Now, Adam roused himself from his reverie, and once more rubbed at Sigrun’s bare back as she curled in on herself. Umbrellas dotted the sand for as far as the eye could see to the left and the right of them, and waiters were moving from one umbrella to another. Most were from the resorts, but the ones in scarlet livery were Lady Erida’s people, and thus, brought the small group caviar on ice and sparkling wine from Gaul. Lassair winced at the fish eggs, and refused to eat them, but Minori, helping Masako over the hills and ridges of sand, immediately took some, munching on the small black spheres with every evidence of enjoyment.
Also along for this unusual excursion were Himi and Bodi, who certainly weren’t children anymore. Himi was twenty, and on break from the University of Carthage, where he was studying medicine. Adam also understood that Himi had re-established contact with his mother while living in Carthage, proper, which cast a slight strain on his relationship with his father. Bodi, at eighteen, was attending the University of Rome, and apparently had almost as much sorcerous potential as his father did. He’d had the best teachers in Kanmi and Minori, had gone to an academy mostly intended for young Roman patricians—god-born and sorcerers only—to prepare for college courses in technomancy. He’d told Adam that his goal was to keep the monsters under the bed where they belonged.
Kanmi was quietly proud of both boys, but Masako was his little darling, and it showed. While the two boys were out body-surfing the big waves, Kanmi had moved to start building a sand-castle for Masako . . . and libelously cheated, using sorcery to carve the dunes into something that looked like it came from the Veil itself.
As he did so, Lassair picked up one of the younger twins, Deiana, and actually walked out to the surf, pulling one foot, anxiously, back from the seawater. Adam watched her, lazily. At least it’s not as salty as the true ocean. That would be . . . buffering, like blood, for you, wouldn’t it?
That, and it is water, Steelsoul. I remain not overfond of it!
Adam chuckled under his breath as Trennus padded out of the surf, shooing his elder twins back to the shore, where they joined Latirian in building a sandcastle. He scanned the other groups under the nearby umbrellas . . . not a few people were watching them, in return. The number of men, and not a few women, who had their eyes fixed on a naked Lassair, pregnant or not, as Trennus coaxed her into the water, was highly amusing. As was the number of people who suddenly developed an urge to spread newspapers across their laps.
Sigrun uncurled herself enough to lean into him, and whispered in his ear, “Lassair is still wondrously fair. And an excellent distraction.” Sigrun nodded solemnly, and then quirked Adam a quick grin as she nodded to the other people on the beach. “She’s the focus of every eye here.”
“Not true, Sig.” He pulled on her braid, lightly.
“Oh, but it is. It has to do, I think, with how much she enjoys life.” Sigrun’s smile was faint, but genuine. “As hedonistic as a child, and as free, in most ways.”
As she spoke Linditus, one of the younger twins, sulked at the edge of the water for a moment, and then toddled back over to the other adults, a cloth diaper pinned at his waist. “Swim!” he importuned Adam, raising his arms, and Adam stood, picked the boy up, hefted him over a shoulder, and took him out into the waves for about ten minutes, or just enough for the boy to start to get cold. He brought him back up onto the shore, looking back at Sigrun as the day began to cloud over.
“Quick!” Kanmi called to Adam. “Go give your wife a kiss and cheer her up. It starts to thunder, and they’re going to close the beach down.”
Sigrun’s expression, as she raised her head from her knees and peered over the edge of her smoked lenses, was mutinous at best. “I do not understand why everyone persists in this jest,” she grumbled as Adam laughingly passed Linditus off to Kanmi, and padded over to sit under the umbrella with Sigrun, giving her a damp kiss. “I call lightning. I do not control weather.”
Sure you don’t, Adam thought, as the first patters of rain hit the umbrella, and kissed her, concentrating, hard, on the fact that they were having a rare day of peace. That they were together, with everyone they loved. “You really hate beaches, don’t you, Sig?”
“It shows?” Her voice was disheartened.
