“Hades,” said Lugorix. He expected Matthias to freak out, but the man just sighed.
“I was afraid of that,” he said—and started rowing, the Xerxes moving forward through the dark water. So far that was all Lugorix knew about the terrain they were in, because the Xerxes still had no lights. He’d seen that roof overhead and that faraway structure. But as to what was much closer—he just hoped Eurydice and Barsine had some idea what they were doing.
But then suddenly lights flared behind them. Through the rear viewport they could see the Carthaginian warship slide from the ramp and onto the water with a thunderous splash. Soldiers crowded its deck, holding weapons and torches. Several of them drew back on their bows while others lit arrows—the flaming brands shot into the dark. Most of those arrows fell into the waters and snuffed out, but others landed amidst tufts of reeds. One landed on what looked like a sandbar, flickering there. None of them fell close to the Xerxes. The Carthaginian ship surged out into the water, smoke pouring from its stack.
“They’re looking for us,” said Barsine. “Keep rowing.”
“You had us manning the guns earlier,” said Matthias.
“So I did.”
“So you thought there was a chance we might face hostiles right off the ramp?”
“And you can thank all your gods we didn’t.”
Two hundred meters back, Ptolemy’s fractured catamaran flew off the ramp and landed in the water.
The mast was still on fire and that was enough for Ptolemy to know that staying on this ship was a losing proposition. He knew what was about to happen, even if his crew didn’t. The Carthaginian ship and its arrows had illuminated enough of the area for him to see the immediate environment—he yelled some orders and the half-destroyed catamaran swerved hard to port, straight toward a sandbar as ballistae aboard the Carthaginian ship began firing at his vessel. Ptolemy hunkered down on the bridge as bolts flew past him.
“Give ’em white heat,” he said.
“What about that sandbar?” said the helmsman.
Ptolemy didn’t even bother to answer.
“Hard starboard,” yelled Eumenes.
He was yelling the words even before the ironclad left the ramp. The last thing he wanted to be was anywhere near either the Carthaginian ship or Ptolemy’s. Both were lit up, about as conspicuous as it was possible to be. All the more so as now the side of Ptolemy’s ship popped open and that gun of his slid out and blasted a huge jet of flame toward the Carthaginian vessel—which was nearly out of range.
But not quite.
The tip of the flame touched the rear of the Carthaginian ship, which immediately caught fire. Eumenes had to hand it to the Carthaginians for their discipline—bucket-brigades were forming quickly to dash water on the fire. Eumenes ordered his ship’s engineers to cut the motors. The sailors on the lowest deck began rowing, the ironclad heading steadily away from the other two vessels.
“Do you mind if I ask where we’re going?” said Matthias.
“Away from all that light,” said Barsine.
“So we can get out of Hades?”
“So we can go deeper into it.”
As she spoke, there was a rush of what sounded like wind. Lugorix looked up through the open hatch to see some of those phosphorescent lights overhead momentarily winking in and out. He thought for a moment that was exactly what they were doing, but then he realized that something was passing between them and the Xerxes. Eurydice stuck her head through the hatch, drew one hand across her throat.
“Don’t even talk,” she whispered.
Lugorix wasn’t about to. He gritted his teeth and kept his head down and kept rowing. Matthias was doing the same. There was no danger quite like the one they couldn’t see. But all of a sudden there was no danger at all that they were going to be overheard.
Thanks to all the screaming.
Carthaginian sailors and soldiers were leaping into the water, tearing at their clothes, waving around wildly with their weapons—and all to no avail. Shadowy forms were swarming around the warship, flapping their wings, looking for all the world like giant—
“Bats,” muttered Matthias.
“Shut up,” said Lugorix. Whatever they were, they were no ordinary bats. They were hard to make out at this distance, but they had a wingspan of at least a yard and teeth that flashed white in the torchlight. They were swarming the fuck out of all twelve decks of the Carthaginian ship. Lugorix watched in horror as men crawled out of oars-ports and dropped into the water. But the bats were aquatic too—they zipped like spears beneath the surface, dragging screaming men back into the air and ripping them to pieces.
