“What’s the situation?” said Ptolemy.
“We’re out of control,” said the helmsman.
“So let me drive,” said the bastard son of Philip—he grabbed the helmsman and hurled him screaming from the ship. Then, turning to the stunned officers—“Give me someone with balls! Someone who can steer this thing! Get that fucking sail down, by the gods! Get some men out on the hull and cut that fucking deadweight loose!” He sounded like a madman. He wondered if that was what he’d become. He half-expected those officers to hurl him from the ship too. But the instinct to obey ran too deep. They were Macedonians first. Only second were they men. The catamaran just missed a cliff and then hurtled onto the side of the biggest wave Ptolemy had ever seen. And only the royal blood that ran through his veins prevented him from shitting in his pants at what lay at the bottom of it.
“Nothing,” said Lugorix.
As the clouds ahead of him cleared, he could see the water pouring in sheets off the edge of everything, thundering down into abyss. It was the waterfall to end all waterfalls—and yet with Eurydice navigating and Barsine at the helm, the Xerxes was hurtling in toward it at just the right angle, making straight for the one place where the water ran down what looked like a gigantic ramp. All Lugorix could hear was the roar of the falls and the sound of Matthias praying. Next moment they were on that ramp and on either side was… not a thing—except for two of the Carthaginian ships, turning over and over as they tumbled into oblivion. But their flagship was a little faster—it skated right along the edge of the waterfall and then veered onto the ramp behind them.
“They went that way,” yelled Eumenes, sighting with the farseeker. The rain was so intense he couldn’t even make out what had happened to the Persian craft—all he could see was that the Carthaginian flagship had followed it, and he knew whoever was piloting that ship was no idiot. Also, both boats seemed to slide from view, while the ones that went over the waterfall everywhere else lurched forward sickeningly before plunging out of sight. That was all Eumenes needed to know about where his only chance for survival lay. And as they hurtled in toward it, they saw all that lay beyond…
“The world is fucking flat,” said Kalyana as he went down on both knees.
“Let’s make sure we stay on it,” muttered Eumenes.
The ironclad surged onto the ramp, began hurtling down it.
The ramp was the only way that offered even the slightest hope of living. That much was clear. As was why no one dared to venture too far beyond the Pillars. The crazy stories that sailors told about how the ocean frayed and the world ended were all true. But Ptolemy had to admire his new helmsman’s pragmatism: the man seemed to be beyond fear as he expertly compensated for the intensifying deadweight represented by the left-hand side of the boat. It wouldn’t work for long. Then again, it didn’t have to. The crippled catamaran roared onto the ramp, charged down into the unknown.
They were picking up speed. As they accelerated away from the lip of ocean, the full extent of the waterfall pouring from the world’s edge became apparent, stretching off on either side of the ramp until it was swallowed up by mist. But up ahead, that mist was dissipating; Lugorix could see pinpricks of light glimmering through it—
“Stars,” said Eurydice.
Lugorix nodded. He drew his blade, slashed away the rope, began to crawl along the hull of the Xerxes, dragging himself toward the turret. Eurydice was so intent on those stars that she only noticed him as he pulled himself up next to her—she glanced round at him in surprise.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Look out,” he said, pointing past her. She looked back in front of her and then screamed a warning to Barsine, who threw the rudder over, just barely keeping pace with how sharply that unearthly ramp turned to the right. The Xerxes smashed into the side of the ramp as it struggled to navigate the bend—and then it was through, rumbling down the second part of the ramp which curled back beneath the first. Lugorix could see the massive support struts and beams that sprouted out from the side of what seemed to be a gigantic rocky wall—the ramp ended in a tunnel set into that wall. They roared in toward it while Lugorix climbed down the ladder into the cabin of the Xerxes.
Barsine was sitting at the controls, silently weeping. He put one enormous arm around her shoulder.
“It’s alright,” he said.
“I wish that were true,” she replied.
They surged into the tunnel.
“Shall we fire, sir?”
Eumenes could understand the temptation. That damn Carthaginian twelve-decker was only about two hundred meters ahead, and firing the torpedoes down this ramp would be akin to a turkey shoot. Which was the problem. The last thing they needed was a piece of flaming junk right in their path. And that was assuming the explosions didn’t bring down the ramp itself. But now the Carthaginian ship was veering to the side as it negotiated a steep turn in the ramp which curved on itself, back toward the edge of the Earth. It lurched sharply; several of the siege-engines on its deck slid over the side and fell into abyss. And then the Carthaginian ship was onto the ramp’s lower section, passing beneath Eumenes’ ship as it headed in toward the cliff. Next moment, Eumenes’ ship was negotiating the same turn; he heard a clanking as his steersmen shifted gears, switching the propellors into reverse, slowing down the ship just enough to prevent it from going over the edge as the rush of water carried it around the bend and in toward a tunnel set in the rocky wall of Earth. But Eumenes wasn’t even really looking at it. His eyes were focused on the curve his ship had just traversed—at what was about to try to follow him—
“This ought to be fun,” he said.
