Laura VanArendonk Baugh
Anastasios looked down upon the stone-paved circle and the white-haired soothsayer in mute horror. Had he dared to speak, he could not have done so.
“Your very words are treason against the Ivory Throne,” pronounced King Kassander. His tall crown shone in the firelight and the reflected gleam of the gilded ceiling. “You will die on the horns of the festival, to wipe clean the stain of your lies.”
“You know it is truth!” insisted the old man, a bit of spittle flecking his beard in his urgency. “You know it, my king!”
“Take him to the arena,” ordered the king.
“She speaks in the flames!” shouted the soothsayer. Guards took him by either arm and drew him back. “She speaks in the flames!”
Anastasios stole a glance at his father, but the king’s face was stony, unmoving, marked neither by sorrow for the soothsayer’s sudden turn to madness nor discomfort at the dire predictions. It was as if all emotion had been wiped away, leaving one of the royal statues which marked the main streets.
“You must witness this,” murmured his mother beside him, pitched for his ears alone.
Anastasios swallowed. He did not like blood, and the bull dances disturbed him with their frightful potential. With his father’s sentence, blood was no longer a probability, but a certainty. But his mother would not allow him to show weakness. She drove him more fiercely than his father. A queen without children, she required more defense of her position and her adopted son’s, and she brooked no possibility of weakness in the heir found to fill the place she could not.
She speaks in the flames. Anastasios could not guess what the soothsayer had meant, but the words had carried all the man’s conviction.
The throne room’s walls were painted with endless figures carrying tribute to the Ivory Throne. Ambassadors and emissaries in bright and splendid costumes, representing lands from Argos to the Adriatic tribes to the south continental peoples, offered gold ingots, chalices and coffers, clever machinery of bronze to calculate the wheeling of the heavens, jade, amber from the far north, slaves, and precious stones of all colors. Everywhere he looked Anastasios could not help but see the magnificence and prestige of his homeland.
The painted figures marched to a painted Ivory Throne, where the artist had set a king, stern and unsmiling. It might equally have been Kassander or any of the previous kings. They looked very alike once painted, Anastasios thought, with tightly curled beards and flat lifeless eyes and the elongated skulls which marked them as nobility.
Anastasios had not been royal at his birth, and so his skull had not been bound as a noble child’s should have been. By the time he was searched out, a slave’s brat got years ago by a king whose queen would give him no heir, it was too late to mold him to fit the crown.
The queen had ordered a special tall cap fashioned for Anastasios, stiff and curved and glittering with jewels.
Such trappings did not impress the soothsayer. “You have spurned the signs of the gods, my king,” he had declared only the day before. “My warning is not the first, but the last.” He pointed at Anastasios. “There is a sign, right before you and in this very court. Great king, you had no natural heir. When can any man recall such a thing in the time of the Ivory Throne? And a boy was sought among the slaves of this house and raised to a higher place than his birth. This defiance of a sign is sure to only further anger the gods.”
“Anastasios is my son,” King Kassander answered, steel glinting in the vowels. “I have sired him and I have claimed him.”
“And you will put a born slave on the Ivory Throne,” said the prophet. “And the consequences will be not on your head, but on every subject in your once-great kingdom.”
“Once-great?” repeated Kassander, and the courtiers shifted their weight and their eyes.
“Do you believe, king, that a bastard slave could follow in the footsteps of your ancestors?”
“We are not so weak that a single stumble would bring us to our knees,” Kassander said. “And this speculation does not credit your warning. Have you nothing more beyond your own disapproval?”
“There are many portents for those who have eyes to see.” The prophet swept an arm to indicate the whole of the island and its people. “In the last two days alone we have been given many signs of ill to come. Birds are flying away in great flocks. Cats hiss and scratch at their mistresses, dogs whine by day and howl by night. Three of the royal elephants waded into the sea, as if to swim to Argos or Egypt. All of these are plain to see, mighty king.”
“I assure you, I have eyes to see.” King Kassander had raised a dismissive hand. “But I have no ears for this sort of malicious speech against my son and heir.”
Yesterday, he had sent the soothsayer out of the court for speaking ill of Anastasios’ ability, but today he had ordered the man’s death for prophesying the kingdom was in imminent danger. Prophesying was his task and duty; why execute him instead of asking his aid?
And if the old prophet spoke the truth? Was Anastasios endangering them all by defying the gods, playing at prince?
The queen looked at him, her eyes probing for weakness. “We must go down to the arena now. Are you ready?”