“Almost as much as if someone has asked you to wear a courtesan’s outfit.”
Her lips curled into a rueful smile. “Now that is a disguise no one would ever believe.”
The rain faded away and the clouds parted as the others all came back to eat on shore. Laughter. Camaraderie. Adam thought Trennus had, altogether, the oddest life of any of them, but they’d all been through so much together, that he couldn’t imagine not working with them. Minori had been brought into the Praetorians as a research analyst in 1965, for example. She still worked for the University of Rome, but more and more of her time was spent on data analysis for the Praetorians.
Light chit-chat between friends. Little pieces of conversation, floating on the breeze.
“. . . they summoned an earth elemental on the moon. It’s how they built all the tunnels for the moon base so quickly. Gods. I wish I could say I’d been the summoner who made that bargain. That’s a name that’s going to be in the history books . . . .” Trennus, to Kanmi, of course.
“Your mother-in-law got you a copy of the Nefertiti tomb paintings for your house?” Minori, to Sigrun.
“Yes. Because we’ve been doing so much reading about the time period.” Sigrun sounded disquieted. “I hung it in the in-law suite we’ve set up for them when they retire. I don’t like that picture at all.”
“I feel like the eyes follow me around the room,” Adam interjected, flipping the wet tail of his hair off his neck.
“You’re not the only one,” Sigrun muttered, shuddering.
“So,” Kanmi said, looking around at them all. “Who’s for digging through the Chaldean Magi archives when we get done with lunch?”
Adam groaned and raised his hand. So did Trennus. So did Sigrun. So did Minori.
Lassair made a face at them all. I will play with the children, thank you. I will leave you to your musty pieces of paper.
“The custodians thank you,” Kanmi told her, arching his eyebrows. “Musty paper is all-too flammable.” He brushed the crumbs off his chest. At forty-five, he was still in good shape, and in middle age, sorcerers really started to shine.
Sigrun looked much more cheerful as she stood, pulling on a light dress and her cloak. “It must be a warm day in Hel’s home,” Trennus told her, smiling. At her blank look, he elaborated. “You’re excited about research, Sig.” Trennus leaned in, lowering his voice to tease, “You’re excited about researching godslayers.”
Of which she technically is one, Adam thought. But there was a difference. They hadn’t set out to be godslayers. They’d . . . done it mostly by accident, both times. The godslayers of old had been, as far as they could tell, creatures of destruction, and nothing more.
A cloud passed before the sun. “Well, yes,” Sigrun replied, hesitantly. “It gets me off of this beach, doesn’t it?”
Adam looked at his wife and laughed.
In the library, all of them dressed and dry, they began to go through what Erida had put together for them. Erida herself, now in her forties, had run a little to plumpness after the birth of her only son, but in a pleasant way. She and her husband didn’t share many interests; it was an arranged marriage, and they lived separate lives under the same roof. Adam couldn’t fathom it, but apparently so long as her husband got routine conjugal visits, he didn’t care what else his wife did. A very upper-class arrangement. Adam had only met Isam Badal, Erida’s husband, once, at dinner a few nights ago, and hadn’t liked him at all. There was something faintly cruel in his eyes, though he masked it with smiles. He was also something of a collector, and spent most of his time chasing down rare wines and sculptures in foreign cities. Erida’s collection of Magi documents appealed to the collector’s vanity. But nothing more. No warmth between them. Just a b
usiness arrangement that gave her Magi family a little more political clout and wealth. But Isam had not done anything untoward around the lictors yet, and they were guests in his house, so Adam kept his mouth shut. But that didn’t stop him from thinking, now, a little sadly, It’s not a marriage. It’s semi-monogamous prostitution. But I suppose that people get out of anything, precisely what they put into it.
