by Laura Gill
Asterion could not have withstood the surge. Amanas’s heart missed a beat when he glimpsed a vessel being dashed against the side of a house. It was a fishing boat, not his triaconter, but nonetheless he visualized Asterion’s hull breaking apart, the oars snapping like twigs from their locks. “Holy Marineus,” he murmured, touching his tattooed wrist. The steward beside him said nothing, though his jaw hung open.
Down below, people were running from a side street toward the base of the hill. Amanas watched them sloshing through ankle-deep water, falling, stumbling in the onrushing current, staggering forward in their desperation to reach higher ground. Then, suddenly, he recognized a group of men among them. “Kyaton!” he called out. One of the men stopped, looked around for the source of the shout, found Amanas on the rooftop, and waved his arm.
Amanas sprinted down the stairs, past servants carrying chests and vessels, and outside where he intercepted his son, scratched and battered and soaking head to foot but alive. He embraced Kyaton. “Thank the gods!”
A head count yielded only twenty-one men. Glaukos was missing. Baalu, Senbi and Durna were nowhere in sight. The ship’s boy had vanished. “Where are the others?” he asked Kyaton.
His son shook his head. “Baalu was swept away on the waterfront, and Durna disappeared when Asterion slumped off her chocks and capsized.” Seawater dripped from Kyaton’s nose; he swiped it away with the back of his hand. “I couldn’t find Glaukos anywhere.”
He was still talking, relating the details of the disaster as Amanas escorted him to the courtyard. Arwia rushed forward to hug him, and wrap her threadbare shawl around his shoulders. Wearing an inconvenienced glower, Diripadu left his draught board, where he had been playing with Obodan, and strode over. “Captain Amanas,” he complained, “we can accommodate only men of quality. This rabble—”
“This ‘rabble’ happens to be my ship’s crew,” Amanas said hotly. Anger helped blunt the loss of Asterion. “No one’s asking you to feed them or take them under your protection. That’s my responsibility. If I were you, I would see to evacuating your people and property. The waters are still rising.”
Self-preservation overrode the vintner’s outrage. He vanished into the house, reappearing moments later on the roof.
“Husband, what are we going to do?” Arwia linked an arm through his. “Should we head for Knossos?”
Above his wife’s soft voice and voices of the dozens crowded with them in the courtyard, Amanas heard the inexorable rush of the sea. He heard people shouting and screaming, and the flow and crash of debris. The afternoon light was sharpening, heralding sunset. Those who had ascended the hill with his crew were already moving on, tramping through the vineyards as they headed south toward Knossos, becoming shadows against the landscape. “Yes,” he replied. “Give the sailors a moment to get their wind, then we’ll go.”
Late afternoon was not the best time to head out, but there was no better option. Wait until the last minute, and the waters might overwhelm them. Amanas tried to persuade Diripadu’s servants to provide lanterns. When his silver tongue failed to override their trepidation about giving away their master’s goods, he waited till they were preoccupied elsewhere and simply took what he needed.
By then, Diripadu’s family and neighbors were heading to the roof in increasing numbers. Servants lit lamps and brought food and wine. Did they think the suffering and destruction down below was some perverse form of entertainment, a pleasant backdrop to an evening of conversation, feasting, and laughter?
Amanas caught Adikira’s arm, drawing him aside. “Don’t go up there. If the flood reaches the second story, the house will come crashing down. You know what water does to plaster and mud brick.”
He did not really have to elaborate, not when the remaining daylight bore witness to tenements and storehouses collapsing and being swept into the torrent. Adikira exchanged glances with his potter-wife, who nodded. “I know what happens, Captain Amanas,” she answered.
In the end, they accompanied his group through the vineyard into the lengthening shadows, ignoring Diripadu’s angry shouts to stay off his property. Amanas snorted. The foolish vintner ought to be pouring libations to Marineus and praying that the floodwaters advanced no farther.
He carried one lantern, and Adikira the other he had filched from the storerooms. “Are we to be drowned?” Adikira’s younger son asked.