Anastasios nodded once. “I am ready.” Or at least, he could not be made more ready by delay.
The festival could not open before sunset, so even the streaked gold light was fading from the royal stands when the royal family entered in procession to take their places. The arena itself was lit with five bonfires spaced about the circle and torches at regular intervals along the wall. This curving wall of linked stone was the height and a half of a man, enough to nearly always protect the first row of spectators.
The crowd had come early to fight for choice seats and drink away the time until the rites opened. They were loud and anxious for the night’s beginning, and the surprise of an execution before the dancing only pleased them more. There was the slightest of hesitations when the soothsayer was announced as the sentenced man, but the general enthusiasm and wine carried them through the moment and they cheered as he was pushed into the arena, his hands bound with golden cord.
The cord did not matter; had he the full use of his hands, he could have done little to save himself. The wall was too high to jump, especially for a white-haired prophet. And even the trained bull dancers who had dedicated their lives to the skill could fall before the sacred bulls. But the binding made it clear, as the bull was released into the circle and snorted at the bonfires, that he was a sacrifice.
The bull was white-skinned with a scattering of red-brown hairs blurring over its shoulders and legs. It shook its head at the first fire and then cantered halfway about the circle to look white-eyed at the shouting crowd.
The soothsayer turned toward the royal pavilion. “I do not die alone this night,” he called, his tone somewhere between warning and defiance. “But I die by the ancient glory of the bull, while you perish in water and smoke.”
His words seemed to catch the attention of the bull, which turned toward the soothsayer and shook its gilded horns in threat. When the man did not move away, the bull lowered its head and rushed at him.
The crowd screamed in horrified delight as the golden hooks caught the soothsayer’s torso and lifted him into the air. He cried out, but the sound was lost in the universal shout. The body fell to the sand, and the bull knelt on it and twisted its horns into the still-moving dead man.
Anastasios kept his chin steady but lowered his eyes. On the golden chair beside him, he had seen his father’s fingers tighten on the armrest—not at the goring, but at the soothsayer’s pronouncement.
If the soothsayer lied, then executing him was just and necessary, but if he spoke the truth, killing him would not avert whatever fortune he had seen. If Kassander feared a true prophesy, then why was the man sacrificed instead of asked how to placate the gods and put aside disaster?
She speaks in the flames.
The bull, redder now over face and forelegs, left the corpse and began trotting about the circle again. A gate was opened and it cantered for the escape from the fire and shouting. With the door safely closed, slaves came out to retrieve the crushed body.
The arena was one circle within the greater circle of the festival ground. The temple was a circle of circles, and its innermost parts were concentric rings. In the innermost ring was an entrance, the Gate of Flames, where the priests and prophets might find portents.
Another gate opened, and the crowd began to cheer as the dancers entered. There were eight of them, four male and four female, dressed in spare, simple garments which left arms and legs bare and with unrestricted movement. Two carried poles a little taller than themselves, decorated at each end with colorful streamers the length of a man’s arm. The dancers formed a line at the center of the ring and prostrated themselves fully flat, faces in the sand, to the king.
Another bull was let into the ring, this one a uniform deep brown, and the crowd whooped. The bull snorted and bolted along the wall. The dancers sprang up from the ground and the bull sprang away, startled by their sudden appearance. Then it charged.
The first man dove to the side, rolling safely away across the sand. The second planted his beribboned pole and vaulted to the other side, his feet skimming just above the gold-painted horns. The next dancer was a girl, her hair drawn high and descending in two braids. She crouched as the bull approached and caught a gilded horn beneath her armpit, bracing one hand against the horn and the other against her opposite forearm. She let the bull’s upward thrust launch her into the air, stretching her hands to balance briefly on its back before flipping to land in its hoof prints. The crowd whooped its approval.
Anastasios’ palms were sweating. At least once dancer died each year, an accepted sacrifice to the honored ritual.
The priests were all in attendance at the arena, watching the bull dancers. Afterward, they would drink like everyone else and would retire. The temple would be guarded, of course, but there would be no one of sufficient rank to challenge a prince.
One of the dancers slipped and fell, and the bull wheeled and drove into her. She screamed horribly as it pushed her across the sand and into the ground, bearing down. The two with poles prodded at the bull and dangled the streamers before it so that it drove forward, pushing its horns at the ribbons as a dancer whirled in place to tease it away, and three others seized the broken woman and half-carried, half-dragged her toward a gate.