It wasn’t just the Phoenician ship they were after, either.
Ptolemy knew he had about thirty seconds. As soon as his ship hit the sandbar, he raced to the prow and hurled one end of a rope over the side. He was still clambering down its length when he heard the commotion from the Carthaginian ship. By the time his men realized he was abandoning them, he was already sprinting along the sandbar, his armor weighing heavily on his back, but it would be suicide to do without it. Behind him he heard the screaming starting. So much for his ship. So much for his crew. It was just him now. He’d just have to make the most of it.
“They’re fucked,” said Eumenes.
“We are too,” said Kalyana. “You have brought us to Naraka.”
“Um… come again?”
“The underworld that the Buddha spoke of. Is that not this place?”
Eumenes smiled grimly. “We haven’t died yet, have we?”
The look on Kalyana’s face said he wasn’t sure of that one.
The screams had finally stopped. The Xerxes kept going, Lugorix and Matthias pulling on the oars, moving steadily away from the slaughter behind them, further into the darkness. Since they were on the surface, Barsine had opened slits in the walls on either side to provide more visibility. As their eyes slowly adjusted, Lugorix realized that the dull glow overhead provided just enough ambient light to steer by. Shadows became visible on either side of the boat—intimations of topography that resolved themselves into clumps of gnarled trees and roots. The Xerxes sailed into a narrow channel that soon gave way to more such channels. A shifting, labyrinthine landscape, lit up by that ghostly overhead light….
“The Greeks may know this place as Hades,” said Barsine. “But for me it is Chakat-i-Daitih, the underworld of which the great Zoroaster spoke, the pit into which Marduk hurled Tiamat. And Lugorix will have heard of Cernunnos—”
“That name is not right to speak,” said Lugorix quickly.
“—the domain of the Horned One. It may be that all of us are correct.”
“You’re all wrong,” said Eurydice.
Barsine looked at her like she wanted to throw her overboard. “So you have been telling me for weeks now.”
“Your gods don’t exist. Your religions are a sham. The sooner you get that through your heads, the better off we’ll be.”
“You persist in regarding this place as some kind of Atlantis,” said Barsine.
“I thought that was yet another line of bullshit,” said Matthias.
“It’s actually the only sensible way to view our whereabouts,” said Eurydice obstinately. “What we’re looking at isn’t the fucking afterlife. Do you think we’ll find Damitra here?” Barsine’s face went red. “We won’t. And we won’t find Lugorix’s parents either. Or his sister. None of them. I don’t know what happens to souls when bodies die. But they certainly don’t end up in this dump. My father was a rationalist who—”
“Your father was a bigot,” snarled Barsine.
“Think I don’t know that? But he and Plato spent their lives trying to understand the elder civilizations that once ruled the Earth.”
Barsine shook her head. “You mean that once tried.”
“Fragments,” said Eumenes as the ironclad navigated through the maze of channels in near-complete silence. All that could be heard was the splash of the oars. “Fragments
are all we have. Plato wrote of a mighty power that lay west of the Pillars and whose legions subjugated Europa and Africa.”
“Doesn’t look like they’re doing much subjugating now,” said Kalyana.
“According to him, they were defeated by Athens.”
“By Athens?” Kalyana clearly didn’t buy it. “How do you explain such a thing?”
“Plato was Athenian,” said Eumenes. “It looked good for him to say that.”
Kalyana nodded. “More books he could sell, no?”
“More books, sure. More royalties, more hash, more pussy. But it still left the question of just what did happen.”
“And you believe you have the answer?”
“I like to think of it as a theory,” said Eumenes.
“Plato can only take you so far,” said Eurydice. “My father’s real breakthrough came when he discovered the lost tales of the bard Thamyris.”
Matthias frowned. “Wasn’t he mentioned in the Iliad?”
