fighting to stay off the rocks ahead until he could find a break in the cliffs. There was no point in even trying to find Amnisos; it would be a mass of half-submerged, mud-choked wreckage. He struggled against the insane currents, fighting to keep offshore as long as possible while stealing glances at the scrolling map.r />
  He finally located a cove of sorts—it might have even been the same one they’d departed from, but it was hard to be sure in his hunger and exhaustion, trying to breathe the foul, stinking air. He could barely concentrate on trying to bring the craft in between waves.

  He almost made it. He was nearing the shore when the hissing roar of another wave grew behind him. He started to abandon ship, stepping up onto the rail. He lost his balance, and came down with his left foot turned inward. He felt a sharp pain, and knew with sinking despair that he’d broken a bone on the outer edge of the foot. At that moment when the wave hit, tumbling the submersible over and smashing it down in the shallows. Jason himself was thrown free, and then sucked under the black, filthy water. He held his breath grimly, enduring the agony of suffocation as he clawed against the irresistible strength of the undertow. His lungs hadn’t quite burst when he finally broke the surface and took deep, gulping breaths of the thick, dust-filled air.

  He was in waist-high water. It wasn’t far to shore, but it took him a long time to struggle through the surf. When he took his first step on land, the pain in his foot made him gasp.

  He looked around. Oannes’ submarine lay capsized among the rocks, where it would be pounded to pieces and washed out to sea. A short distance away was the wreckage of a local boat that had been swept ashore by the tsunami. He crawled to it on hands and knees, and found a broken plank that he could use as a clumsy crutch. He also tore some fabric from the clothing of a dead sailor—his own tunic was reduced to tatters—and bound his left foot as tightly as he could stand. Then he spotted a half-empty wineskin that had miraculously survived. He squeezed the contents down his throat without pausing for breath, heedless of the impact of the alcohol hitting his empty stomach. At least it deadened the pain of his foot.

  Finally, he looked down at his arm. The plastic case containing Deirdre’s TRD was still tied to it. He activated his map display. The red dot of that TRD showed him where he was—a little west of Amnisos as he’d thought. He expanded the scale so that it included Mount Ida.

  There was no point in delay. Indeed, if he sat for much longer he would never be able to force himself to get up, for it would be so much easier to lie down and die. He used the plank to lever himself up onto his right foot, and began to hobble off.

  *

  Jason’s brain implant held the archaeologists’ deductions about the Minoan roads and trails. So he was able to find the one that led west. He wanted to avoid the southbound route to Knossos, which must be in a chaos he was in no shape to cope with. He was also in no shape to help Deirdre escape if she was still there. He could only hope she had been able to get away in the aftermath of the cataclysm. If so, he knew where she would be heading.

  So he struggled southwestward, joining the human flotsam of refugees from the coast, trudging through the stormy weather as the atmosphere righted itself after what had been done to it. He was unmolested, unlike those who had anything worth stealing. Once, he even fell in with a group whose leader, a deserted soldier called Koza, was able to get by in Achaean despite his quintessentially Cretan name. He was good-natured in his brutal way, and shared a windfall of food they’d obtained from a wealthy villa. (Jason was in no position to quibble about how they’d gone about obtaining it.) But their hospitality didn’t extend to letting him slow them down. They pressed on, leaving him to forage from abandoned peasants’ hovels for food, and for cloth to wrap around himself against the increasingly cold nights.

  He lost track of time as he limped slowly across the landscape of Hell. After a while, he found he was able to walk on his broken foot, with the aid of a walking stick. It was painful, and he knew it wasn’t doing the fracture any good in the long run. But it was a little faster, and that was the only factor he could let himself consider just now.

  He was on the road for only about ten miles, but it seemed ten times that. Then he turned due south, toward the looming mass of Ida, and the hard part of his journey began.

  The distance he had to cover was only about seven miles as the crow flies—but such distances had ceased to have any meaning for him. The trek was an eternity of trails suitable for donkeys but not for a half-lamed man, over what his neurally displayed map called the Kouloukounas Range (with a subscript indicating that it had been called the Tallaion in Classical times—God knew what it was called currently) and into the Mylopotamos Valley. He avoided a town called Anogeia (subscript: Axos) because it was choked with refugees from the coast. Then it was upward again, every step a pain-filled struggle.

  By now he was in regions not directly affected by the tsunami. And the clouds were thinning out, gradually dispersed by the winds that would carry the volcanic ash around and around the planet, west to east, until everyone in the north temperate zone had breathed atoms of Kalliste … and of the Teloi portal device. And of Oannes.