Tonight, Anastasios would find the Gate of Flames and see if she—whoever she might be—was yet there and yet speaking.
The temple lay between the palace and the arena—by day, an easy walk for a slave, but a more difficult reach for a prince who would be observed and marked with every step. It was long past dark by the time the bulls had ceased and the arena had emptied, but Anastasios waited another hour after the festival sounds had slowed. There would be much drinking in the city below the palace, but the temple itself would be deserted by even the most dedicated of worshipers, and this night he would be unremarked.
He put on his own sandals, something he had done rarely since becoming a prince. He tied the laces, checked the tall cap which would grant him admission to the temple if challenged, and left his rooms.
The temple and palace sat on a hill overlooking the city on one side and the sea on the other. A very few orange lights still gleamed, but the festival’s carousal was winding to a close, and the night’s drinking had mostly ended. The temple itself was dark and quiet. He crossed the grounds by the light of the half-moon, sitting partway up the curve of the sky. Anastasios was halted by two guards with bronze and copper armor who extended spears to block his path. “The temple is closed at this hour,” one said.
Anastasios pushed his hood back enough to reveal his face and artificially tall cap. “It is not closed to me.”
The guards snapped upright, spears drawn to parade position. “My apologies, prince. I did not recognize you in the dark.”
Anastasios nodded and went past them.
The temple was dark but for the flame ever-burning upon the altar, casting long, flickering shadows upon the tiled floor. Stone columns stretched upward into the shadowy ceiling, decorated with brightly colored motifs to illustrate the kingdom’s wealth and power as well as the bulls present on nearly every temple surface. Anastasios moved toward the altar, which still bore the charred remains of the festival day’s bovine sacrifice as well as a little flatbread half-baked on the edge, and pushed on into the corridors beyond. He would have to guess his path from here.
He kept one hand on the wall and eased forward into the dark. He stayed near to the wall, but after a dozen steps he shuffled into a chest and gasped with surprise and pain. He knelt and felt for the lid, grasping inside for the lamps he hoped he would find. He was not disappointed, and after a few moments of fumbling he stuck a spark and lit the little lamp.
He heard a small sound behind him, and he turned with the sudden knowledge that he was not alone in the room. A young woman looked back at him, dressed in the short, efficient garb of a bull dancer, with her hair in two descending braids and a darkened bandage about her upper left arm. She looked at him, wide-eyed, and it occurred to him that perhaps she was not supposed to be here either.
“I was offering a sacrifice,” she said, confirming his suspicion. “I did not expect anyone else so late.”
“It is late for a sacrifice,” he agreed. He had learned, watching his father in court, that agreement without explanation could accomplish much. “And there has been much sacrifice already today.”
“This was a personal matter,” she said. “Euanthe was badly injured in the bull dancing tonight. She will never dance again, may never stand straight again, but one might still ask that she may live.”
“The bread,” he recalled.
She nodded.
“I too am here on a personal matter,” he said.
She started to answer, hesitated, and then looked at him more closely. Her eyes widened, and she flung herself to the floor. “My lord prince!”
She had not easily recognized him, and why should she? His face was on no coins, no statues, no paintings. Self-consciously he felt again for the weight of his elongated cap. “Rise,” he said. “I seek the Gate of Flames.”
She sat upright and looked at him in surprise. “The Gate, prince? Why?”
He had not anticipated her questioning him. “Need I explain? I wish to see if there is indeed a portent there.” Belatedly he realized he had explained, after all. Quickly he added, “Do you know the way? If so, you might be of use.”
“I am a bull dancer,” she said, “and the path to the Gate of Flames lies outside the dancers’ quarters.”
He thought back to when he had been a slave’s child instead of a king’s. “That does not mean you do not know it.”
She smiled, recognizing the subtle change in his voice. “That is true.”
“Then, if you will keep my secret of coming in the night, I will keep yours of taking me to the Gate of Flames.”
Her smile broadened. “Of course, prince.”
He gestured her to her feet. “What is your name?”
“I am Casta.” She turned. “This way, prince.”
The gate was not a door, but a well. Stone steps spiraled down about the outer wall and disappeared into the dark.
Casta looked dubiously down. “I don’t like it,” she said frankly. “It feels like the earth is breathing.”
It was an odd phrase, but Anastasios agreed. The air here was warm and darkly scented, dangerous in some way he could not define.
She speaks in the flames.
“The priests and prophets come here,” he said, “so it must be safe enough. Let us go down.”