Erida, herself, seemed mostly pleased with the situation. It gave her all the advantages of marriage, including a place to live, access to her own money, and a husband with whom to occasionally scratch a conjugal itch, with none of the inconveniences of actual intimacy. She’d also clearly cast a few feelers at Kanmi in the past couple of days, as if testing to see if he’d be interested in making their friendship a little more; Minori hadn’t changed expressions, and Kanmi had shut Erida down, every time. With surprising politeness, from Kanmi, but he obviously liked Erida. Cherished the long friendship by correspondence. And Minori’s exquisite manners and noble upbringing somehow let her ignore the one or two overtures in her husband’s direction, though Adam would have bet good money that, in the privacy of their rooms, Kanmi was making it very clear to Minori that he understood to whom he belonged.
Erida bustled into the library now, and began by closing the shades. “Ultraviolet light and ancient writings do not mix well,” she noted, and began removing dust covers from glass cases. “Each case has been pumped full of non-reactive argon gas to help preserve the papyrus and parchment scrolls,” she went on, briskly. “Cuneiform tablets, thankfully, don’t require quite the same standard of care. I have a number of translations of each. Most of the translations don’t agree. And we have a few other . . . interesting items.” She turned back, a twinkle in her dark eyes. “You are about to see what few outside the Magi have ever seen. A good thing you are my favorite barbarians, eh?”
“We’re indebted, Lady Erida,” Adam said, simply. “The hobby’s become something of an obsession, I’ll admit.” Obsession had led him to teach himself how to read ancient Aramaic. Kanmi had picked up a smattering of Linear B, Chaldean, and Babylonian. Linear A, of course, remained indecipherable to every scholar.
Erida turned out to be an incredible guide through history. “What most people tend to forget, because history books tend to be written geographically, instead of temporally, is that cultures don’t exist one after the other, or as entirely separate entities,” she told them. “The earliest references to the god-born and the godslayers come from Sargon of Akkad. He was spirit-born, and his mother, not knowing what to do with him, put him in a sealed basket and let him float down the Euphrates, where he was taken in by the king of that land . . . .”
Adam shook his head. “Ah . . . that . . . sounds a little familiar,” he said. He’d read through the early godslayer narratives relating to Sargon’s god-born descendants, but he hadn’t actually read about Sargon much.
Erida winked at him, slyly, and plopped down on a divan, popping a piece of fruit from a basket into her mouth. “Yes. Your Moses scavenged his life-history from Sargon. Or, perhaps, your god is a plagiarist. Take your pick.”
“I’m going to go with ‘there’s no such thing as a new story,’” Adam muttered.
Erida continued, showing them what little there was on the various godslayers and the namtar-demons. “Now, there are those who translate the cuneiform to suggest that the namtar-demons fought at the behest of the godslayer kings. But I believe most of these translations to be . . . rough at best. I think it likely that the kings of old, while they might have bound a spirit or two, mostly followed along behind the namtar-demons, like scavengers. There was a war between those demons and the gods of old, and all we have left are . . . the traces of soot on a wall. Oral traditions, finally written down when all those who actually saw what occurred, were dead.”
She moved on to the next case. “Akhenaten is more generally known,” she said, quietly. “But the Minoan civilization antedated Akhenaten, and we can’t read most of its writing. What little they passed on, was in Linear A, like the Phaistos Disc. Thirty-one symbols on the front side, thirty symbols on the back, and no one knows what they really mean.” Erida looked around. “They disappeared when Thera erupted, giving rise to the legend of Atlantis. The land that was so arrogant, that it was punished by the gods by being cast into the sea.” Erida reached into the case, removing what was almost certainly the original Phaistos Disc, and passed it around. “What do you notice about it?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.
“Clay,” Trennus said, immediately. “Baked into solid form. Symbols on both sides.” He flipped it over, carefully. “Some of the images repeat frequently, like this . . . stone or gem image.”