“Yes, and not to his credit. He challenged the Muses to a singing contest: if he won he got to fuck them.”
“I take it he didn’t?”
“Of course not. He lost big-time, after which they smashed his lyre and blinded him. Typical penalty for hubris. But he was most famous for the epic poem Titanomachy. Which was eventually written down by one of Homer’s students and then later destroyed during the Persian sack of Athens. Or so they thought. But my father got hold of a copy.”
“As did I,” said Barsine.
Eurydice stared. This was obviously news to her. “How?”
“You said it yourself—my people sacked Athens and made off with the spoils.”
“Assholes,” muttered Matthias.
Barsine ignored him. “The Titanomachy made its way into the hands of the Magi. And then Damitra absconded with it during the war with Alexander.”
“And you were going to tell me when?” said Eurydice.
Barsine smiled mirthlessly. “Now seems like as good a time as any.”
Maybe it was just Lugorix’s imagination, but he fancied he could hear the noise of Eurydice grinding her teeth. He figured this to be a productive development. If Eurydice and Barsine were at last leveling with each other, then maybe he and Matthias would finally get some answers.
Assuming the two women didn’t kill each other first.
“We ought to have discussed this weeks ago,” said Eurydice.
Barsine shrugged. “I didn’t know whether you were working for the Macedonians.”
“At least I wasn’t fucking them.”
Lugorix had to hand it to Barsine—she had class enough to keep her cool. Sometimes being an aristocrat had its advantages. Then again, they were probably used to having their guards beat the crap out of the peasants when they got uppity. No sense in getting their own hands dirty. Barsine took a deep breath.
“All we needed to cooperate on earlier was getting here,” she said softly. “There was no sense in talking about the alleged layout of this place until we made it.”
“Well now we have,” said Matthias. “So how about you two get it together and start talking. What does this Titanomachy discuss?”
“The war of the Titans,” said Eurydice using that patented dumb-ass tone that seemed to be so effective at getting Matthias’ goat.
“The war between the Titans and the gods?” said Matthias.
She shrugged. “I don’t know for sure.”
“Then why the fuck are we even listening to you?” said Matthias. Lugorix could only marvel at how totally their relations had disintegrated to utter shit. That was why you should never start sleeping with someone who you were trying to infiltrate the underworld with. There was no way such a romp could end well. Especially now that Eurydice showed herself to have none of Barsine’s restraint. She slapped Matthias hard.
But he just grinned.
“Any more of that and I might stop rowing and start getting excited.”
“You’re disgusting,” said Eurydice.
“Eurydice is correct,” said Barsine. For a moment Lugorix thought she was talking about Matthias. But then she clarified: “At least from the standpoint of Greek mythology. According to the legends, the gods overthrew the Titans. But the Titanomachy doesn’t really distinguish between the two—doesn’t rule out whether it was simply a war between two groups of Titans, or perhaps two groups of gods. It just says one group was of Olympus; the other, of the Underworld. So to call them gods just means we don’t really understand anything about their true nature.”
Lugorix frowned. “So we’re talking about a war between two large and powerful gangs of assholes,” he said.
“And if they were gods, they weren’t the kind you worship,” said Eurydice. “They were the kind you run from. It was the Olympians who stopped those who ruled the Underworld from conquering the sunlit lands above.”
“So the Olympians won?” asked Lugorix.
“Not exactly,” said the daughter of Aristotle.
“The Sibylline Books,” said Eumenes. “They’re the key to all this.”
“The books that Alexander consulted with at Rome?”
“He didn’t just consult them,” said Eumenes. “He ripped them off.”
Kalyana’s mouth dropped in a wide open O. “He stole them?”
“Alexander’s never that crude. He bribed the priests with untold riches to look the other way and allow him to substitute a bunch of nonsense texts that Hephaestion and I cooked up. But the real trick is that Alexander got ahold of the other Sibylline books—the ones that were supposed to have been destroyed.”
Kalyana frowned. “Destroyed… by who?”