The steps were narrow, both in depth and width, and he kept one hand on the wall as he descended. Casta followed behind him, leaving enough room that a slip would not send them both tumbling to the unseen bottom. The odor increased, sulfurous and foul like a midden. Anastasios’ eyes began to sting.
The stairs ended in a passage which was no longer dressed stone, but more carved half by man, half by nature. It was tall enough for Anastasios to stand nearly erect, but too narrow for Casta to walk beside him. The passage curved away into the dark, untouched by the feeble reach of the lamp.
“This is the way,” Casta said, her voice low in the dark. “A labyrinth to enlightenment.”
He lifted the lamp, showing the rough stone wall’s curve darkly golden in the lamplight. Concentric circles, again. “Do you know the way?”
“I know there is a way. That is not quite the same.” But she took the lamp, pressing past him in the narrow corridor, and started down the passage.
There were no branching paths, for which Anastasios was grateful. This was a labyrinth, then, and not a maze. Troughs ran along the floor, deep and narrow grooves parallel to the curving walls, and Anastasios could not guess their purpose.
The path doubled back on itself, working back and forth but ever inward. He kept close to Casta, and she stayed near him, as if they somehow needed each other’s warmth in this warm dark.
The curves became tighter and tighter. And then the passage opened into a wider space and Casta stopped so abruptly that Anastasios bumped into her from behind and jostled the lamp. She did not look back at him or speak.
Beyond her, something was in the dark. He could feel it, sense it, a disturbance in the air and a presence against his skin. Casta lifted the lamp, and eyes shone green back at them.
They leapt backward, Casta stumbling against Anastasios, and he caught and steadied her.
Anastasios steeled himself. “Who’s there?” he called, and his voice wavered only a little. “Your prince asks.”
There was a rustling sound, as of leather or scales brushing stone, and a soft laugh. “Not my prince,” came a low voice, resting just a bit longer than usual on the final consonant.
Anastasios swallowed and took the lamp from Casta. Be confident and assertive, his mother had admonished him, and demand their respect. They cannot refuse you. He put a hand on Casta’s shoulder and stepped past her, raising the lamp high. “Who are you, then, if not my subject?”
Light spread forward, and a lion’s face stared steadily back at him from the shadow.
Anastasios flinched backward, but Casta’s hand caught him between the shoulder blades. “Stand still,” she whispered, her mouth close to his ear. “Quick movements enrage or entice. Be still, and offer no threat.”
She would know how to face dangerous animals. He froze, his knees nearly trembling with their rigidity, and waited.
The lion’s lips curled in a cat’s smile. “Your female is clever,” it said, its mouth forming about the words as no lion’s mouth could do. “But you live by my forbearance, not by her wisdom. I have something to say to you, prince.”
Anastasios swallowed. “How can a lion speak to me?”
“A lion.” The cat sounded disdainful. The big head turned, showing a thin mane which did not conceal the ears. The mouth opened, and the beast spat forth a stream of fire.
Casta and Anastasios screamed together. Fire lit the passage, making them shield their eyes, but Casta against Anastasios’ back kept him in place despite his fear.
When they looked again, the floor trough was full of fire, burning invisible fuel in a long line about the outer edge of the round chamber. In the center stood a creature, a beast beyond comprehension. It was a lion, or at least the front part of it was. A goat’s head rose from the withers and watched them over the lion’s thin mane. A long tail moved restlessly behind the lion body, but it was not a tail, it was a serpent with its own head for the tail’s end, eying them.
“Trikephalos,” breathed Casta.
The goat head spoke, its voice thinner and higher than the lion’s. “Someone has schooled you well, girl.”
Anastasios recognized the sound of the word as the language of the eastern peninsula, Athens or Argos or one of those, but he did not know its meaning. He could not appear less educated than a temple girl, however. “You said you had something to say to me.”
The lion’s ears tilted back in annoyance. “Foolish prince, I am the Khimaira. If you asked your girl, she would tell you that I am a portent, an ill omen. I foretell disaster and ruin. You should take care in demanding news from me.”
Anastasios raised his chin. “If you bear ill news, then all the more reason I should hear it promptly, so that I may address it. For what is an omen, but a warning, and what is a warning, but an opportunity to evade ill consequence?”
The snake head rose and looked down upon them. “I birthed the sphinx, cleverest of creatures,” it spoke, sibilant. “What gives you to think you can play word games with me?”
“You would not come to the temple only to mock me with a warning you will not give.” He hoped this was true.
