The Great Thirst Boxed Set

by Mary C. Findley

  Talia gestured toward a column rising out of the water below them and swam toward it. At the moment they were snorkeling but Keith saw that, to get a better look at the column Talia guided him toward, they would have to dive down. He switched over from snorkel to his air hoses and followed. He had been skeptical when Talia had told him she was born on the Caspian Sea but it sure seemed like she was born to swim. He loved watching her move in the water.

  Concentrate, man! Talia circled the column and Keith reached out a hand to touch the jagged top. What? He motioned to her and switched on his headlamp. Talia flinched in the sudden bright light but swam up beside him. Keith chipped at a coral-crusted spot and held his hand behind the broken edge. Talia gripped his arm as both of them saw under the marble column and encrusting sea creature skeletons a latticework material that was translucent.

  Talia pointed downward and they swam deeper, to the bottom of the column. They rooted around the base with their headlamps and found cracks, beneath which they could see more translucent material. Keith tried to chip off a sample but realized he couldn’t even scratch the material. Talia produced a diamond-tipped cutting tool and, with great difficulty, they managed to remove a small piece.

  “What could it be, Amu?” Talia asked when they were back in the boat describing their find and showing off the sliver of red crystal.

  “I cannot imagine what the substance is, or what this even means,” Naddy replied. “A pillar that appears to be ordinary stone, but conceals an understructure, made of some sort of crystal harder than any I have heard of?”

  “I think maybe it’s corundum,” Keith ventured. “The name corundum comes from Tamil, a language they speak in India and Sri Lanka. But sometimes they call it adamant spar, like from the ancient material the Greeks called adamantine. When it’s red, like this stuff is, it’s called ruby. Remember how the Bible talks over and over about rubies being precious, and hardly even mentions diamonds? Some people think corundum is what they mean. It is valued for being almost unbreakable.”

  “Yes! Yes! Milton in the Paradise Lost speaks of Lucifer being bound in adamantine chains. He said Adam’s sin bound us to Satan by that unbreakable link as well. He said the gates of hell were made from adamant. Keith, this is impossible, though, that such a thing could be done. A city carved of a substance almost as hard as a diamond?”

  “Well, nobody’s saying the whole city’s made of corundum,” Keith said. “Seems like that latticework inside the column was, and we could see cracks in the base that showed something like a hollow space under there. I could be wrong, Naddy, but that latticework might not have been carved. Being crystals and all, it looked like it was intentionally grown in that shape. I doubt it’s the gates of hell, but it seems like it’s worth a look.”

  “It must be tomorrow, then,” sighed Naddy, looking up at the setting sun.

  That night Keith did some research on Olous using the shielded phone he had gotten from Naddy for the trip. He was surprised at how little information there was about the city. He did, however, find legendary connections to the city of Knossos, where Minos was supposed to have lived. Even the word labyrinth was believed by some people to be derived from an old Minoan word for a double-headed ax. Minoans were a culture older than the Greeks.

  “So maybe there was no big old maze? Just an ax? Wow.” Keith found that the ax was supposed to be associated with a Minoan goddess called Britomarte. It was her symbol of protection. People carved or stamped it on things to prevent harm.

  He got dizzy trying to figure out what this goddess was all about. Some sites said she was a beautiful mermaid. Some said she was a huntress, living in the mountains and woods like Artemis. He found some coins that showed her looking like a gorgon – scary, with snaky hair, holding the two-headed ax. She was sometimes called “the mistress” and people thought she might be older and more powerful than Zeus, like a mother-goddess. There were sites that said Knossos had serpent-people that could be related to the stories about this Britomarte.

  “Naddy was right about these myths being mixed-up stories about people having more power than God,” Keith sighed. “This Britomarte might have been called a ‘sweet virgin’ but she seems more like a demon. And they even made offerings to her of honey. I can’t figure out whether any of this is important at all. Naddy said sometimes the truth is hidden in the nest of lies. This thing about the ax keeps bugging me for some reason. I almost wish there was a maze and a minotaur. Sounds safer than a snaky-haired goddess with an ax, anyway.” Keith shut down the phone and crawled into bed.

