One day, she hoped, the humans might learn the truth and understand, but, of course, that was a fool’s dream. She knew they would never thank her, never accept them for what they were after the white lies spoken to spare humanity the worst.
The lie would burn like acid, pain and anger overwriting calm rationality. Judgement was coming and the Warriors of Mithras were its deliverers.
* * *
Mithras’ devotees, seers of an argued truth,
Flocked to the Eternal City as outlawed pilgrims.
Welcomed as all are, within the tenets of Tanit’s law,
They began to seek the power that faith offered up
And crave it as their own.
— From The Elissiad
The city was in uproar, riots rippling out from the temple district to the poorer parts of town. Someone had thrown a spark and the city had nearly exploded, metaphorically and literally. The Warriors were on the march, the people running or joining their ranks, a choice as stark as life and death.
Fires were blazing, smoke tainting the air. Explosions were rocking the Elephant Gate and sending the great stone beasts to their annihilation. From rock to carved stone, from time-honoured sentinels of a bygone moment of glory to dust ground into powder.
All cities must one day fall, even ones raised up by gods. Especially those.
Elissa watched from the temple; it was more her home than the ancestral palace that her family name allowed her to claim as home. She knew a princess might escape where a priestess would not but she was Tanit’s servant and that still meant something to her even as she understood what Attis’ parents truly were, not gods but others, from beyond the realms of man or deity.
She had lain with Attis more than once but there was something special, something pure about that last time in the back room of the temple; a rite more sacred than any performed in Tanit’s worship.
They had woken to a city in uproar and Attis had left her, briefly, with promises he’d return, and take her from the city before it burned itself out in anger and rage.
She used the time to absorb the truths he had told her and she almost sympathised with the Wild Man; grief had forced open his eyes to see things most normal people would never even consider. They had seen a locked box but he had opened it and riffled through the contents.
They were not gods but mortal others, albeit ones from an alien sphere orbiting a different star. He had explained and she had understood but that was a luxury few in Carthage would share. They would only feel the sting of betrayal as the Wild Man and his acolytes told them a truth skewed by hate and fear.
And the people of Carthage were left, in limbo, right at the heart of it all.
The populace felt wronged by what they saw as deception and she could almost see her death reflecting in their eyes. The mobs coalesced, their flickering torches, the ripples of their anger and fury echoing closer. They were coming for her and there was little she could do to stop her fate from catching up with her.
Was this how the Roman Senate, those aging warriors and patricians now enjoying their retirement from the army with power and pleasure, had felt when the Father of Strategy had breached the gates of Rome?
Had they seen the extinguishing of their dreams, of the Pax Romana? Had they laid down and run knives over their veins or had they tried to fight the inevitable, to save their beloved city and the republic on which they had invested their lives? History said Hannibal had lined them up and executed every man who would not take his own life with honour.
What could she do when faced with such a similar end?
“Elissa!” Attis called out for her, sounding frantic as his voice echoed through the temple’s hall.
The candlelight, glinting on the blade in her hand, had temporarily seduced her. She was dreaming of death before the blade had even tasted her blood. His voice shattered the pull, her silent invocation to death; his words becoming stoppers of wax in her ears against the Sirens of old.
“Attis?” Her voice cracked like glass and she reached for him.
“You’re alive. Come on, we need to get out of this city before the mob find us.” He offered his hand, the curve of his horns catching the fire light. “Even being princess, heir apparent, won’t save you from their wrath tonight and they want me dead, the bull to be slain.”
“Where do we go?”
“We take a sky-ship, already programmed. Then we leave, go somewhere where no one knows the names Attis and Elissa.”
She nodded. “You would rather live with me?”
“I’m more mortal than I am what my mother is,” he replied, hair curling over his beautiful ears, over the markers of his non-humanity. “I would never pass as Tanit and Baal’s child where they call home. I would be as much an oddity, an outcast, as they are here. They plan to leave, to return in centuries when minds have opened and anger has cooled. I intend to stay. With you.”
Her heart wanted to burst from the joy that he had put her before his parents, sided with humanity over those-who-weren’t-gods. But this was not the time for such trivialities or for telling him of the sickness, the courses which had failed to come and the seeds taking root in her belly.
“We can escape through the Priests’ Gate.” She said, taking his hand and pulling him through the back of the temple, into the courtyard which backed onto the streets.
A voice rose in the streets: “Tanit and Baal are false deities! They lie, they deceive! They blind you, citizens of Carthage. Our city was eternal before they came and now it is tainted by their darkness. Rise up and see the light, reclaim your city and your lives!”
In the span of hours, anger had erupted and, again, night was sweeping over Carthage. Lamps had been lit, orbs of glass and ever-burning flame that Tanit had gifted them to light even the darkest night.
So much of this city had come from the goddess’ generosity: the clean water, the night lights, the libraries’ worth of books on a single glass tablet. They were the small forms of magic which even humans could summon and dismiss at their whim but bettered the lives of the city as a whole.