“You would not require my warning if you opened your eyes to the omens Nature herself has given you,” snarled the lion. “Think, boy.”
Anastasios swallowed. “My father had no natural heir, and I had to be found to bear the prince’s crown.”
“No,” said the goat, irritated, “as if you were so important. Look around this place. The air which sinks can be set afire. What air sinks and puddles like water, and what air burns?”
Anastasios looked around the circular room as if the answer might lie against the curved wall. Fire licked about the edge of the floor, an ankle-height ring of flame. Another concentric circle.
“Your father knows,” said the serpent’s head, tongue flicking as if to taste Anastasios’ response. “Your father killed to keep this secret.”
Circles within circles. “The soothsayer,” Anastasios said. “He spoke the truth.”
“How could he not? For I had given it to him.”
“Then all the portents—his ill omens—something really is coming.”
The lion’s lips curled upward. “Oh, yes.”
“The earth,” Casta said, her voice uncertain as she interrupted a prince and a monster. “The earth breathes out contagion and flame and death. The very earth will strike against us.”
The goat seemed pleased. “I said she was clever.”
“How do we stop it?” Anastasios looked from Casta to the beast, his pulse racing. “What sacrifice is needed?”
Must they kill many bulls? Bull dancers? Even the false prince? What would soothe the anger of the fiery earth?
The lion shook its head, ruffling the mane. “Not every crisis of earth is the act of an angry god,” it said. “You cannot soothe what is not angry.”
Anastasios’ heart leapt. Had the soothsayer been wrong as well as right? Was the false prince not an abomination to the gods?
The lion was still looking at him. “I came to speak warning, but it is not to tell you to turn the disaster aside. It is to tell you to escape it.”
Anastasios swallowed. “And this is what my father refuses to do.”
“If he leaves, he is a king without a kingdom. He will live on the crusts of mercy tossed by those he has ruled. Instead of demanding their tribute, he will plead for their aid. It seems he believes it is better to die a king than to live a beggar.”
“And is he wrong?” asked the serpent, head swaying seductively. “What is a man worth, when he cannot be what he was?”
Casta shook her head. “But there are thousands in this city,” she said. “Tens of thousands, and more over the island. What about them?”
“A great king is always buried with grave offerings,” said the serpent’s head, faintly satisfied. “He is given slaves to serve and food for feasting and ornaments for amusement. Your King Kassander will have the greatest grave of all great men, the mightiest and most glorious tomb of all time.”
Anastasios shook his head slowly, trying to grasp this. “He—he could not—he would not allow the kingdom to….”
But he would. His father was proud, unyielding, and fiercely protective of their dignity and the Ivory Throne’s. Rather than become a beggar at the table of kings he had once subjugated, he would die in wealth and splendor.
“When?” he asked, and the word cracked in his throat.
“Very soon,” the goat said.
“Tonight,” said the serpent.
Anastasios’ throat closed. Tonight? But that was too soon—there would be no time to convince his father….
The lion turned, and Anastasios saw it in profile for the first time. Two goat’s udders swung swollen beneath its belly as it turned. It sat, and the dugs left thin trails of moisture where they brushed the stone, vanishing in the heat.
“You have a—” Anastasios stopped. A cub? A kid?
“A child,” supplied Casta. “You are a mother, and not afraid to leave your child when you perish here. That means you must know a way of escape.”
The three heads looked approvingly at her. “Very good,” said the goat. “It is true, I will not be here when the earth splits and pours forth molten rock and death.”
“Then tell us how we can escape with you!”
“Oh, clever girl,” said the lion’s head, “you are not clever enough. My father was the winter storm, my mother was disease. How could you travel the paths I walk?”
Casta shook her head, tears lighting her eyes with reflected fire. “But there must be a way. You would not come to warn us if there—there has to be a way. If we cannot take everyone, we can take some.”
The fires around them flared, and the ankle-height flames leapt unevenly. Far, far below them, a sound more felt than heard pressed upward, a terran growl of discontent.
The lion’s head swung to face them. “Run,” it said.
Anastasios did not wait to argue further. He seized Casta’s wrist and pulled her back, turning to retrace their path through the winding labyrinth. The oil lamp fell and shattered, but the trough-fires lit their path and led them forward.
Casta pulled free and sprinted, and Anastasios knew she would have passed him if not for the narrowness of the passage. “Hurry!” she pressed. “We can yet warn them!”