  Talia and Keith dove for the base of the column as soon as daylight allowed them to take the boat out the next day. It took a long time to chip their way into the column, but they were able to work around the red crystal lattice. Keith couldn’t help noting that the lattice was made in a hexagonal shape, like the honeycomb chambers in a beehive. They shined their flashlights into the empty space below the column. Half-buried in sand lay a double ax-head. It appeared to be the same red crystalline material as the latticework inside the column. Keith started to reach for it but Talia stopped him. She started shoving sand into the hole, much to his astonishment. She pointed off into the murk of deeper ocean.

  Two divers swam fast and hard toward them. Naddy had hired a couple of men to generally help as needed, and at first Keith thought those two had suited up and joined them for some reason. One of them drew a knife and swiped at Keith.

  Talia streaked past him in a blur of motion and Keith saw a rod-like object appear in her hand. A shockwave pushed him aside as she shoved it against the man’s side. The man cartwheeled away in a storm of bubbles. Just before the attacker passed out of reach Talia’s other hand snaked toward him, a knife gleaming in her hand. Keith watched, stunned, as she sliced the man’s airline in two.

  The second man caught her off guard and ripped her mouthpiece away, getting her in a headlock. Keith dove into the struggle as Talia lost her knife. He caught the knife and stabbed at the man’s back but the blade just bounced off the air tanks. Talia’s eyes widened as her mask began to fill up with water. Keith got a better grip on the knife but the man twisted away and again the blade bounced harmlessly off him.

  Keith felt a bump on the side of the knife hilt. It slid under his thumb and he jabbed once more at the man. Incredibly, an underwater explosion rocked all three of the struggling divers and a gaping hole appeared in the man’s air tank. He broke off the attack and swam away rapidly, another storm of bubbles following his retreat. Both men disappeared back into the murk but headed toward the surface.

  Keith grabbed Talia and pulled her straight up, using his mouthpiece to buddy-breathe with her. A few moments later they broke the surface.

  “What happened? Talia, are you all right?” Sophie clasped her niece in her arms as the men hoisted both of them into the boat.

  “I’m fine. I’m fine!” Talia insisted.

  Keith gasped out the story of the attack. They all spotted a boat a mile out to sea taking in two divers.

  “We have to go back down,” Keith cried. “We found something just before those guys attacked. Maybe I’m crazy, but I think it was Britomarte’s ax! We have to go back and get it.”

  “No, Keith,” Talia said. “When those men attacked, they saw that our collection baskets were empty. They’ll assume we didn’t find anything. That’s why I pushed sand into the hole where the ax head was. They’re still out there watching. If we go back down, they’ll realize they have to come back too.”

  “Talia is right, of course,” Sophie sighed. “Besides, we have no authority to remove artifacts, and if we did, we would have to declare it and make the find public. I cannot say whether it is important to our quest, but the best thing to do is report it to the Guardians and let them deal with it, as they did the scroll.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Keith asked Talia.

  “I’m fine. I have training to be able to hold my breath underwater a lot longer than that. It still scares me, th
e thought of drowning, but I really am all right.”

  “You had no air, and you were still fighting that guy. And what happened with that knife?”

  “It’s a wasp knife. It’s got a CO2 cartridge in it,” Talia explained. “Divers use those knives to kill sharks. I’m so glad you figured it out.”

  “You think they were trying to kill us?”

  “They may just have wanted to force us to the surface so they could double-check to see what we were looking for,” Talia said nervously.

  “Those Guardians better hurry up and figure all this stuff out,” Keith grumbled. “Where to next?”

  “Rhodes,” Naddy replied. His fingers twitched, and Keith knew he was as eager as any of them to get his hands on that ax head. But seriously, Keith asked himself, what can that have to do with quenching the Great Thirst? Getting it will probably just waste time we don’t have. Whoever was chasing us has sure enough caught up.