Ptolemy’s eyes went wide as he saw what the hamstrung catamaran was heading for. He gripped the edge of the beam in front of him, muttered a prayer to the gods, the irony of the gesture all too palpable to him: as though the gods would take pity on anyone mad enough to sail a giant catamaran off the end of the ocean. As they hit the turn on the ramp, there was a terrible grinding crack, followed by the even worse noise of wood tearing asunder. The floor bucked under their feet as the rightward boat lurched to the side, remained on the ramp while the leftward one sheared off entirely, smashed over the edge, disintegrating into pieces falling away into nothingness, men turning over and over as they tumbled. Ptolemy caught a glimpse of stars above his head—stars all around—and then the halved-catamaran was rumbling after the other ships, closing in on the maw that led into the bowels of the Earth.
“It’s not truly Atlantis, is it?” said Lugorix.
“It’s been called that,” Barsine replied.
Lugorix shook his head. It was all he needed to hear to understand how totally he’d been deceived. For his own good? For hers? For the world’s? He didn’t know. The tunnel roof had closed in over their heads. The Xerxes was sailing down into the darkness. Barsine switched off the engines. Eurydice was no longer calling out any directions. She couldn’t see where they were going. None of them could.
“Shouldn’t we be getting some torches up on the deck?” asked Lugorix.
“We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves,” replied Barsine.
There was something in the way she said it that made it sound like she was more concerned about what was in front of them rather than what was pursuing them. The craft was picking up speed now, the angle of their descent steepening. If there was any kind of barrier or obstacle ahead, the first they were going to know about it was when they smashed into it. But that didn’t seem to be worrying Barsine.
“I told you before we even got to the Pillars that Atlantis was just one word for it,” she said. “But it’s got many others. And nearly all of them are romantic myths. Anything to avoid having to face what really lies at the end of West. Because that’s the one thing people can’t deal with.”
And now Lugorix started to see something out there—the glimmers of phosphorescence very far away, as though he was looking up at an enormous bowl. Other lights burnt on top
of what might have been a distant mountain peak—or maybe it was a tower—but those lights were strange: they seemed a little like torches, but unlike torchlight they didn’t waver. And if they were fire, then they were an odd color: not so much orange-red as yellow-white. Lugorix had never wanted to be somewhere less.
“What can’t people deal with,” he heard himself say.
“The thing the Greeks call Hades,” she replied.
Chapter Eighteen
The decisive moment was approaching.
The bridge was less than a quarter mile to completion—just out of range of the Athenian siege-engines, mounted on the hills around the beach. The crews of all those catapults and ballisatae and trebuchets had fired enough rocks across the last few days to have their range calibrated perfectly—they knew exactly where each missile was going to land and they couldn’t wait for the workers atop that bridge to extend it another fifty meters. Nor could the several hundred ships of the Athenian navy that surrounded that bridge on three sides. They kept a wary distance to be sure, held at bay by siege-engines positioned along the length of the bridge—but they had their own machines aboard and were obviously preparing to assault the great structure from all sides in a combined offensive.
Watching the scene from a cave in one of the hills, Agathocles figured it was going to be an interesting fight. That’s when he noticed Athenian riders tearing ass into the main camp. Shortly thereafter, his spies brought word that a frenzied argument was underway in the Athenian command tent. Apparently the just-arrived viceroy of Syracuse—one of the archons himself—had commanded that the troops be withdrawn from the beach. And some of those troops were objecting in no uncertain terms.
“It’s bullshit,” said Xanthippus.
Diocles shrugged. He wasn’t in the mood to listen to Xanthippus. Truth be told, he wasn’t in the mood to listen to anyone. The higher-ups argued about plans, and then the lower-downs argued about what the higher-ups were going to do, and it didn’t really matter. Someone who was neither him nor Xanthippus would make a decision, and then someone would die. Hopefully it wouldn’t be him.
“Did you hear what I said?” growled Xanthippus.
“Sure I did,” said Diocles. “Didn’t realize you needed an answer.”
Xanthippus spat noisily. He didn’t, of course. Bitching was its own reward. It was the only perk involved in crouching in this trench with a bunch of other soldiers looking out at all those ships and that fucking bridge that came closer with every passing day. If Diocles had had his druthers, they’d still be wandering along the barren Iberian coast—or better yet, wandering deeper into Iberia. Getting off the map and into the wilderness and away from all this mess. The two of them had been lovers since Diocles was sixteen, and ever since then that was all Diocles had wanted to do—run away with the older man, split from everything. But Xanthippus had been in the army. That hadn’t meant much back in those days—he was stationed in Athens, he’d had plenty of time to spend with Diocles, and there was no real sense that that time would ever be at an end. The empire had been at its height, halcyon days, with no storm clouds on the horizon. Yet for Diocles it had never been halcyon. Everywhere he looked there were those who weren’t fully human under law: women, slaves, foreigners… while those in the assembly shouted and swore and those with the money steered that shouting in any direction they wanted. He didn’t know why these things bothered him so much. They didn’t seem to bother anyone else.