The labyrinth uncoiled before them and at last they burst through to the spiraling well of stairs. Now Casta did pass him, heedless of his rank, and dashed up the stairs first. “I’ll beat the temple shield,” she called back. “You order everyone to boats.”
Anastasios did not question her order, but its effectiveness. He was a prince, yes, but not the king. If the king had decreed the soothsayer’s words false, how could the prince gainsay him? Who would act on such treasonous words? But perhaps if they heard the temple shield—
They ran through the temple and past the altar, still smoldering, and out to the great porch. Casta took up the mallet which hung from the wall and ran to the enormous bronze shield which hung between the columns. “Go to the palace!” she shouted as she heaved the mallet into position. “Warn everyone!”
It was a simple instruction, yet so difficult. How could he warn everyone? Who would not believe him mad or treasonous? If they did believe him, what would he order them to do?
Casta swung the mallet and struck the shield. The metallic clang cut through the air and then faded to a low rumble which rolled through Anastasios, shaking his belly and his blood and burning inside his ears. He bolted for the palace as she wound back and struck it again, sending waves of sound out across the sleeping city.
He reached the palace gate before her fourth gong. The guards, jolted from their nocturnal watch by the sound, started toward him and then held their posts. “Who are you?” they demanded, and then, “My prince! What is the matter? Why does the temple call at this time of night?”
He hesitated. How could he say this? “We are in danger,” he said. He held up a hand as one of the guards turned to signal another on the tower. “Not from attack—from below. The earth will split and destroy us. We have to leave the island.”
They stared at him. “The earth will split?” They could not argue, not with the prince, but he saw their disbelief plain in their expressions.
“I spoke with the Khimaira!” he snapped. “She spoke to me in the temple, beyond the Gate of Flames!”
The gong’s resonance had built to a steady roar of sound, and lights were being struck in the buildings below and in the palace windows above. The guards were surprised to hear of the monster’s appearance, but they were not yet convinced. “And if the earth itself should wish to swallow us, what must we do to placate it?”
There was a short, feminine cry of protest, and the shield’s boom ceased. The temple guards must have reached Casta. Anastasios wanted to scream with frustration. “We have to flee! She said it would come tonight!”
The shield’s last tone still resonated, a deep sound which rolled under them and made Anastasios’ bones buzz. It did not fade, but rose, threatening to drown even his shouts, and he realized it was not the brazen shield but a sound from the earth, deeper and louder than anything he might ever have imagined. One of the guards seized him, sheltering him with his body against invisible attack, as the very stone trembled beneath their feet.
Anastasios shouted over their curses. “We have to get everyone off the island!”
The guard not holding Anastasios shook his head. “Impossible, my prince. Even if we have the time, we haven’t the boats. Our merchants and our fishers and our warships together could not carry everyone. And we would need food, and supplies, and—”
The earth bucked beneath them, throwing them to the ground. Anastasios pressed his hands to his ears as the city shook. Stones and dust showered around them. Down in the city itself, the buildings seemed to wave as if they sat upon the sea instead of upon rock, and then they parted, wrenching aside as a gap opened like a new street, cutting the circles.
Anastasios pushed to his feet as the shaking stopped, running forward a few steps to stare down at the city. The noise stopped, so now the cries and shouts could be heard. Lights moved in the dark as people searched for children or spouses, and scattered flames showed where oil had spilled and caught during the rocking.
A new sound, familiar and yet out of place in the dusty chaos or the palace’s porch, was rising. Anastasios ignored it as he turned toward the temple. It was yet standing, though clouds of dust showed it had been shaken with the rest. Had Casta been harmed? Where was she now?
One of the guards began invoking deities in rapid succession. Anastasios turned and saw moonlight reflecting on the waves, waves which never should have been so near to the palace. Water was washing into the city, rushing toward the great new crevice in its center.
“Sound all the bells,” Anastasios said, though he knew even as he spoke there was no point. No alert remained to call after such a shaking and booming. There was no one who was not aware of the danger. But they had to do something. “Sound all the bells, for the people to get to safety.”
But where was safety? The ground had gone from beneath them and the sea was coming into them. There was no safety but in boats, far from the swirling maelstrom this would become.
He left the guards as they still spoke and started toward the temple. If Casta had been seized, she must be released. She must flee the island.
But the temple guards were staring down at the city with her. One held the mallet in his fist, the other had a hand on Casta’s shoulder, but it was clear any thoughts of detaining her for beating the shield were forgotten. “Casta!” he called, and she turned to him.
“It’s terrible,” she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper.