  Chapter Thirty – A Colossal Relief

  “So here we are in the middle of a story about idols again,” Keith sighed as they checked into the hotel upon their arrival on Rhodes. “Rhodes was dedicated to the worship of Helios, the sun god. They had a giant statue here that was one of the wonders of the ancient world. What are we supposed to be looking for here?”

  “Idols were sometimes built to hide older worship of the true God,” Naddy cautioned. “Long ago in Bahrain the ancient Dilmun civilization sprang up. It went back to the time of Sumerians, historians and anthropologists say. They regarded it as a holy land and added it to the Gilgamesh epic. It was a thriving trade center, a major supplier of copper.

  “What if the truth about Dilmun was that it began as a city where God was worshiped and it only later fell into idolatry? Where there is copper there can also be orichalcum, and perhaps the orichalcum of the map we found was obtained, under the guidance of a remnant of ancient faithful.”

  “Ancient faithful? What do you mean by that?” Keith asked.

  “We read the secularist history of the world, and they speak of paleolithic, neolithic, bronze age, so glibly, so many millennia ago for each, but they admit they know little or nothing about these people.

  “The heroes like Gilgamesh, may have been one and the same as Nimrod, or the reputation became a tool to gain godlike control for others around the world. All this happened swiftly, men spreading out after Babel. Seas were lower, mountains had not yet risen to their full height. Pathways existed to traverse the world.

  “What if some, like these people of Dilmun, believed in the true God, and ran from the persecutors who founded Babylon, and Erech, and these cities where the false gods were born? What if they prospered and flourished for a little while, blessed by God, but in the end fell, and the believers’ remains were crushed under the heels of the conquerors, the unbelievers?”

  “The myths say evil men like Minos enslaved virtuous and skilled men. The true counterparts of Daedalus, inventors and craftsmen, were forced to serve tyrants. Do you see how this could be a faint, fractured tale of a faithful man compelled to serve evil, to build wonders, but finally to seek escape? The fall of Icarus could be the crushing of a man’s faith, or symbolize the martyrdom of his child in honor of that faith.

  “They killed or harried to death these faithful if they could not force them to serve. They also stole the fruit God gave them – livestock, produce, offspring – anything they could lay hands on. Perhaps even ancient technology they could scarcely understand and eventually destroyed or lost.

  “But these blessed ones, these ancient faithful, had time to learn ways to preserve and to spread the Word that they had. The Scriptures tell us we must always be teaching, always sharing, whatever else we are doing. We must do it sitting, standing, walking, working, resting, for the sake of our children. So they learned ways to obey this command.

  “This forgotten knowledge waited for the creators of the Testaments and their Guardians to find it, and to ensure that the complete Word would somehow be preserved for us to find. Sometimes, perhaps, they had even to be hidden in plain sight, as we have said so many times.

  “Carvings we cannot now read may be a code for parts of the puzzle to find the Testaments. Mosaics or frescoes could be pieces of the puzzle, or perhaps the lewd and debauched designs hide the sacred ones. The Testaments could be scattered all over the earth, each one written in a different language. We have to seek guidance and pray God blesses us with a way to quench the Great Thirst when it comes.”

  They separated to nap in the afternoon. Talia and Keith came down to dinner in the hotel restaurant, but, after more than an hour, Naddy and Sophie had not arrived. Talia called her uncle’s phone but got voicemail. They checked their rooms and found them empty.

  “Yes, Ms. Ramin, the doctors did go out some time ago,” the desk clerk reported. “Your uncle said something about ‘the feet of the Colossus’, as I recall, but that is such a folk legend, I wondered how serious archaeologists could think it worth investigating.”

  “The feet of the Colossus?” Keith asked. He had to chase Talia out of the hotel. “What’s that?”

  “People disagree about how the Colossus of Rhodes was built,” Talia explained as she hailed a cab. “People used to think the feet were spread out over the water, one foot each on two land spits. But most people think it couldn’t have been made strong enough to stand like that. They think its legs were together.”

