“That’s a volcano, and it might be a little cranky right now,” Tasalus agreed in his low, pleasant voice. Zaya was terribly, horribly shy around Maccis’ older brother. He was, by far, the most handsome man she’d ever seen in her life, but was saved from mere prettiness by a broken nose he’d acquired in school at some point. “Gods. They might be caught between fire and flood.”
“Inghean?” Eisa asked, tentatively. “What about our mothers and our father? What about Aunt Sig and Uncle Adam and . . . everyone else?”
“I don’t know,” she told them all, and Zaya suddenly realized that Inghean’s hands were shaking, but she was obviously trying to be calm for everyone in the room “I don’t know where they are. I don’t know where Rig is.” A hint of desperation there, tightly masked. “All I know is, he called me and told me he was going on a mission with our parents, and he’d call me when he got back, and that if all went well, he’d have good news. He sounded excited.” Belatedly, Zaya realized that Inghean was talking about her husband, and sat up a little further. “The phone lines are probably flooded right now with emergency calls,” Inghean went on, steadily. “They’ll call when they can call. They’re not going to get in the way of emergency responders.”
Maccis raised a hand, tentatively. “So . . . what can we do?”
Inghean bit her lip. “Fyriacus, you and Enica are fifteen. You’re in charge of the house. I’m going to go talk to Fritti. Anyone over sixteen—Tas, Deiana, Linditus, that means you—can come with me and . . . see if there’s anything volunteers can do.” Deiana and Linditus were both on break from their universities . . . . Linditus had been studying biology up at the University of Londonium, apparently, while Deiana had been studying advanced summoning at the University of Lutetia.
Zaya looked around at the others, unhappily. “I should . . . probably go home,” she said, quietly.
“Yes. Your mother will be looking for you. I’ll give her a call. Maccis, get her home safely, all right?” Inghean had taken charge, effortlessly, and everyone was grateful for some direction. Particularly Zaya, who felt helpless in the face the disaster, and the fact that it was rushing towards them . . . at least, the ripples of it were, in the form of the waves that would be hitting the Judean and Carthaginian coastline in a few hours.
On the bus, heading back to her house—so very odd, to be on a bus—Zaya scuffed her feet against the metal floor. “I guess there won’t be any bonfires tonight,” she said, quietly.
“Probably not,” Maccis told her, quietly. “But there’s always next year, if you want to come with us.”
“Do you think I’ll still be here next year?” Her tone was a little forlorn.
“I hope so. Where else would you go?” Maccis shrugged.
Where else, indeed?
______________________
No one had a complete picture of the devastation in those first hours. The earthquakes, and the resulting tsunamis—not one, but three, in distinct pulses—did enormous primary damage. Tacape was leveled, in its entirety, as were Oea, Leptis Magna, and many other Carthaginian and Numidian cities. Fires broke out in the rubble, as ley-towers overloaded. The earthquakes felt as far away as Jerusalem had devastating effects in Egypt, particularly in Alexandria. The Great Lighthouse, rebuilt so many times before, collapsed entirely. The palace of the Ptolemies, ancient and wondrous, saw its roof collapse. The Nile, to the east, had its course diverted, and in the Sinai Peninsula, a network of cracks and fissures appeared between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Half a dozen failed canals had crisscrossed this region previously, one built by Ptolemy, and based on earlier construction attempts by pharaohs. A more massive construction had been built, lined with poured stone, by Rome in the eighth century after Caesar. This canal, called the Janus, had been enlarged over the centuries. But now massive fissures ripped through the ancient construction, and water flowed freely between the two seas for the first time.