“By the chick who sold them to Rome in the first place.” Kalyana raised both eyebrows at that. Eumenes just laughed. It was that crazy: “Dig this: couple of centuries back, the Sibyl of Cumae showed up and offered nine sacred books of prophecy to Rome’s last king. He asked how much, she named a price, and he said forget it, no way I’m paying that much. Whereupon the old crone burnt three of the books, and repeated the same offer for the last six books. And he still said fuck off. So then she torched three more and offered him the remaining three at the same damn price.”
“And this time he paid,” said Kalyana.
Eumenes nodded. “And those three books were kept in Rome ever since.”
“But she didn’t really burn the others,” said Kalyana.
“Apparently not. Prophetesses are like magicians—you have to watch their hands. Or maybe she had extra copies. Lot of that going around these days, I hear. Hephaestion and I found the burnt remnants of the six beneath Avernus, near Cumae. Which was supposed to be one of the gates to the underworld. And may well be, but the damn thing’s blocked.”
“By what?”
“Probably during the War,” said Eumenes.
“Which war would that be?”
“The war. Between the guys down here and the guys up there.”
Kalyana nodded. “Make sense.”
“Really? I’m still trying to wrap my head around it.”
Kalyana shrugged. “In Vedic scripture, there is a book called the Bhagavad-Gita that speaks of a war that shook the universe—a war in which the gods themselves took part. So the Sibylline books, they say this too?”
“The first three were the best three it turned out,” said Eumenes. “The king of Rome really should have taken that offer. Anyway, the war pretty much brought the house down. The skies rained blood and the oceans boiled and the continents buckled and someone blew up the land-bridge between Africa and Europe—”
Kalyana’s western geography wasn’t his strong point, but even so: “What land-bridge?”
“Exactly. All that’s left now are the Pillars of Gibraltar. Both sides hammered away at the other with terrible magick and weapons until they had nothing left to hammer with. In the end what was left of the Olympians got frozen in the arctic ice on an island called Thule and the Chthonic gods got sealed down here.”
Kalyana pondered this—looked out at the fire-streaked gloom through which they were moving. “Do you know where exactly?”
Eumenes grinned mirthlessly. “We’re heading there now,” he said.
Retreats were never pretty.
Most of the Athenian army had perished on the beach, but those soldiers who survived were busy staggering back to Syracuse, joined by hordes of refugees fleeing the invaders. Just when it seemed like matters couldn’t get any worse, Mount Etna—that great volcano on the eastern coast of Sicily—had started rumbling and belching smoke and ashes. It was though the gods themselves were signalling the downfall of Athens. Clouds of grey hung low overhead and all the birds had stopped singing. It was like the world itself was dying.
Maybe it was. The rampaging Macks had massacred the first few villages they’d reached; after that, everybody was on the move, frantically heading for the safety of the island’s walled enclaves. The most popular of which was Syracuse. That was where the biggest walls were, after all—that the city was almost certainly Alexander’s main target didn’t really seem to have occured to most of the refugees.
“It’s a deliberate strategy,” said Xanthippus. His helmet was lifted half-back, nose-guard against his forehead, the better to march with. He was fortunate to be marching at all. But the three Syracusans had done a good job with the arrow that had struck him—cutting the shaft in two, and carving out the arrowhead with a blade they’d first heated in boiling water. They were clearly soldiers of some kind themselves, however much they denied it. Xanthippus had confided to Diocles that they were probably Syracusan resistance; Diocles had replied that he really didn’t give a shit. They’d saved Xanthippus’ life, and that was all he cared about. Though if they really were Syracusan resistance, he’d have expected them to find some way back to Syracuse that didn’t involve marching alongside two Athenian soldiers. Then again, maybe that was the smartest way to do it.
“Of course it’s a deliberate strategy,” said the long-nosed man—the one who seemed to be the boss of the three Syracusans. “Make sure as many people get herded into Syracuse as possible. There’ll be that many more mouths to feed.”
The Pillars of Hercules Page 36