  “What’s that got to do with Naddy and Sophie and where they might be?”

  “For one thing, they promised me they would not leave the hotel without telling me, or without me,” Talia said. “I am furious that Uncle Naddy would break his promise.”

  “Well, he probably got distracted, wanted to check something out, and figured your aunt could beat off the bad guys if there was trouble.”

  Talia had to smile at that, but sobered again. “The other thing about the feet of the Colossus is that there are some big stones in the harbor called the Feet of the Colossus. It’s another legend, but they are there, and I can only hope that’s where Amu and Zanamu went, to the harbor.”

  Talia flung herself out of the cab as they approached the harbor where they had come in from Crete. Keith followed her through a dense mob of people that seemed to him to be about to fall into the ocean. Talia pushed and shouted in Greek and made the sea of people part.

  “A rescue boat!” she gasped. “Amu! Zanamu!”

  “Hey, hold on!” Keith grabbed her around the waist as she seemed about to dive straight in. “You can’t swim out there. Wait. I can see two people wrapped up in blankets in the boat. One big one, one little one. Wait, and we’ll see what happened.”

  They met the boat and Keith helped Naddy up on the dock, while Talia got Sophie in her arms. They both shuddered with cold and a harbor manager let them all into his office to get a report of the incident.

  “Someone sent a message to the room,” Sophie explained. “We thought it was from you, Talia. It said to meet you here at the Feet of the Colossus. We thought it was strange, but we came.”

  “A message? You mean a text?” Keith asked.

  “No. A paper message. People still do write those,” Naddy blustered.

  “I don’t,” Talia exclaimed. “You should know that, Amu. I would text you.”

  “We reached the edge of the dock, and men suddenly appeared and grabbed your aunt,” Naddy said, his bluster vanishing. He clumsily patted whatever part of his wife his half-frozen hand could reach. She patted back in the same manner. “The crowd was almost as bad as it is now, but I was not going to let them disappear with her. I fought them, but I lost my balance as I pulled her away and we both fell in.”

  “What men? Did you see what they looked like?” Talia asked.

  “Just black clothes, hooded sweatshirts – we could not see faces.” Sophie shuddered.

  “Did they say anything?” the harbor manager asked.

  “Nothing.” Naddy and Sophie replied in unison.

  After hot baths
and room service soup and tea, Naddy and Sophie seemed nearly back to their old selves. They had no more to add to their story about the near-kidnapping. Keith and Talia parted from them at midnight.

  Talia cried out as she ulocked the door to her room and Keith ran back to her. She stood in the open doorway staring at the floor, where a white sheet had been slid under her door. One sentence was scrawled across it, in English.

  “Next time you might not get them back.”

  They stayed close together in Rhodes after that and poked around, as it seemed to Keith, far too long considering they found nothing at all in the way of artifacts or knowledge. He found it harder and harder to even appreciate the beauty of these places after what had happened in the waters of Olous and at the feet of the colossus. It seemed like any enjoyment mocked the danger following them, and came at the expense of people who were struggling and could be killed doing real work to protect and spread the Word of God.

  “Was it a mistake to come here to Rhodes?” Keith asked Talia as they pulled their baggage into the hotel elevator. “Where do we go next? How long will it be before some black van runs us down, or people try kidnapping one of us again, or those guardian people give up on us, since we don’t seem to be doing anything more to help them? Will they all get killed off before they even figure out what to do with what they have?”

  “Oh, Keith, you can’t get discouraged,” Talia begged. “Not every expedition can succeed. A search always has setbacks and failures. When we get to Cappadocia you will see that persecuted people can find a way to be safe. We’ll visit Derinkuyu, an underground city where as many as 20,000 believers hid from persecutors. You won’t believe it, even when you see it.”

  “20,000 people? Living underground? Are you kidding?”

  “People, cattle, food stores –everything. Wait and see.” Talia stretched up and kissed his cheek.