The climb was long, hot, and increasingly steep. Rock slides were common, making the ground unstable. Tiny tremors sent pebbles skittering down the mountain, bouncing crazily. They both were stung on hands and faces by tiny bits of rock.
They worked their way steadily upward, the trail carrying them northward over the spectacular cliffs and great, violent upthrusts of rock, until they were able to get glimpses of the northern segment of the crescent-shaped island, with the doomed little pre-Kameni Island hazily lying to the west. Smoke rose slowly from distant vents, adding to the brownish-gray pall.
Conversation became impossible. The thick air was made thicker by sulfurous stenches. They realized at about the same time that their increasingly intense headaches were not caused by the heat and slipped on their breathing masks, which indicated that they were being exposed to dangerous gases, hydrogen sulfide foremost among them. And though no one was around to see them, they still followed orders, both swathing their heads and lower faces with lengths of rough cloth to hide the masks.
Their headaches faded away slowly as the breathing masks removed the dangerous gases from the air. The relief gave them both energy, and they picked up their pace again. As they climbed toward what appeared to be the summit, the thunderheads sailed inexorably toward them, lightning occasionally flashing down to stab the sea.
They were high enough now to look directly down into the clear, blue-green water. Now they could see some of the underwater vents releasing vapors that heated the water within the ring: these were discolored silver-green in some places, and in one or two an ominous rusty-tinged green, like an old bruise. Above the sea hung strange palls of dust and smoke tinged with a sinister orange.
Ross nodded, and Eveleen took out her palm-sized video cam, sweeping the scene with care. "I wish I could see Akrotiri from here," she murmured.
"Maybe higher up," Ross said. "Though the distance will make it look like a toy city."
Eveleen nodded, tucking the cam securely into her belt-pouch. "Let's go."
They trudged up the last distance to what had to be a gigantic vent. Ross, ceaselessly watching for signs of Baldies standing guard, kept his hand near his side, where he wore a weapon. Memories of his hand burning, of helping Ashe cross-country with a bullet wound in his shoulder, made him wary.
At last they reached the vent.
Whose instinct reacted first?
Before he saw anything except swirling smoke and vapor, Ross knew there was someone in that vent. Eveleen let out a startled exclamation about the same moment he palmed his weapon and aimed it, flicking the safety off.
A figure slowly emerged, hands out-held.
They waited, not speaking, as the figure resolved in a humanoid form.
But the Baldy Ross expected failed to materialize. Instead, he stared at a being he'd only glimpsed once before, years ago on his very first run, at a station buried in ice: A triangular face, sharply pointed chin, angled jaw, small mouth, hooked nose. Dark skin covered with long, silky down, crest over the head, and below that two round eyes. Intelligent eyes.
The being slowly brought a furry hand to its chest and squawked in its high voice, using a language full of trills and clicks.
Moments later passable Greek emerged.
"You must come within, for I do not wish to cause you damage."
A small device glinted at them from the other hand and Ross realized it was some kind of weapon.
CHAPTER 9
"YOU NEVER MARRIED?" It was early—Eveleen and Ross were just past the oracle. The place was mostly empty but for the fallen greater buildings of Akrotiri, built haphazardly all along an axis, with the small rooms furnished with benches and bins and cubicles of stone.
Men did not have access to the buildings identified with the priestesses, only those that were made for general use or for men's concerns. Religion here was an integral as well as natural part of everyday life, as one could tell from the rise and fall of voices in song, the processions, the stylized clothing of various members of the religious callings. Women's rooms were not open to men, and Linnea went there alone, leaving Ashe to investigate those belonging to men only.
She had just emerged from one, wherein some local women were singing a lilting song as they decorated a young girl with flowers and a bright kilt, and last clasped a necklace of stylized serpents around her neck. On the walls was the famous fresco of the ladies, the flowers bright and fresh, the perspective breathtakingly graceful. A golden glow from oil lamps made the colors seem real.
Linnea had had to blink away tears. She had known what to expect, yet still she had not been really prepared for the effect of such free, bright, and generous beauty, and the corresponding claw of loss.
So she put her question about marriage to Ashe when she emerged, and he glanced at her, looking amused, and said, "No."
Just that word seemed bald, ungracious. She knew she had trespassed, even though she had taken care to use the Ancient Greek, not just to protect them, though no one paid them the least attention, but because its wording was necessarily quaint and distant from their habitual English, and so it created its own borders of finesse.
Then he added, as though he realized that he had sounded ungracious, "Though it was not an easy choice. But it seemed the best one. My absences would put a burden on a family."
She nodded. She had a brother in the military, and she knew what his wife had suffered when he would be gone one year, two, often without any communication. For twenty years she had spent holidays alone with their children, and birthdays, except for last-minute surprises; he had almost missed their daughter's wedding.
"You did not think to marry within the Project?"
"In the very early days there were few women. And I am, unfortunately, a member of the last generation. A wife with me would take my mind from the work to her, to protecting her. Though I know it's not fair, or right. But instinct is hard to argue with."