“We should be safe on that hill.” Amanas nodded toward high ground a mile distant, where people were gathering and lighting bonfires against the encroaching darkness. “And Knossos should be safer, still. I’ve never heard of the wrath of Marineus penetrating very far inland.”
Warm ashes drifted in the air, settling like snowflakes on heads and upturned faces. Amanas observed no stars. Even the moon hid her pale oval behind a pall of smoke. Distant thunder rattled nerves, but at least the earth was not shaking. The sailors began to sing about Marineus.
Elissa hastened to Amanas’s side. “Make them stop,” she hissed. “They’ll bring the god’s wrath down on us.”
The way the sailors sang it in the darkness, there was a certain melancholy about the ballad, even though it was meant to be glad. They were paying tribute to Asterion. “No,” Amanas told his mother. “Let them sing. If Marineus wants to destroy us, there will be no hiding from him.”
Adding his tenor, he joined their song toward the end, and in the sober silence which followed, he suggested some happier tunes to celebrate Asterion. “Let us sing ‘The Salty Nymph’ and ‘Dionysus’s Hard Mast.’ Asterion heard you chant those many times when you were at the oars.”
He started them on the first song by humming the opening bar. Yershan joined his baritone to set the tune, and then Nakht with his light voice began singing the first stanza:
There was a saucy nymph
With hair of foam, and a wicked tongue.
I brought her abroad, and taught her well,
And left her with salty spray upon her thighs.
All the women but Adikira’s wife were scandalized, but the sailors kept singing through the darkness. They hiked up the hill with that ballad on their tongues, stilling their voices only when encountering the refugees huddled around their campfires. Then all they wanted was to warm themselves by the fire and dry out their sodden clothing, and fill their bellies. Amanas shared out his family’s rations of bread, cheese, and dried fruit, but divided thirty ways it did not stretch far. Other refugees, those who had nothing, observed them hungrily, and might have mobbed them had Amanas not possessed strength in numbers. He ordered the sailors to take the watch in shifts. “By midday tomorrow we’ll be in Knossos.” What would happen after that, he could not say, and refused to make false promises.
Unable to sleep, Amanas alternately dozed and shared watch. His belly growled, protesting the scant rations, but thirst drove him to distraction. There was no spring on that height, and what little had filled his waterskin had gone to his crew, women, and children. He had just enough saliva left to moisten his mouth. Even Diripadu’s sour swill would be a welcome sight.
There was a spring on the way to Knossos. Having suffered far greater privations, especially at sea, he was confident he could last until morning. He hated to see his children suffer, though.
Morning dawned with overcast skies, the air still heavy with smoke from the fires burning in Katsamba and from the direction of Knossos. Amanas surveyed the landscape through which they had passed yesterday evening. Diripadu’s vineyard and the nearby olive groves were untouched, and his house appeared intact upon its hill. The floodwaters had obviously not risen to the level of the upper town. A number of refugees expressed their intention to return and salvage what they could, while a few, dark shapes receding into the distance, were already on their way back. For Amanas, there was no debate. According to Kyaton, Asterion had capsized. If what the floodwaters had done yesterday to other vessels caught in its surge was anything to go by, Asterion would have smashed into the waterfront, splintered, broken apa
rt.
“Papa.” A tug on his hand interrupted his melancholic thread of thought. Amanas glanced down at his middle daughter.
“What is it?”
“I’m thirsty,” the little girl said.
He squeezed her hand. “I know. It won’t be for long, though. There’s a cool spring on—”
An ear-splitting boom hit him like an invisible fist, wrenching his daughter from his grasp, and slamming him to the ground. The next thing he knew, he was lying flat on his face, dazed, and his eardrums were ringing. What was that? He did not know, only that it had knocked down everyone around him. Blood leaked from his daughter’s ear. She was shaking her head as though trying to dislodge something, and beyond her Obodan was on all fours, patting the ground as if blind.