“Each unit is probably actually a word, like a hieroglyph,” Erida cautioned. She tilted her head to the side, and her curly, hair, just touched here and there with gray, shifted with her. “Now, there are any number of people out there who will tell you what a peaceful, fertility-oriented culture the Minoans were, and how they were matriarchal, had no military tradition, and only wanted to trade, make babies, and watch their men perform acrobatics with bulls—no comments, Kanmi, please, I beg of you—”
“I would like to note that all of the comments have already been made in my mind.”
“Noted,” Adam said, raising a hand. “Move on, please.”
Erida laughed, a rich ripple of sound, and did precisely that. “However, what is not generally known, is that there’s evidence of human sacrifice on the island of Crete. Three separate buildings, including one at Anemospilia, in which the sacrifice was evidently interrupted by an earthquake. We all know that earthquakes are usually perfectly natural phenomena. In the light of the later Thera eruption? I suspect that this may have been a warning. Stop now, or there will be consequences.” She gave them all a keen glance. “Almost every incident of godslayers appearing seems to be connected to human sacrifice . . . or to humans becoming too powerful, in the case of Akhenaten. But he’s a special case.” She patted one of the glass boxes on the table beside her, fondly. “Like your Sayri Cusi.”
“Special,” Adam muttered, and slumped a little in his chair. “That’s a word for it.”
“I’m hearing a lot of supposition,” Minori warned. “And Crete’s population was wholly separate from the one on Thera, was it not?”
“Unfortunately, when you’re talking about a time period fifteen hundred years before the ascension of Caesar, supposition is almost all that we have,” Erida returned, amiably. “They were in regular communication. They transmitted a little written culture between each other. Trade can be supposed to have existed between the islands. So I tend to envision connected cultures. And thus, a warning, perhaps, at the sacrifice site on Crete. And then a full eruption that destroyed an entire island, at Thera. Conjecture, yes. But there is this to back it up.” She stood, and opened another case, and removed a vial. The vial was filled with what was probably saline solution—saltwater buffers and blood binds—and a thin fragment of something crystalline that glittered in the light. She passed that around, too. “All right,” Sigrun assessed. “Pretty. But what is it?”
“Diamond. Thera isn’t really known for diamonds. It’s not faceted; faceting gemstones wasn’t much done until the thirteen hundreds, AC. It’s been rounded and smoothed, however, possibly by magic. And we estimate from the rest of the dimensions, however, that the original stone would have been the size of a human eye.” Erida tipped her head to the side. “This gem was found on Thera in a layer of rubble from the original explosion, which occurred fifteen hundred years BAC.” Erida grimaced. “After its discovery in about 1754 AC, it was sold as a novelty to the kings of Persia, who set it in a necklace and gave it to favored queens, until it was re-examined thirty years ago, using more updated scientific and magical methods. Its . . . problematic composition and provenance has led it to being in the hands of the Magi. Oh, don’t worry. It’s not radioactive.” That, as Trennus gave the vial a slightly wide-eyed glance in his hand.
They all looked at her, fascinated. “Problematic composition?” Kanmi asked.
“It’s diamond, in a place where diamond doesn’t occur naturally. It’s also pure carbon, without a trace of any other impurities to give it color. Usually, there are at least traces of other compounds, which will allow someone to trace where a gem originated from in the Earth’s crust. This one? Not even a hint. I would say it was lab-created, except that it was found before methods of creating diamonds in laboratories were invented.”
Adam tried to wrap his head around that. “That’s . . . impossible.”
“I would call it the result of a magical process that has been lost to time.” Her tone was dubious, however. “But yes. In the main, I’d say it is just as impossible as the Assassin,” she said, pointing to a picture of the Nefertiti tomb wall, framed behind her, “wearing full-plate armor, form-fitted, in an era in which most people wore a bronze breastplate and maybe greaves over their sandals. The hooks and barbs on the armor require a facility with metallurgy beyond what the Egyptians had, and they’re not ornamental—they don’t appear to impede the figure’s movements, and are positioned logically to allow the wearer to use the spikes as weapons.”
The Goddess Denied Page 3