“What is your mother?” Elissa asked. “You said they were Other but what is that?”
“She’s as mortal as you or I.” He replied. “She was born on a world so far from here you can’t even see it in the skies.”
“Then why come here?”
“An accident,” he replied. “Long before I was born. They were marooned here and decided, because of the primitiveness of humanity, that being gods was the only way you’d understand what they are. They needed to repair their vessel and gods have always accepted gifts. Somewhere along the way, they decided to stay.”
“And now?”
“A lie is bitter even one told with the best intentions. Their time is done here.”
Elissa pulled her hood further over her face. “Will Carthage fall?”
Attis looked genuinely lost, as if he had no answer to give her. “All cities must, eventually, I suppose. There’s no such thing as true immortality. I don’t think they wish the city’s destruction though, just the power that comes from dominance.”
Arrows whistled through the night air and filled Elissa with dread. An archer was on the roof, no doubt angered by the day’s revelations. He probably didn’t even know who they were but was instead simply trying to prevent people from coming too close to the temple… or leaving it.
Another arrow hissed by her ear, embedding itself into the lintel of a house. Elissa’s stomach settled in her mouth and she nearly stumbled and pulled Attis down with her, into the dust of a pot-holed street.
The blood was hot and, for a moment, she thought it was her own. Red, deep crimson-scarlet, and spattered across her face. For a fleeting second, Elissa was convinced an arrow had caught her as it flew past, a surface wound but she felt no pain.
Attis collapsed on top of her, pale as a shade.
“No!”
The arrow was buried in his back, deep enough to pierce organs and kill a mort
al man. Attis might be a son of gods, no, a son of Others, but he was still like her. He lived a life on borrowed time and his, well, it was about to run out as if the Fates themselves had cut his life-string.
“You have to go, Elissa…” He coughed, blood bubbling from his lips. “Get out of the city.”
His lifeblood washed the streets, staining her hands but she knew there was nothing she could do. The smell of it swamped her senses, dragging her down into a dark and terrible place that didn’t have Attis in it.
“Attis, please don’t leave me.”
He couldn’t answer; the light had already left his eyes and she screamed his name into the darkness, unable to call his soul back from wherever it had gone.
* * *
And Carthage, doomed to fall to ash and dust,
Boiled in dissension across the summer night.
The Warriors of Mithras unspooled calm
And left chaos and death in their wake as the city fell.
Above them, in the darkened sky,
Tanit and Baal prepared themselves to ascend
And return to their ancestral realms beyond the star-lit heavens.
And below them, devout Elissa was left behind.
— From The Elissiad
She had run all night and now dawn was coming.
Elissa stumbled, clothes stained crimson from the blood and black with smoke. She bent into a gutter, emptying her stomach and wracked by sobs, the convulsions forcing every mote of joy from her memory. They would find him, in the dust, a dead creature hung between two worlds. Attis would become the symbol of sacrifice, of blood shed to save a life and the inevitability of death.
The Warriors of Mithras had slain their bull and the sun would rise on a new, very different city, smote by righteousness. She hoped the Wild Man had found peace in the chaos and the death of so many unbelievers.
Fires were burning on the horizon, ash and soot and smoke hanging across the skyline.
Elissa felt the shock hitting her now, her heart was hammering, her skin coated with dirt and blood. She shook, tears sending streaks down her face. She had seen them, from the shadows, parading Attis’ dead form, crying out that they had slain the Bull-Lord, Attis, and Mithras now ruled Carthage instead of the liars Tanit and Baal.
It had broken her even as she fled, using the back streets to move across the city and escape it.
Above her, she saw a glinting silver ship, like the sky-ship Attis had used to take her to see the elephants, but this was many times larger. It expelled fire like the roar of some ancient beast from primal mythology, from before the monsters even of ancient Olympus and Egypt. It moved, slowly disappearing into the dark, and she wouldn’t even have noticed it had she not been looking at just that moment.
She watched from the field as it began to move, the engines roaring as Tanit and Baal returned to wherever their kind dwelled. Did they know about Attis? Did they care? Did they think the pair of them had absconded to live a happy life together?
The truth was much more stark and it made her want to weep anew as her goddess left her, abandoning city and priestess. The despair of it rising up to drown her.
Outside the city’s gates, the land turned flat, fields and grassland stretching out in the star-filled half-dark that came just before dawn. She could see the aura of it, the sun peeking above the skyline and slowly casting ancient light over the bloodied ruins of Tanit’s Eternal City, now rendered mortal, dying with the coming of the day.
Elissa Barca, one of the few survivors of doomed Carthage, walked into the dawn and uncertainty, grieving for all she had lost.
A Word from Asha Bardon
The happiest part of my traumatic foray into compulsory education was learning you could study what was then termed “Classical Civilisations”; a two-year A-Level course which focused on ancient Greece and Rome, covering everything from art and literature to religion and history.