The earthquakes rattled Crete and Sardinia, the Hellene peninsula, and the Italian one. Buildings collapsed on the islands, and there was no time to do more than a cursory search for survivors as people flooded the roadways, trying to get either to higher ground, or further inland. Laconia and Messinia, in southern Hellas, particularly port towns like Kalamata and Githia, were almost scoured from the earth, leaving nothing but debris on the waves around them. The southern face of Crete was wiped clean, and Sicily was devastated. The ancient Carthaginian town of Lilybaeum, now thoroughly Roman and famous for its sweet wine, called Marsala by the locals, was leveled by earthquake, fire, and flood. Lucentum and Carthaginensis, on the Iberian peninsula, and currently predominantly Gallic cities, were under eight feet of water by the end of the day, and Tyre’s port was shattered. One news report from Tyre focused its camera on an ancient shrine to the god-beast, Dagon, where mariners had often made sacrifices before leaving port, now collapsed, the statue of the Destroyer lying on its side.
Frittigil had been looking forward to a day off. As soon as she she’d heard the news reports, however, two things had gone through her mind. First, that her son was . . . the gods only knew where in the world, apparently on a mission with Sigrun, Adam, and the others. Sigrun and Adam rescued me, and then they brought me home. Twice. They’ll bring my son home, too. Fritti swallowed, and put it out of her mind, which allowed admittance to a different thought, entirely. Oh, gods. We’re about to have a refugee crisis that’s going to dwarf the one from the northlands. I have to go to work. We’re going to be swamped with people.
In North Africa, a group of Berber nomads, who had already completed their seasonal migration out of the Sahara and moved with their camels and their sheep into the high pastures of the Atlas mountains, were struck by tragedy as a rock-fall caused by one of the quakes killed a grandfather, the eldest member of the group. His wife, who had been carding wool near their tent, dropped what she was doing to run to him, screaming, but her relatives held her back, looking up at the sere cliff-face above them apprehensively. She clutched at her head, knocking her scarf askew, feeling a splinter of something pounding into her brain. “Don’t just stand there!” she shouted. “Kill it! Kill the giant that has your father trapped under his foot! Save him!!”
Her sons and grandsons stared at her, and then at the rock-fall, from which dust still rose in a cloud, and turned her over to the women. They needed to try to keep the startled herds of sheep and camels from wandering off . . . though at least one of her sons felt a wash of lethargy cross through him as he realized that none of it mattered. They had the sun and the mountains and the free air, but the world was ending, and they would all die with nothing to show for their lives. It was a thought that had occasionally occurred to him in the past, but never with this magnitude.
One of the grandchildren, about twelve years old, stood transfixed. Rather than helping to herd the sheep back together, though everyone around her shouted for her to do so, she smiled. “Their voices are so beautiful,” she told her family. “I have to do what they tell me to do.”
“Who? What voices?”
“The spirits, of course. I have to follow them. I’m sorry.”
One of her brothers ran after her, and tried to stop her before she calmly walked over the edge of a cliff, but to no avail. He staggered back to camp, his face stunned, and fighting back tears; though twelve, he was old enough to behave as a man ought. “She went mad,” he told the others. “Just . . . mad.”
In the battered city of Tacape, the chemical production giant of the region, hardly a single building stood upright, and chemicals poured out of shattered tanks, into the earth and the open air. A pall of toxic smoke hung over the city, which was heavily, dangerously lethal in some areas, particularly where ammonia and chlorine were involved. Rescue efforts started simply and locally, as survivors dug for the members of their own families. Gardia, fire response, and medical responses were hampered, as many of the people who provided these services had been trapped in fallen buildings, themselves. A group of sorcerer
s, based at a small technomancy school at the center of town, began moving from building to building, trying to raise fallen I-beams and pull out survivors. Lifting with will alone, one of the sorcerers pulled a little girl out of the debris, and stared down at her, aghast. “Come on, come on, we’ve got more people trapped in there!” one of his companions shouted at him. “Is she breathing?”
“Yes . . . .”
“Then treat for shock and move on, we don’t have time.”
“You don’t understand. She’s covered in spines.”