  Of course, the “temperate zones” aren’t going to be so temperate for a couple of years, are they? he thought to himself, because it was important to keep thinking of things other than the fatigue and hunger and pain that might otherwise break down the barrier behind which lurked despair. It’s going to be like the “nuclear winter” people were worried about back in the late twentieth century, when atomic energy had arrived a few decades before the Age of Totalitarianism ended, and things looked scary for a while. Deirdre said there are going to be two bad growth years—the puny tree-growth rings will show that, four thousand years from now.

  The thought of Deirdre quickened his pace a little. He continued southward, along trails through slopes whose maple, oak, pine and cypress were coated with an ominous dusting of ash, until he had reached the upland plain of Nidha. The local shepherds fled at his approach—they were probably wary of strangers at the best of times, and times had ceased to be the best when the heavens had filled with soot and strangers from the coast had begun to flee into the highlands to escape the fury of Poseidon.

  Here, his brain implant told him, he was five thousand feet above sea level. The snow-capped peak of Mount Ida, in front of him, towered another three thousand feet.

  He didn’t need to go that high, though. Instead, he worked his way around the mountain toward the southeast until, just above the plain, was his destination: a cave mouth that glowered forth from under a beetling shelf of rock.

  The later Greeks, his orientation had told him, believed that cave to have been the nursery of Zeus—and also his birthplace, according to some traditions, although there were other claimants to that honor among Crete’s caves. He didn’t know the current inhabitants’ position on the question. But Zeus had indicated that they regarded it as sacred to him in some way, and that Deirdre could hope for some sort of sanctuary there. Jason’s experience in history’s unsettled epochs made him skeptical of the value of such assurances in such times—and it was hard to imagine a time more unsettled than this one had suddenly become.

  But he could only press on, hoping against hope. The sun was low in the ashen-streaked sky when he topped the lip of the cave and peered within. Someone had been in residence, for the embers of a dead fire glowed in the dark recesses… .

  A split-second danger instinct made him twist aside and duck. The heavy tree limb, swung from behind, swooshed over his head. He automatically reached up to grab the cudgel with one hand and one of the arms holding it with the other, simultaneously pulling forward, using the attacker’s own momentum to bring him around, off balance. But he forgot about the dull ache to which he’d become accustomed, and let his entire weight fall on his left foot. Sickening pain tore through him, and he lost his grip and his balance. Collapsing, he pulled the attacker down atop his back. An arm went around his neck. He managed to break the hold, and a moment’s clumsy wrestling ensued. It ended abruptly when one of his opponent’s knees, by accident rather than design, came down on his left foot. The agony took his breath away, and he found himself on his back, looking up into a face that could barely be seen amid a tangle of long dark-auburn hair.

>   “Hey,” he gasped, “do you always pick on cripples?”

  Deirdre’s green eyes widened, and she fell on top of him with a laugh.

  “Jason!” she finally gasped. She raised herself back up with her arms and looked down at him. “It’s really you! But you’re hurt. And where’s Sidney? And Oannes?” Then, abruptly, she grew silent. Jason’s face gave her all the answer she needed. She got to her feet and helped him up to a sitting position.

  “Tell me about it,” she said quietly, “while I get the fire going again.”

  Jason related everything that had happened, pausing only to take bites of the cheese she brought him, and sips from a wineskin. By the time he was done, the sun had set in a blaze of red and orange. With all the particles in the atmosphere, this part of the world should have some spectacular sunsets for a while. Jason wondered if the people would appreciate the sight, busy as they were trying to find enough to eat.

  “And so,” he concluded, “you can thank Sidney for the fact that we finally have this back.” He untied the little plastic case from his upper arm and handed it to her with great solemnity, like an offering. She took it from him the same way.

  He wasn’t sure what he had expected in the way of a reaction. She held the case for a moment, then opened it and stared down at the nondescript little sphere with an expression that was … what? Serious, certainly. But there was something beyond that. Sorrowful, perhaps?

  “So Sidney died for this,” she finally said. She did not meet his eyes.

  “Not just for this,” he reminded her. “He also made certain that Cronus and the rest of the first-generation Teloi—except for whoever was aloft at the time, as per their standard operating procedure—were in the pocket universe at the time the portal device was destroyed. Which means the genies are inside the lamp … only the lamp isn’t there to get rubbed anymore. They’re in for life.” He grinned wolfishly. “I wonder how long those lives will be, trapped there with each other?”