Linnea nodded. "Ross and Eveleen have managed."
"Many of the younger agents have paired off successfully, though not all the marriages last. They did not find it easy to adjust. Though they are much alike, and I believe they have an excellent chance of going the distance."
"Adventurers," Linnea said, the noun she chose calling to mind Homer and his tales.
They had emerged from one building and had tried another, but it was all fallen in, destroyed so badly that no one had even excavated the rubble yet. Either that or it had fallen relatively recently.
On to the next one, much smaller, roofed with woven mats. They peered in windows, watching people come and go. Though they could not examine every room, at least they could watch for anomalies.
The noon sun beat down, the air breathlessly hot, drifting with faint ash-fall. One of the tremors froze everyone for a moment into a tableau, a still life backlit by garish sun, while hissings of little stones sifted down from cracks in the walls.
Then songs rose again, donkeys brayed, children laughed, adults' voices exclaimed in question, concern, annoyance, worry, with many glances skyward up the mountain.
Linnea had just looked over to say something when the communicator Ashe wore next to his skin pulsed just once.
It was from the boat.
"An attack?" she spoke without thinking, but at least she'd used Ancient Greek.
He said nothing, of course, but nodded his head upward when they reached one of the narrow intersections. They toiled up a steep street, with a cliff to one side, looking down at roofs, some with withered gardens. Behind them were more buildings. As he left it to Linnea to peer in the windows and go into what buildings she could, he found a tiny join where one wall did not quite meet another, shaded by a very straggly wild palm. Trusting to its protection, Ashe raised to his eyes a slim pair of field glasses, shading them by his palm.
Linnea, seeing what he was about, backed out of his field of vision, instead watching the occasional passerby to draw attention away from Ashe if necessary.
S
he waited until his hand lowered.
"Baldies on the beach," he murmured.
Linnea felt her heart lurch.
They eased into a crowd moving down toward the shoreline, where the early morning fishers were just arriving in with fresh catch.
Linnea peered up along the sand, which seemed to shimmer in the heat. A thunderstorm was on the way, she realized, though judging from the faint, acid-tangy breeze and the slowness of those clouds, it would not arrive until sundown.
Ashe drew in a breath. He stepped aside from the street into an angle of the low wall that guarded the street from the sheer fall to the next level below. He leaned over, looking down, concealing his actions as he raised the glasses again, mostly covering them with his palm so it looked as if he were shading his eyes.
"I should have expected that," he murmured. "Right out in sight. Of course. People will see what they expect to see."
Silently he handed Linnea his glasses, and she copied his movement, covering them with her palm to shade her eyes as she scanned.
The shoreline seemed curiously flattened, colors muted. But there, not far from their anchorage (was that chance?), where the road from the city to the harbor passed close to the shore, there stood a group of slender hairless humanoids, all dressed alike in rich, glimmering fabric that changed from blue to green to purple depending on how the wearer moved.
The Kallistans walking past looked at them but did not linger or approach them. It was as though an invisible line were inscribed in the sand around them.
"I wonder if they have the same effect going as at that apparently abandoned building?" said Linnea in a bare whisper. "But what are they doing?"
For much of the time the Baldies did nothing, standing in silence, watching, as people streamed by. But occasionally, more often when the crowds moving between the city and the harbor were thickest, one of their number would step forward and stop a group of people. As they watched, the alien stopped a pair of young men.
The men looked up at the Baldy, their body language, even flattened by the distance, eloquent of fear and respect. The Baldy spoke, gestured; the men nodded and replied, then hurried away at a dismissive motion by the alien. The other Baldies paid no attention to the exchange, instead watching intently the people all around.
"They're looking for us."
"Or, if not us, anomalies among the people walking about?"
"They must know we won't expose ourselves in any way that the locals would notice," Ashe murmured, as around them, people exclaimed in worry about the poor catch and fishermen in approaching boats tried to gather crowds to them by calling out what was in their nets.
"How will we eat if the fish all die?" a woman exclaimed in Ancient Greek.
"No, they're probably not so much interested in the answers they get from people as in their reactions and those of the people around them," Ashe murmured. "We're not really clear on the capabilities and limitations of their suits, but I wouldn't be surprised if they could detect our subliminal awareness of who they are, the way we focus on them in a way different from the locals, who just think they're priests from some strange country."
Linnea nodded. That would certainly be true of an entrepot like Kalliste, where people were used to strangers and wont to assume that any out-of-the-ordinary behavior could be ascribed to foreignness.
The women around them, waiting for the fishermen to unload their nets on the sand and spread out the fish, paid the two of them no attention.
"I think we are being punished," an older woman said.
"For what?" exclaimed the first. "I am a good wife; my husband is a good artisan; my children sing to the gods."
"But I think we'd have to be a lot closer," Ashe continued. "The Baldies cannot really control minds, or send messages, unless you wear their fabric, which has some sort of communication built in," Ashe murmured. "But they can certainly influence people, probably the more so when they're grouped together, as now. I'm sure there're some advanced statistics that guide the way they search. After all, time is on their side, no matter what they intend."