“What, she’s bleeding?” One of his companions came over, and finally got a good look at the eight-year-old cradled in the man’s arms, and his mouth fell open. The man’s grip had to be careful, and not just out of respect for the possible broken bones and internal injuries. The entire dorsal side of the girl’s body was covered in four-inch-long white spines, like those of a desert hedgehog. They had replaced her hair, and flowed down over her spine and legs, all the way to her ankles. They’d clearly grown through her clothing, too, and little splatters of blood suggested that they’d thrust their way through her skin from the inside out. “Oh my gods. What the fuck? Was this some kind of a sick experimental laboratory or something?”
“I don’t know. But this looks fresh. She looks like those gods-be-damned nieten, only a new one. I think it’s probably a blessing she was unconscious for this,” the first man replied, grimly. “How can I treat for shock if I can’t put her on her back?”
“Ah . . . the quills should . . . lie flat once she’s lying down, right? Let’s try, anyway.”
In Carthage itself, to the northwest of Tacape, one out of every ten people died in the next twenty-four hours, either crushed by rubble in the first quakes, or in the floods as the giant waves flooded back across the enclosed basin of the Mediterranean, though more gently than they had initially struck places like Crete and Sicily. Survivors ran through the streets, some of them clearly hallucinating. Some people muttered that this was all the result of a government conspiracy, and began shooting at gardia and medical response teams as they moved into neighborhoods with heavy equipment, trying to rescue as many people as they could.
At one office building near the port, rescuers were vastly puzzled. “Astarte’s tits. Who brings a lion into an office complex?” one of them demanded.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve got a paw here.”
“Maybe the president of the company was a gladiatorial enthusiast and wanted to make a point about non-productive employees.”
Graveyard humor. Necessary to maintain sanity in the face of so much destruction.
A third man joined them. “If there’s a lion, there’s probably a handler, too. Just be very gods-be-damned careful. An injured lion will probably try to eat your face. Work around it for now.”
A voice, from under the rubble, rough and hard to understand, but clearly audible. “Is . . . someone there? Help!”
The voice was coming directly from where the paw was, and they could see the paw twitching, spasming. Grimly, they worked, layer by layer, atop the shifting pile of debris, their faces covered by scarves in a futile effort to keep the plaster dust and . . . everything else . . . out of their lungs. They moved to where they thought the man’s head was, and finally uncovered a tawny mane of hair, which they jittered back from, one man reaching for a pistol. The head turned, cautiously, revealing . . . a mostly human face. Golden eyes, a heavy beard that melded in with the mane, and viciously curving teeth behind lips that had been pulled thin and cleft below the nose. “Thank you,” the man mumbled, dazedly, clearly barely conscious. “Thank you.”
Nieten was their first thought, but as they uncovered the rest of him, they realized that he went beyond a mere nieten. His entire lower body had been replaced. Like a centaur on a Hellene vase, he had the upper body of a man—still wearing his stained and battered work shirt—but the lower body of a male adult lion. Two arms, with clawed fingers. Four paws. A tail. And he had a piece of rebar through one of his leonine legs.
The rescuers all stared at one another, their eyes wide and blank above their makeshift masks. And then, as one, they lifted the man-beast free of the rebar—he screamed, and blacked out from the pain—and then they carried him, awkwardly, to a litter, and did their best to staunch the blood. And then got back to work, not knowing what they’d find next.
In Hellas, Sophia Caetia had awoken this morning, and didn’t see herself taking any appointments. For once, she knew precisely what day it was, and huddled on her bed in her room with the ghastly murals on the walls. Finally, at just about ten in the morning, she got out her paints, and approached the only bare wall in her suite, and began to outline the sketch she knew needed to be there. The scene she knew Sigrun would, eventually, need to see, in order to know where to find her. A mountain path. Five male centaurs. And a single, broken human female body. The face wasn’t visible—Sophia never could draw herself—but she’d daub in golden hair and a white, blood-stained peplos later. For now, she just needed to get the figures started. The raw, brutish energy of the centaurs, the madness in their eyes. They’d been men once. The transformation would start the distance from the rest of humanity, the breakdown of law and order would add to it, and then the mad gods would take away whatever had remained.