They must have angered some god. Amanas had no other explanation for what had happened. Perhaps his mother had been right, after all, and their singing last night had offended—
All thoughts froze when he saw the thing that was barreling toward them from the northeast. A sinister black cloud of dust and smoke rolled over the heights of Katsamba, swallowing everything in its path. Diripadu’s house and courtyard vanished in an instant. Amanas knew the horror that was even now surging across the vineyard, closing the distance between them. He had seen such clouds racing down the slopes of Kalliste’s sacred mountain, down the flanks of the burning mountain of Antimelos.
He felt its searing hot breath sting his skin in the same instant he smelled the sulfuric stench of the angry earth. His conscious mind was no longer working. Instinct took over. Turning, forgetting his children, his wife, his mother, he bolted. Waves of onrushing heat prompted him to gasp for air, and in that second he was finished. One inhalation sufficed to scorch the back of his throat and burn his lungs.
Amanas had just enough time to realize he could not breathe before the darkness and killing wind enveloped him. There was a split-second of pressure and intense heat, and then nothing.
*~*~*~*
With him unofficially relieved of his post and she with no hearth to tend, Rusa and Dusani decided to sleep later than usual. Rest might help alleviate their troubles, they reflected, as morning came and they grappled against their ingrained habits of rising and going to work. “Today’s not a day for leaving the house,” Rusa mumbled before shutting his eyes again.
Then came the blast.
Rusa shook his head where his hearing failed, trying to figure out what was going on, when suddenly a wave of heat—heat more blistering than pavement on a summer’s day, hotter even than the interior of a bread oven—burst into the room. Black, thick with choking ash, it exploded toward him with a force sufficient to knock him facedown back onto the mattress. Despite the choking fumes, he screamed as the superheated air blistered his unprotected shoulders and legs, even as he tried to shield his wife and youngest child from the scorching darkness.
Dusani had also thrown herself over the baby. Rusa felt the tension straining her muscles.
Spots flashed behind his eyelids. He was starting to black out. Gods, what was happening? No deity answered, except through sheer terror and the physical agony of his burning flesh and the seemingly insurmountable struggle to breathe. He was going to suffocate—or burn to death, he knew not which—and he was powerless to protect his loved ones.
And then, inexplicably, the constricting bands around his chest eased. He slowly regained consciousness, although his breathing remained labored and his lungs painfully spasmed as he hacked up dirty sputum.
The mellow morning light that had been streaming through the window only a quarter-hour before was now lost in a swirling haze of warm gray dust. Rusa’s eyes watered, forcing him to squeeze them shut.
The mattress shifted, and then Rusa felt his wife’s hand touching his hair, cheek, and shoulder. That last contact elicited a sudden, stinging pain. Rusa hissed between his teeth. Dusani removed her hand.
Already deaf, Rusa could not stand being blind as well. He opened his eyes again, blinked, and saw his wife perched on the edge of the mattress, her body heaving, retching, straining for oxygen. Dust powdered her tousled dark hair. Her distress regardless, she held Khasos over her shoulder, rubbing his back. His face was scrunched, his mouth open in a soundless wail. He did not appear to be injured.
Dusani set the baby down beside Rusa, then, standing, she stumbled from the room, stirring more dust in her wake. Rusa’s gaze followed her through the doorway, where the violence of the wind had torn the curtain free. Everywhere he saw destruction. Dusani’s dressing table was overturned, its contents scattered across the floor. A hairline crack raced through the plaster around the window whose shutters had been torn asunder by the blast. What other damage had his father-in-law’s house sustained?
Terror motivated him. Rusa managed to maneuver himself upright and inspect his injuries. All along his arms and legs he discovered to his horror livid splotches where the burning wind had scalded his exposed skin.
As he groaned, he thought he heard the sound. And above that, his son screaming. “That’s enough, Khasos.” The pitch of the infant’s wails hurt his head, which was already aching.
Rusa pinched his nostrils and swallowed to try to clear his ears further. What sounds reached him were distant, as if perceived through a funnel, but all that mattered was that he heard, because it meant that his deafness was not permanent.
When Dusani returned, she was carrying cloths and a ceramic jar, yet to him her movements were hesitant, her countenance was ashen. Rusa saw her mouth shape words. “Servants are dead.” Her voice reached him as an awkward echo. “On the stairs, in the corridor.”
