by Ryu Mitsuse
As he drank the legate became aware of two human shapes engaged in a hushed argument behind a rose thicket not far from the fountain.
“We must go to the harbor. The boats will leave us behind.”
“What’s the use of running? We should follow the king’s orders. I don’t care where he wants us to go. We’ll go.”
One of the voices sounded like that of an old man; the other, young.
“What are you saying?” the older voice demanded. “There is fertile land enough over the sea. We can go there, begin anew. My son, we are not horses or cattle. Must we follow meekly along when we are told we must leave this land our forebears cultivated to go off to some distant sun across the starry sky—some ‘planet’? Are we slaves to do our master’s bidding?”
“But, Father,” the other voice said, “how will we get through this wall of fire to the harbor? You heard what they said—the bridges over the second ring canal have all burned and fallen. There are so many corpses floating there, one cannot even see the surface of the water. Please, Father.”
The voice of the older man was hoarse and tired, yet it still had not lost its strength. “Get up. If I’m fated to serve the House of Atlas, those men who are not men, I’d rather toss myself into the boiling stewpot of the canals.”
“Father!”
“Bah—a curse upon the House of Atlas! They are not humans in truth! They are avatars of evil. How long they must have waited for this day to come. Yes, they gave us treasures, priceless things beyond measure. All to buy their absolution in advance for this day of days!” The raw pain in the old man’s voice stung Orionae’s ears. “Get up, my son! We must get on that boat. We must tell the people of the world what happened here this night.”
Orionae crawled through the smoke, making his way toward the two debaters.
“Who’s there?”
The legate could feel an icy hatred stabbing at him through the darkness.
“I am the legate Orionae.”
“The legate?”
The two huddled figures craned their necks to look in his direction.
“He tells the truth.”
“And what is the legate doing here?” the old man asked, his voice harsh and suspicious.
“I lost consciousness during a meeting of the council and was carried to the hospital ward. When I awoke, it was to this chaos. Tell me—what is the darkness that has swallowed half our city, and what caused these fires?”
The old man whistled in his throat. “That star-filled sky appeared at day’s end, quite suddenly. One moment the western half of the capital was basking in the evening sun, the next moment it was gone. The fires came afterward.”
“Do you know how they started?”
“I do not,” said the old man with a shake of his head.
The youth continued where his father had left off. “Poseidonis the Fifth announced that he intended to move the kingdom. He proclaimed a great exodus. When the other kings didn’t follow his command, Poseidonis borrowed the power of the gods and judged them. Legate, some of the people took up arms. Others protested with words, begging their liege to change his mind. But it was all too late. The heart of Poseidonis the Fifth no longer lies with his people, if it ever did.”
The true shape of what had happened was finally becoming clear to Orionae.
The old man’s wiry hand grabbed him by the arm. “Legate, we’ll give back our hospitals, our schools, our autocarriages, our nuclear reactor. We’ll give back everything the House of Atlas dangled before us as bait. All of it! We can return to the primitive age of a thousand years ago for all I care. It’s better that way. We never asked the royal house for their assistance! They came of their own accord from who knows where.”
“But, Father,” the son cut in, “can we really just return to our primitive ways? Do you even know how to make a flame? Are you going to twirl a stick or pound two pieces of flint together? Will you hunt your food with a bow and arrow? No. I want no part of a life with no food—a life spent waiting to die of some trifling illness.”
Orionae put a hand on each of the men’s shoulders. “Both of you, you must get to the boats. Stay here and we’ll all die in flames. To the harbor!”
“Legate! Have you not heard a word I’ve said? We were like animals in a laboratory! Always given newer and tastier delicacies to distract us, while our reactions and changing lifestyles were monitored. To hell with this exodus! To hell with the king’s orders! Can’t you see? The only thing one thousand years of rule by the House of Atlas has proven is that our happiness, our bounty, everything about our lives was an illusion.”
Orionae pulled the old man up off the ground. “I know. All the more reason why you should get on that boat and go to the land across the ocean and tell people what you have just told me. Tell the people the meaning of happiness and a rich life. Tell the world of the bitter defeat we of Atlantis have tasted. You must do so—or this kind of tragedy could very well occur again.”
The old man shook in Orionae’s arms.
“Now go!” the legate said.
“No! I’m going to the palace!” the son shouted, turning to dash across the courtyard.
“Wait, no!” The old man jumped as though he’d been electrocuted.
“I will find your son,” Orionae said, giving the man a push in the direction of the quays. “You must go ahead to the harbor. Quickly!”
There was no one to be seen on the stair in front of the palace; the great edifice itself sat like an abandoned ruin, distinct in its darkness from the brilliance of the fires below. From halfway up the stair, one could look down on the raging sea of flame and the starry sky where the other half of the city had been.
The layer of smoke that rose from the fires stopped where the starry sky began, as though blocked by some invisible wall. Any flames that reached that dark divide were cut off there, their flickering tongues bending down and spiraling upward, searching for some egress.