"It is the gods who fight one another," a third woman said, pointing up at the mountain.
"If they cast fiery stones at one another, it is we who are struck," said the first woman in a sour voice.
The older woman laughed. "It is always thus, in war."
Linnea sighed, cramping her fingers together in her robe. "What do we do?"
"Watch, wait, and keep a respectful distance."
——————————
ASHE AND LINNEA spent most of the afternoon on or near the last set of stairs before the beach, watching. The Baldies remained where they were, somewhat down the road on the seaside, waiting with inhuman patience for the trace of an anachronistic mind.
Ashe watched them. Though he'd had many encounters with them over the years, this was the first sustained observation he had ever been able to make.
Linnea was quiet, obviously watching the volcano, the city, listening to the people, as Ashe walked and watched by turns. Late afternoon, after another of those long tremors, they followed a small boy herding baby goats up onto the rocky low hills adjacent to Akrotiri. The recent rains had brought up tufts of tough, brown-edged grasses through the ash and pumice drifts. The goats did not appear to like this grass and kept frolicking with one another as they sought green farther along.
Thus they passed up beyond the waiting Baldies, below on the shoreline, and then to the other side.
At last, as the oncoming clouds began to block the sinking sun, Linnea said, "They must think we are stupid."
Ashe shrugged. "Stupid? Ignorant is more like it. Remember, they know we have interfered with them, but they believe it is by accident. And they do not know where or when the humans who have opposed them come from. So as yet they have not interfered with us in our own time; we have managed to keep the time-lines safe."
Linnea frowned. Beyond her shoulder, over the edge of the headland, the sun was a crimson ball of fire underlighting the sky with spectacular, faintly sinister color. "So they think we're like the monkey with the typewriter, then?"
"I think so. We've worked hard to keep it that way. And to keep our encounters here in the past, where we originally found them."
"How strange, that beings who appear to be from the far future would be consistently discovered mucking about in the past."
"A mystery I've almost given up solving. It's enough to fend them off, to keep them from destroying us by tampering with the past," Ashe said. "Although, of course, that might be enough reason. Sort of flattering, really."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, maybe we're too strong, up in the future, and the only way they can attack us is in the past. But that begs the question: why attack us in the first place?"
Linnea shaded her eyes against the slanting ruddy glow of sunset, peering out through the forest of prows and masts of the incoming boats. "Do you suppose we'll ever know?"
Ashe shrugged.
Linnea sighed. "It was fortunate that Stav and Kosta went out hunting vents."
"I don't think the Baldies can find our boat, as long as they don't see anything to cause them to attack and investigate more closely," Ashe said.
Did he sound as doubtful as he felt?
"Our lab rats at home shielded the equipment fairly well in that boat; I doubt there's enough EM escaping to bring down alarms."
"Not over what must be emitting from there," Linnea said, looking up at the volcano.
"True—"
Ashe's words died when he saw the Baldies go tense and alert, their faces raised. Though no apparent signal was received, as one they set out at a fast pace, uphill, directly north.
Ashe thought of the attack on their camp, then looked at small Linnea, who had not had the time to get any sort of defense training. "Go on to your room and watch. Brief the others when they turn up," he said tersely. "I'm going to try to find the Baldies' base."
She did not argue.
"Good luck."
——————————
LINNEA HURRIED BACK toward the city gates by the lurid red light still glowing in the west. She still had plenty of lapis lazuli, but she did not want to waste one on a smelly, scarcely functional torch.
She was not the only person running to beat the oncoming darkness. Akrotiri at night glowed with dim but welcoming golden light, tiny pinpricks from uncounted lamps. She passed through the gates and ran the short way across the first market area toward her house.
By the light of the lamps many were still lingering over business; the day's heat was now just a stuffy sort of warmth and far more bearable. Linnea paused to trade for some grapes, more because she delighted in speaking with the people than for any other reason, and then bought a big bucket of water.
The bucket pulled at her shoulder joints, making her feel hotter than ever, and some sploshed out until she got the right rhythm for walking with it. Never again, she vowed, would she take for granted the infinite blessing of running water.
Of course some of the buildings had their own running water, even now, despite the quake destruction. She could hear and even smell it, a faintly sulfuric odor coming from an underground hot spring, but she had none in her little room.
And so she withdrew to it, and by the light of a swinging lamp coming weakly through the window opposite, she gave in to—oh, don't just call it temptation. The smell, the itchiness, of her underclothes had become so repulsive that washing them was now the first priority of her life.
She undressed under her robe, keeping well into the shadows of her room, though no one glanced in as people walked by. All the windows were open, and on the still, warm night air she could hear voices. She purified the water first, then drank. After that she washed her face and hands, and then her body as well as she could without completely undressing. And then she scrubbed her underthings. Since she had no soap, she scrubbed and rescrubbed until her hands felt red and tender, and the cloth smelled just like damp cloth. But where to put them?
Andre Norton - [Time Traders (Ross Murdock) 07] Page 8