Rusa gestured to his temples. “I can barely hear you,” he said softly, “and my head aches.” Gods, did it ever ache! His throat was sore from coughing. The servants were the furthest thing from his mind at that moment. Dusani had said nothing about the children or Yikashata. What did that mean? He started to move.
His wife stopped him. “You shouldn’t be moving around.”
“The children...”
“All fine. A few injuries, but they’re being looked after,” she answered quickly. “Now lie on your belly so I can tend to you.” Dusani insisted, even though the blankets were filthy except for the outline where their bodies had lain, and started tending his wounds. She was as gentle as possible, dabbing his spine and the backs of his limbs with a lukewarm wet compress, but even the slightest pressure of her touch made him wince. As she worked, she chanted in a hoarse voice in a spell for the relief of burns.
“Payawon, divine Healer, enter into this man’s body. This man is Dadarusa, son of Yikashata. He stands justified before the gods. He has committed no outrage, mortal or immortal. Becoming one with his flesh, may you, great Payawon, drive out the pain of his wound.”
Then she slathered his burns with honey, and loosely bandaged them in the cleanest linen she had been able to find, as she explained when, despite the ringing in his eardrums and his pounding headache, he expressed his doubts about the suitability of the bandages. “They’re dirty.”
“I gave the very best linens to Zabibe for your father,” she answered, carefully enunciating each word so he could follow the movements of her mouth rather than have to endure her raised voice. “His burns are worse than yours.”
Yikashata was injured? “Why did you wait to tell me?” Rusa crawled onto his hands and knees and maneuvered upright. It hurt to move, but as both a son and father he knew that lying there, wallowing in his own discomfort was out of the question.
“I didn’t want to alarm you about your father until you’d allowed me to tend to you.” Dusani reached for Rusa as he lowered his right foot to the floor and started to stand. “So many are injured or dead, Rusa,” she explained. “I can’t have you neglect yourself. Here, let me.” She retrieved his sandals, brushed away the dust and then helped him into them. “Please, be careful.”
With her assistance, Rusa hobbled next door where his father and children had been sleeping. Yikasha
ta lay atop ash-powdered fleeces, moaning hoarsely and almost insensible from the pain of the burns on his face, legs and arms. Crouching on the footstool beside him, Zabibe was tending his wounds, dabbing honey onto the blistered flesh with feather-light touches while trying not to weep from her own burns. Rusa saw blood staining the cloths the woman had used to clean Yikashata’s burns. “What happened?”
Dusani related what the servants had told her, how Yikashata had risen to comfort the children after the thundering blast awoke everyone, and then how the cloud of hot ash had enveloped and thrown him to the floor.
Rusa found an overturned footstool, shook loose the dust and debris, and awkwardly seated himself beside Yikashata’s cot. “I’m here,” he said, bending to his father’s ear. “It’s Dadarusa.”
Yikashata did not acknowledge him. His eyelids were blistered and swelling, and his hands swathed in bandages. Rusa dared not touch him for fear of aggravating his suffering. “Can you give him something for the pain?”
Dusani placed a hand on his shoulder, snatching it back the second he winced. “Nefret has gone to fetch juice of the poppy.”
Rusa could have used some of the poppy’s numbing properties himself, but it was essential that he keep his head clear in the hours ahead. The angry gods might not yet be finished with them.
Still seated, he turned his attention to his children, gathering his daughters in as reassuring an embrace as his wounds allowed. Beruti sported burns on her hands and right temple that had not yet been dressed, while Anath wore a bandage on her arm and cheek. Neither girl cried despite the pain each must have been suffering, but Rusa felt the fearful tremors wracking their small bodies. If he could have taken their wounds upon himself, he would have done so in a heartbeat.
Isiratos was not there. “He went to help Yishana clean up the damage.” Dusani referred to her brother, who with his family was also lodging temporarily under Kikkeros’s roof. “He’s bruised and has burns across his neck and shoulders, but he insisted on going.” She shook her head. “He’s afraid a fire will break out.”