He came to the edge of the porch and looked down with them. The first of the sea reached the rift and poured over the edge in a thin sheet, white in the moonlight. A moment later there was a hiss like a world-sized serpent and enormous clouds of steam burst into the air. The fissure boomed through the clouds rising to obscure their view.
If it had been him—if he had been the cause, he might have been able to stop it. He could have fled in a boat, or died in the arena. But he could do nothing.
Anastasios reached for Casta’s hand. “We have to go,” he said. “We can try to reach the docks. My father’s ship will be there.”
“Your father—”
“If he will not use his ship, that is no reason we cannot,” Anastasios said sharply. “I am his prince and heir. If he chooses to die, then I inherit his ship and may ride it to safety.”
The temple guards looked briefly disturbed at this frank speech but did not argue. Below, screams were rising as the steam rolled across the houses nearest the rift. One guard nodded. “And we will watch you, my prince,” he said. “Let us go to the ship.”
A clever way to ensure his place aboard, but Anastasios could not begrudge him that. He nodded. “We must hope the docks are yet standing. And that the water has not yet risen above the length of the anchoring lines.” If the ships could not rise above the flood, they would sink as the dock lines pulled them under or break free to float away in the torrent, leaving Anastasios and the others trapped in either case.
Casta wrapped her fingers about his and they started along the temple porch. One guard stopped to retrieve a torch from a holder, and Anastasios was glad of the supplement to the moonlight. The water below was deeper now, too strong to be resisted, and people and crates and animals were carried thrashing down the streets and into the black crevasse. Their shrieks and bellows, and the screams from those watching from the roofs, made Anastasios wish for the earth’s roar again.
They came to the stone steps which led down toward the docks, curving along the upper border of the city. Dust and loose stone lay over them. On either side, scattered over the hill, tiny vents spat steam or smoke like the breath of hidden demons.
The guard started down the steps, testing each foothold, and a few stones shifted beneath his weight, but the steps generally held firm. He was about twenty paces below them when he turned to call upward, “It is safe to descend, prince.”
Anastasios, Casta, and the remaining guard started forward. A tremor ran through the earth, and they each froze, but it passed. Casta and Anastasios looked at one another and then hurried down the steps.
The scouting guard ran ahead, kicking a few stones from their path and testing each step for stability. They came to a passage cut through the hill’s shoulder, a luxury to spare the king climbing and to display his wealth to ascending guests. The earth rumbled again, and dust and small stones showered from the dressed walls on either side.
The foremost guard hesitated and then drew a copper bull figurine from somewhere within his clothing. He held it close to his mouth for a moment, glanced over his shoulder at them, and then started forward again.
The earth remained still, and the dust in the roofless passage began to clear. About ten paces in, the guard began to cough. Anastasios at first supposed it was the stone dust, but the man’s cough grew fiercer. He stopped, and Casta and the second guard with him. He remembered the sting in his eyes and throat as they descended into the Gate of Flames.
The coughing guard looked at the bull in his hand and recoiled. He spun to face them, his wide eyes streaming. He pulled at his throat, as if something invisible tightened around it, but Anastasios stared at his breastplate, where all the copper symbols of the temple had blackened.
Casta gave a little gasp at the sight of the dark bull and armor. The guard choked, stumbled, and went to the ground.
“Nereus!” shouted the second guard, and he rushed down the steps toward the passage.
Anastasios remembered the Khimaira turning to spit fire into the floor troughs, and all the room and passage lighting at once. “No, stop!” he shouted.
The guard reached the passage and ran directly into the ground, as if he had fallen asleep midstride. The torch leapt and the air itself erupted into flame, engulfing both men. There were no screams.
Casta snatched at Anastasios, pulling him back along the path. “Come away!”
They ran back toward the temple. The earth roared again and they went down hard as the shaking began. It was like the ground wished to shiver them off, as a bull might a fly, and they clung to each other as if that might hold them to the earth.
An enormous metallic clang reached them even over the booming of the earth cracking open, and Anastasios looked up to see the temple’s great bronze shield rocking and shuddering where it had fallen. First the blackened bull—and the fallen gong—just now the soothsayer’s accusations of defying angered gods seemed as credible as the Khimaira’s talk of a disturbed earth.
The tremor ended, and they got to their feet. Anastasios had lost his cap, and his hair hung over one eye. The palace had fallen, stones tumbled inward. The temple stood half-erect.
Anastasios looked down on the city. The steam was fading, but now the rising sea carried buildings as well as people. “We have to reach the ship. We cannot stay on this island.”