Certainly not Xanthippus. He believed in Athens, and even when he didn’t, he believed it was better than any alternative. And when war came, that alternative got a whole lot worse. Macedonia and its god-kings were a whole new level of trouble. So Diocles enlisted too. Not that he fooled himself for a moment that he was doing so for any other reason than to be with Xanthippus. And so, less than three days after being dropped off in Iberia by that crazy gang in that crazy ship (no point in telling that story to anyone), he’d helped his lover light a bonfire when they sighted the sails of an Athenian warship. They didn’t know how fortunate they’d been until they reached Sicily, where they found out that in the wake of the fall of Carthage and Massilia there was hardly any Athenian activity west of Sicily. The Empire had pulled in its extremities like a tortoise just seeking to survive.
But now the pair of them were part of that Empire once again. They were Athenian soldiers, said Xanthippus; they’d sworn an oath on the altar of Athena, and you couldn’t break those oaths lightly. In fact, you couldn’t break such oaths at all, unless the altar itself shattered. Which it probably would before this all this was over. But in that case their bodies would most likely be in pieces along with it.
“Did you hear that?” said Xanthippus. Diocles was too immersed in his thoughts to register that Xanthippus had even spoken—the man had to shake him by the shoulder to rouse him from his reverie.
“Hear what?” he asked.
“We’re moving out,” said a third man. “Orders just came on down.”
“So they finally made up their minds,” said Diocles.
“To obey?” Xanthippus laughed. “Took them long enough.”
“And obeying’s all we can do”—but the third man trailed off in mid-sentence as a series of thunderous booms suddenly reverberated over the hills. The ground shook as though it was getting smacked by an earthquake. Trails of fire roared over the hills from behind them.
“Macks in the rear!” yelled somebody.
“Holy shit,” said Xanthippus as those plumes arced above them and rained down on the Athenian fleet, pancaking into ship after ship. Some detonated on the spot, some just caught fire, began to sink as the water rushed through the holes punched in their hulls. From an organizational perspective, the attack came at the absolute worst time imaginable, since the orders had just been given to abandon positions and march away. Everyone was yelling and shouting and screaming and a lot of soldiers were just running off the beach entirely. So much for retreating in an orderly fashion…. Xanthippus stayed where he was, so Diocles did too. Which left them in an excellent position to watch while lines of foaming water suddenly began to radiate out from positions on that great bridge—almost as though very fast fishes were swimming below the surface. As each of those lines touched an Athenian ship, that ship detonated, flinging wood and bodies into the water with unbelievable force. Within thirty seconds, every ship that was visible was on fire. But still those plumes of flame kept hurtling in from over the hills.
Only now they were falling onto the beach.
“We’re gone,” said Xanthippus. He grabbed Diocles and shoved him out of the trench, scrambling after him as the soldiers on the beach began dying messily. Flame and smoke was everywhere. Someone yelled that the Macks were upon them. And then Diocles saw them: hundreds of men wearing Mack armor and riding on… he had to blink to make sure he was seeing them correctly.
They were camels.
He only recognized them because he’d seen a merchant in Athens selling them once, to grace the gardens of the rich. He hadn’t been impressed. They were noisy and they were smelly and and now they were everywhere. Macedonians leapt down off their backs and speared Athenians still blinded by the smoke. An arrow hit Xanthippus in the shoulder and he went down. Diocles dropped to his knees next to him.
“Leave me,” he muttered.
Diocles said nothing—just grabbed the larger man and dragged him to his feet before putting his arm around his shoulder and helping him stagger forward. He had no idea what the plan was—get back to the trench? Get chopped to pieces? Stand back to back and fight? He saw some rocks up ahead. He pulled Xanthippus into their lee.
That was when he noticed the cave.
It wasn’t much. But under the circumstances it was enough. Diocles helped the wounded Xanthippus inside. The two men crawled deeper.
“That’s far enough,” said a voice.
Diocles stopped. “There’s room for us all to hide,” he said.
“Your friend needs medical attention.”
“I’ll manage,” grunted Xanthippus.
“We need to get that arrow out,” said the voice.
“For that, you’ll need some light,” said another.
There was the sound of metal striking flint. In the light of the flame they saw a face—long nose and short dirty hair and unkempt beard. Two other men crouched behind him. None of them looked to be Athenian.
“Who the hell are you guys?” asked Diocles.
“Observers from Syracuse,” said the first man.
“Doing what?”
“Watching your fleet get axed,” said the second. “Perdiccas landed a fleet on the coast.”
“Perdiccas?” Diocles was tired of all these strange names.
“One of the Mack generals. Burnt all his boats on the northern shore. Though we never dreamt he’d get here so quick.”
Xanthippus frowned. “You’re working with the Macks?”
“We’re working with the rats,” said the first man, gesturing at the burrow they were in. Everyone started laughing, even Xanthippus. After a moment, Diocles joined in too. It seemed like the polite thing to do.
Matthias clambered down the ladder.
“Eurydice said I was needed down here,” he said.
Barsine nodded. “You are. You two can start rowing as though your lives depended on it.”
“And while we do that you’re going to tell me what this place is,” said Matthias as he settled his hands around an oar.
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