What could have happened to an entire half of the city? Orionae wondered as he had many times already. Still no answer presented itself.
The great ringed metropolis, populated by four hundred thousand souls, and forty kilometers across until today, had been reduced to rubble. What had been home to so many was no longer a fit place for human survival.
I must meet with Poseidonis the Fifth. The need for answers threatened to burst Orionae’s heart. From whence did the House of Atlas come—and who were these people?
Bizarrely, this was the first time he had ever thought to ask this question. The story of the founding of the Kingdom of Atlantis, told in tales by his forebears and recorded in the ancient texts, was already legend. It seemed that the people of the kingdom didn’t actually wonder, even out of plain curiosity, where the House of Atlas had actually come from.
One day, they came down from the sky.
That was all they had—the beginning of everything—and that was enough.
One day, they came down from the sky.
As long as everything was going well, who needed more? But when the time of peace had passed and the people began to feel uneasy about their welfare—when tragedy struck, and they looked for the causes and origins of their unhappiness—every doubt led back to this one question: from whence did the House of Atlas come? A question for which it was no longer possible to claim an answer.
The corridors of the palace shone brightly with cold light. These giant passageways, built to accommodate the massive frames of Poseidonis the Fifth and Atlas the Seventh, rose almost twenty meters from floor to ceiling. But the only living being moving through all that space now was Orionae.
The legate hurried along the angled slidewalk that led up to the second floor, a vast conveyor that crept along like a giant annelid. Enormous doors stood in pairs on either side of the passageway. The doors were equipped with sensors and would slide open to admit any who stood before them. Some of the rooms were familiar to Orionae—the council chamber, the offices of the Privy Council. He passed
them all by, running from the second floor on up to the third.
The third level also appeared deserted. The palace was said to have sixteen or seventeen floors in all, though even the legate Orionae had never been higher than the sixth. He had only a vague conception of the work that went on within the palace and had never really thought to find out more. He knew that Chief Secretary Iras and his dozens of aides took care of most of it, though Iras himself was rarely seen in public.
“Your Majesty!” Orionae shouted down a vacant corridor. “It is I, the legate Orionae! Where are you?”
His voice drifted down the passage, fading into the distance. After an instant’s hesitation Orionae continued on, his pace wavering slightly, following the receding echoes of his own voice. He hadn’t the slightest idea whether he was headed deeper into the palace, or making his way toward an exit.
“Your Majesty! Orionae has come! Your Majesty, where are you?” he shouted in both directions.
“I’m here.”
A tremendous fear struck Orionae, and he braced himself so he would not collapse on the spot.
“What do you want, legate?”
He looked around but saw no sign of Poseidonis the Fifth—only his own shadow wavering in the bright, cold light that fell upon the metal of the corridor floor. And yet with his entire body Orionae could sense the presence of Poseidonis the Fifth looming powerfully above him.
“Your Majesty! You must tell me what this means. Why do you strike down your own people?”
“Legate. I will soon report on my failure to the Planetary Development Committee. Yet understand that this failure is only one of my results. Legate, you saw the fire? It was that fire that foiled my plans, the greatest barrier to the designs of the committee, and our final answer.”
“Your Majesty!”
“It is likely that we shall never again appear before you or the people of this city.”
“Your Majesty—wait! Where did the other half of the city go? How did it disappear? Will it come back? Please tell me, Your Majesty! What is the starry sky I see outside that has appeared in place of the lost city?”
There was no answer. Orionae felt the towering presence of Poseidonis the Fifth grow gradually weaker, fading into the distance.
He could smell smoke in the corridor now. The fires must have reached the palace walls. It was all over.
Everything was over, headed for an ending beyond the reach of his hands to save.
What would come next? A primitive society, such as the one the old man by the fountain had described? Would darkness visit the hearts of men?
Or would everything be consumed by that dark sky and those mounting flames?
Everything—
The storm had blown its last.
Plato lay sprawled across the stone, half buried in sand.
The quiet wind of dawn gently brushed the sand from his body.
By the time one of the village women came out to fetch water and found him there, the philosopher was already dead. The woman ran to inform Seim the Elder, and within moments a crowd of Elcasians had gathered. They carried Plato back to the small dwelling he had been given for his night’s lodging. Gladius was still there, leaning up against the wall, fast asleep. He awoke with a start.
A physician of the village stuck silver needles into Plato’s arms and legs. The needles were connected to tubes; into these the man poured liquids from several different bottles of glaes. Then many strange and curious devices, the purpose of which baffled Gladius’s imagination, were carried into the house. They made whirring and burbling noises such as those heard when air and liquid mix. Gladius stood rigid in a corner of the room, watching the hurried yet precise movements of the men and women who encircled the sickbed. When the sun had risen quite high in the sky, Plato moaned suddenly, and the men and women slowed their activity.
“There. He will be able to stand in two or three days,” the physician told Gladius. “We must not rush him. He was entirely dead, you see, and needs time to recover.” The Elcasian busied himself picking up the various medical devices that had been placed around the bed. His assistants left the room in silence.