Casta shook her head. “If we keep to the hill….”
He pointed to the seawater rushing through the city. Only the rooftops were visible now. “The water is still rising. Who can say if there will be a hill by morning?”
She swallowed and nodded. “Or docks, or a ship.”
But the inward rush of the sea was slowing, it seemed. The fissure had been filled, with water or buildings or bodies, and though the water was high, it was no longer pouring into a steaming cauldron. It was now a treacherous shoreline, waves slapping against the reefs and boulders of half-crushed houses and floating debris.
Anastasios looked down the porch toward the path they had tried. “But if we cannot go to the docks, then I don’t know—”
“The shield,” she said. All courtesies of rank had gone. There was no time for spare and pretty words. “We will ride the shield.”
“What?”
She was already hurrying to the fallen gong. It lay with the rim turned upward, a wide dish with a raised lip. “We will use this as a boat,” she said. “We can take it out to the docks and find a proper ship. Hurry!”
It was madness, but madness was all around them, so why not? He crouched and began shoving with her, grinding the great bronze shield over stone.
The temple porch fell away to a steep slope, where the palace and the temple could look down upon the city and the tributary sea. “You first,” said Casta. “I will be better able to leap in as it runs.”
That was undoubtedly true. Anastasios tucked himself into the shield, pulling the remnants of the hanging chains inside so they would not drag behind or snag on debris. “Now you,” he said.
Casta gave a mighty push, and the shield slid over the porch’s edge and started downhill. She sprinted alongside and leapt into it, catching her arms about Anastasios as the shield tipped and veered. Then it stabilized and sped downhill, sliding smoothly over the grassy slope.
There should have been people on the hill, Anastasios thought. They should have climbed to safety. But the earth’s assault had come in the night, when all were drunk and spent after the festival, and almost no one had been awake to flee.
“Lean back!” he called to Casta. “We can’t let the lip dip into the water!”
They shifted back as best they were able, lifting the leading curve of the shield like a prow, and it struck the water with a jolt which snapped Anastasios’ teeth hard enough to pain the back of his head. But the shield bobbed and floated, and they quickly scooped out most of the water which had splashed inside.
“Now, to the south,” Anastasios said. “Toward the docks. We’ll find someone there.”
The currents were confused and twisted about the shattered city, and they had only their hands for paddles. They were swept at the sea’s whim despite their best efforts. But they were afloat. After a time, they ceased wasting their strength and waited for the tide to turn, if it would.
They leaned together for warmth and for the stability of their makeshift boat. Anastasios wondered where he might have been now, had he not found Casta in the temple in what seemed a lifetime ago. Where she might have been, had she not found him. They drifted among the debris, moving through the city. They passed a broken wall where a mewling bedraggled kitten perched, and Casta stretched to seize it and folded it into her lap.
The hill began to crack as the city had, splitting narrowly between palace and temple, and the fallen buildings began to tumble down the slope. The fissure steamed, a ghost in the moonlight of all that lay beneath the surface.
He had been first a penniless slave of the city, and then a rich slave to an ill-fitting crown. Now he was a penniless prince—except perhaps he was not even that, not now. The Ivory Throne was nothing now, and for the first time, he owed obedience and obeisance to no one but himself. It was a curious sensation.
“Look,” Casta said quietly. “The dawn.”
“Look,” Anastasios said, pointing to the south. “A ship.”
It was not the royal ship; that, like the docks, was nowhere to be seen. It was a fat-bellied trade vessel, possibly out of Athens. He rose on his knees and shouted. “Hoy! Help!”
An answering hail came from the ship. “Come this way, if you can!”
They paddled as best they could, and then a rope was tossed from the ship and they snatched at it. They were pulled close and then over the side, the kitten clinging to Casta with all claws. Two sailors went down to tie ropes to the shield’s chains to draw it up, as such a fortune of bronze could not be sacrificed.
“Poseidon had an eye for you,” said the captain. “You’re the fifth and sixth we’ve picked up.” He gestured to a cluster of refugees sitting together on the deck. “That’s not much for a city.”
Anastasios nodded.
“Have you seen anyone of the palace? King Kassander? We’ve been watching for his ship, but there’s been precious few vessels seen.”
What is a man worth, when he cannot be what he was?
Casta opened her mouth to speak, looking at Anastasios, but he answered first. “No one from the palace,” he said. “The palace was taken in the earth-shaking. We alone were saved.”
N is for New Beginnings