Sophia hummed as she worked, but tears streaked down her face. I can’t step away from the path. It’s not possible. And even if I could . . . the whole world could be undone. The only hope of the future is if Sigrun lives. If any one thing changes . . . it can all change. But it can’t change, so it’s safe. The future’s . . . safe.
She could see it all happening, before-and-as the shockwave occurred. The energy wave actually moved faster than the seismic ones, and, of course, she could see where it went before it actually reached there. A knock. “Sophia! There’s been an earthquake in North Africa!” one of her fellow Pythias shouted through the door, sounding agitated.
“I know. There will be two more, and then something that will register like a nuclear plant exploding on the seismographs. Also, there will be tidal waves. You should urge government officials to evacuate people in coastal cities to higher ground.” Sophia reached over and turned on her far-viewer, just for background noise. And with every report, from every city, she could see the future unfold.
In Athens, a woman slipped over a fallen marble column, staggering out of a temple before the whole building collapsed. In the square outside, as people around her screamed and ran, she dropped to her knees, screaming in pain as every cell in her body burned. She writhed on the ground for ten minutes, clearly in the hold of some kind of seizure, and finally fell unconscious.
When she would awaken in a hospital, tomorrow, she would look down at herself in horror. Her skin had shifted from olive to a vibrant jade green, and taken on a waxy, smooth feeling as the hair on her arms and body fell away, though the rich cloud of dark, curly hair on her head remained the same. The sclera of her eyes was green, as she found when a nurse there, with a look of horror on her face, handed her a mirror, but the irises remained dark brown. She couldn’t know it yet, but a battery of tests on her would reveal monumental changes to her entire physiology. Her cell walls were now made of cellulose and pectin—materials common to plants, not animals. She had chloroplasts now, embedded in all her epidermal cells, and this helped her produce energy when she was in the sunlight—which felt warm and good on her skin now, like a lover’s caress. She could still eat and digest other plants, and even animal proteins—it was better for her, and those of her kind, apparently, to do so when sunlight was scant. The pores in her skin, and most of her follicles that had produced hair had been replaced by stoma, and she could respire CO2 through her skin, and oxygen through her lungs—breathing was now mostly optional for her, so long as she was holding relatively still. For heavy exercise, such as endurance running, her lungs were still needed, but her skin-breathing gave her an extra boost. The stoma also helped her regulate
water loss . . . as did the waxy sheen of her skin.
She would weep. She’d beg the gods on bended knees to take this affliction away from her. But there’d be others of her kind, both male and female. Some would take after deciduous plants, and be highly sensitive to cold. Others would take more after conifers, and their hair would fall out, replaced by needle-like spikes. They could reproduce together, but not with other humans. They were further from humanity than the jotun.
In three years, she’d realize she was pregnant, though her husband had left her, and her fellow dryads would ask her if she’d taken a lover or been masturbating—female dryads could get themselves with child, if they weren’t careful!— and she’d tell them, indignantly, no! But that she hadn’t felt like eating since Achille left her, and that she’d thought she’d needed to lose weight . . . . And that would be the first time that doctors would realize that low-light conditions and a starvation-like diet could lead a dryad to bud . . . to reproduce asexually and spontaneously, as her body thought that drought conditions might lead to the organism’s death.
Males would prove incapable of budding, and apparently, most of would be relieved by this fact.
Sophia, locked in her vision, dreamily wondered how that might have worked, if it had been possible. If a seed-pod would have swelled up, replacing the testicles, and then fallen off when it was time, only to allow the testicles to regenerate, later. It probably would have made it difficult for the male to walk, she decided, and let the vision flow take her away again as she painted.
The Goddess Denied (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 2) Page 94