I spent two amazing years and then the first of my BA lost in the ancient world. (I studied both Classics and Religious Studies and Theology, until the Classics department shut down.) I learned about religion in Athens, about the creation of pottery and the distinctive art forms of sculpture. I learned about Rome, about Egypt and Cleopatra, I read Juvenal’s Satires, The Bacchae and, of course, Virgil’s Aeneid.
“The Elissiad” is my ode to that era, though twisted by the key moment when Hannibal Barca crossed the Alps with his elephants and, instead of defeat, he obliterated Rome and Carthage, his home city, gained the mantle of the centre of the civilised world, the Eternal City.
In the Aeneid, Aeneas falls for Queen Dido (whose Carthaginian name, by the way, is Elissa), their romance engineered by the gods and it ends, of course, in tragedy. Dido’s fate eventually sees her cursing eternal enmity between the as-yet-unfounded Rome and Carthage and she is one of many figures Aeneas is briefly reunited with when he wanders the Underworld. She invokes gods and becomes the reason for a city to hate another city that lingers into the consciousness of an empire.
But what if, in this landmark city sustained and built from stolen Roman technology, there were aliens involved? Part of what I loved the most about classics was the religious side and the cult of the Great Goddess, Magna Mater, Isis, Cybele, Cythera of the Seas… it was a key part of the Roman part of life for them to adopted cults and enfold them into the official religious canon of the Empire.
For the people of Carthage, life was different and their religious life was dominated by a mother/father pair: Tanit and Baal. Tanit, as a deity, was known for accepting stillborn children so what if her alien incarnation used them as a way to bridge the gap between herself and Baal and the humans who worshiped them as gods.
Against this was the original monotheists, the solar cult of Mithras, whose most famous piece of iconography shows him slaying a bull. As in Rome, their religion has made its home in Carthage but, for some unexplained reason, they see through the deception and seek to “enlighten” the rest of the city.
Though I was initially daunted when Sam accepted my pitch, “The Elissiad” became this delightful way to take not only alternate history but also subvert the things I learned to make an interesting narrative. This is, for me, what makes writing fiction such fun.
In a former life Asha Bardon was Lesley Smith, a freelance journalist, but now writes fiction full time. She’s written two novels: The Changing of the Sun and The Parting of the Waters. She is currently working on various projects including a trilogy and a duology of novels set in her Ashteraiverse.
Asha's hobbies include baking, archery, and binge-watching box sets on Netflix. She lives in a small English market town with three cats and her guide dog, Unis.
She blogs at ashabardon.com and lives on Twitter as @AshaBardon
The Tesla Gate
by Drew Avera
It’s early in the twentieth century and Nikola Tesla is attempting to build a device to traverse time and space. And as he gets closer to opening the Tesla Gate, what he doesn’t realize is that he risks losing a part of himself, a second personality, that is more real than he imagined.
SEPTEMBER 1904
"IT'S BEEN EIGHTEEN YEARS, Nikola," she said, pursing her lips as she watched me work through a line of empty beakers and vials. "Can't you at least pretend you're excited to test our invention?"
I scoffed lightly while scribbling more notes on a torn piece of paper. "My invention, Alokin," I reminded her. A negligible comment considering the small detail that we shared the same brainwaves.
"I'm just as much a part of you as the image you see in your reflection," she retorted, "perhaps more, given our secret."
Her words burned, molding me into a man less devoted to studies and more convinced that what I had to offer truly would change the world. Alokin was the one who insisted my talents were wasted with Edison. My true calling was to be perched atop the world and looking down on my own creation, like a god. She was right, though, it had been eighteen years.
"I'm sorry," I
whispered, partially for my excluding her from my work, but mostly for being too distracted to perform simple calculus proficiently enough to not make a mistake on the last scrap of clean paper I could find in my lab. I held back a curse as I thought of how many mistakes could be erased if I didn't insist on writing exclusively in ink.
A smile stretched across her face and the elation in her eyes was distracting me. "Apology accepted, at least the part you meant for me."
She knew me too well.
A knock at the door distracted both of us for a moment. We looked into one another's eyes, both riddled with the frustration of work interrupted. Few things wrought such utter agitation as distractions, especially when I was on the cusp of the greatest discovery in the history of mankind. "I wasn't expecting a guest. Were you?" A smirk and shake of the head preceded her walk towards the door as she phased through my work station and passed through me like a spirit. I was used to it, even the jolt of shock which accompanied it. "Wait for me," I said softly, not wanting the visitor to know I was talking to myself.
The heavy wooden door opened with a pull, made difficult because the frame was slightly warped.
"Nikola," my visitor said as he pushed his way past me. His hair was a mess atop his head and he looked as if he hadn't slept for days. "I've been sending you letters, haven't you seen them?"
I watched as Samuel shuffled through my correspondence, lackadaisically tossing the uninteresting slosh back onto the table. There was a time when I would have been nervous around him, given the stature of the man more commonly known to the world as Mark Twain; for me he was more than a celebrity, he was a savior. It was his words in story form which kept me going when I fell ill so long ago. I owed a lot to him, even if I never spoke about it. "I'm sorry, I've been really-"
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