The physician closed the curtains on the windows, straightened the blanket over Plato, and then departed, a wooden box filled with vials of medicine and small surgical instruments tucked under his arm.
The philosopher slept with his head pressed into his pillow, barely moving. At times Gladius feared that his master might yet be dead. His eyes filled with tears as he watched over the old man.
What siren beckoned you out into that raging sandstorm, he wondered, and what did you see there?
The Arab was painfully aware that their great journey had now begun in earnest.
Plato spent the next several days drifting somewhere between wakefulness and sleep. Gladius tried speaking to him, but the old man never responded. When Seim visited, the sight of Plato lying there seemed to give him a great deal of pain.
“Elder,” Gladius asked him during one of his visits, “could there be some connection between that custom of your village, the Night of Silence, and my master’s sudden illness?”
Seim gave no reply but stood solemnly, gazing down at Plato. The philosopher was sitting up in bed, his back against the wall, but his eyes stared off into space, seeing nothing.
“Ahem. Master Gladius. The Night of Silence, as I have told you, is a ritual in which the people of our village receive a revelation from our suzerain. Yet not all of us receive this revelation. Only a select few glean anything from the Night when it comes—and those who do are forbidden to speak of what has been revealed to them. Thus, no one knows who in the village has received such enlightenment—not even myself.”
“Hrm,” Gladius muttered. “I suppose that’s fitting for a Night of Silence.”
“In days long past, they say, everyone in the village received revelation from our suzerain. Through the ritual they would learn firsthand about an event in our past. This knowledge brought us closer together in mind and spirit. Now, such togetherness is beyond our grasp. Master Gladius . . . in truth, I have begun to lose confidence that Atlantis, our suzerain, and the revelation ever existed at all.”
“If you seek enlightenment, you’re talking to the wrong man.”
Seim turned to leave the room.
“Elder—” Gladius called out, and the older man hesitated at the door. “Before entering the service of Master Plato, I lived among many people in many lands. Over the course of those earlier years, I adopted the customs and ways of numerous people, different tribes . . . too many to count. I could not have survived otherwise. One thing I discovered is that in the tales and legends told by all of these peoples, there are always stories of destruction and salvation. I’ve wondered why this is. Why would there be so many tales about a horrific destruction and the salvation that followed when no one alive could possibly have witnessed either? The tales seemed too close to truth to be mere fancies, and too inevitable to deny.”
Seim the Elder stepped out the doorway and vanished, leaving Gladius to wonder whether the Elcasian had even heard him.
Three days later, a rare rain fell from the muggy morning through to the night, moistening the desert sands.
“Gladius. Today we head west,” Plato announced, standing suddenly.
“M-Master,” Gladius stuttered. “How do you feel?”
“How do I feel? I’m fine. Should I not be?”
“I . . . when did you wake?”
“Gladius,” Plato said, a bit testily. “This rain is the sort of opportunity that comes but once or twice a year. The journey to the west of the Atlas Mountains would be brutal under any other conditions. We must hurry. Prepare for our departure!”
Gladius could hear in his master’s words the obstinacy and sudden passion he knew well. There was no better indicator that Plato had returned to full health. The Arab nodded. “Very well. I will get ready at once,” he said, thinking that all he really needed to do was to fill their donkeys’
water skins and the two would be ready to depart. “Master, do you know which route we will take?”
Plato peered out through the window at the misting rain, seeming lost in thought. “Four days to the northwest of here, west of the Sawai Valley, lies the village of Tovatsue. He awaits us there.”
“Awaits us, Master?”
“Indeed.”
“Ah—who awaits us? When was this appointment made?”
Plato turned to his servant, lifting an eyebrow. “How unlike you, Gladius, to forget such things.”
“I beg your pardon, Master.” Gladius bowed his head, desperately trying to make sense of the old man’s words. Not only had he never heard of any village named Tovatsue, but the name sounded so unfamiliar as to be meaningless to him. What people speaking what language would name a village so? He also wondered who might be waiting for them there—he could recall no such arrangement.
Still milling these questions, Gladius went to call on Seim the Elder to announce their departure.
Three donkeys were laden with food and water skins, and they borrowed a fourth, upon which Plato rode. In the writings that Plato sent to his friend Tethys of Terinth, it is noted that when the philosopher made his farewells, he invited the elder to call on him, back in Greece.
Plato and Gladius left the village in the misting rain alone, Plato having refused Seim’s offer of a guide. The people of the village gathered and stood watching the two travelers depart.
The dampened desert spread out, vast and barren, before Gladius’s eyes. He wondered what was waiting for them on the other side. He cared not whether Tovatsue meant life or death for him; the distinction hardly seemed important.
After they had gone a short distance the two men paused and looked back. Elcasia seemed sunken and faded, far off in the sea of sand behind them.
“Master?” Gladius pointed. “What do you think that might be?” Though he had not noticed it when they entered the village, he could now see a curious structure like a large bowl set on its side, towering a short distance from the houses. It appeared to be fashioned of some kind of thin metal framework.